timmers said:
And this is the problem I have regardless of the nationality of anyone.
I believe that clean riders are able to do this subject to what the performances were and them being compared logically. You "know" Froome is doping. Is this from TV or from seeing him in person?
The big problem is that if a clean rider were able to do this, you would have anticipated that that clean rider show that this was a possibility from early on in their career. I do not know or pretend to know whether Nairo Quintana, for example, is doping, however he was a phenomenal talent in Colombia, who has been a star climber from the word go, and in his first 18 months as a pro won a 2.1 medium mountain two day race, was 2nd in another, won a mountain stage of a WT race (from escaping), a short 2.1 stage race due to a mountain solo win, was a star domestique in the mountains of his first GT (after being allowed to drop a lot of time in the first half of the race to test recovery, as you might expect from a young rider in their first GT), an Italian semi-classic with a very steep finish (the same one Froome rode sideways four years ago), was 3rd in a WT MTT, won a WT mountain stage in Catalunya and then won a very difficult mountainous short stage race in País Vasco.
That suggests to us that Nairo Quintana is the real deal, even though we have no idea whether or not he may or may not have been doping. We don't have any bank of results to call upon that suggest he is anything but a massively talented rider.
Froome is different. Even pre-bilharzia, his results were only reasonable. His results were going in the wrong direction and he was about to be jettisoned from his Sky contract, with minimum domestique wage offers from Garmin and Lampre on the table. He obviously had some talent, but it was not taking him anywhere. Then suddenly, bam, he finishes 2nd in a GT only because the team didn't back him fully until it was too late. But the team didn't back him fully only because he was totally unproven. You can talk about Sky's bias towards Wiggins in other races since then, sure, but in the 2011 Vuelta it was only sensible that they work for Wiggins; at that point in time, he's a guy who's finished 4th in the Tour de France and podiumed Paris-Nice and then won the Dauphiné, while Froome is a guy whose main claim to fame is finishing less than 10 minutes down on Alpe d'Huez after being in a break three years earlier.
So even if you believe that performances like Froome's are plausible clean, and I don't see that much reason why they would be literally impossible to do clean, you still have the next level of questioning, which is, "do I believe that performances like that are plausible clean
from Chris Froome?" This is where I baulk at it. Because Chris Froome, even when healthy, never showed anything like this. The best climber in the world had, up until the 2011 Vuelta, only ever shown top 10 results in the mountains in three races in Europe and a handful of pre-season and post-season events elsewhere (Jayco Herald Sun Tour, Giro del Capo). One a year. And if the "the péloton is getting cleaner" approach were the answer, why have Froome's times increased by so much and others not achieved the same gains? Is this because he was the ONLY clean cyclist? And if the answer is that "the péloton is getting cleaner", why have Froome's times improved so dramatically so suddenly, when we know he had had the bilharzia treated far in advance of the 2011 Vuelta?
The Walsh of SDS separated out Séan Kelly, who showed he was world class from the word go, from Michelle Smith, who had a very sudden transformation to being world class. That same David Walsh is now defending Chris Froome against an onslaught of doubters, many of whom see in him nothing worse than simply that he is a Michelle Smith, not a Séan Kelly, but in the media love-in and the detraction from the spectacle of the racing have found in him a convenient boogeyman, suggesting either David Walsh has been able to buy the unconvincing tales of how much talent Froome showed back in 2006 and turn a blind eye to the period between 2008 and August 2011 we have to erase for his progress to seem linear, or that he no longer differentiates between "good dopers" (talented athletes who dope, like Kelly) and "bad dopers" (untalented athletes who become chemically-created golems, like Smith). I would be mighty surprised and extremely disappointed if his spidey-sense was not set tingling by Froome's transformation. Now, as we've got into the arguments about before in this thread, maybe he did ask the right questions, and he was given good answers. But you wouldn't know that from this book, and you couldn't find that out from this book. Those who want to know
how Walsh can be so convinced by Team Sky and how they explain away the discrepancies to an audience which to all intents and purposes needs to be treated with more respect than the insults to our collective intelligence they often spew at the fans, knowing that a large % of these are casual fans who won't question the explanation they're given, will not find anything to satisfy their queries here.
And there are still queries. Many of them.
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