French handball player Jemima Kabeya dies suddenly, aged 21
Kabeya had represented France in the junior categories. The team did not disclose the cause of death.
'She was a goalkeeper of great talent and an exemplary teammate, but Jemima was above all a radiant, sunny young woman of immense kindness,' the club said. 'Her smile and her commitment will leave an indelible memory in our hearts and in the history of Handball Plan-de-Cuques.'
According to the international handball federation, Kabeya had played at Plan-de-Cuques since 2022, extending her contract for two years in 2024. She was one of the top goalkeepers in the French league this season, with a 35.6% saving efficiency and 78 saves.
'The IHF president, Dr Hassan Moustafa, would like to extend condolences to the family, friends, teammates, and all those who were touched by Jemima's presence,' the IHF said. 'The loss of such a bright and vibrant young life is a tragedy beyond words.'
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A Fast Tour de France—No Doping Required
For fans of the Tour de France, the word extraterrestrial has a special resonance—and not a fun, Spielbergian one. In 1999 the French sports newspaper L'Équipe ran a photo of Lance Armstrong on its front page, accompanied by the headline 'On Another Planet.' This was not, in fact, complimenting the American athlete for an out-of-this-world performance in cycling's premier race, but was code for 'he's cheating.' At that point, L'Équipe 's dog-whistling accusation of doping was based on mere rumor. More than a decade passed before the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency declared Armstrong guilty of doping. His remarkable streak of seven Tour wins was wiped from the record, but misgivings about extraterrestrial performances have never left the event. L'Équipe was back at it in 2023 when it used the headline 'From Another Planet,' this time for the Danish cyclist Jonas Vingegaard, who won that year's Tour. And earlier this year, the U.S. magazine Velo reported on the 'other worldly' performances of Tadej Pogačar, the Slovenian favorite to win this year's race, which will wind up in Paris on Sunday. Despite the astronomical language, no evidence at all suggests that Vingegaard and Pogačar are doping—which makes their recent dominance of the Tour all the more striking. This year Pogačar is in a class of his own: Earlier this week, he surpassed his 100th career win and could be on target to beat his astonishing 2024 record of winning nearly half the races he started in. 'The conversations I hear are: How is Tadej Pogačar better than rocket-fueled Lance Armstrong? ' Alex Hutchinson, the 'Sweat Science' columnist for Outside magazine, told me. ' What is it that has changed? ' This was precisely my curiosity because—by all the available data, and there are a lot—the current crop of contestants for the Tour de France podium are faster and better than ever before, and that includes the bad old days of systematic doping. Travis T. Tygart: Bad regimes are winning at sport's expense The sport's problem was once so endemic that it reached beyond the pro peloton and down even to the humble amateur ranks in which I used to compete. We would shake our heads when occasionally someone got busted for taking an illegal substance— just to try to win 50 bucks in a park race. Yet the story of the past decade has been a reversal of the old vicious cycle. That alone was notable enough, but what's truly remarkable is the sport's virtuous cycle, which I wanted to understand better: not just being clean but having attained an entirely new level of human performance. For a century, the sheer rigor of a bicycle race lasting three weeks and covering thousands of kilometers, up and down mountain passes, lent itself to artificial stimulants. Riders were always looking for a little help, but the big change came in the 1990s with abuse of a medical drug named erythropoietin, which increases red-blood-cell production. That led to years of extraterrestrial performances, fueled—as Armstrong confessed to Oprah Winfrey —by a sophisticated blood-doping scheme. Travis T. Tygart, the chief executive of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, led the investigation of Armstrong and his co-conspirators, which was crucial to ending that dire era and setting the sport on a better path. 'What we're hearing—and we have good sources in the peloton and the community—is that the bias is in favor of clean athletes: that you can be clean and win,' he told me. This was a strong statement from the ultimate clean-sport cop. 'In anti-doping, my job is to be skeptical but not cynical,' he went on. 