King Boonen said:
ow i definitely believe they can change.
you came up with that absurd sweeping statement ("it's all about winning") in the first place.
ow i definitely believe they can change.
you came up with that absurd sweeping statement ("it's all about winning") in the first place.
- Jul 25, 2012
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- Jul 25, 2012
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sniper said:
Another clinic law. every single thing you say will be analysed in every way possible with the most contrary meaning being taken. thou shalt not use poetic licence and pedantry shall reign supreme.
hrotha said:
The opposition was cr*p though. No "old variant" Berto or Andy S. Evans palpably sub-par to the extent he couldn't keep up with TJ, Nibs on the back foot due to the amout of TT-ing and all other likely GT contenders had ridden the Giro.
To deny this is every bit as daft as denying that Wiggins' and Froome's transformation to GT winners is at least a tad suspicious.
It's entirely possible that Wiggins was doping against cr*p opposition; the two aren't mutually exclusive, even though the the latter can be used to try and counter accusations of the former.
indeed.King Boonen said:
that wiggins doped structurally to reach a peak level is an inherent assumption and is not up for debate in this thread.
as i understood it, the thread is about whether he and others before/after him consciously quit the juice after having cashed in, for instance because they consider it aint worth the (health and reputational) risk anymore.
- Jul 25, 2012
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hrotha said:
Yeah, all those classic and monument wins must have made Dave Brailsford really happy.
This is not the conversation I was having with Ferminal and is not one I particularly want to engage in. So I won't.
- Jul 25, 2012
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sniper said:
Yes. But the discussion I was having with Ferminal was whether Wiggins had had a good career, so really the basis of the premise. I don't wish to be drawn into a discussion about his doping or one assuming he was doped.
hrotha said:
No they didn't - they did f*ck all in the Giro, the Vuelta, the Classics or the World Championships.
They did dominate the week-long stage races and the Tour, most likely because they had several riders doped to the eyeballs, but this does not mean they dominated the whole season or that the Tour opposition wasn't cr*p!
hrotha said:
Nibs was the best of a bad bunch up against Wiggo and Froome, but the amount of flat TTing meant that he had no chance at all.
As an aside, whilst I think Nibs is the least unlikely GT winner of recent years to be clean, his transformation from Tour 2012 to Giro 2013 is an issue well worth a thread of its own, I'd say...
- Jun 10, 2010
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They did f*ck all at the Giro? They had two guys in the top 10. They dominated stage races as a whole. You can't seriously expect any team to win everything before you can say it's too much. They ended up on top of all the rankings and won most of the stage races they targeted.Wallace and Gromit said:
Again, this is a red herring. No matter how many flat ITT kms there were, the fact remains that Nibali didn't drop Wiggins once in the mountains.
http://forum.cyclingnews.com/showthread.php?t=8517
Do love a new thread about a Sky rider so we can discuss everything we've already discussed on about 30 other Sky/Brit related threads
- Jul 1, 2011
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hrotha said:
OK. F*ck all was maybe a bit strong, but 2 top 10s in a race is not dominating it.
hrotha said:
My previous post highlighted that they dominated a lot of stage races. I'm not denying this!
I alluded to it being "too much" by suggesting they achieved the stage race wins by having a lot of riders doped up.
hrotha said:
That they did. Again, it's pointless to deny it. But to call this domination of the whole season is patent nonsense.
To be fair, that Giro team was built around Cav, who won 3 or four stages and missed out on the red jersey by one point. Uran won the white jersey and Henao was in the top ten so a pretty successful GT all in all for Sky.
Quickstep of course won as many races as Sky, of whose tally 15 wins came from one rider, Cav. They were the top ranked team, and had the second highest ranked rider, and they certainly dominated the majority of the Stage races. The Vuelta they managed fourth, so not too shabby either.
Dominated the season? Maybe, but you have to qualify it to an extent, at the risk of being I'm downplaying their sucesses again, as opposed to most being exaggerating them.
Quickstep of course won as many races as Sky, of whose tally 15 wins came from one rider, Cav. They were the top ranked team, and had the second highest ranked rider, and they certainly dominated the majority of the Stage races. The Vuelta they managed fourth, so not too shabby either.
Dominated the season? Maybe, but you have to qualify it to an extent, at the risk of being I'm downplaying their sucesses again, as opposed to most being exaggerating them.
JimmyFingers said:
Maybe my standards are just very high.
Froome's 4th place in the Vuelta was a good effort, but he was struggling to hang on by the end, let alone do anything close to win, which is a clear precendent step for domination.
Dominating the season would surely require wins from throughout the season consistently in all types of reasons. The conspicuous absence of Monument, Classic, Giro and Vuelta wins is hard to incorporate into any workable definition of dominating the season.
I wouldn't dispute claims that Sky were most powerful and successful team of the season, or that these levels of success aren't suspicious.
That Vuelta team was hilarious, Froome was running around like a headless chicken for most of it. I remember the stage that finished on a race track and Sky hit the front hard and early to try to set it up for Swift. Froome took multiple turns on the front which was bizarre, they even caused a small split in the Peloton. In the end they got swamped and Degenkolb won. Utterly pointless as Swift is a second tier sprinter at best (on current form) although a very handy track rider (Scratch Race World Champion, although of course track isn't considered difficult, you don't need talent or hard work to win there, and trophies won there don't count really, not as much as the road....apparently).
Hilarious to watch though, bore out Yates assessment that there's not many people at Sky that know a lot about racing.
Hilarious to watch though, bore out Yates assessment that there's not many people at Sky that know a lot about racing.
- Sep 14, 2011
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- May 26, 2010
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JimmyFingers said:
Not a sky thread. Wiggins was given as an example and BroDeal the OP aked for others, which should've taken discussion away from Sky but as you insist on defending the indefensible the thread is kept on sky as others repeat as nauseum the reason d'etre for Sky being obvious juicers.
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