Parker said:
He had a decent 2002. He was hardly a superstar. His best GT finish was 19th. In 2007 he was ranked 986th by CQ Ranking. How the best current GT rider can be 24 seconds faster over a 40 minute climb than someone barely scraping into the top 1000 riders isn't suspicious.
No he wasn't a superstar, but this is a case where CQ only tells you half the story since he barely raced outside of Giro build-up, after all it was the super-peaking era. He was routinely among the best climbers in the Giro, but he was inconsistent as all hell and would usually lose a truckload of time and go stagehunting as a result. He won three serious mountain stages at the Giro, and was almost always up in the top 5-6 in major mountain stages for years. He was very visible in the Giro's mountains for the best part of a decade and on his day he could climb with the very best - it's just that those days were infrequent and his skillset was such that he absolutely sucked almost everywhere else, so he was always stagehunting. Pérez Cuapio has climbing pedigree, dismissing his climbing time as irrelevant because he wasn't a superstar does him a disservice.
Besides, after pointing out that Froome was only 24" faster than Pérez Cuapio, maybe you could point out that he was only 24" slower than the most doped of all Danilo di Luca's Giri, or that extrapolating from Froome's time in relation to 2007, he's therefore 45" faster than Pellizotti, 1'16" faster than Riccò and 1'31" faster than Mazzoleni, which doesn't look as clean, now, does it? You see, these name vs name comparisons can prove almost anything you want, as some riders may have just been on a bad day, and just using the fact that you didn't remember Pérez Cuapio as a reason to dismiss any suggestion of Froome's time being suspicious is just as worthless as claiming that him being faster than other known doping climbing specialists who weren't riding that race for GC, like Rasmussen, Mayo and Sella, is proof that his time IS suspicious. I'm not a fan of using pure climbing times as a comparative measure unless it's an MTT on a consistent route, because the rest of the stage, and the GC position and how it's set up, affects how hard people ride it, weather conditions aren't consistent etc.. But at the same time, the 2018 stage was harder than the 2007 one, and putting a time close to some of the heavy chargers of that era is always going to raise eyebrows.
I'm not going to pretend that Froome doesn't get more stick directed at him because of who he is and his current circumstances, but given how willing you've been to pursue avenues by which Froome could possibly not have been playing every card he possibly could to get an advantage, and continuing to defend Sky's integrity even after the team that claimed it would hold itself to higher standards than anybody on anti-doping failed to match the anti-doping stances of teams like Lampre and freaking
Vacansoleil when it came to handling riders under investigation, I got the impression your intent was to use belittling Pérez Cuapio as a means by which to absolve Froome of criticism, rather than any fair comment on the Mexican's real or perceived talent levels, which I felt needed more colour adding.