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Quintana technically wasn't doping, but my definition of doping is according to WADA definition, not my own opinion. An athlete and their team look at WADA code and it tells them what is doping/cheating and what isn't.
The point you made essentially comparing Ferrari to Brailsford I think shows the enormous stretching of even your own wild imagination you are having to make to even have a conversation and try and relate Thomas to anything you think might have happened. The main argument is there is as much about Thomas as there is on any neo-pro and so in the belief that one has to prove beyond at least some reasonable doubt, it needs more than your imagination or bias to be believed really.
I thought Team Sky were going to be the all-singing all-dancing clean team that would withdraw riders from races rather than get TUEs.
I don’t know why I wouldn’t still despise Sky/Ineos for spending gobs of $ to bring in attnys, scientists, expensive lab testing, etc to clear Froome of his doping violation, which not only showed how tilted the legal playing field was/is for top riders on wealthy teams, but also damaged the anti-doping system. It may be that the current managers (aside from whatever connection Brailsford still has) & current riders have no connection to that, but I see no reason to like or trust the corporate entity given their history. On the other hand, it doesn’t get in the way of me rooting for individuals on the team like Bernal or Pidcock.
Where did you read they wouldn't use TUEs like any other team? Their claim was they would win Le Tour with a clean British rider. As I just said, riders, teams, organisers, wada and uci define that as not doping by breaking WADA code. You can run your own made up definition of anti-doping of course, but it doesn't mean it's more valid than the reality of their claim that still upholds true against the definition of WADA,
This was one of their many promises back in 2010, "we will withdraw riders from races rather than get TUEs" in order to preserve their cleanliness, because they were aware that in the climate of 2008-9 people were unwilling to buy "doing every substance not nailed down as long as it's inside the WADA code" as a definition of "clean". They didn't promise "not breaking the rules", they promised "clean". They promised attention to detail, and drew attention to the success that this attention to detail brought, while simultaneously pleading total ignorance of how a doctor named in the Rasmussen court documents ended up on the team "just to weigh people", and a known Ferrari customer ended up on the roster cheerfully telling the press he was putting out the best numbers he'd ever managed.
It's fine. Some people like to watch Manchester City - a Johnny-Come-Lately moneyed team who flaunt their status as too big to fail by using high-priced lawyers to make it too expensive for the authorities to make them face consequences - because they have the best players, so they can swoon at a 4-0 dismantling of a lesser team, because they're watching really high quality football, and are happy to cheer for the overdog. Other people like to watch a close competition of players, regardless of whether that means compromising the quality of the game by viewing players objectively at a lower standard, and object to the morality involved in assembling those corporate, financially invulnerable teams of galacticos. It's two conflicting viewpoints of sport that are simply largely incompatible.
I didn't fall for it. I'm simply saying: they were dishonest.
"Peters insists that Leinders was scrupulously ethical in his time with Sky. ‘We agreed as a team that if a rider, suffering from asthma, got into trouble with pollen we would pull him out of the race rather than apply for a therapeutic use exemption on his behalf." (source: David Walsh, "Inside Team Sky")
Which has nothing to do with Wiggins TUE which was the proactive prevention of pollen exacerbating asthma before competition began, because the maximal dose for what he was using under WADA code was leaving him with side-effects and not optimal according to Freeman and the TUE medical notes.
There were major figures in the sport who, reportedly, even as late as 1996 insisted that EPO is not doping.
I don’t recall for sure, but I didn’t think by 1996, only several years after EPO appeared to be be in wide use throughout the peloton, riders or DS’s were even acknowledging they knew of EPO use to journalists or others in public?
It was in 1995, actually. It's an anecdote from a 2013 book by Belgian journalist Hans Vandeweghe, "Wie gelooft die renners nog?" (Who still believes these riders?).
Very interesting, thanks for that. Because coaches, whose riders were likely benefitting from EPO by that time, would say “it’s not doping” doesn’t mean that riders in general, or the anti-doping authorities, really believed “it’s not doping.” I’m sure Merckx didn’t believe oral cortico-steroids were doping either, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t doping.
It's more that I feel the need to at least suspend disbelief enough to believe I'm watching a competition between sportsmen rather than lawyers.
Perhaps not small, but Sunweb was similar in budget to Ag2r.
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