Very unfair on Eze to say he was more ridiculous than Horner. If you look at Eze's results before he got to ride the 2007 Vuelta, he was a pretty good climber on the domestic circuit, who got to ride the Vuelta due to his home region having a ProContinental team. Was he a shock at that Vuelta? Sure. But the route was not that tough, and he only finished top 10 in three stages. It wasn't the strongest GT field either - sure, the 4 who finished ahead of Eze could contend in practically any GT they entered at the time (Menchov, Sastre, Samu and Cuddles, with the latter 3 within 30 seconds of each other and 3 mins ahead of Eze), but below Eze you have Karpets and Efimkin (what have they done since?), a young Igor Antón who was domestiquing for Samu, an old and doping Triki Beltrán and Carlos Barredo, who's never been thought of as a GT GC man. Sylvain Chavanel was 16th.
Eze at that point was 31 years and 10 months old. We widely consider
28-32 to be around cyclist peak years, so he was at the upper end of that. In the 2008 Vuelta, he came in as leader for the first time, and had been good in País Vasco and Burgos. Because he was coming in as a protected rider, it could be bought that he was strong enough to replicate his previous year's performance, and again the riders beneath him all have their reasons - Valverde lost 3 minutes in a stupid error in a flat stage, J-Rod was having to domestique for Valverde at times, Gesink was young & inexperienced, Bruseghin had raced all 3 GTs that season including the podium of the Giro, and it isn't really a shock for him to finish ahead of David Moncoutié and Egoí Martínez, who would have been domestiquing for Antón - who would probably have finished ahead of Eze too - if he hadn't crashed out. In 2009 the now 33-year-old Eze was badly affected by the crash in Liège, but in a pretty tame race that was heavily controlled by Caisse d'Epargne and saw very little in the way of concerted attacks on Valverde, he was still able to come top 5. 2010 was the point at which everything unravelled, but then if you look at the field, the kind of people who'd been ahead of him in previous years were no longer there - it's one thing competing against the likes of Menchov, Samu, Sastre, Contador, Valverde and Evans, and another competing against guys like Purito who he'd beaten before, and guys like Peter Velits and Nicolas Roche. He also approached the Vuelta with a different calendar to normal as well, which may have meant he arrived at the Vuelta better prepared (in all senses of the term) than in previous years. There's a good chance that, seeing the genuine chance of an overall victory that simply hadn't been there in 2008 and 2009, he took a bit too much of a risk on the amount he needed to take and it was detectable. Certainly while I was supporting Eze all the way, when he did a good 45k pan-flat TT it alarmed me. He was usually Purito's level of bad against the clock.
So yes, Eze was doped, despite my desperately hoping it wasn't so. But the real alarm at Xacobeo was David García da Peña. He was a couple of years younger than Eze, and had improved at 30 similarly - but then again he was getting to do more, and better, races. However he had mostly been nondescript apart from winning the Tour of Turkey before it had any mountains, and a stage of the Vuelta in 2008. He was 14th in the Vuelta that year, but that was with the benefit of a 14 minute gift on his stage win. In the 2010 Vuelta he was still there to domestique for Mosquera when the only other rider with a domestique was Nibali - and his domestique was Kreuziger, who had been top 10 of the Tour and was much, much higher rated.
I think it's unfair on Mosquera to say he was more ridiculous than a number of other late bloomers. This includes Ryder Hesjedal, who was almost as old as Eze when he broke through, but in a much tougher field, and did what Eze couldn't and won a GT. And it definitely includes Bradley Wiggins, who hadn't shown the slightest bit of climbing nous until the 2009 Giro, when David Harmon nearly had a coronary about him being in the front group when Cunego was dropped on Alpe di Siusi, a stage he still finished 3 minutes down on. And then he turned up at the 2009 Tour and could climb with the best - most of whom were juiced up - for most of the race. At least Eze had shown he could climb with at least some of the best in smaller races before that (take for example
this,
this and
this). His (doped) light was hidden by the fact that he wasn't getting to ride the major races against the top opposition, unlike say, Santambrogio whose level we felt we had a good grasp of since we'd been watching him against that opposition for five years before his jump in performance this year.
Does Mosquera belong in the file with Kohl, Riis and Santi? Definitely. But I don't see why he's so much more preposterous than many, many other riders who've had big changes in fortune when they've already been in the bunch for a number of years. Including Chris Froome. He wasn't quite the Horner-alike you want to make him out to be.
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