An Opportunity to Foretell the Future by Revisiting the Past
Editor’s Note: Competitive performance in pro cycling seems to be peaking, with all-time climbing records falling left and right – raising inevitable and understandable questions about the purity of the sport. In this re-examination of our 2021 article, we suggest that the sport could benchmark a defensible standard for the modern era by restaging one of the Tour de France’s most iconic time trials from its past – and provide cycling with a critical apples-to-apples comparison that might help it chart its future.
The 2025 men’s Tour de France route, presented by ASO earlier in October, will be one of the most demanding and historically enriching editions of the modern era. The riders will be challenged by multiple finishing climbs made famous by prior Tours, a potential peloton-breaking stage across the Massif Central, and an all-French itinerary of host cities and towns. The 2025 Tour will likely elicit heroic performances from the top riders and provide fans with a worthy winner, but – in the process – those performances may raise more questions than the sport has answers. We suggest that the inclusion of just one stage from the race’s storied past might help to clarify and perhaps set the record straight.
The legendary ascents in this edition – Mont Ventoux, Superbagnères, Courchevel, and Hautacam – are likely to see prior climbing records obliterated. “Obliterated” is not an overstatement in this context; over the last dozen or so editions of the race – but particularly in the last couple of years – pro cycling’s record books have been continuously rewritten. In turn, this has given rise to a virtual cottage industry of athlete performance and physiology analytics. Sports scientists race to be the first to post the calculations on social media platforms – VAM (altitude gained per hour of climbing), estimated average watts, the inferred VO2 max (maximum oxygen processing capacity) of the riders; the list goes on.
In sports like cycling and marathon, each fallen record refocuses intense scrutiny on just exactly how the athletes prepare for the biggest races – the equipment they use, their training and preparation regimens and the coaching staff overseeing their performances. Many sports scientists and longtime observers have analyzed the exploits of today’s most talented riders and their teams, and a few in the field have hinted that we might be on the precipice of a new performance-enhancing era. Unfortunately, this is not an unreasonable criticism of pro cycling; regrettably, the sport has written several chapters of the modern performance enhancement playbook, through organized doping programs, pariah scientists and training gurus, and airtight omerta.
Cycling has suffered through some of the highest-profile doping scandals anywhere in sport. However, the simple comparison of climbing records over time is fraught with too many variables to be a true reflection of what is happening in cycling today – i.e., are we witnessing progress in endurance training science and modern aerodynamic equipment, or is it something else? But there are ways to better dissect and address this question. What if pro cycling had a true apples-to-apples evaluation, in which multiple eras of the sport’s best athletes, training methodologies, and scientific observations could be accurately and realistically compared over time, putting such relative performance questions to rest? That is the argument for ASO to finally revive the legendary final week time trial stage around Lac de Vassivière.
In a 2021 article, we examined the history, past winners, and scientific value of this unique time-trial course, tucked between Limoges and Clermont Ferrand in the Massif region. In brief, the picturesque lake is France’s largest man-made reservoir and the site of three historic battles between some of history’s greatest time trialists. Greg LeMond, Erik Breukink, and Miguel Indurain each stamped their name on the 46-kilometer course around the lake’s perimeter: LeMond won the 1985 edition, Breukink in 1990 (with LeMond sealing his third yellow jersey), and Indurain in 1995 to win his fifth and final Tour. Yet each edition told a different analytical story and can provide unique insights into why we may be at a new crossroads of trust in professional cycling.
LeMond and Breukink were closely matched in the 1990 edition, and at that time there was still limited impact of synthetic EPO doping, as Amgen had only introduced the product in 1987. However, EPO had proliferated wildly across all endurance sports by 1995. Doctors and team staff already had significant experience in dosing athletes with the blood booster and were able to transform donkeys into thoroughbreds, as indisputably demonstrated at Vassivière that year. Indeed, the entire peloton crushed the course an average of five minutes faster than Breukink’s win just five years earlier – a truly preposterous result. Indurain was nearly six minutes faster in 1995 than he was in ‘90; even the mediocre 27th place of Rolf Aldag – who confessed post-career to doping – matched Breukink’s 1990 winning mark. Few observers wanted to talk about that highly-suspicious, peloton-wide eight percent improvement; no one at the time wanted to step up and explore the consequences of why an entire sport had changed so rapidly.
