Latin American rowers from many countries train (or used to) at Tiquicaca Lake, in Bolivia. The highest lake in the world. Apparently intense training in a thin atmosphere made them more powerful when racing in richer atmospheres.
It's quite common, and how it's done is often depending on where you compete (if you need high altitude experience during the race itself). So some practice sleep high train low, while others are high and do the workouts as well at altitude.
Many athletes also sleep in altitute tents. Basically something you wrap around your bed or a mask, that simulates being at altitute.
But anyway, that requires doing the exercise inside the controlled atmosphere. I'd guess the lure of carbon monoxide is that you can breath it, go out and exercise on a normal atmosphere. (That is, if you don't die on the first step.)
But then, if I had to guess I'd say the fact that the effects are long-term would reduce the athlete's performance. So yeah, I'd guess wrong.
You're right, carbon dioxide in large enough doses is no bueno, but even then it's more likely an issue of asphyxiation than anything else, and it's really a matter of scale. Carbon dioxide exist at ~400 ppm and safe at 5,000 ppm over 8 hours, compared to 50 ppm for carbon monoxide[1]. I know which one I'd rather use to substitute some oxygen for.
I was just trying to point out that if they wanted to induce hypoxia, there's better gases to be inhaling.
Reminds me of swimmer Mark Spitz who had a mustache at the 1972 Olympics in Munich, and won 7 gold medals in a world record. The Russian swimming coach asked him about the mustache, and he replied that American scientists had determined that it made him faster. A year later, in the 1973 World Championships, most of the Russian team had mustaches, while Spitz had shaved his off.
I got a light case of CO poisoning from using a grill outdoors in a space that I guess wasn't really well ventilated. Threw up in the middle of the night (wasn't the food, everyone else was fine and so was I the very next day). I didn't feel any faster after that and it was kind of a miserable experience.
I don't think I would mess around with that stuff.
Nitrogen is apparently pretty dangerous too because, from what I understand, your body doesn't feel like it's not "getting enough air" like it does with high CO2 concentrations? Something like that, I don't recall the specifics...
It's build up of co2 in your lungs/body that gives you the urge to breathe, yeah. So any messing around with the air composition could kill you without noticing the lack of o2, as long as you keep breathing thus getting rid of the co2.
Joking with some coworkers I once took a big breath of what should've been helium but had accidentally been misfilled with trimix welding shield gas (He/CO2/Ar).
I knew immediately what had happened as I coughed in duck noises.
> That’s what happened in January 2023 when two riders on Uno-X Mobility had to be taken to hospital after a go-karting session for team bonding left them with carbon monoxide poisoning.
Surely it was the go-karting and the team-bonding...
I don't know what it is about cycling that seems to concentrate some of the most insane physiological manipulation (not sure if that's the right phrase tbh).
Other sports like baseball/tennis/etc seem to have some issues with like general steroids. But the level that cyclists go to always seems to exceed them by orders of magnitude.
I don't know how true it is, but I've heard that some cyclists had/have to set alarms throughout the night so they wake up to do jumping jacks to get their heart rates back up above the "artificial" 15bpm that their training + cocktail of drugs has caused.
I think because there's less "skill" required, in the sense of hand-eye coordination, than ball sports. The predominant factor seems to be how hard and how long you can push yourself. Once you reach the human body's natural physical limits, chemical advantage seems like the only way to break through those.
As a cyclist (albeit never raced), I want to get offended by this but I feel is largely correct. There is a lot of real time strategizing happening in road races however the marginal gains of simply having more Watts per kg for more hours trumps everything else.
Bicycles are the most efficient form of transport... at moderate speeds. At elite level speeds you are so far down the exponental well of wind resistance that you need meticulous attention to aero savings and sustained power output. All of the possible aero gains permitted under the rules are already accounted for. That leaves power output as the only avenue for gaining a competitive advantage. No other sport has the same combination of antagonizing factors at play.
This is an interesting thought, it makes sense intuitively.. I could see it being adjacent to why steroids are prevalent amongst body builders. After you've hit your "genetic wall" for size/strength, chemical advantage could seem like the only way to keep progressing.
It's interesting to see it play out in an "official" sport, rather than just individual workout/ "aesthetic" tournaments. Maybe they should add some more skill elements to major cycling races.. perhaps a slalom through the orange cones of a construction site every few miles? lol
This is very wrong. These guys go downhill on small country roads very fast – sometimes over 100 kmh. You need deep riding skills to handle these speeds without getting injured.
For what it's worth, I don't think people are trying to say it's a zero skill sport. It's not an indictment of you or the sport.
I see the "argument" as: in sports like soccer or basketball, skills like dribbling or shooting accuracy don't have a skill "cap" and are generally uncorrelated to physiology. This is compared to the skill of descending a mountain at speed, which is dictated by how fast you can actually make yourself go, which is a matter of physiology.
It's not that strategy and skill don't exist in cycling, it's that raw power output (Watts per Kg) is ultimately the deciding factor once cyclists get to the skill cap of piloting their bike down a mountain.
