DirtyWorks said:
ctaylor said:
On the bright side, at least he looks like an athletic human, rather than a Salbutamol powered stick man!
Right. I'd argue he's clean-ish given how consistently he rides. Unlike a Froome, he was a prodigious talent.
It's a shame Pistolero is banned because now actually
would be a good time to bring up Valverde.
Now, given your contrasting Sagan as somebody who has always had the level and consistently so vs. somebody like Froome, who is far less elegant on a bike, has deficiencies in a number of skills and so forth, I actually agree with you to some extent, but that doesn't necessarily make Sagan any cleaner per se, just that were the péloton to be completely paniagua as of tomorrow, we could expect Sagan to continue to be one of the top performers. After all, Valverde was one of the most ridiculously talented kids Spain ever produced. Not just at espoir level (which was actually his weakest time results-wise), not just at junior level, but back to cadets and back to when he was 11 years old when he went on his ridiculous winning streak that led to the "El Imbatido" nickname. Alejandro Valverde is just about the first guy you should be able to point to and say, "that guy always had the talent to be one of the best". But he's also a well-known doper and nobody in their right mind would say that his consistent excellence into his late 30s is a sign of cleanliness. Somewhere along the line he started doping and seemingly never stopped, but we can't pinpoint exactly where, because he kept on getting results.
Sagan, like Valverde, has consistently been a top results-getter from very early on. How clean that makes him is a total crapshoot. All we can say with any certainty is that on the Cipollini scale, he's more like Basso than di Luca.