'All athletes deserve sports fans' trust and belief in them, even if they're doing amazing things that we've never before seen.' No one I spoke with for this article, including riders past and present, dissented from this view or raised suspicions about performance-enhancing drug use. The gold standard of cycling performance—which boils down to a rider's ability to push against the wind and go uphill fast—is a high power-to-weight ratio, given in watts per kilogram. The benchmark figure is how many watts per kilo a cyclist can sustain for a one-hour effort. Every rider now has a power meter fitted to their bike, so they know their numbers in a constant, real-time way (together with heart rate, speed, and other measurements). 'Cycling is more quantifiable than any other sport,' said Hutchinson, who is also the author of Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance. 'The power meter really gives you a window into the soul of the cyclist.' The riders now train with the data, they race with the data, they publish their data on Strava and similar training apps, they probably dream about their data. So we know that during a crucial mountain stage in last year's Tour de France—won convincingly by Pogačar on his way to overall victory—he produced approximately 7 watts per kilo for nearly 40 minutes. His main rival, Vingegaard again, actually tried an attack that failed, despite an estimated output of more than 7 watts per kilo for nearly 15 minutes. These were efforts in the Pyrenees; at sea level, the numbers would be even higher. (This all gets geeky quickly.) Within living memory, a figure of 5 watts per kilo would have been enough to make a professional rider competitive in a multistage race such as the Tour; and at his blood-doped peak, two decades ago, Armstrong was averaging an estimated 6 watts per kilo. In 2004, on that same climb in the Pyrenees, he took nearly six minutes longer than Pogačar did last year. In other words, Armstrong on dope then would be an also-ran next to Pogačar today. From the May 2018 issue: The man who brought down Lance Armstrong For Hutchinson, this realization of human potential is a triumph of sports science. 'Pogačar's getting better every year because the technology, the ability to control his training and racing, is getting better,' he told me. His hypothesis is that all of these data, gathered and processed, are helping an athlete not only maximize their output but also optimize it. Data are 'allowing people to live on the edge of their capacities more effectively than they used to,' he said. To make a mechanical analogy—endurance athletes love to talk about their 'engine'—a pro cyclist knows exactly where their red line is and how to live right on it. 'Every sport sees evolution to a certain extent,' Sean Quinn, a professional cyclist who was the 2024 U.S. national road-race champion, told me from his altitude-training camp in Europe. 'But the reason cycling has seen such an accelerated evolution in the last 20 years is because of the evolution of science across so many different dimensions.' Measuring riders' wattage is only the beginning of optimizing their performance. Inevitably, there's an app for that: A premium subscription to VeloViewer means that 'nine out of 10 guys in the peloton have seen a large part of the course before riding it,' Quinn explained. Highly accurate long-range weather forecasting can predict the wind speed and direction for a given race and course, Quinn said. That information helps cycling teams decide when to use aerodynamic but heavier wheels over lighter ones that produce more wind resistance. The improvement in equipment is relentless. A bike is limited to a minimum weight (about 15 pounds), but as long as it meets certain regulations of dimension and geometry, its drag coefficient can be wind tunnel–tested to the nth degree. And not just the bike itself—everything is subject to this aerodynamic imperative: the rider's helmet, jersey, shoes, even socks. Less drag means more speed, and fewer wasted watts maintaining that speed. Much of this technological advance can be attributed to the philosophy of 'marginal gains,' pioneered by the British Olympic cycling team in the early 2000s. At the time, short-distance events held in the Olympics' velodrome were regarded as a sideshow by the pro peloton, whose riders mostly showed up only for the more prestigious road races. By that happenstance, the Olympic velodrome became an arena for clean sport—and a laboratory for technical innovation. 'They made incremental improvements,' Phil Gaimon, a former U.S. pro, now an author and podcaster, told me. 'You make 100 of them and they add up in a big way.' As the doping culture waned, steady advances in equipment and training ultimately led U.K. riders to a string of Tour de France victories in the 2010s. Soon, the whole peloton had to get with the program: Everyone is an incrementalist now. 'Equipment's improved,' Gaimon said, but 'probably the main thing in the last couple of years would just be nutrition.' Tygart, the anti-doping chief, agreed: 'The nutrition is significantly different. Riders are fueling way more and in different ways from what they did in the past.' Eating more marks a big change from past custom, which Gaimon summed up as: 'Here's your apple, go ride for six hours.' Cyclists have always responded to the obvious logic that when the road goes uphill, the lighter you are, the better. In the years before he turned professional, Quinn was aware of a 'big movement toward weight loss and high-volume training, a lot of hours on the bike, and being as skinny as possible.' Until the 2020s, many riders still believed that fasted training—or, as Quinn says, 'functional starvation'—was the way to go. 