Cycling’s much-discussed power data passport trial is currently underway and involves 60 riders from five professional teams, including Jonas Vingegaard’s Visma-Lease a Bike squad, the International Testing Agency confirmed this week.
According to the anti-doping body, the two-year ‘feasibility and pilot study’, first announced on the eve of last year’s Tour de France, aims to monitor riders’ power and training data, exploring whether it could be used as a “supplementary source of intelligence”, alongside existing measures such as the biological passport, for anti-doping purposes.
This so-called power data passport trial, which has divided opinion within the peloton over the past year, is funded by the UCI’s anti-doping programme and run in collaboration with the University of Kent and University College London.
In a statement this week, the ITA said the trial “aims to assess whether longitudinal performance modelling based on riders’ power data can meaningfully support anti-doping strategies in a scientifically robust and operationally responsible manner”.
Despite objections from some within the sport, the ITA insists that the trial’s purpose is not to create a situation where anti-doping rule violations can be established solely by analysing performance and power data.
Instead, the trial will be used to “evaluate whether certain patterns or evolutions in performance may, in the future, help inform areas such as targeted testing strategies, sample retention decisions, additional laboratory analysis, or investigations”.
“A central objective of the research is to better understand typical variability in performance over time and across different rider profiles and age groups,” the agency said.
“Researchers are studying how performance evolves throughout a rider’s career, how race performances relate to training data and how repeated efforts can be analysed in a meaningful and reproducible way despite the many variables inherent to elite cycling.
“The work particularly examines what researchers describe as ‘excess performances’, which represents individual performance trajectory of an athlete adjusted for the average performance of all athletes within the population at the same age as well as any confounders.
“The model therefore examines the change in an athlete’s performances over time rather than focusing solely on an isolated exceptional performance.”
The study aims to assess the range of factors which influence power data, including differences between power meter devices and calibration methods, systematic and random measurement error, race dynamics and rider specialisation, and the relationship between training outputs and race performances.
In March, the ITA told road.cc that just under 60 riders from five different teams have signed up and have consented to share their historical power data as part of the trial on a voluntary basis.
Those teams were this week confirmed to be Visma-Lease a Bike, led by two-time Tour de France winner Jonas Vingegaard, along with Picnic PostNL, Jayco AlUla, Decathlon AG2R, and Cofidis. Meanwhile, Uno-X Mobility, Tudor, and TotalEnergies have approved “participation frameworks” and talks are ongoing with other squads.
The first year of the trial will focus on retrospective analysis, using historical rider data to “determine whether a meaningful and sufficiently reliable” monitoring approach can be developed, before a pilot phase assessing data from that current season.
The ITA has also established a dedicated ‘Power Data Advisory Panel’, bringing together experts from the world of sports science, athlete representation, cycling technology, and integrity operations.
“We are constantly looking at how to make the cycling anti-doping program smarter and more effective”, ITA director general Benjamin Cohen said in a statement.
“Power data has been part of the conversation in cycling for many years. It is one of the sport’s most widely used performance tools, yet until now its potential contribution to anti-doping has remained largely unexplored.
“Thanks to the commitment of riders, teams and recognised experts, we now have the opportunity to assess its potential through a structured scientific process and determine whether it can meaningfully complement the anti-doping toolbox in the future.”
If the trial proves a success, and is approved by the UCI, the governing body’s regulations will be amended to require the mandatory sharing of individual power data for all professional men’s road riders, before potentially moving to the women’s peloton and other sports such as triathlon, the ITA says.
It’s this potential for mandatory power data sharing that has proved controversial within the cycling world, attracting criticism from Adam Hansen, the president of the CPA, the professional riders’ association.
“The CPA is not really happy about this at all,” Hansen told road.cc earlier this year. “There are some riders who don’t mind it, they think it is okay. But I do think it is bringing things too far.
“Riders have so much responsibility at the moment. Their whole life is under WADA, they have to do their whereabouts, they have to be at a special location every day for one hour, they have to fill those details in, they have to make sure that they eat the correct diet, they have a training plan they have to follow.
“And while this is voluntary at the moment, I’m really worried when it becomes mandatory.”
The Australian continued: “I always ask the question what happens if the rider refuses to upload his training? And they said, ‘well, they’d have to enforce it.’ And then, for me, it’s like, ‘okay, what happens then?’
“At first they said it’s just a test. I said, ‘okay, that’s fine. But what happens when it’s not a test? What happens when a rider does not submit his training data? What happens if his SRM or Garmin is flat? What happens if his power meter does not work?
“What happens if his bike doesn’t work that day? What happens if he doesn’t ride on his road bike, and he rides on his mountain bike, and this changes his whole training programme? How can you know this?
“How do you know when he’s training at 80 per cent and not 100 per cent? Because if he has a week of training at 80 per cent and then he decides the week after to train at 100 per cent because he’s following the instructions from his coach, how did they know that he was training that week at 80 per cent and that’s not 100 per cent?
“And then the week after it [appears to be] 120 per cent, where they are thinking ‘is it 20 per cent over his limit? How can he do that?’ But it’s because he’s been training easier before.
“I highly believe it won’t be successful. And then it will be scrapped. But we will see how it goes.”
The trial has also been criticised by high-profile rider agent Alex Carera, who has represented four-time Tour de France winner Tadej Pogačar and several other professional cyclists for many years, Carera arguing that the use of power data as an anti-doping measure is unnecessary and unwarranted.
“I know that a commission wants to analyse the data of Training Peaks and decide some elements. No. Why? Our sport has changed a lot. Now cycling has credibility,” he told road.cc.
“Maybe 10 or 15 years ago, no, but now we have credibility because the mentality has changed. We don’t [need to] find other stupid things to create only problems, because cycling is different than 15 years ago.
“Maybe we needed to come back to have the credibility to show to the fans that we want more controls, 24 hours availability, and so on.
“But now the mentality has changed. We do not have this problem, the doping problem. Why do we need to create something [new]?”
