Something that JM Beaushrimp mentioned in the Girona thread, about people missing key moments of the season being suspicious, and how training will never replace racing in terms of preparation, made me wonder about something I don't know that has bugged me for awhile. I know there are people here who used to race at a high level, so I hope for some kind of informative discussion.
With regards to building form (in the legit way), would you say that racing but not giving it 100% is probably better than training? I'm just thinking of someone like Andy Schleck, who races a decent amount of races but only really 'races' most of them in the sense that he genuinely seems to only give it so much and then stop caring about anything but the Ardennes and the Tour. How would you compare that, on a level of suspiciousness, to someone like Sastre, who only raced 8 days leading up to the Tour one year, for example? And how would that compare to someone like Evans (or even Valverde for that matter, to make it interesting), who races a lot at a high level all the time? Is how much you race really a huge factor in determining who dopes, or do people just have different enough physiologies that you could argue that anyone might be 'clean' or doping regardless of their schedule?
With regards to building form (in the legit way), would you say that racing but not giving it 100% is probably better than training? I'm just thinking of someone like Andy Schleck, who races a decent amount of races but only really 'races' most of them in the sense that he genuinely seems to only give it so much and then stop caring about anything but the Ardennes and the Tour. How would you compare that, on a level of suspiciousness, to someone like Sastre, who only raced 8 days leading up to the Tour one year, for example? And how would that compare to someone like Evans (or even Valverde for that matter, to make it interesting), who races a lot at a high level all the time? Is how much you race really a huge factor in determining who dopes, or do people just have different enough physiologies that you could argue that anyone might be 'clean' or doping regardless of their schedule?