So basically, could I cycle down a hill at 50-70mph? Absolutely not. But among the people who can, then the competitive advantage becomes how fast you can make yourself go down that hill.
> I don't think people are trying to say it's a zero skill sport.
I didn’t say you were, you were saying that there’s less skill involved, which is outright untrue.
> in sports like soccer or basketball, skills like dribbling or shooting accuracy don't have a skill "cap" and are generally uncorrelated to physiology.
Skill is highly correlated to physiology at the higher levels. Plenty of people practice as much as Messi, yet haven’t a fraction of his footballing ability.
> It's not that strategy and skill don't exist in cycling, it's that raw power output (Watts per Kg) is ultimately the deciding factor once cyclists get to the skill cap of piloting their bike down a mountain.
You’ve not watched the famous Pidcock descent then.
> the competitive advantage becomes how fast you can make yourself go down that hill.
Very little pedalling is involved at 60mph, it’s 100% skill.
> Skill is highly correlated to physiology at the higher levels. Plenty of people practice as much as Messi, yet haven’t a fraction of his footballing ability.
This is counter to your thesis. Messi's dominance doesn't come because he has elite physical characteristics. He's dominant because his level of skill with the ball at his foot is an outlier even among elites. It's not because he's pushing the physical limits of the human body.
There might be some variance in skill for elite riders, but I would guess the density curve of skill in that cohort is a very narrow bell curve, ie. low variance with relatively few outliers. This is what I mean when I say pure skill is not the major factor in success in cycling. Most riders are going to be pretty closely matched skill-wise, and the winners are going to be those that can generate the most power for a sustained amount of time.
No, it’s because his skill is deeply tied to his body’s physiology. I wager you’d find physical traits that you simply must be born with. His height, balance, reaction times. Physiology.
> Most riders are going to be pretty closely matched skill-wise
This is true for all sports.
> winners are going to be those that can generate the most power for a sustained amount of time.
Strategy comes into it a lot, just like most sports.
Also, there’s plenty of talented footballers that will never go pro because they lack the ability to run fast or maintain that intensity for 90 minutes (fitness).
I’ve given up on this thread because people seem to be getting very defensive and interpreting malice when there is none, but your comment here is similar to what I was trying to say. Cycling has a tighter bell curve of skill than other sports, just like all/most endurance sports.
It’s not a knock, I still enjoy those sports a lot, often more than wider skill bell curve sports.. oh well
> he said less in comparison with other professional sports.
No, we’re taking umbrage with the fact that people are saying cycling requires less skill, when this simply isn’t true. It requires different skills, that’s all.
I'm a keen cyclist (doing and watching); the elite differentiator is aerobic capacity (anaerobic for sprinters) not skill. Going fast up a hill wins GC and require no skill. Going fast down is more skilful but less important.
There’s plenty of amateur footballers more skilful than professionals, yet can’t make it because they lack the physical attributes (speed/strength/stamina). I’ve watched high skill teams shredded by a team that just shoved them off the ball and outran them. Barcelona’s style under Pep wasn’t mostly skill, it included a HUGE amount of physical fitness to maintain a press to win the ball back.
A massive part of Rooney’s rapid decline was his shit lifestyle reducing his fitness and speed as he grew older.
The competitive advantage is not physiological. Following your reasoning, that'd mean an F1 driver's competitive advantage is how fast they can push the pedals to get to 300kmph.
The real advantage is how fast you can navigate dangerous mountain roads which are narrow and have many hairpin turns.
I don't know that that's the analogy you'd want to use. It is correct that an F1 driver's competitive advantage is how fast they can get to 300 kmph (or just accelerate in general, since there's skill/strategy involved as to when/where to accelerate). If we're following that reasoning... the engine is that competitive advantage, and we know that to be a significant factor because there are millions of dollars of engineering effort to optimize the cars they race. The reaction time of how fast you can push the pedal is an incredibly small part of that equation.
If you're on a bike, that competitive edge "engine" is the cyclist own physiology. Yes, how fast you can navigate the roads is part of it, but is it not the acceleration/max speed out of the hairpin turn that represents the lion's share of overall time? Rather than the fractions of seconds gained/lost in the timing of accelerations at the turn? I guess it depends on the length/ frequency of turns in the course.
Just out of curiosity, would you be defending the skill required to do cross country as vigorously as you are for cycling?
Only someone who’s never cycled quickly could say there’s less skill involved. Try riding down the side of a mountain at 50mph and follow up your post.
The other sports you listed provide much more strain on the muscoskeletal system and the cardio impact is bursty. But with cycling you have this amazingly efficient machine relieving that type of stress so it becomes more of an exercise of how efficiently the body can process oxygen and pump blood under constant duress.
> I don't know how true it is, but I've heard that some cyclists had/have to set alarms throughout the night so they wake up to do jumping jacks to get their heart rates back up above the "artificial" 15bpm that their training + cocktail of drugs has caused.
Even as a casual runner (top 20% in a marathon, def not competitive), I have had to silence low heart rate alarms on my apple watch because my heart rate regularly drops below 40bpm at night. When I’m in peak condition for a race, I’ve seen it drop as low as 30.
