The American media is winding itself up for the feeding frenzy that will be Lance Armstrong's attempt to win a record breaking 6th Tour De France this July. Meanwhile, one of his rivals, the somewhat Scottish David Millar spent a month on a voluntary ban from cycling whilst his team was investigated for drug taking. Millar gave this interview to Scotland on Sunday to express his feelings about it. The important words for me are...

It upsets me to think that people assume every pro is on drugs. Just because people can't comprehend the level of fitness and ability that some riders have, they now assume they all do it on drugs.

It really is difficult for ordinary folks to comprehend how guys like Millar - the World Time Trial Champion - or Armstrong, can ride a bike for long distances at average speeds exceeding 27 miles per hour. In fact in time trials, both Millar and Armstrong regularly top 34 miles per hour for a distance of 30 miles.

Now I'm no slouch on a bicycle on my day, and back at the time of the Singapore project I was riding mountain bike races in Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore. On one race, I came in (a distant) 15th, behind a winner who just the previous month had picked up the gold medal in the Commonthwealth Games for the road race. Another regular racer, an Australian, had a gold medal from the olympics (for speed skating). Now these guys were about 15% faster than me - and that is a lot believe me, its huge when you have to chase after it. In turn, neither of them could have lived with the European pros who are perhaps 15% faster again, and most of them can't stay with a Millar or an Armstrong who are maybe 5% faster when it suits them to be.

These days I get around Seattle on my bike at about 22 mph. Armstrong can happily scoot around his home town of Gerona, Spain at 34 mph - a better than 50% productivity improvement over me - and people think he is doing drugs.

So is it any wonder, when I tell people (indeed, show them with metrics) that agile development team A is 5 times more productive than team B who in turn are twice as fast as team C at another location, that people don't believe me? After all, these programmers are only human - right? How can it be possible to go 10 times faster? Just what kind of drugs do you take to make that possible? Is it time we banned these prescriptions with names like FDD or TDD or XP in order to level the playing field for everyone else? Perhaps some police raids to dig out the story cards and some spy equipment to detect morning stand up meetings? It is disgusting that some developers can go so quickly. It has to be stopped!

[Update: July 7th, 2004 - In rather sad reports recently it turns out that David Millar has admitted to taking drugs on at least 3 occassions over the past 3 years and he is likely to be suspended for at least 2 years as a result of his admission. There is speculation that his career as a top cyclist is over.]