Again, to sum up:
1. Road racers go faster when they lose weight and maintain muscle.
2. Salbutamol in large doses lets you lose weight and maintain muscle, and is legal in small doses.
3. Chris Froome has suddenly tested positive for a large dose of Salbutamol.
4. Chris Froome claims he uses Salbutamol because he’s an asthmatic.
Did you catch that? No. 4 is entirely compatible with No. 2, it just sounds somehow like a denial that he was doping.
The misdirection is quite effective because it takes our eyes off the performance enhancing effects of Salbutamol when taken intravenously or orally, and focuses instead on its legitimate and non-performance-enhancing effect as an inhalant for asthmatics. And by the way, we’re reminded, Chris Froome has always been an asthmatic; suffered terribly all his life from it, in fact.
Before we pick up on the hard-to-swallow story about Froome’s asthma, though, let’s remember that large doses of Salbutamol help you lose weight and keep muscle and therefore go faster. And Chris was very lean and very muscly and very fast on the day he tested positive. In old Perry Mason shows that would have been called a “smoking gun.”
However, we’re asked to ignore the smoking gun and look in a different place, the world of asthma, where Salbutamol has no performance enhancing effects because it is inhaled. We are asked to forget that Chris Froome is an endurance athlete, that endurance athletes go faster with weight loss and retained muscle, and that Salbutamol is very effective at doing just that. It’s as if we found the smoking gun in the defendant’s hand and were asked to consider not that he had murdered someone with it, but that he was a lifelong collector of guns, and we’re not allowed to point out that the truth of the latter statement doesn’t in any way negate the truth of the former.