This will be slightly long-winded post, but here is my opinion/feeling about the Team Sky...
1) Team Sky is only a tip of the iceberg, but the roots are in British Cycling & National Cycling Centre/Manchester Velodrome.
2) National Cycling Centre (from here on NCC) was opened in 1994 to promote & develop British Track Cycling. It is state-funded, institutionalised centre with open (and likely hidden) access to co-operation with universities, medical schools etc. in a way which (maybe except Astana) no road cycling trade team can even dream about...
3) NCC understandably started with an emphasis on track cycling as many track events are PURE performance sports with no tactics adaptation to daily conditions (elements of nature) etc. included. The results started to pile up :
1996 Olympics : no medals on track (Boardman & Sciandri took medals on road, but they had nothing to do with NCC, really)
2000 Olympics : Gold for Jason Queally in 1000 m TT, 3 other medals. No yet success in more tactical events like individual sprint, madison, keirin etc.
2004 Olympics : 2 Golds thru' Sir Brad & Chris Hoy
2008 Olympics : Total domination! 7 golds out of total of 10 available on track. Every "performance event" gold to UK! Only points races and men's madison slipped away...
4) 2009 : The birth of Team Sky in a very close co-operation of British Cycling...
I am bluntly accusing that NCC is a hotbed of very advanced doping research and the natural progression has been to start with the "easiest" pure performance sports and move towards most tactical, most pricey sport (= professional road cycling).
This would also explain why it is mostly British riders who do advance to "alien"-level in Team Sky. As it is national institution, the best of "knowledge" is not to be given for your competitors. While they are teammates in Sky, they are "enemies" of British Cycling in WCs/Olympics etc. Sky has employed a lot of talented foreigners, but the only one who appears to have been given "full 5-course meal" is Richie Porte. Otoh, numerous foreign riders (EBH, Löfkvist, Gerrans, Uran, Henao, Deignan, Roche, König etc) have remained very mortal, stagnated or even plummeted off the cliff while in Sky. So it is not only a "peloton a deux vitesses", but also "team a deux vitesses".
And this separates Team Sky from almost ALL of its competition... Even the richest competitors are still private teams - only Astana has similar governmental backing. However, I also think that cutting-edge sports medicinal research is more likely to happen in UK, than in Kazakhstan.
And this leads to...
5) I don't think Team Sky are BIGGER cheats than most of their competition (although they are the most double-faced in their insistence of innocence). Frankly, yesterday Froome put a whipping for plenty of riders/teams, which have no moral qualms in using any available PEDs/methods as long as they avoid being caught. However, the rest of the teams are restricted to "known methods" of blood transfusion / micro-dosing etc. while I'm pretty convinced Team Sky has some completely unknown, off-the-market, unpublicised stuff which they can utilise freely without ANY danger of detection (at this moment). Quite BALCOish, but likely with public sources / funding instead of private lab.
6) So, do I feel sorry for beaten "cheats" like Contador, Nibali, Piti etc. for them being caught way behind in "arms race". Not really. They would do the same without any remorse given a half-chance...
7) But at the same time - this is
- killing the suspense
- making the world of cycling even MORE unfair for riders. If the best stuff is (at least for a moment) available only for riders of certain nationality, why should others bother?
8) I am strong supporter of CLEAN sport. I also believe that to be unrealistic ideal. However, a world where the doping is limited to certain known methods/PEDs and doping controls can even hinder and put limitations to a use of those known "evils", the field is rather fair and even. The guys who want to ride clean will likely not win too often, but they are not in unconquerable disadvantage AND they pretty much know how much of headstart the dopers have...
9) But in a world where one group of riders (apparently not even close to a full team) have stuff which no one else knows about... That is no longer a sport. It is WORSE that Lance-years. At least Lance used same stuff as everybody else. He only could use it more efficiently as he had the "immunity" from getting caught and a "private line" to whistle-blow whomever had the audacity to raise their bar to match him (Hamilton, Mayo).
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