Team Ineos (Formerly the Sky thread)

[Parrulo]

rolland was actually up the road with the break but other then that that's a pretty good list.

you also raised exactly the same question i did so you prolly will get the same idiotic "but he finished 18 minutes down on the stage therefore he was totally spent after that" excuse i got. . .

 

[Libertine Seguros]

Touché, had forgot about that. I stand corrected on Rolland.

Nevertheless, to tell the truth there are reasons (Giro fatigue, crashes, being old) that justify the majority of those, but really, Rogers is a journeyman and as I say, I rate him no higher than Karpets. Karpets was probably doping in 2007, but the most I know we have on him is that in the Mantova sting they had something about a Russian rider based in Spain, and Karpets lives near Pamplona. Maybe he was named with Losa or something, I don't know. I think that was just LuLu, Kolobnev, Pereiro and Moreno, and nothing came of that anyway. With Rogers we have explicit links to Ferrari and to Freiburg.

Also, even if we explain it away, it begets another problem... while each tree can be explained away fairly convincingly, there is an entire fricking rainforest here, and that whole rainforest springing up simultaneously is not as easy to swallow.

 

[ToreBear]

I hate to interrupt a good arguement; but I´m too scared to start a new topic and upset the Hog, so I´d like to change the subject a wee bit.
What do people think about Brailsfords long term startegy in dealing with doping issues?
I have to confess to thinking he sounded naive and lead footed compared to J Vaulters. Zero tolerance in procycling is all very well, but as has been said elsewhere "you don´t win anything with kids" and anyone who has been around in procycling during the Lance years has had some contact with doping (team doctors; team mates, training camps etc)
I thought he´d take stock and admit he was wrong and try to reframe the debate al la JV. But no, here he goes and doubles rather than quits.
And the more I think about it, the better I think it looks. OK, not just now, and there are clearly going to be gaps in the squad after the re-interview with the boss and the psychiatrist.
But in 3 years time?
Might it look like it was worth the effort?
Time will tell, but we have to hope procycling won´t be in this mess in 3 years time (and the mess we are in now is largely from more than 3 years ago)

Reading
http://www.cyclingnews.com/features/dave-brailsfords-pursuit-of-utopia-for-team-sky

I think I agree. I was initially very sceptical, but this might work. DB seems to be willing to take the consequences. And this does not look like your typical sign this paper interview. Seems more like an invite for people to finally come clean about their past.

One thing is lying by saying yes or no, another is lying throughout such an interview process.

Of course this could all be super smart PR. But I don't think so.

Who knows, perhaps we will see a press conferance with a crying Wiggo in the near future?

 

[Telmisartan new]

Reading
http://www.cyclingnews.com/features/dave-brailsfords-pursuit-of-utopia-for-team-sky

One thing is lying by saying yes or no, another is lying throughout such an interview process.

Of course this could all be super smart PR. But I don't think so.

Who knows, perhaps we will see a press conferance with a crying Wiggo in the near future?

Your right,this is no PR exercise,they are having a clear out but paying up the contracts.I am utterly convinced this thread has contributed to Brailsford doing this,he's using LA/USADA as the catalyst but the pressure started on them at the Tour,that's when Brailsford started feeling the heat and decided they would have to look not only at Leinders but also the whole team,not an overnight decision by Brailsford IMO.Yates out,Julich out,Rogers out,Sutton out and probably one or two others.Life is wonderful at the moment.

Cheaters never win.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iEMoC-sOqyw

 

[skidmark]

Reading
http://www.cyclingnews.com/features/dave-brailsfords-pursuit-of-utopia-for-team-sky

I think I agree. I was initially very sceptical, but this might work. DB seems to be willing to take the consequences. And this does not look like your typical sign this paper interview. Seems more like an invite for people to finally come clean about their past.

One thing is lying by saying yes or no, another is lying throughout such an interview process.

Of course this could all be super smart PR. But I don't think so.

Who knows, perhaps we will see a press conferance with a crying Wiggo in the near future?

Yeah, the 'we will take care of anyone who admits to doping, but their time with us is done' line was at least a qualification to his hardline stance. Moves him from a 10 on the Omerta Index to about an 8.

