It's not that people aren't bothered by it. It's that for a lot of people, the hope that anti-doping is actually about cleaning up the sport is currently at rock bottom levels. We aren't discovering new things about doping, we don't have recent frames of reference of high profile doping incidents to compare against, and don't have the confidence in the powers that be of any stripe actually wanting to fix the problem, that many simply aren't as invested anymore in the storylines of the Clinic. The 90s were a ridiculous time in doping, but then we had things like Festina, the EPO test and so on.. Big advances in anti-doping. Then somebody comes along with suspicious transformations and dominates and people doubt it, and create a lot of dialogue. Then they clear off and we get things like Puerto, Oil For Drugs, the 2008 CERA busts, and anti-doping progresses a huge distance in a short period of time. We have characters who get busted who talk big-time about what they did, how they did it, who did it. People like Sinkewitz, Sella, Rasmussen, Kohl, Frei. Fans learnt a lot about the seedy underbelly and a lot of interest was generated. Whoever became dominant straight after that was always going to come in for a lot of scrutiny, because fans - although still a lot more ignorant than they thought they were - were a lot more clued-in as to what lay beneath than they'd ever been before.
If you look at the early Sky rosters and said that the riders that went on to be big stars were, like, Rigoberto Urán and Edvald Boasson Hagen, there'd be way less discourse generated, because those guys had always been good from a young age, whereas Sky managed to convert veteran track racers who hadn't shown climbing ability in a decade as a pro and injury-prone classics men into elite climbers, not to mention Froome's incredible rise from the verge of being dropped to take a minimum WT wage domestique contract at Lampre or Garmin to becoming the greatest rider of his generation, before we get to the insane number of contortions required to create a coherent and credible timeline for his medical history with his racing ability. Doing this at a time shortly after we'd seen some incredibly blatant jumps in performance pulled up for doping (di Luca, Sella, Mosquera, Kohl) was always going to generate huge amounts of discussion.
But there haven't been any big doping busts lately - those that there have been have been either small fry teams and riders (many of whom have been pretty blatant, like W52, to the extent that they are mostly just laughed at rather than scrutinised) or they've been for pretty minor things like Nairo Quintana for tramadol, and nobody believes that tramadol on its own is the entirety of a 2023 full scale doping program any more than they believe Alberto Contador actually ate a tainted special steak brought personally for him. So there isn't any real feeling that we have an idea of what we're looking for, and we have had a few cases in the intervening period that have dealt huge blows to the credibility of positive tests - Daryl Impey and Roman Kreuziger managing to poke huge holes in the ability to secure bans from biopassport irregularities, for example. At the moment, there isn't the same need for obfuscation or the same belief on the part of vocal anti-doping voices in the chances of securing any kind of conviction if anything is turned up. Simultaneously Jumbo are a representative of 'old' cycling. They're the old Rabobank team. They can't have the same pretence of "that was then and this is now and everything is clean and we are proof" because they were there back in the day and they were doing it back in the day. They can't make the same false promises as Sky did because nobody will believe them in the first place.
I honestly think that was the bigger part of it. People don't like cheats, but even more than that they don't like feeling like they're being taken for idiots. Jumbo don't have that. They are shady as all hell. Wout van Aert's ability to climb like he does at his size and sprint like he does across the range that he does is as suspicious as anything Geraint Thomas has ever done, and lord knows I've said my piece on his transformation over the years. Vingegaard's emergence, and the way van Aert and Laporte have been riding all spring... it's crazy. But people had genuine hopes that the sport would clean up after the fallout from Puerto, the 2008 Tour (the cleanest in living memory, or at least the best for anti-doping), and the Reasoned Decision meaning that the sport was finally free of the spectre of the EPO era and Armstrong for good. And given the talk that they talked, people had some belief that Sky might be a large part of that. Most of the mockery they endured in 2010 was more about their corporate presentation and self-aggrandisement, and nothing to do with doping accusations, that came later. As a result Sky turning into the very same thing that we'd just seen a decade-long fight to get rid of meant they were treated far worse than had they been just one of the old guard teams like Quick Step, Movistar or indeed Jumbo.
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