Well, the problem is hyperbole. Even the most cynical people in this forum who describe Froome as having "zero talent" are meaning "relative to competition", in this case meaning the elite pro péloton. I'm not about to argue that he doesn't, or didn't, know how to ride a bike, even if his style of doing so may be among the ungainliest ever, along with the likes of Fernando Escartín, Juan Mauricio Soler and Francisco Mancebo, all of whom were great climbers. Soler was even the team leader at Froome's own team back in 2008-9.
Similarly, when we've looked at the performances and the power outputs, there has always been this debate over what's plausible, but it neglects the most important question, which is "is it plausible coming from that particular rider?" We can look at the climbing records on Mont Ventoux for an example. Nobody is going to argue away somebody matching Iban Mayo or Marco Pantani unassisted without serious cognitive dissonance, but at 58'31 you have David Moncoutié's best time, a rider who has been generally perceived as clean. Even if we add a bit to that, and say that there's a race with a summit finish on Mont Ventoux and the winning time is 1'00'00" on the money, if you have somebody like Marcel Kittel trail in at +1'00" it's going to raise eyebrows - a 61 minute ascent of Mont Ventoux is not in and of itself suspicious, it's a good 5 minutes slower than Iban Mayo's time from the Dauphiné, but if somebody like Marcel Kittel pulls it off, people are going to call BS, because that's quite simply not what Marcel Kittel is born to do (with apologies to Marcel, I just picked him as a pre-eminent sprinter who is known as a pure power guy, just for an extreme example).
Saint Unix has their list of the immediate success stories (there are many others you can add, take for example Darya Domracheva in the biathlon, competing as a youth she had to race against the boys, because she was regularly pasting the girls not only in her age group but in ALL age groups; Alejandro Valverde is always a good example to point to here because he's a rider nobody is going to call clean, but his indomitable record as a cadet which led to his "El Imbatido" nickname speaks for itself as to there being a special natural talent level from an early age also). Froome is something of an exception to that in that he didn't come to the sport via a traditional route, but nonetheless, it is worth noting that other late converts have been successful far more quickly - at the elite level there's Michael Woods, Primož Roglič and Richie Porte in recent years, for example (Porte came from triathlon so at least had some cycling background, but Woods came from distance running, and Roglič even came from a sport where explosivity is more important than endurance). But Froome didn't come to cycling with an established sporting background already there, nor did he come to the sport at a fully physically grown stage like them, so they're not fair direct comparisons either. Somebody like Bauke Mollema is a better comparison point, having taken up cycling at 19, and won the Tour de l'Avenir at 21. That stands in stark contrast to Froome's records from South African domestic events that was once publicised, which showed him not to have been especially out of the ordinary there either.
Nevertheless there must have been something there, including that vaunted "rough diamond" style that, once the inefficiencies were coached out of him, could reap dividends (strangely, there has not been any physical change in that style, other than the descending which he has markedly improved, but that's been only once he was already an established star, and not to do with his emergence), otherwise he wouldn't have found his way to the UCI World Cycling Centre or onto Barloworld - nevertheless Barloworld was, at the time, the only logical team for him to get onto that would have been able to ride at the top levels, and for all the attention paid to his performances in the final week of the 2008 Tour, he wasn't even the most promising young African climber at Barloworld, because while Froome did well to survive the break over the Croix de Fer and stay with Menchov for a bit after the Russian was dropped on Alpe d'Huez, he did get detached from the group just after Johan van Summeren (not exactly a vaunted climber) and he did finish 9 minutes behind the reigning Vuelta winner. Augustyn survived a strong break over the Col de la Lombarde and then was the strongest climber in it on the Col de la Bonette, cresting the highest peak in the race alone and he would have been in the position to win the stage had he not wiped out on the descent and lost his bike, which descended the Bonette to a fate unknown, much like Millar's legendary Contursi Terme bike throw that sent the bike rolling down the hillside over the barriers. But still, there were some performances there that suggested Froome had at least some talent to make it as a pro, if not a multiple Grand Tour winning one.
This is the problem - there's not linear progress with Froome that means we can answer the question "is it plausible coming from him?" with any degree of certainty at all. There's little by way of signs of early promise that tell us that he was a genetic freak, born to succeed in endurance sports. There's definitely no aesthetically-pleasing style on the bike that tells us he had a natural affinity for riding. And there's no bank of results obtained that told us he was anything other than a moderately talented climber who could feasibly do a decent job for a team leader if he developed. I've traditionally said that I thought he could have become a rider like Egoí Martínez or Chris Anker Sørensen, and I don't feel that's an unreasonable level for what was possible from what he showed in his first years at Barloworld. But Barloworld themselves are a difficult one to judge, as they had a number of unreliable riders and riders with awkward, shuffling techniques, and they also had a number of dopers and positive tests - so actually ascertaining what development opportunities they provided is fairly difficult. But if it was simply that Sky provided better development opportunities, teaching him how to ride within himself and not be wasteful of energy as they described him as being, and improving his pack skills and tactical awareness even while he was struggling with the bilharzia, you would expect him to be at least stagnating, compensating for his less competitive physical shape with improved nous and energy preservation. But he wasn't - his results were going backwards until that hail mary was thrown in the Vuelta.
Then you have to add all of the other factors that have come to light over the last five and a half years - the TUEs, the jiffy bags, the asthma not mentioned in his book but coming to light shortly after its release when he was shown puffing on his inhaler in the middle of a race he won easily, the dubious team doctors, the laughably bad concocted story about the lost laptop, and so on - that make the team less trustworthy. Some of these factors Froome can help, some of them he can't. Then throw in the case history of cycling that makes his a) level and extent of success, and b) speed of emergence at such a late stage in his career look extremely unusual without broaching the subject of doping, and things mount up.
The thing is, "is it plausible?" is one thing. But "is it plausible coming from Chris Froome, given all that we already know and all that we already have seen?" Well, that's a much more subjective question.
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