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Slash Podcasts.

Hello and welcome to more or less on the BBC World Service,

the show that punctures the overinflated numerical tires of the Newspelaton.

The Tour de France reaches its climax this week.

In the background, the US anti-doping agency charged the retired seven-time winner Lance Armstrong

with using performance-enhancing drugs.

Armstrong denies the allegations, but Biana Reese has admitted taking performance-enhancing drugs

when he won the Tour in 1996.

Then Alberto Contador was stripped of his 2010 Tour win after failing a drug test.

But cycling we're told has finally cleaned up its act.

Britain's Bradley Wiggins, where of the yellow jersey for most of this year's Tour,

is infuriated by the assumption that as Tour leader, he must be taking drugs.

So we were fascinated by this question from loyal listener Paul Nicholson.

If the Tour is being cleaned up, can that be proved statistically by showing that riders are on average slower than before?

Wesley Stephenson's here, fresh from sitting for hours on the end watching other people do all the hard work.

No change there, then, ways.

Let's think about how we would compare this year's Tour with previous tours.

Well, yeah, we could look at speed.

So if we were to look at the speed for climbing outdoers, one of the toughest climbs on the Tour,

you can see that in the late 1990s, this was being climbed in less than 38 minutes.

...