The Hitch said:
The issue Martin isn't that Walsh believes sky and we don't. That was already the case a year ago but until a few days ago, many of the people who are going hard after Walsh here including myself left Walsh alone even at times gave him the benefit of the doubt.
But Walsh goes well.past agree and disagree here. He paints with a childlike innocence and naivety a black and white picture of heroic benevolent princes fighting evil witches and dragons.
And in a way not unfamiliar to those with an interest I history, he paints a clearly fabricated picture of what those who don't agree with him believe in order to make them look bad.
It's like the writers in medieval times who would always say the leader their monarch was fighting was ugly because in their eyes ugly=evil
Their king and all his family was always so handsome though. And charismatic and all the other qualities humans can possess.
And we have it here. Everything about everyone at sky is brilliant. They are all intelligent, funny, inspirational, super super hard working (more than anyone else), committed every second of every hour to integrity and fairness and so on and so on.
The doubters on the other hand supported lance (cursed to begin with) . They support contador. They are idiotic and impulsive. Their reasons to doubt Sky in the first place are mob like and totally unfounded and a result of their total inability to think things through like Walsh does. No matter how ridiculous it sounds they point at sky for absolutely any reason they can think of it and scream - doper.
I know you may think a few of the members of the clinic fit the above, but for Walsh holds it as the generic descritption for those who doubt Sky. It is totally not on and a clear case of him taking absolute liberties with the truth in order to present his own side. Michael Moore, Fox News style.
Great post, really nails the problem IMO. The issue here is bigger than whether or not Sky riders dope. It's that someone who writes a fairy tale fantasy about the team has zero credibility when he asserts that they did not. I have no problem at all if Walsh wants to write a book like this. I do have a major problem if this book is cited as a reason for believing Sky didn't dope.
A writer who really, seriously wanted to get to the bottom of what's going on at Sky would never write like this. Even if he was able to track every rider and staff member on the team 24/7 and demonstrate it was virtually impossible for them to be doping, he still would not write about them in such glowing terms.
High Octane said:
As to that argument, the trouble is, none of the experts who know about V02 calculations have concluded that Froome is doping. Not even LeMond who hugged him on the podium. Indeed, according to Vaughters', who had a very large VO2 max himself, it's a now quite a dated way to ascertain somebody's capabilities. But good for trying to be more constructive.
Kind of depends on who you consider experts, doesn’t it? The Science of Sport didn't conclude that Froome was definitely doping, but neither did they brush aside his climbing times as definite evidence of being clean.
The argument doesn't actually depend on V02. V02 is calculated from climbing speeds, and so is secondary to calculations of power. Froome's performance raises two questions: 1) is his power comparable to that of dopers of the past? and 2) is his power since the Vuelta 2011 compatible with his power in previous years?
You are correct that power comparisons are difficult when different climbs, weather conditions, racing strategies, etc., are involved, and I also agree with you that the evidence against Froome is considerably less than that against LA. But just as one might have difficulty concluding with certainty that Froome is doping because of all the statistical noise, one can’t point to his climbs, as Walsh does, and say they are well within the possible bounds of a clean performance. Walsh, who ought to know better, is just as guilty at jumping to unwarranted conclusions as any of Froome’s critics.
Worse, IMO, because while one can look at the climbing times and make an argument for either doping or not doping, the latter generally requires making more extreme and unlikely assumptions (body weight, tailwind, etc). Much like the passport in this respect. Just because the data do not reach the bar of slam dunk evidence of doping does not mean that they are much more likely to indicate being clean than doping, or even that the possibilities are equal. On this forum, where our conclusions do not result in sanctions, we are free to come to the more likely conclusion, not hindered by the extremely rigorous criteria needed to avoid an occasional false positive. This criterion--must be significant at the p < 0.001 level or whatever--is lurking in all the arguments by people who say Froome's climbing does not indicate doping, and necessarily slants all conclusions heavily in their favor, but is rarely if ever acknowledged.
But the really damaging criticism for Froome is 2), his unprecedented improvement. We might have a better idea of how much he really did improve if Sky would release some power data pre-2011, but to the best of my knowledge Sky hasn’t done that. Why? How can a team that claims they want to be transparent refuse to do this? The argument that the public at large, non-experts, will interpret it wrong doesn’t hold here. They could release the data to some select researcher as they did with the post-2011 data. So what’s the problem here?
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