 

[ToreBear]

zubeldia dragged himself back before the top and rogers obviously caught evans and TJVG that's why they are 7 at the top.

no1 is saying rogers was going full blast on all climbs the thing is when he went he dropped a lot of people inclusive GC contenders putting out more watts then back in 06 when he was riding for T-Mobile and was a ferrari client

like libertine and i have said before on this thread and the sky defenders still refuse to answer: what would you think if vladimir karpets, winner of the white jersey on the 04 tour, the Volta a Catalunya and the tour de Suisse in 07 with a top 10 finish at the vuelta also in 07 and 4 other top 15 places in GT's (2 at the tour 1 at the giro and 1 at the vuelta) and owner of a very handsome mullet but with nothing to show in terms of visible performances, other then tackling contador off the road on the 2010 tour, for a couple of seasons all of sudden started to drop people left right and center over the mountains of france for his team leaders valverde and cobo sitting comfortably 1st and 2nd on GC?

what would you think of movistar and karpets?

Sky has no history like Movistar does. Sky I think is much richer than Movistar. Sky does not originate in a country that some on this board view as doping heaven. (PS. I love spain, my parents live there, and some of the arguments about spain and doping take it to extremes).

Movistar have not set themselves up for a big fall if they are shown to dope the same way sky has.

I think if sky is proven to have run an organized doping network the consequences will be much bigger in the UK, than if similar happened in Spain. I don't think Movistar has the same importance to spanish cycling as sky to UK cycling.

So the teams are too different to compare in my book. Their situation is too different. It just becomes too abstract.

But, I'm a newbie cycling fan. But, in this sport, it might not be that big a deal, since no one knows who was clean when. So it seems impossible to tell a clean performance from a dirty one. How can one know what to expect if one does not have a clear frame of refference?

 

[Libertine Seguros]

Yeah, the 'we will take care of anyone who admits to doping, but their time with us is done' line was at least a qualification to his hardline stance. Moves him from a 10 on the Omerta Index to about an 8.

It makes sense, but then the whole "all clean, all singing, all dancing" lines that they came out with at the beginning have backed them into a corner.

Either Brailsford really is as naïve as the article points out he isn't, or Brailsford was being pretty economical with the truth about whether the team really paid that much attention to riders' pasts during the hiring process before. Well, either that or Barry, Rogers, Leinders et al are just excellent thespians. They came into the sport with an idyllic, utopian vision of a team free of all doping suspicions, and it ends here with a number of shady riders and staff being jettisoned and a bunch of awkward press conferences with their tails between their legs. And while what Brailsford says makes a good deal of sense, there is a feeling of the same promises three years later, and is it going to go the same way?

Although they wanted to set up an all-singing, all-dancing clean team, and that is a pretty honourable goal, perhaps it might have made more sense to accept cycling's past and do it as a transitional thing, like Garmin have. The whole "we know that some of you guys have history, but you and I both want this done clean from here on in", use those guys as role models and mentors to the presumably clean youngsters being brought in. That way, the commitment to clean cycling doesn't ring so hollow as it did with Team Sky. I stated at the very start of Team Sky that finding clean riders might not be so hard these days (nevertheless, Barry and Rogers...), but DSes, soigneurs etc without the stench of the EPO era may be tougher to find.

The other thing is that while Brailsford launched Sky's clean ethos with a bang, he scaled it back very quietly. Therefore for those who don't follow the sport as closely as those who post on a message board and seek out news stories from foreign-language dailies on it, they may not have been aware of this, and now feel betrayed by, or compelled to believe, the crocodile tears act of Brailsford talking about having been lied to.

 

[skidmark]

Sky has no history like Movistar does. Sky I think is much richer than Movistar. Sky does not originate in a country that some on this board view as doping heaven. (PS. I love spain, my parents live there, and some of the arguments about spain and doping take it to extremes).

Movistar have not set themselves up for a big fall if they are shown to dope the same way sky has.

I think if sky is proven to have run an organized doping network the consequences will be much bigger in the UK, than if similar happened in Spain. I don't think Movistar has the same importance to spanish cycling as sky to UK cycling.

So the teams are too different to compare in my book. Their situation is too different. It just becomes too abstract.

But, I'm a newbie cycling fan. But, in this sport, it might not be that big a deal, since no one knows who was clean when. So it seems impossible to tell a clean performance from a dirty one. How can one know what to expect if one does not have a clear frame of refference?

