I agree with this. Armstrong didn't pay, as you say, all that money to Ferrari for nothing. And I recall an article in Tutto Bici after Riis won that Tour entitled something like "How Chemicals have Transformed Cycling," which basically outlined the ways in which the author believed the Dane used massive amounts of PEDs to win his Tour.
The idea of from "donkey to race horse" is not derived from the English language, because in cycling lingo it comes from Italian and French. At any rate, in Italy it was said back in the 80's and 90's that doping can't transform a "donkey into a race horse," in the sense that you have to have a decent engine to work with in the first place.
Having said that, the sophistication and quality curve of doping from the early 90's till today has surged dramatically, for which I don't believe someone like Riis would have won a Tour in the pre-EPO era, nor Armstrong certainly his 7 before the likes of medic cum businessman Ferrari entered the sport. This is the point I think that is critical here and this is why their era has obscured and mystified the whole GC order, since we can't believe what we saw with our own eyes. Krebs insistence, therefore, on the statistical data, without any knowledge whatsoever of what guys like Riis and Armstrong actually did off the bike (hopefully the USADA will help clarify this) to become champions, means that he has no basis for drawing the conclusions he puts forth: which seems to suggest that their doping regimes made relatively little Impact on their achievements, that it was more a combination of physical ability and determination that produced the stellar results, given that everybody was doing it, which means that the playing field was more or less level.
My point has always been, no offence, that this is a load of BS and I wonder if he is being deliberately specious or involuntarily deceptive.
I had previously outlined why I think the market forces, the expertise of certain medics and the persona of Lance, combined in a unique synthesis that galvanized their individual properties and released their potential to produce a formidable and unique cocktail - with even the possibility of cutting edge pharmaceuticals that only he had privileged access to, which was then injected into Armstrong (and none other) that gave him the decisive edge to be able to do what he did. Before his era, such would not have been possible, and thus he would not have been the champion he became. Well much of that came down to sheer money and the power over the cycling market he came to occupy. Given the image he produced of himself as the super clean cancer survivor that dominated the hardest bike race in the world longer than anyone before, the type of rider he was before he hooked up with Ferrari et al and the gargantuan profits he banked: Lance is the greatest sport fraud of all time.
I got no comment on what I previously wrote, but I stand by my arguments.