CNF Clinic Award: Most Suspicious Performance of 2013

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Most suspicious performance of 2013

  • Cancellara, PR+RVV

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Jun 15, 2009
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The Hitch said:
Also I dont get why, since for you age is what matters most, you identify Santambrogio as the guy who is spitting in your face and as together with Mosquera and Horner the most obvious doper.

Hesjedal broke out in gts aged 30. when he came 7th in the TDF He then aged 32 won the Giro.

Wiggins broke out aged 29, he came 4th in the Tour de France - an edition totally tainted by doping. He then came 3rd in the Vuelta aged 31 and won the TDF with 2 stages aged 32.

Samtabrogio broke out aged 28. He won 1 stage, then faded from the race and finished 9th.

If age is so important to you, how is Santambrogio's performance the most suspicious from these guys?
He was younger than both those riders when he broke out, and acheived far less.

I don't get it.

While I was sure when i called you a liar, I am not sure now: Did I call Santa "the most suspicious from these guys"? I thought I made it clear Wiggins was more suspicious.
Did I gave Santa the same "honour" as Horner and Mosq? I doubt.
If so, i have to correct it. Horner and Mosq stand above all. LA is/was No 3 (former No 1, then Mosq, then Horner, i guess the line stops here, it can´t get worse than Horner unless LA comes back at age 45 and does another T-10)...
 
python said:
do you mind, if i apply your own phrases to you, red flanders, a poster whose opinions i usually respect...repeating the disagreement with foxybrown over and over does not make it believable to anyone. wait ! anyone ? how would a good fella red flanders know the opinion of anyone, much less everyone ? granted, i personally agree with your opinion against the foxybrown's opinion - froome is a red-hot suspect for doping, but who gave you the right to speak for everyone else ?? you seem to overreach just as blatantly as your accusation against the foxy you seem to have a personal issue with. i can disagree with him without your rhetoric and yet to respect your posting when i find it appropriate. can you ?

Fair enough.
 
The Hitch said:
I think all these are easily refutable with quotations from the forum.

Certainly with regard to the accusation that I don't back up why I think riders are doping, I can show you several long posts from my posting history that explain at lentgh exactly why I believe certain riders are doping, and I comment and commend on other posts from other posters such as Libertine Seguros that offer similar explanations.

And I think some of your denials are certainly questionable and if we went into detail with them, you'd be fighting a losing battle, (eg the idea that it was just Big Doopie who said I was demented, when you quoted his post and added the phrase "at least it would explain a lot")

However I think the original discussion of whether Horner did break those records (posters can judge for themselves if they think he did or didn't) must have been annoying enough for everyone else, so I'll let it slide.

Hitch: I just appreciate you fighting the good fight. This guy is insufferable.
 
Jun 15, 2009
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53x11 in DC said:
This guy is insufferable.

I feel the same towards you. It all started with your LA love letters in the "official Armstrong thread" & the offending fight against "TFF", and climaxed in the "PESPECT Horner thread". I guess you never stop cheering for dopers.

Oh and a little hint for you: That Hitch "fightes" the "good battle" vs me doesn´t mean he is on the "Horner bandwagon". He thinks he is a doper as me. We only differ in details about him, and pretty much on all Sky issues.

Bye-bye until the next time...

;)
 
Apr 20, 2012
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FoxxyBrown1111 said:
Where have you been? I expected you earlier to join the party...



Never said this. But you have a link, right? Good luck...



Corrected for you.



Hypocritical... sure, says the one who runs mad when someone just asks questions about a certain guy, the untouchable hero, everybody else is evil.
Sorry Foxxy, did the Schnaps get a bit too much to the head?

Yes you are being hypocritical with regards to gramps, Santambroglio and Mosquera.

To the bold, I do think you got me confused with someone else.
 
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.
 
Mar 13, 2009
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Libertine Seguros said:
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.

used to be 27-30, in the Riis/Ullrich/Armstrong dope epoch. Now the new stuff is better.

I think Froome dawg could win at 50.
 
blackcat said:
used to be 27-30, in the Riis/Ullrich/Armstrong dope epoch. Now the new stuff is better.

I think Froome dawg could win at 50.

Used to be 23-26 in the 80's but somewhat older before that. What we did see in the 70's and 80's was the emergence of big champions who all showed at a very early age–Hinault, Fignon and Lemond. The best, dominant champions who dominate the sport all showed very early...before the age of oxygen vector doping.

People crushing the field after years of ridding as middling pack riders or 2nd level domestiques simply did not happen without significant doping.

There were Stars and there were Water Carriers. Now the Water Carriers become Stars. Not normal.
 
Mar 13, 2009
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red_flanders said:
Used to be 23-26 in the 80's but somewhat older before that. What we did see in the 70's and 80's was the emergence of big champions who all showed at a very early age–Hinault, Fignon and Lemond. The best, dominant champions who dominate the sport all showed very early...before the age of oxygen vector doping.

People crushing the field after years of ridding as middling pack riders or 2nd level domestiques simply did not happen without significant doping.

There were Stars and there were Water Carriers. Now the Water Carriers become Stars. Not normal.
which is why i referenced the RiisUllyArmstrong era. I coulda added Indurain.