I'm not sure I understand your rebuttal. You seem to be saying that it's fine to be more suspicious of Movistar because they have a 'history'. Or do you just mean that a comparison is not relevant, it's just as fine to suspect Sky as Movistar?

 

[Libertine Seguros]

Sky has no history like Movistar does. Sky I think is much richer than Movistar. Sky does not originate in a country that some on this board view as doping heaven. (PS. I love spain, my parents live there, and some of the arguments about spain and doping take it to extremes).

Movistar have not set themselves up for a big fall if they are shown to dope the same way sky has.

I think if sky is proven to have run an organized doping network the consequences will be much bigger in the UK, than if similar happened in Spain. I don't think Movistar has the same importance to spanish cycling as sky to UK cycling.

So the teams are too different to compare in my book. Their situation is too different. It just becomes too abstract.

But, I'm a newbie cycling fan. But, in this sport, it might not be that big a deal, since no one knows who was clean when. So it seems impossible to tell a clean performance from a dirty one. How can one know what to expect if one does not have a clear frame of refference?

USPS was much richer than Banesto/Illes Balears/Caisse d'Epargne/Movistar. The US is not viewed as a doping heaven, despite many, many high profile cases. With the Lance myth, they had set themselves up for an even bigger fall than Sky.

They doped. On an almost unprecedented scale. The other question your case then brings up is, if there is less reason not to dope for other teams, then how can Sky, clean, be so completely dominant over these other teams who are more likely to be doping? Especially bearing in mind that BMC are even richer than Sky and have a much more stacked roster, if we look at their pre-2012 results.

 

[Parrulo]

indeed sky doesn't has the same history as "movistar" after all Abarca sports which by the way is the true name of the cycling team, movistar is just a sponsor name, has been a team since 1980 while sky has only been a team for 3 seasons.

anyway so at the end of the day your full argument is just like i predicted: "sky are clean because they are british and movistar and doping because they are spanish, also sky said they were the clean so they must be"

you know what other team used to say they were clean,mostly their team leader? that's right US Postal, you just admitted that you are a newbie cycling fan but maybe you heard of them, they have been on the news a bit over the last couple of weeks. oh funny enough if they were found guilty of doping it would be a major loss for the fight against cancer (their own argument not mine . . .)

i also advice you to check footage from the armstrong years and how US Postal went rode and check the similarities with Sky. hell i will even provide you with a video so you get a place where you can start your research. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKI8ZPQ2kLU

 

[Zam_Olyas]

Because Sky is not from a doping country argument again.

 

[ToreBear]

Since when does that not count as shelling them? Does that mean that Danilo di Luca didn't shell Paolo Savoldelli on Sestrières in 2005 because he only finished about 10" up?

You posted some live ticker info from stage 11. Let me reproduce it as you seem to have forgotten it.


Oh, a group of 8, with four Sky riders in it, Rogers was on the front at this point and hey, doesn't that mean only 4 guys there?


Now down to 11, including the two who were caught. That means that the following GC candidates had been dropped:
Schleck
Zubeldia
Rolland
Scarponi
Klöden
Horner
Menchov
Valverde
Vinokourov
Leipheimer

With retrospect, it's easy to sneer at the inclusion of some of those names (Menchov and Leipheimer in particular), but that's still a pretty strong GC in its own right.


Easy, just needs to lose weight... er...

16:24 Result of col de la Croix de Fer
1. Rolland (EUC) 25pts
2. Kessiakoff (AST) 20pts
3. Velits (OPQ) 17pts - 10"
4. Horner (RNT) 14pts
5. Kisierlovski (AST) 12pts
6. Ten dam (RAB) 10pts
7. Martin (GRS) 8pts
8. Kiryienka (MOV) 6pts
9. Rogers (SKY) 4pts - at 2'10"
10. Wiggins (SKY) 2pts

So We have Roland and Horner up front
Which leaves

Schleck
Zubeldia
Scarponi
Klöden
Menchov
Valverde
Vinokourov
Leipheimer

Could they have had a bad day, or were they enjoying the Tour clean for the first time?

The only person here without question marks is Zubedia? Is there any thing on him, just curious.

Touché, had forgot about that. I stand corrected on Rolland.

