Sports Science and Elite Athletes: The Ed Coyle/Lance Armstrong controversy

 

Dear readers, I came across this interesting commentary of the never-ending story of the famous Ed Coyle’s paper published on the Journal of Applied Physiology in 1998 entitled “Improved muscular efficiency displayed as Tour de France champion matures”. This paper generated a lot of controversy already as soon as it was published with a lot of discussions at scientific conferences and letters to the editor.

Now it appears that Prof. Coyle has admitted some “minor errors” in his analysis of efficiency.

Jonathan Dugas and Ross Tucker have analysed and discussed very well the issue in their blog “The Science of Sport”. So, I invite all readers to visit their blog and read the story, it’s really interesting.
Then, when you are done with it, you can read the details of the error here:
“ Story 2 "

While I believe at times the authors of the blog took a clear position maybe lacking some objectivity, the process they went through is excellent and the quality of the discussion and presentation of the case is brilliant. I also suggest you read the comments as some are really valuable.