Triathlon and Triathlon Yokohama

It is interesting to see the wattage in this race.  Strava is helping with this.  It can be helpful if we want to monitor doping in athletes, the changing of wattage according to training monitoring and performance in race. We know the wattage of Crisanto Grajales during the race 222 watts average; McElroy 344 watts; Iden 333 watts; Pevtsov 277 watts; Viain 247 watts.  We can see who pushed the peloton and the one who drafted.  Grajales drafted Iden; Pevtsov and Viain drafted McElroy and the rest.  In the Bermuda triathlon Alarza produced 335 watts for his sixth place finish, He was in the front pack.  Seeing previous wattage a few years back where wattage was around 360 for second pack or drafting in the first pack, we can see that athletes did not train for a while after the Olympics; their performance is very poor.  Please see our post in this blog:

 22 avr. 2013

San Diego and Auckland Triathlons

Different strategies are coming into play in triathlon. Changes come from above to below, hardly any change come from below.  That is the reason why revolutions do not change anything, they come from below to above imposed by force most of the time.  Something moving from above to below is not common, frequent and/or well-accepted; we appreciated what Mr. Brownlee, The Great Champion of Triathlon, said at the finish line interview:

“I didn’t know how fast I was going to run to be honest because it was only literally this week that I felt decent,” Brownlee said of trying to break away on the bike. “I don’t understand why there’s eight to 10 guys in that group and none of those guys finished in the top 10. I don’t know why they’re not pushing on the bike. It doesn’t make sense to me. I tried to get away a little bit; form a group of three or four of us, see if we could get away, but that didn’t work.”

Frodeno's power San Diego and Auckland many years back.

It will take a few months or years to improve biking in triathlon after Rio.  Calculations for cycling in the Tour de France give information about doping; producing more than 400 watts for one hour is suspicious of doping by the rider.  There is already a limit to what a modern cyclist can do with the current training and nutrition.  Strava could be a better follow up than the biological passport in the case of doping, easier and non-invasive; or they could complement each other.