Nevertheless, to tell the truth there are reasons (Giro fatigue, crashes, being old) that justify the majority of those, but really, Rogers is a journeyman and as I say, I rate him no higher than Karpets. Karpets was probably doping in 2007, but the most I know we have on him is that in the Mantova sting they had something about a Russian rider based in Spain, and Karpets lives near Pamplona. Maybe he was named with Losa or something, I don't know. I think that was just LuLu, Kolobnev, Pereiro and Moreno, and nothing came of that anyway. With Rogers we have explicit links to Ferrari and to Freiburg.

Also, even if we explain it away, it begets another problem... while each tree can be explained away fairly convincingly, there is an entire fricking rainforest here, and that whole rainforest springing up simultaneously is not as easy to swallow.

rolland was actually up the road with the break but other then that that's a pretty good list.

you also raised exactly the same question i did so you prolly will get the same idiotic "but he finished 18 minutes down on the stage therefore he was totally spent after that" excuse i got. . .

Well I had to make sure you guys remembered that, because from reading this thread, one would thing Rogers had become the new Virenque.

 

[ToreBear]

I'm not sure I understand your rebuttal. You seem to be saying that it's fine to be more suspicious of Movistar because they have a 'history'. Or do you just mean that a comparison is not relevant, it's just as fine to suspect Sky as Movistar?

I mean that inserting movistar into skys position during the tour becomes too difficult. Their situations are too different.

 

[Telmisartan new]

It makes sense, but then the whole "all clean, all singing, all dancing" lines that they came out with at the beginning have backed them into a corner.

Either Brailsford really is as naïve as the article points out he isn't, or Brailsford was being pretty economical with the truth about whether the team really paid that much attention to riders' pasts during the hiring process before. Well, either that or Barry, Rogers, Leinders et al are just excellent thespians. They came into the sport with an idyllic, utopian vision of a team free of all doping suspicions, and it ends here with a number of shady riders and staff being jettisoned and a bunch of awkward press conferences with their tails between their legs. And while what Brailsford says makes a good deal of sense, there is a feeling of the same promises three years later, and is it going to go the same way?

Although they wanted to set up an all-singing, all-dancing clean team, and that is a pretty honourable goal, perhaps it might have made more sense to accept cycling's past and do it as a transitional thing, like Garmin have. The whole "we know that some of you guys have history, but you and I both want this done clean from here on in", use those guys as role models and mentors to the presumably clean youngsters being brought in. That way, the commitment to clean cycling doesn't ring so hollow as it did with Team Sky. I stated at the very start of Team Sky that finding clean riders might not be so hard these days (nevertheless, Barry and Rogers...), but DSes, soigneurs etc without the stench of the EPO era may be tougher to find.

The other thing is that while Brailsford launched Sky's clean ethos with a bang, he scaled it back very quietly. Therefore for those who don't follow the sport as closely as those who post on a message board and seek out news stories from foreign-language dailies on it, they may not have been aware of this, and now feel betrayed by, or compelled to believe, the crocodile tears act of Brailsford talking about having been lied to.

Great post, i agree with all of that,Brailsford is far cleverer than he lets on, he's fooling nobody,backed into a corner,even as recently as the Worlds he was trying to act as if he wasn't concerned but he knew then the writing was on the wall.I have been his biggest critic,the guy seriously cheeses me off,he was banking on it all going away after the Tour but he didnt reckon with a dogged press (and Clinic!) persevering with the story,he has treated a heap of people in the know like clowns in the forlorn hope it wouldn't attract much attention in the mainstream media,LA/USADA finished that tactic although he would have known it was coming.Its the tail between the legs factor i am enjoying.

 

[ToreBear]

Your right,this is no PR exercise,they are having a clear out but paying up the contracts.I am utterly convinced this thread has contributed to Brailsford doing this,he's using LA/USADA as the catalyst but the pressure started on them at the Tour,that's when Brailsford started feeling the heat and decided they would have to look not only at Leinders but also the whole team,not an overnight decision by Brailsford IMO.Yates out,Julich out,Rogers out,Sutton out and probably one or two others.Life is wonderful at the moment.

Cheaters never win.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iEMoC-sOqyw

Good point! I haven't thought that far.

Yeah, the 'we will take care of anyone who admits to doping, but their time with us is done' line was at least a qualification to his hardline stance. Moves him from a 10 on the Omerta Index to about an 8.

Yep, it will be interesting to see the results.

 

[ToreBear]

USPS was much richer than Banesto/Illes Balears/Caisse d'Epargne/Movistar. The US is not viewed as a doping heaven, despite many, many high profile cases. With the Lance myth, they had set themselves up for an even bigger fall than Sky.

