Libertine Seguros said:
With Zakarin he had few results to speak of until he was as old as Foliforov is now and had tested positive as a teenager. He did have his breakthrough with Rusvelo though. Foliforov's been a decent U23 at least, but as we know from the likes of Zakarin that doesn't preclude an early start.
Remember there was that incident where three of their riders got busted and got reduced bands cos the doctor cocked up something three years ago.
However, that said, the amount of salt being thrown in the PRR forum because of Foliforov winning is ridiculous, he beat Kruijswijk by half a second after resting up yesterday, and we didn't see enough of his ride to really ascertain techniques like happened with Zakarin when we watched him and thought, how does he put down that power riding so inefficiently? People are reacting like it's Horner winning the Vuelta, and it really isn't like that. It isn't even Santambrogio, cos he's only done this on one stage thus far and the time check was rendered more or less irrelevant by a poor placing of it to make it difficult to judge. Maybe like Cobo in 2011 on the Angliru, he just chose the best gearing. And yes, maybe he chose the best gear.
Exactly, Foliforov had a few interesting results in his first year as a pro, 15th in 2015 Andalucia (The Froome vs. Contador show) ahead of guys like Reichenbach, Kelderman and van den Broeck (Forsanov finished 13th), crushed everyone in the 10km long uphill ITT at the GP of Sochi (1'28" faster than Firsanov) and 10th in the Tour de Slovénie (9th on the Queenstage, 45 seconds behind Roglic).
Only 4 seconds slower than Aru (who's 2 years older) in the 2012 Giro della Valle d'Aosta MTT (Chernetckii smashed everyone in that MTT, I always expected him to be the next Russian gc rider and not Zakarin).
Yes, Gazprom might be a shady team, but those 2 guys had already shown some potential and it's still more believable than Dumoulin's transformation...
The guy beat your favs in the MTT, deal with it!