As we summarized in 2021, grand tours frequently include many popular finishing climbs – “from Alpe d’Huez and the Angliru, to Monte Zoncolan and Mont Ventoux” – but mountain stage comparisons are inherently inexact because weather, team tactics, and course variations from year to year (distance, placement of other climbs in the stage) complicate the analysis. However, each edition of Lac de Vassivière came at the end of the third week of the Tour, placing the athletes at the limits of their fitness and recuperation and also followed a nearly identical loop of the reservoir (with a slight 1995 start/finish zone deviation). Furthermore, the weather conditions were similar each time for the top riders – and team tactics did not factor into the energy they expended to hold on to or improve their GC aspirations.
Setting aside the short Le Puy du Fou prologues of the 1993 and 1999 Tours, no ITT stages have so precisely duplicated conditions as closely as three editions of Lac de Vassivière. For all these reasons, in the broader “experiment” of pro road cycling, Vassivière remains to date the closest thing to a control or standard as the sport has ever offered. And to this day, it could almost seem suspicious that we haven’t seen more such identical grand tour ITT courses that could serve as clear historical and longitudinal markers to measure the progression of rider abilities in the modern era.
Suspension of disbelief is a feature of many sports, but just as the Kenya Crisis has done for endurance running, Barry Bonds and Mark McGwire delivered for baseball, and countless riders provided for cycling, the illusion of clean competition has often been washed away. Aside from riders who confessed to it later, Lac de Vassivière did not confirm who doped in any of its three editions, but it certainly cleared away enough smoke to show that a fire had started.
Yet here we are – some 30 years after that blitz of Vassivière’s unrelenting undulations – and we still seem to be at more or less the same intersection of the sport’s performance narrative and believability. The Tour de France is nearly unique in terms of what it demands of its winners: endurance, strength, mental fortitude, and impeccable preparation. That latter demand – preparation – is a combination of many things: training, discipline, nutrition and medical oversight. And all too often after storybook wins have taken place, the sport and its fans have witnessed what “medical oversight” actually meant - moving the needle of athletic performance by manipulating oxygen processing capacity via EPO, steroids, and blood transfusions. New EPO-stimulating medications and treatments like carbon monoxide breathing systems, along with supportive dual-use medications permitted with therapeutic use exemptions, could still be pushing that needle today.
Cycling’s fans will no doubt be enthralled by the narrative in France this coming July – heroic efforts, brilliant tactics, and raw emotions unleashed by riders winning stages on the sport’s biggest stage. We also can’t help but think the inevitable record-breaking efforts will be dissected and belabored by questions about the sport’s integrity if and when new climbing records fall. Are riders today simply more physiologically gifted than 15, 30, or 40 years ago, or are advances in modern training and aerodynamics the reason today’s peloton can exceed the exploits of the last generation? And beyond those “advances,” what else can explain the dramatic and continuing performance improvements?
In this light, we offer a challenge to cycling’s celebrated race analysts, physiologists, and watts calculation nerds: if there is truly race to calculate the race, can a lineage be modeled using 1985, 1990, and 1995 data and predict the outcome of a theoretical 2026 edition of Lac de Vassivière? For example, if the incremental advantage of first-generation aero equipment might have been Breukink’s slight 1990 advantage, and a 10% EPO improvement might explain many of 1995’s heroic times, what could today's supposed +/- 15% aero bike and positioning improvements – and perhaps new nefarious doping vectors – yield as a new fastest time?
There are two paths forward that pro cycling can consider. In one, we hope that anti-doping systems and policies catch up in the arms race with the practices of modern doping programs. This, of course, may never happen, although incremental progress has been made via cycling’s CIRC Report and the exposure of Russia’s Olympic state doping scandal. A more desirable path requires definitive proof that genetics, modern training and preparation, the structure of modern racing and other related factors have enabled our greatest modern cyclists to reset the modeled asymptotic limits of human physiology.
ASO missed a unique opportunity to revisit Lac de Vassivière’s time trial in 2025 to potentially level-set men’s pro cycling with its historic past, history-making present, and record-breaking future. It could have added this important stage in any recent Tour de France edition, and hopefully it will appear again soon, but the lack of such a modern reference point only kicks the can further down the road – where doping revelations historically extract a heavier price. The results might generate heated debate but that data might at the very least help fans, scientists, and potential sponsors to make up their minds based on facts, rather than unresolvable speculations.