re: 111: TDF Poggie Genetics Harder than You. Fin.

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Today’s Move episode.

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Lance "This was the biggest mistake he's made in his entire career". "don't give these people a reason to hate you" "don't give them a reason to question you"


This is one of The Move podcasts to watch.



One thing we haven't talked about at least in the last few days is is Visma losing Kuss. It wouldn't have made a difference in the big picture but I guarantee Jonas missed him. The combo is what broke Poggi.







ETA Tadej has won 25% of the GT stages so far this year... That's some Cannibal level shite right there.

The most likely superdope candidate is a blood substitute derived from the marine lugworm. It's creator told L'Equipe in 2020 that he'd been contacted by a well-known cyclist asking about it.

It can transport 40 times more oxygen than our natural hemoglobin and doesn't have the nasty cardiovascular side effects of blood substitutes derived from cows such as Oxyglobin, which is only approved for veterinary use and was one of the doping products mentioned during the Operacion Puerto affair.

The lugworm derived blood substitute works fast and any detectable trace of it disappears from the body within 4-8 hours depending on how much is taken. Cyclingnews says the changes it causes won't show up on biopassport results either.

It got approved for use in Europe in 2022 just for preservation of organs before transplant, you put the organ in a bag containing the blood substitute, so it's on the market although not in a form that is approved for internal use but cycling docs are probably using that way anyway.

There is an internal form that can be used as a blood substitute currently in clinical trials, which would be harder to get ahold of and which could be superior for doping compared to the available organ transplant solution.

The bottom line is that this new blood substitute could provide turbo power without the side effects and is available at least in a form not intended to be used internally.

Tadej could be using the version still in trials, which could be better, or his docs could have come up with a special cocktail that adds other doping products to the lugworm blood substitute to optimize his program.

Lol. Phil was like Tadej is going to let him win the stage

The top three are pretty evident at these point, but one is not like the others. No disrespect to Remco, but he’s got work to do in GT against these freaks. He’s still is a force, especially in one day races, I think he exceeded the expectations at the start of this tour. If you told people before the start that Remco would be attacking Vin for podium position, they would have said no.

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took Jonas to Gapplebee's for lunch.

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I think Lance is right about Pog cooling it a little bit. Win if you want, but if anyone knows about making the race harder than it needs to be, it's Lance. I'm not saying give stages away, and I think he and George were off when they implied he did Matteo dirty by not giving him the win; but you absolutely can end up with more enemies than just Visma by playing your winning hand the wrong way.

George bought the stage he won.

When Pogacar was coming up from behind to pass Matteo, they should have played the Jaws music.

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I think Lance is right about Pog cooling it a little bit. Win if you want, but if anyone knows about making the race harder than it needs to be, it's Lance. I'm not saying give stages away, and I think he and George were off when they implied he did Matteo dirty by not giving him the win; but you absolutely can end up with more enemies than just Visma by playing your winning hand the wrong way.

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I guess I’d agree if you just acknowledge all those stages that Tadej gifted to Binny and Jasper and let them win

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Here's the paper on the detection method. The lugworm hemoglobin is either rapidly degraded and/or eliminated, which can make it essentially undetectable in a cycling context.

The questions are how long does the performance enhancement last and how does its effectiveness degrade as the lungworm hemoglobin disappears over a 4 to 8 hour time frame.

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Thanks.

ETA - some parts from the paper:
In animal studies, lugworm Hb was administered
at doses between 200 and 600 mg/kg,8,9 which would be equivalent
to an absolute therapeutic amount of 14–42 g in a 70 kg adult....Small amount that has to be given IV, so that's pretty easy.

Overall, these results are in accordance with an earlier study
describing a rather short plasma detection window of only 4 h in mice
injected with 200 mg/kg of lugworm Hb.17 Nevertheless, detection
times were found to correlate well with serum coloring and the pre-
sumed active window of the drug. Consequently, the presented dop-
ing control assay should be well suited to test in-competition samples
for the presence of this HBOC....

After injecting lugworm Hb at a dosage of 200 mg/kg, all diagnos-
tic peptides were unambiguously detected for 4–8 h (Figure 2). The
absolute signal intensities were found to significantly decrease from
2 to 4 h, indicating a rapid degradation and/or elimination of the pro-
tein complex.

So it degrades quickly, and ability to detect goes down sharply at about the same length of time for a stage. From one of the references it looks like the p50 for human Hb is just a little higher than it is for lugworm Hb, and I believe that means the lugworm Hb will unload oxygen to the tissues more easily. If it carries 40x more oxygen that is important, but it's also way larger. Human Hb is 64 kDa and lugworm 3600 kDa and blood viscosity goes up with lugworm Hb, so that could be a problem if you're not hydrated. I don't know what the effects would be down in the smallest capillaries.
If 200mg/kg has a window around 4h, I wonder what dose is needed to really boost your performance. If it's 100mg/kg, how many more watts can you push and how quickly is it out of the detection window? If it's out quickly, then at the end of the stage it may be degraded and gone, so where does the performance benefit come from - maybe it's from being able to supply enough oxygen in the beginning to use more fat and thus have glucose available later, with a lower circulating lactate level, so you're not as close to the limit as another rider might be. That would also mean blood pH is not dropping and this preserves native Hb unloading.

This is interesting. I hope they fund some human performance studies on this so we can see real world data.

Ok, from one of the references listed:
M101 supplementation increases cellular ATP production, thus, it efficiently maintains the metabolic processes, and protects mitochondria by decreasing the need to switch from mitochondrial respiration to anaerobic glycolysis.
Lower binding of nitric oxide, so it's not scavenging vasodilators and maybe that offsets increases in blood viscosity.
Furthermore, its prospects as a therapeutic O2 carrier for conditions involving massive hemorrhage, for instance, accidents, terrorist attacks and war injuries should be investigated...Recently, M101 has also been proposed as a “molecular respirator”, a potential tool to help COVID-19 patients in their struggle with hypoxemia [ 84 ].
They need to be funding trials for this stuff.

Top three finished today’s TT very proportionate to their strengths all tour. Not surprising I guess. Pog bossed all the way to the end. What a performance.