Re: Re:
fmk_RoI said:
topcat said:
fmk_RoI said:
Valv.Piti said:
I very much agree with Rasmussen that his raid was plausible and within the limits. Had nothing to do with Landis or whatever - I argued that just after what he did after the half the forum moaned that it isn't natural, it was Landis esque etc.
Well, it might very well not be natural, but to go back to Rasmussen, it definitely didn't show that he is on some hardcore stuff the rest of the field isn't. Its pretty even.
Quite by coincidence, since Rasmussen's interview, the whole debate has moved on from that ride. It's now back to past and all the dots that beg to be joined. Funny how thst happened.
You can only say the same thing so many times. A few ppl didn't think the solo ride was that outrageous. A few more ppl think the recovery shown and the 80 km solo was a legendary dope fuelled ride. There isn't really anything more to say about it.
You can only say the same thing so many times, and yet here we are as we've been since it happened, speculating as to what occured in 2011, because there's really so so so much more to say that hasn't been said. Yes. Yes. Of course that's why so many who declared it the most dope fuelled ride in the history of dope fuelled rides have moved on, cause they ran out of things to say about it and remembered they had so so so much more to say about 2011 instead. Yes.
This was precisely the point of my post about the difference between "is it plausible?" and "is it plausible from him?".
Because in terms of raw watts, power put out, and so on, it's not Mayo on the Ventoux, no. But that doesn't mean it's automatically believable, just because it's humanly possible. Like I had with my example of Marcel Kittel doing a 61 minute Ventoux - of course a 61 minute ride up the Ventoux is possible - plenty of riders including some with very good reputations have done that. But a rider of Marcel Kittel's skillset and background doing that would be preposterous (notwithstanding the W/kg required to do it of course would be well out of whack with what we're talking about here, given Kittel's sprinter build. Therefore perhaps the example works better with a smaller, explosive sprinter like, say, Caleb Ewan, whose weight is in line with the likes of Valverde and Landa, but who hasn't shown anything remotely like the durability required to be that far up the field on a climb of that size or scale). At this stage, Chris Froome MkII (post 2011 Vuelta) putting out that kind of power isn't altogether that surprising, in a vacuum, but there are still reasons that Chris Froome MkII putting out that kind of performance on stage 19 of the 2018 Giro d'Italia
is altogether surprising, however.
Some of those are short-term - the fact that he'd only shown that kind of form on one previous stage, in a much shorter effort which he paid for the following day. And some of those are long-term, and that is demonstrably including the metamorphosis from Chris Froome MkI to MkII back in 2011. Because there is a further dichotomy, between "is it plausible coming from him?" and "is it plausible coming from him without assistance?" - as I say, little that Chris Froome could do performance-wise would make me genuinely surprised at this stage, but simultaneously there's little that he can do that will make me un-see what I've seen before, which makes his subsequent self-reinvention as a superstar of world cycling difficult to swallow.
Therefore:
"Was it plausible?" - Most likely. The power outputs provided for the limited part of the stage we got originally weren't out of this world, and the likes of Rasmussen - who has been highly critical of Froome many times - has said that it wasn't altogether a performance level that is often derided as extraterrestrial.
"Was it plausible coming from him?" - At particular times, yes. At this particular time, perhaps less so. Prior to his 2011 reinvention and during the first half of the 2012 season, most likely not. In 2018 to date, not really, but the fact he has at various times 2012-17 put out this kind of power does make it less out of the ordinary - it's just that he's never had to race from behind in this kind of manner before. And of course, doing it whilst under investigation and filibustering a potential suspension does colour people's thoughts regarding this as well.
"Was it plausible coming from him without assistance?" - this is absolutely where 2011
is relevant to the debate of his 2018 performances. Because
something meant that Chris Froome went, in a short space of time, from a rider being jettisoned from a contract by a team who had set their hearts on winning Grand Tours with a rider with the same passport as him, and being offered to other teams as a domestique, to a rider with the raw power to be a Grand Tour winner. Now, many people using the sport's past as case history and able to employ Occam's Razor came to an almost inescapable conclusion early on about that, but even for those who didn't want to broach that subject, numerous subsequent events about the management and handling of riders at Team Sky have pointed in the same direction. Now, just
what that assistance was, or indeed is, remains conjecture. But, even if the ride to Bardonecchia was plausibly within the limits of human capability, we then must make the assumption that Chris Froome is capable of riding up to a level which is at that kind of height, at that point in May 2018, unassisted. That he is one of the best of the best, the most gifted natural athletes, given that we are already talking within a péloton which consists only of the most gifted natural athletes in the sport anyway. And it's harder to buy that if you've seen him ride to a completely nondescript level for a number of years, and explain away improvements with a meandering justification of a perfect storm of illnesses, injuries and diseases, presented in a way that bends around and avoids straight answers more than Dave Brailsford in front of a parliamentary committee.
That's why 2011 is relevant today.