samerics said:
Don't ruin their fun!! Exactly, knee jerk stuff on a stage that isn't even one of the biggies where the ridiculous performances, a la Armstrong, Pantani etc have emerged in the past. It's a great team bought by vast financial resources, and a medical team of experience is bound to, when we have had an era like we've just had, have people in it who've worked on teams who doped. Are they not allowed a chance too? Basso was, and he was actually banned, not just guilty by association!!
I think part of what's galling was that they came in with the "nobody who's ever had any connection with doping. Ever!" approach. I don't know if they perhaps hadn't banked on how hard that would be. After all, while they may be able to assemble a pretty good squad of clean riders these days, getting the experienced Directeurs Sportif and doctors, mechanics etc who weren't around in the bad old days is nigh on impossible. And while when they took on this philosophy it was greeted with great fanfare and attention... when it was dropped it was with nary a whisper. Of course, it was suspicious that it had ever been in place what with Michael Barry on the 2010 squad, but in signing people like Rogers after a pretty disappointing 2010 season it was clear that it was being abandoned.
The other thing is that, while the bio-passport may not reduce the number of dopers in the péloton, it may reduce the amount of doping, in that the amount being used is no longer the brazen "wake-me-up-in-the-night-as-if-I-sleep-more-than-four-hours-my-blood-will-clot-and-I-will-die" days of the Mapei Roubaix, Bjarne Riis and Gewiss-Ballan at La Flèche Wallonne. Therefore the numbers that are produced on these climbs may not match up to the numbers of Pantani et al, but the riders still have an unfair advantage over others who are either clean or not taking the same gambles on amount as them. Riccardo Riccò was not the only guy doping in the 2008 Tour, but he sure had an advantage over the likes of Kohl, who were doing the same thing, and over a number of other shady riders there, no? Floyd Landis' epic 2006 raid was not because he was dirty and everybody else was clean, but rather that most of them were dirty and he was the one willing to go furthest.
With the various comments about the small time gaps to people like Cancellara and Gallopin, it's understandable that sceptical eyebrows may need to be lowered slightly. But there's only so many times that the same team can have three or four guys left while most of the other favourites disappoint before eyebrows are raised. I mean, the other favourites can't ALL underperform forever, right? I mean, this was the excuse for why the Vuelta wasn't suspicious... why Paris-Nice was such a walkover... why Romandie was comfortable... why the 4 of the 9 at the Dauphiné wasn't supposed to be found suspicious... and now this. That's a fair few times now where Sky have all conveniently converged upon the best form together while seemingly every other team has made a mess of their preparation.
It's a bit like Armstrong's blood values in the 2009 Tour, when he posted them. They dropped, and jumped back up, and dropped, and jumped back up. They stayed within a fairly small range, and given the parameters of testing and the variables such as altitude, dehydration and so on, nothing concrete could be drawn from them... but that didn't mean they didn't look suspicious as all hell. Team Sky's performances, in isolation, may be explicable given other parameters such as other teams' disappointing races, form of contenders, numbers produced and so on... but it's happening often enough now where it's hard to swallow the whole "they weren't that good, everybody else was just disappointing" argument any longer.
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