Ferminal said:
What I can't quite get my head around is how he got busted as a lowly Continental rider not part of the ABP. He would have been blood tested OoC on very few occasions, maybe 2-3 times max. He was either doing a ridiculous amount of EPO or was unlucky and got tested close to a withdrawal (BBs wouldn't make sense at his level though). In either case it would have been obvious to anyone who saw the results that he had been doping so I guess neither of the two teams bothered to look. I also wonder if they needed to target test him after the initial dodgy result in order to establish a baseline (hence why it took until Q3 2013)? Maybe he got a sniff that something was up and that was the reason for going cold.
Sérgio Ribeiro and Antonio Amorim are two Portuguese riders who were sanctioned on the Biopassport this year, neither of whom have ever raced for a team at the top 2 levels. It looks like Barbot (the team that is now Efapel) was biopass compliant in 2010, and subsequently their values in more recent tests have been completely incongruous with their biopass tests, and hence the suspensions. It looks like the same here. The issue is less that Sky didn't see any issue of doping from the transformation - and this taking place at two races where Dan Martin intimated that there was no testing. Following on from that point...
MatParker117 said:
Garmin tested him in April (Nothing ununusal), trained with Sky in May which is pretty common for most BC affiliated riders as I believe Ed Clancy & Steven Burke were there at the time preparing for the Olympics. Sky then tested him after the world championships.
this is fine, but if Sky were looking to sign him from as early as May, you would have thought they'd have got more tests going on if they were really as full of the attention to detail as they stated at the time (and we now know to be false), unless they were blinded by science to the extent that they didn't wake up to the simple smell test - they couldn't see the wood for the trees. Does taking another team's testing results and conducting your own some five months later constitute the amount of due diligence? Your mileage may vary. On a lot of riders, I wouldn't have thought that was a bad level of background checking to be honest. But with how spectacular and dramatic JTL's transformation was, perhaps more scrutiny was merited. After all, JTL himself acknowledged that suspicions would be piqued by his rapid rise and said he would be undergoing tests to show he was for real... but nothing more was heard of this. Did it happen?
JimmyFingers said:
I think Sky's uber-professional, meticulous, leave-no-stone-unturned PR guff gets exposed though. There was a lot of suspicion surround JTL when they signed him: late twenties, break-out season while not under BP scrutiny, and then a fat contract at the end of it. Was it 3 years he was out of the sport due to the virus? Comes back in, time is getting short to build the career, get the big contracts, win the big races, make his name. As I said, story old as time. Sky got mugged off IMO: as soon as he was riding for them there were stories about him getting ill from the training. He was mediocre to the point of invisible in the few races he did ride in 2013, classic racehorse to donkey stuff. Whether they leaked it on purpose to Walsh, or whether he picked up whispers of it when he was 'embedded' there, people at Sky must have twigged at some point surely, before news of the investigation broke.
He looks bang to rights, 2 year ban beckoning and good riddance to him.
But the whole thing is, did the attention to detail shtick really cause Sky to be blind to, as you say, the oldest trick in the book? I mean, yes in retrospect it looks crystal clear - dope to get the fat contract, then play safe. It would worry me that in a team that prides itself on leaving no stone unturned in the pursuit of performance improvements, that a trick as fundamentally simple as that could fool them. At this point, they've been apparently fooled into believing a lot of lies that anybody could have seen through. The tearful cries of "we were deceived" as they jettisoned riders named by USADA (along with the quiet casting aside of Mick Rogers to little fanfare) and the claims of ignorance with regards to Geert Leinders perhaps pick up a bit of credence if they genuinely were foolish enough to fall for Tiernan-Locke's gambit without suspecting him. While this is not going to be good PR for the all-singing all-dancing clean team, it's more about the way that in order to spin the David Walsh argument that they were simply foolish and naïve we will soon get to the point where we're really not crediting them with much intelligence at all, given how this zero tolerance policy is proving just as impermeable as the last one (that is to say, as impermeable as a seive).
JimmyFingers said:
And as I said there's nothing to incriminate them beyond the fact their winning so suddenly claiming that they are doping with the complete lack of anything to suggest they are is as bad as someone saying 'they train really hard and are lovely chaps, they must be clean'.
This bit is about the Brownlees. I would agree that I have never heard anything to say that they dope, especially since I don't have much interest in the sport, however triathlon is not a sport with a good reputation on the doping front, so I'm afraid that the same issues you will find from cycling or the 100m sprint of guilt by association among successful athletes is always going to be an obstacle that comes up.
JimmyFingers said:
JTL's initial sanction preceded Cookson, no need to weave him into this. Many thought it was a parting gift to him from Fat Pat, although JTL's agent is Pat's son of course.
Difficult to gauge how glaring the fluctuations are in comparison to say Horner's. I do know his sister claims it is a conspiracy from Sky to be able to sack him.
Perhaps they realised he was doping when they saw his blood values from this year. Oh and the fact he was slow as ****.
However I think you have to really work at the spin to throw this at Sky. His high reading were from when he was at another team, when he was winning. His low values are from while he was at Sky and taking up the rear.
Agreed that this doesn't necessarily reflect badly on Sky in terms of Sky doping at all, but it does reflect badly on their recruitment and leaves them with egg on their face, because as has been mentioned before, they included attention to detail as one of their mantras, and just as a higher standard of transparency and cleanliness is expected of them because they made a big deal of how clean and transparent they would be, because they drew attention to how keen their attention to detail supposedly is, when it's repeatedly shown to be anything but, they look like incompetent buffoons at best (which their stage racing record suggests they aren't), and flat out liars at worst.
argyllflyer said:
Any tests Sky did on JTL before they signed him are pretty worthless as it wasn't BP data because he wasn't part of the programme. It seems to take a year to get a calibration of what 'normal' is for a rider. In terms of whether he delivered credible data within the boundaries of normality in those tests for Garmin / Sky etc, what can they do apart from take his word he was clean? It took a year on the passport to produce evidence he was doped in 2012 as his normal values were apparent.
At the same time though, Sky would surely have been able to test him while he was a Sky rider. Not even in a nasty way, but potentially even in a diagnostic way. They had the record of his levels from before, they could say, "hey Jon, what's up man? You've been struggling this year to finish races that would have been suited to you. Do you want us to check on your levels and see if there's any health problem? Is your head in the right place?" After all, it was pretty clear by April that he had a bad case of the Cobos. Then, if there's something wrong, they could have approached the rider to question things before it gets to the UCI level. Take him off the road with some BS excuse about illness while it gets sorted out (see Gerolsteiner & Francesco de Bonis, another guy who broke out late), maybe an internal suspension or getting the UCI to take a closer look, saying "guys, it looks like we've bought a dud" making Sky look tough on doping with the added bonus of him not having actually doped at Sky. If they were oblivious to something being up, you'd be alarmed at how little they care about riders beyond the A-team, since it was plainly obvious to anybody watching that the spectre of Pecharromán was looming large.
martinvickers said:
You do know where you are, don't you?
I lold. Very true.
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