'Especially in the past five years, it's become public knowledge that that is the opposite of what you want to do.' Racers are now constantly replenishing calories as they ride, in a highly calibrated way: They know exactly how many grams of food to eat and how often. This all adds up to an awful lot of energy bars and gels, as another former pro rider, George Hincapie, a co-host (with Armstrong and others) of the cycling podcast The Move, attested. Although he retired in 2012, his 17-year-old son Enzo now races on a development squad affiliated with Quinn's team. 'The amount of nutrition that shows up at my house for his training rides is mind-boggling,' Hincapie told me. 'It drives my wife nuts: boxes and boxes of nutrition.' But in the race to eat, not all calories are equal. Off the bike, quality meals are now a priority at all times—during training periods, in hotels at races, in the off-season. I spoke with Hannah Grant, a Danish TV chef and author who spent several seasons preparing food for the Saxo Bank pro-cycling team in the 2010s. At first, she encountered stiff resistance to the dietary changes she was trying to introduce: more vegetables, whole grains, no white pasta, no refined sugars when not on the bike. 'I was called 'the spawn of Satan' for taking the ketchup off the table,' she told me. A turning point came when one rider on the team was found to be gluten-intolerant, and Grant was able to change his diet in a way that hugely helped his performance. 'He was, like, 'This is working!'' she said. 'And then the other riders were, like, 'What's he doing that we need to do?'' Grant follows the latest practices because she now provides recipes to Vingegaard's team. 'Each rider will have the day's menu on their app,' she said, 'and it will tell the rider: You can have 37.5 grams of lentils; you can have 92.8 grams of chicken; and so on. You see them standing with their phones at the buffet.' Fueling the engine properly might seem blindingly obvious for participation in a race that will require a cyclist to burn 4,000 to 8,000 calories a day. But because riders tend to be conservative, even superstitious, in their loyalty to tried routines, shifting the culture took some time. Today's generation of rising stars are digital natives for whom ignoring the data and the apps is unthinkable: You can't win without them. To those of us who love the sport of cycling, the notion that intelligence has proved stronger than even the most fiendish cheating is terribly appealing. In today's Tour de France, I'm tempted to see not just a redemption narrative but an arc toward human perfectibility—and need to remind myself that, back in the worst doping years, fans were routinely fed supposedly technical reasons for the extraterrestrial performances: For instance, Armstrong was said to be more efficient because he pedaled at a higher cadence than other riders and had great 'ankling' technique in his pedal stroke. So that history does make one legitimately skeptical of claims about magical technical gains. No one I spoke with would rule out that doping still exists in the sport. Occasionally, athletes are still caught at it—but that now seems to happen more at lower levels of competition where the monitoring is less comprehensive. One permitted practice that offers some performance benefit is sodium-bicarbonate loading. You read that right: Chowing down baking soda helps aerobic performance in some circumstances by buffering lactic acid, a by-product of intense exercise. But eating an extra muffin won't do it, and the gastric distress associated with eating a lot seems a natural limiter. Another, more alarming method involves microdosing with carbon monoxide—a deadly gas—to mimic the effect of altitude training. Cycling's governing body has moved to ban the practice. But these are small matters compared with the rampant cheating that used to pervade the sport. Tygart's dictum—'be skeptical but not cynical'—makes ample sense. Assuming that Pogačar rolls over the finish line on the Champs-Élysées on Sunday with his lead intact and claims a fourth Tour victory, cycling fans seem safe to celebrate a clean, fair win for him and a victory for applied science. True, the Slovenian's preeminence has turned this year's race into something of a formality—a spectacle that can encourage a nostalgia for when the competition seemed to turn on other human factors such as race craft and guile, a capacity to suffer, and the will to overcome, rather than on data analysis and physiological optimization. Yet cycling never truly had a golden age. From a clean-sport perspective, it was bad old days all the way.
