PETACCHI

[mrP(Boonen)VT]

And now he's out with bronchitis - because he didn't use his inhaler

Come on Marco, you must have a field day on Astana........out to win this year's (clean) Giro

[Andrew G]

You old cynic Paul, I'm sure DiLuca could get between the Astana trio somwhere . Wore my Milram jersey to work today as well .

Even with team dodgy now riding it'll probably be the cleanest grand tour for a while. With the stages they have planned should make good viewing anyway.

I read a great thing from Savio (Simoni's PVC team DS) on the mountain TT with the unpaved section and 20% and 24% sections. He said there are no team cars as it's too narrow so a mechanic will be on the back of a quad bike following them up. He's going to do a test on his. Whoever is the most svelte and quickest at running up and down a mountain gets the job .

[kieran]

read:

[url]http://www.acsm-msse.org/pt/re/msse/abstract.00005768-199210000-00015.htm;jsessionid=LgrbL5SC1QDBZFVWhB0hmYvd4YvGrdtKhyszGlQ2xKV3hQbNml9p!1379360954!181195629!8091!-1[/url]

[Andrew G]

Many moons ago when I last saw the quack (who is also a qualified sports doc) he said they'd been various tests on supposed performance enhancing products and quite a lot of them had little or no effect, it was largely pschosymatic. Not your EPO and the like but the more low key ones like inhallers.

There'd been a load of tests done, not on cyclists as it was tied in with another sport - forget which now - and they'd concluded that although some had a very small performance assistance any potential benefit was far outweighed by something as simple as having a double espresso before the start. That's without even weighing it up against the risk of getting caught and resultant penalty.

Marco in your extract this could easily in many cases be as a result of "believing it works" rather than it actually doing it, particularly when combined with their get out of jail [quote]All of these factors, when combined with proper diet and training