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Tadej Pogacar answers carbon monoxide rebreathing rumours and 'Mou': "It’s not like we’re breathing exhaust pipes every day in the cars"
CyclingThursday, 18 July 2024 at 15:00
Tadej Pogacar has been absolutely headlining this Tour de France with incredibly performances in all terrains and a popularity that never fades. But he's also been in the spotlight for other reasons over the past week including an investigation into carbon monoxide rebreathing in the World Tour and also a mysterious figure 'Mou' who many believe is a mole within the UAE Team Emirates structure that has been letting out information that at points appears quite convincing.
Pogacar was asked about this the carbon monoxide topic after stage 16 but gave a very vague answer, replying he did not know what it was. This came after an investigation from Escape Collective which warns to the possibility of this method being used for performance enhancing. The Slovenian was asked again this Thursday afternoon after stage 17 and understood what the question was this time around: "It’s a test in altitude camp to see how you respond to altitude. You need to do this test, it’s like a two- or three-minute-long test. You breathe into a balloon for one minute and then you see the haemoglobin mass, and then you need to repeat it two weeks after," he responded.
“But I did just the first part of the test. I never did the second part because the girl who was supposed to come after two weeks didn’t come. It’s not like we’re breathing exhaust pipes every day in the cars. It’s just a pretty simple test to see how you respond to altitude training.”
The performances over the weekend, including an historically strong ascent of Plateau de Beille that has broken records left and right when it comes to climbing power output, has further raised questions over the preparation methods of UAE Team Emirates and other teams. Pogacar has also been asked about 'Mou', a Cyclingnews forum user that back in February and March claimed to be quite close to the Slovenian and extensively talked about details in his changes in training, preparation, coaches and predicted his significant improval in 2024.
What has given some degree of validity to this figure is the release of alleged training data from Pogacar himself on Training Peaks, inside knowledge on the change of coaches for several of his teammates and him, and changes that have accurately been predicted months ahead. On X (formerly known as Twitter), this user has been continuously sharing messages and also some of his former posts, and has grown to a level of popularity that sees reporters at the Tour question Pogacar who this is.
"I have heard in recent days the he has received a lot of attention. He is right about some of that, but most of it is wrong," Pogacar responds when asked about 'Mou' from Ekstra Bladet. "I don't know who that guy is and what his purpose is. He is just trying to be important on Twitter and on various forums. I don't follow it, but I've heard a lot about it and people ask. Maybe we can all figure it out together. It is perhaps more your job than it is mine to find out who he is".
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- Exactly who, Joey, is "they"? Flimsy, illogical conspiracy theories aside, it is in no one's interest (financial or otherwise) to "drive away small local events." Major cultural and macroeconomic factors are reducing ridership, but there is no "they" in this context.verve82520-12-2024
- And our virtual platforms allow us to "ride" famous place that we can't get to in person, which is a pretty fabulous aspect of this weird weird sport.RidesHills19-12-2024
- Which off-season are you referring to? The one after he won the Tour of California? The one after he won 3 stages and was on the podium of the Vuelta? The one after TJV screwed up, never put him away, and lost the Tour on the time trial? We've seen the guy hit the wall, lose energy, nearly fail, and lose races ("I'm dead") more than once. He's got a visible threshold and his fueling regimen is a clear weak spot. You'll need more detail to make this more than under defined insinuations .RidesHills19-12-2024
- Interesting analysis. And yet, I'm in the US, and at a recent wedding reception as a group of us older folks had to stand at a certain place to keep track of a thing, we got to talking, and every single one of us had a favorite rider, a favorite circuit of races, a moment when we fell in love with the sport, and a joy in the complexities of it all. None of us knew about the other's fandom until that moment. It's wonderful that these are my brothers-in-law, and we now know to talk about this when the spouses aren't listening. Point being: there are fans all over, and for US folks, the loss of GCN+ has been huge. As so often, it's the media bottleneck that matters more than anything else. Look at F1 in the US before Netflix, as an example.RidesHills19-12-2024
- On the one hand, what he says is trivial. Of course it's genetics. It always is, in any sport. That's just obvious. Look at Mondo Duplantis, whose sprinting speed is key to his pole vaulting, for example - he's just plain faster than other vaulters and good at the rest of the event as well. In cycling, even when you take the most genetically weird group of people and give them amazing training, some will be better than others, as well. Distributions are distributions and there are outliers and that's just that. Pogacar's body is built for this kind of thing, it seems, with him only recently having had to pick up skills that others have used all along. I'm still inclined to believe that these folks are using entirely legal means to arrive at their shockingly good performance, given how more senior riders kinda complain about (or at least comment on) the regimens and control over the nutrition and exercise and all that. And in every population, there are edge cases of truly exceptional behavior.RidesHills19-12-2024
- And it’s likely going to get worse. They are going all-out to drive away small local events which are where a lot of new riders come from. They want fee income and Olympic medals. That’s all.JoeyB19-12-2024
- Oh Lordspock12319-12-2024
- Interesting suggestion, fo you think testing Tadej’s (or Bolts’ or so many others’) parents would have given us a preview of his potential then or what criteria do you have to pick parents with?Mistermaumau19-12-2024
- Even amateur teams suffer this sort. But this is also largely due to the precarious sponsorship, in very few sports do you find kit with so many sponsors having to be integrated and changing so regularly.Mistermaumau19-12-2024
- I think it’s pretty obvious what was responsible for destroying interest that used to be there.Mistermaumau19-12-2024