I know it was younger before the O2 vectors
 
blackcat said:
used to be 27-30, in the Riis/Ullrich/Armstrong dope epoch. Now the new stuff is better.

yes. 30 used to be considered a watershed where it was downhill thereafter. Merckx lost his first tour at 30 and was never same thereafter. Riders like poulidor and van springel who had results well into their thirties were huge news.

Zoetemelk won his only TDF at the advanced age of 33-34 and it was the oldest post war winner at the time. And even there there were extenuating circumstances. Zoetemelk had lived through the Merckx and most of the hinault years before getting his chance. He had finished second 5 times previously, including his first participation in 1970, the year after winning the amateur TDF at the time the Tour de l'avenir.

Again TDF promise at a very early age and often precipitously downhill after 30.

Blood doping and hgh, etc. changed all of that...
 
Jul 21, 2012
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unrepentant doper Contador declinces after 30
unrepentant clean rider Hesjedal peaks after 30

most strange indeed.
 
The Hitch said:
Peculiar to hear "gt riders should decline after 30" arguments from someone who believes in Ryder Hesjedal.

100% agree.

As I said o2 vector drugs have completely altered the landscape. Not a single person can point to any rider and say that guy is "naturally talented" or "his is a natural progression". No such things exist in a world hierarchy that has been turned on its head for 20+ years.

Apart from Dan Martin of course.
 
Mar 13, 2009
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red_flanders said:
No worries, just looking to add to your comments. Thanks.
agreed. And the Horner stuff has middled aged men now winning GTs.

I must admit i like Chris and have a soft spot for him, but fairs fair, is this a fricken sport still?
 
Mar 13, 2009
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Big Doopie said:
100% agree.

As I said o2 vector drugs have completely altered the landscape. Not a single person can point to any rider and say that guy is "naturally talented" or "his is a natural progression". No such things exist in a world hierarchy that has been turned on its head for 20+ years.

Apart from Dan Martin of course.
indeed.

is this then a sport?
 
Dec 13, 2012
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Big Doopie said:
yes. 30 used to be considered a watershed where it was downhill thereafter. Merckx lost his first tour at 30 and was never same thereafter. Riders like poulidor and van springel who had results well into their thirties were huge news.

Zoetemelk won his only TDF at the advanced age of 33-34 and it was the oldest post war winner at the time. And even there there were extenuating circumstances. Zoetemelk had lived through the Merckx and most of the hinault years before getting his chance. He had finished second 5 times previously, including his first participation in 1970, the year after winning the amateur TDF at the time the Tour de l'avenir.

Again TDF promise at a very early age and often precipitously downhill after 30.

Blood doping and hgh, etc. changed all of that...

Happening in other sports (athletes performing better/equally as good at older ages). Tennis - used to peak really young now players are still winning slams in there late twenties/early thirties. Football and swimming also the same.
 
Big Doopie said:
As I said o2 vector drugs have completely altered the landscape. Not a single person can point to any rider and say that guy is "naturally talented" or "his is a natural progression". No such things exist in a world hierarchy that has been turned on its head for 20+ years.

Yes, not everyone can be a "natural talent" and dominate at 20 like Peter Sagan :(
 
Big Doopie said:
don't mean to be rude, but see above.

And btw Clentadoppucci isn't declining because of age. Any fan with a brain knows that.

he just wasnt that good anyway.

Posting the same over and over again won't make it true :)

Next time you make that claim it would be nice if you'd show us some facts and arguments to support your claim that Contador is really nothing more than a decent domestique. :)


:mad:
 
Jun 15, 2009
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red_flanders said:
Used to be 23-26

Exactly. That should make it even harder for people not to vote for Horner in this poll, a guy who improves the older he gets.

Big Doopie said:
Riders like poulidor
...
Zoetemelk won his only TDF at the advanced age of 33-34 and it was the oldest post war winner at the time.

Blood doping and hgh, etc. changed all of that...

To be fair, Poulidor & Zoetemelk podiumed in their very 1st tours, something that can´t be said of most of the old guys who podium finish nowadays.

Yep, the game changer was EPO/transfusions. Thus latest starting with the Indurain era.
But even back then we didn´t hit rock bottom. We just did in september 2013. Or didn´t we? I am ready for even worse and everything now. A out of complete darkness Chad Haga TdF-Win or a sprinter turned GT contender TdF win or Horner at 45 if he gets a new contract in the next couple of years. It´s a sad joke...
 
Apr 20, 2012
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FoxxyBrown1111 said:
a sprinter turned GT contender TdF win or Horner at 45 if he gets a new contract in the next couple of years. It´s a sad joke...
How about a prologue 'specialist' becoming a TT god and climber? Shoot, I forgot, we allready have seen that joke in 2012. Maybe a former TT god turning into cobblestone king?
 
Jun 15, 2009
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Fearless Greg Lemond said:
How about a prologue 'specialist' becoming a TT god and climber? Shoot, I forgot, we allready have seen that joke in 2012. Maybe a former TT god turning into cobblestone king?

A good one. Agree. Anyway, Horner was the one who gave me the idea of my "future GT winners" clinic thread. He was the most absurd GT winner ever. It was a hell of a job to top all the jokes of the past 20+ years.
 

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