Cycling still stuck between the soft commentary and hard questioning

About 2km into the one of my local rides, right where the road out of Glencullen and across the Dublin Mountains approaches its highest point at Glendhu, there is a large granite boulder with a simple inscription carved into the face of it.

O’Connell’s Rock

23rd - July 1823

It was here, exactly 200 years ago this Sunday, Daniel O’Connell stood to address a mass gathering of people who had come to collect the sweet blackish berries off the fraughan, the wild version of the blueberry which grow in hilly places.

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Five months before, after a meeting in Glencullen House, O’Connell had formed the Catholic Association, and grasped this opportunity to preach support for Emancipation, such spontaneous events becoming known as monster meetings.

Later, in 1825, his daughter Ellen married Christopher FitzSimon, also of Glencullen House, and it’s always fun to salute that rock whenever we ride by. Especially when its birthday comes.

Okay. That’s my soft Eurosport-style cycling commentary out of the way. You know those parts whenever there’s a lull in the Tour de France, and Carlton Kirby and Sean Kelly call on Jonathan Harris-Bass to share some local history, or better still some local recipes. They always sound delicious.

It’s understandable why they’d want to break up five hours of live race commentary with such harmless vignettes; given the familiar unease with which this Tour has unfolded over the last 21 days, it would be better if they balanced it out with more hard questioning.

There are obvious restrictions to what they can ask and don’t tell while live on air (and who knows which way Kelly’s head is shaking). Nor is it necessarily their job to explain the inexplicable.

Still, long before Saturday’s penultimate stage, the mountainous 133km from Belfort to Le Markstein, this Tour has been begging some hard questions. Particularly when Jonas Vingegaard, the 26-year-old Danish rider who five years ago was still working in a fish factory to help keep his cycling dreams alive, softly crushed the opposition in Tuesday’s 22.4km time trial from Passy to Combloux.

Ahead of that stage, Vingegaard was leading Tadej Pogacar by 10 seconds. By the finish, he’d opened another one minute and 38 seconds on the Slovenian, a simply startling margin in a mere 22.4km of road, hilly or otherwise.

“D’une autre Planète”, ran the headline of L’Équipe the next day – which you can probably guess translates as “From another planet”. Not necessarily avoiding the hard questioning given the last time they used that one was about Lance Armstrong.

Or, “Mais comment fait’il?” asked Aujourd’hui in the headline – a straight-up question: “How did he do it?”

Velo magazine went in a little harder still: “Without hyperbole, the time trial that Jonas Vingegaard executed on Stage 16 was arguably the greatest time trial performance in cycling history. That includes all eras, riders, climbs, and comebacks. It was hard to believe the live timing as the results flashed across the bottom of the screen.”

It was certainly the most impressive time trial since Pogacar himself first came of age to win the 2020 Tour, at 21 years and 364 days, the youngest winner in post war history – beating his compatriot Primoz Roglic by almost two minutes.

Earlier, Velo had also noted: “The power numbers from this year’s Tour de France are the highest in the modern era of cycling. 7w/kg for 20 minutes is the new standard for GC contenders, and many of these performances come after 3500kJs of work, at 1000-2000 metres above sea level, and in 30+°C (86+°F) temperatures.”

That’s a lot of sports science for one sentence, the power in this case being the rate at which energy is being used by the rider over a given time, and handily measured in watts, same as your household electricity is. It seems Vingegaard could help take a nice chunk lot off your monthly bill.

He also has a reported Vo2max of 97, when tested as a junior, one of the highest in sporting history, although I’d be putting a question mark beside that.

On Wednesday, after he again crushed Pogacar on the very hilly Col de la Loze, Vingegaard did face some hard questioning.

“I can tell, from my heart, that I don’t take anything,” he said. “I don’t take anything that I wouldn’t give to my daughter and I would definitely not give her any drugs.”

Last Sunday, he also said: “To be honest I fully understand the scepticism. We have to be sceptical, with what happened in the past, otherwise it would happen again.”

Since 2021, the International Testing Agency (ITA) has been handling testing in cycling, and on Wednesday, they confirmed Vingegaard had undergone four anti-doping tests in the last two days, including one an hour before the start of Wednesday’s 17th stage.

Around the same time, Raphael Faiss, manager at the Centre for Research and Expertise in Anti-Doping sciences at the University of Lausanne, was answering questions on Reuters about a new blood-boosting substance Roxadustat, designed for anti-anaemia purposes and banned in sport.

Roxadustat is not new, has been around since the early 2010s, though only available in the Asia market. It’s also been detectable since 2017, but has an elimination half-life of 10-16 hours, making it particularly difficult for anti-doping controllers to catch.

Former Wimbledon and French Open tennis champion Simona Halep has already been provisionally suspended since October 2022 after testing positive for Roxadustat at the US Open last year; she has strongly denied knowingly taking the banned substance.

In the Tour de France Unchained series on Netflix, there is some old footage of Vingegaard, when he was working in that fish factory, up to the summer of 2018, shot by Danish television channel DR back in 2017 for a series on promising young sports stars. He combined 4am starts at Hanstholm Port with his racing and training until the summer of 2018.

Now, he’s entering the penultimate stage of the Tour with a seven minute and 35 second lead over Pogacar and a 10:45 margin on Britain’s Adam Yates in third. Depending on how Saturday goes, Vingegaard could well win by 10 minutes, which would be the biggest margin of victory since Jan Ullrich won by more than nine minutes in 1997.

We all know how things ended up for Ullrich, and given all of cycling’s history it’s perhaps inevitable that every yellow jersey winner is left to feel guilty by some association with its past. This year’s Tour is hardly proving an exception, is it?