Being serious though, Rabobank
released mid-season data in 2009 on the tests they'd had, who had been tested and what for, to that point in the season.
Denis Menchov, you will note, has 24 tests there.
The team then
updated at the end of the season.
As you will see, Menchov's total number of tests increased from 24 to 42, split perfectly between the number of blood and urine tests.
When the UCI surreptitiously updated their suspensions pdf on July 10, 2014,
Menchov was included in it, banned for bio-passport violations several years prior and stripped of his result at the 2009 Tour de France. That's right - he kept the Giro d'Italia victory but had to have that 65th place at the Tour taken from him!
But clearly, those 42 tests didn't yield any positives.
And from what we've since learned, the biopassport is a long way from infallible and people like Kreuziger have successfully argued cases against it. You certainly have to go quite some way to even trip it in the first place, as
Levi Leipheimer posting an off-score of 132,8 without being flagged shows. Wiggins' own off-scores have raised questions under further scrutiny in 2009.
So why are off-scores set so high? Ostensibly to off-set various environmental factors that can yield false positives, such as altitude. That's why people from places at high altitude have, in the past, carried certification allowing them higher hct% when they had the 50% rule, because their natural hematocrit value was higher than the norm. Damiano Cunego was one of the most famous of these, although
Rob Hayles managed to trip the wire too, coming from the high altitude environs of Portsmouth (some notable quotes in there from Brailsford and Palfreeman, by the way). Palfreeman anyhow points out that hematocrit can fluctuate naturally by "up to 7%", but for an off-score like Levi's to be natural, that's going to be one hell of a fluctuation.
Gewiss in 1994-1995 had an average fluctuation of double Palfreeman's figure - still some of them are inside the 133% off score, although admittedly not one stays below the 50%; one of the key reasons why that rules was implemented.
And now we also know that Sky have been using TUEs. TUEs are legal, but they can be misused or abused. Certainly the use of triamcinolone in this circumstance (which would be medically inadvisable given other conditions we are told Wiggins had/has) is within the letter of the law, but compared to the much more widely-prescribed but less powerful substances (including the very one - prednisolone - that had proven the difference between Chris Froome being too sick to race and Chris Froome dismantling the entire field at the Tour de Romandie, apparently) it was rather using a sledgehammer to crack a nut, if the performance-enhancing effects weren't being taken into account in the prescription, shall we say. Callum Skinner's angry reaction to his TUEs being disclosed has rather put Wiggins in a bind, too - Skinner's reaction is, regardless of whether he is or not, what you would want and hope for in a clean athlete. First, anger and frustration at this information coming out that makes him look questionable, followed by a voluntary release of information that justifies and proves that the condition for which the TUE was applied was legitimate. It then raises more questions about Wiggins, because he hasn't done this. It is a key part of the jigsaw, because when the TUEs were released, we discovered he was prescribed a substance, the use of which should have been precluded by a pre-existing condition we had previously been told about. If Wiggins can prove à la Skinner that the one condition is legitimate, it raises questions about the prescription of triamcinolone by a medical professional who should have known better given Wiggins' other pre-existing conditions; if Wiggins can't prove that the original condition is legitimate, then we have a very simple case of a team appearing to be either exaggerating or lying about medical conditions in order to procure TUEs, which is a doping offence.
So if you take those factors all together:
- a rider can be tested 42 times without a positive, yet be known later on to have been doping
- because of the variables, the tolerance levels on the biological passport are extremely generous
- TUEs were being utilized to prescribe performance enhancing substances
- the substances prescribed and the conditions claimed by the athlete create dissonance that calls the legitimacy of the TUEs in to question.
So once more, where does this leave us? The best case scenario here is simply that Sky did not break any anti-doping rules. They played within the letters of the law. But that's not the ground-breaking, innovative approach they told us about at the outset, is it? What we've learnt over the course of many years is that very little of what Sky do is revolutionary. They just use the same approach as everybody else - sports science, pushing the boundaries of legality in both the medical and technological fields - and have been better at it, largely due to the resources available from one of the biggest budgets in the péloton (that they've then seemingly been able to supplement by pilfering staff and reappropriating funds and resources from British Cycling because of the overlap between the goals of each), and have also been better at selling this to the audience, via a combination of targeting the newer fans of the sport to whom the narrative can be more easily sold, keeping journalists complicit, and especially for the home audience, selling a patriotic line by wilfully conflating the national and trade teams. But that's not revolution, that's marketing. As Marc Madiot said
all the way back in February 2010, "we put riders in wind tunnels too - we just don't put out a press release about it". Every team out there is doing everything its budget will allow to look for the improvements out there, not just Sky. And as Bjarne Riis' autobiography quote that Digger used in his blog post points out - Riis was known as a marginal gains guy, he just didn't repeat the mantra enough to give it a catchy PR name. Since retiring as an active competitor he's brought the same approach to management and has presided over victories in four GTs (1 Giro, 2 Tours - 1 by default - and 1 Vuelta) and 8 Monuments (1 MSR, 2 RVVs, 3 Roubaixs, 2 LBLs). He was also one of the most blatant and egregious dopers in the history of the sport. And he didn't test positive either.
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