Professional cyclists have the highest VO2max of any athlete. Even without drugs I would be completely unsurprised if their heart rate gets to 20bpm in deep sleep.
Definitely some amount of it is natural, I'm even less competitive with running than you, but seeing my resting heart rate go down as you ramp up distances is a satisfying thing when you realize the hard work is paying off in a "tangible" way :)
I did a little more googling after the above comment, and it seems like another factor that (in theory) plays into the issue for the anecdote is that their blood can get thicker from doping. So it's a recipe of very low heart rate + extra viscous blood to pump that = danger.
Regardless, it's some pretty interesting/freaky stuff!
I had heard that in the context of absurdly high hematocrit, where they would get their heart rate up to move the (very viscous) blood around their body. No source, but doesn’t sound impossible when everyone was on EPO.
That was the early EPO era.. there were some riders that died in their sleep their blood was so thick from massive amounts of EPO. Their red blood cell counts were excessively high.
If someone is well-informed (the key point here - but I assume professional athletes are well aware of what they're doing) and still wants to do something weird and/or dangerous to their body, without harming others in the process - who is to deny them their bodily autonomy, and on what basis?
> and that people would do it in the first place
Two words: professional sports. Those folks willingly (I hope, or that'd be insane) risk their health for money, fame, and advances of medical science. Although the entertainment industry really tries the weirdest thing that I really don't understand - trying their best to shift the focus away from the science advancement as much as possible, even though this is the only actually valuable thing in professional sports.
I meant legal in the allowed by the sport’s governing body sense, not the will the cops show up at my door sense.
If this is what athletes do to get to the top of the sport, then it soon becomes a pseudo requirement. If the sport regulators don’t clamp down on it then they’re basically forcing people to do something insanely risky if they want to compete.
Plenty of professional sports have banned things for simply being too dangerous even if they do give an edge.
It is almost certainly just something that hasn't been banned yet. There's a very long list of similar things which the UCI has banned, but they generally don't ban things which people might hypothetically do but haven't actually started doing yet, so each time someone comes up with a new idea there's a window of time to do it while it's still legal.
I expect you’re right. It has to get on the radar to be banned.
To make matters worse unlike PEDs this may be very hard to catch.
It just floors me that someone who knew about the similarity between high altitude and partial CO poisoning not only decided to try it but got others to go along.
Injecting spider venom isn’t dangerous as long as you get the dosage right.
If doing this makes it possible to perform better, people are going to push the edge of the amount that’s “safe“. Right up to the limit. Tip toeing over the limit.
People will get seriously hurt/die if they do it wrong.
It’s CO. there’s a reason the government is always telling people to make sure they have carbon monoxide detectors. It’s not because they might get too good at sports.
> Injecting spider venom isn’t dangerous as long as you get the dosage right.
Venom actively damages your cells, CO just restricts oxygen access.
> If doing this makes it possible to perform better, people are going to push the edge of the amount that’s “safe“. Right up to the limit. Tip toeing over the limit.
Not necessarily. It’s not like EPO where more is better, the benefits likely cap out long before you reach a dangerous level of CO, so going to “the limit” isn’t something that’s likely to happen.
> It’s CO. there’s a reason the government is always telling people to make sure they have carbon monoxide detectors.
Yes because your boiler might leak an uncontrolled amount of CO and, because it’s odorless, you don’t know if you’re breathing too much before you pass out and, subsequently, die. That’s a different situation than being in a controlled environment where you can set the dosage quite easily.
I’m not sure this is dangerous, per se, as long as the dosage is measured. As you learn in school, CO is only poisonous because it replaces oxygen in your blood. There’s no negative long term effects as long as the dose never reduces the oxygen mix of air beyond what a human can survive on.
This is being used to simulate altitude training, so I don’t see how you can ban it. It’ll just mean all teams go back to altitude training instead. We don’t consider altitude training doping because that would be an insane position to take. Would you ban riders from mountainous regions from cycling?
That second point also means it’s not being dangerously configured because we know the oxygen % levels at different altitudes.
I wonder what'll happen if/when it leads to a fatality:
> Other details like optimal dosage are still very much in question as well. [...] Aside from the risk of death, acute carbon monoxide poisoning can cause lasting health problems, including delayed neurological damage. [..."]But if you inhale carbon monoxide, the half-life is 300 minutes. If you get toxic levels, you’re really screwed” because the gas can’t leave your body for hours. [...] And in especially acute cases, victims would need access to a hospital equipped with a special hyperbaric chamber for treatment.
I browse default with javascript off, and if it seems like a website is messed up, I enable it on a per-site basis. Browsing like this is 1) really nice for my laptop battery, but 2) also completely eliminates many of these soft paywalls.
Cycling journalism doesn't pay well and has suffered in recent years. Escape Collective is a group trying to 'go their own way' to provide high quality reporting on their own terms.
So it makes sense for them to paywall it; it's not meant for a broader audience, but people who want a lot of high quality bike news.
Source: Olympic rower who is a friend.