They doped. On an almost unprecedented scale. The other question your case then brings up is, if there is less reason not to dope for other teams, then how can Sky, clean, be so completely dominant over these other teams who are more likely to be doping? Especially bearing in mind that BMC are even richer than Sky and have a much more stacked roster, if we look at their pre-2012 results.

In my book the us is and has been a doping heaven. I hope things are changing there, time will tell.

If everybody suddenly stopped doping in 1996, who would be the winner of the Tour? Things would look unreal.

As for why others given less consequences of doping would be clean, I don't know. Perhaps there were rumours of better testing, or some doctors freezer broke down? The reasons could be many.

 

[JimmyFingers]

It makes sense, but then the whole "all clean, all singing, all dancing" lines that they came out with at the beginning have backed them into a corner.

Either Brailsford really is as naïve as the article points out he isn't, or Brailsford was being pretty economical with the truth about whether the team really paid that much attention to riders' pasts during the hiring process before. Well, either that or Barry, Rogers, Leinders et al are just excellent thespians. They came into the sport with an idyllic, utopian vision of a team free of all doping suspicions, and it ends here with a number of shady riders and staff being jettisoned and a bunch of awkward press conferences with their tails between their legs. And while what Brailsford says makes a good deal of sense, there is a feeling of the same promises three years later, and is it going to go the same way?

Although they wanted to set up an all-singing, all-dancing clean team, and that is a pretty honourable goal, perhaps it might have made more sense to accept cycling's past and do it as a transitional thing, like Garmin have. The whole "we know that some of you guys have history, but you and I both want this done clean from here on in", use those guys as role models and mentors to the presumably clean youngsters being brought in. That way, the commitment to clean cycling doesn't ring so hollow as it did with Team Sky. I stated at the very start of Team Sky that finding clean riders might not be so hard these days (nevertheless, Barry and Rogers...), but DSes, soigneurs etc without the stench of the EPO era may be tougher to find.

The other thing is that while Brailsford launched Sky's clean ethos with a bang, he scaled it back very quietly. Therefore for those who don't follow the sport as closely as those who post on a message board and seek out news stories from foreign-language dailies on it, they may not have been aware of this, and now feel betrayed by, or compelled to believe, the crocodile tears act of Brailsford talking about having been lied to.

It's difficult to know exactly why or when Sky took the wrong turn. They did come into the sport with an arrogance that they could do things their own way, and whether harsh reality set in and they were forced to, as you say 'scale back' their zero-tolerance policy and start bringing in suspect staff or whether it was naivety and sheer stupidity it's difficult to gauge.

One thing I will say: people say Brailsford is clever and a lot of this is PR spin, but if he was clever he would have played 2012 so much better. Really, Sky couldn't have made themselves more suspicious looking if they tried: dodgy doctors, Tenerife training camps, a DS that worked with Lance, USPS racing tactics. Most of what they have done just invited accusations of doping, and so people have been queuing up to do so, as this thread is testament to. Don't tell me Brailsford is clever, or that master of media spin, because all of this could have been handled so much better, going all the way back to 2010.

I also believe the peloton knew what was coming. Gossiping would have been rife, people surely knew Lance's head was going to tumble, there must have been whispers how the USADA report was going to go, although I suppose some may have been surprised by the breadth of it.

As I said, Sky have made it so easy to accuse them of doping it makes me confident that they aren't. If they were they would have been much more underhand about it, much cleverer. This season has been a series of PR blunders and now they are implicated in the USADA report.

So again don't tell me Brailsford is clever, or a really sharp operator. He's playing catch up, trying to repair damage than a cleverer player would have avoided in the first place. I mean no team is spared the clinic's suspicions, but Sky essentially have painted a target on themselves for you to take potshots at

 

[Libertine Seguros]

In my book the us is and has been a doping heaven. I hope things are changing there, time will tell.

If everybody suddenly stopped doping in 1996, who would be the winner of the Tour? Things would look unreal.

As for why others given less consequences of doping would be clean, I don't know. Perhaps there were rumours of better testing, or some doctors freezer broke down? The reasons could be many.

But is that line of reasoning - applied to 21 teams - any more far-fetched than simply "Sky doped"?

When they dominated Algarve, it was a pre-season race. When they dominated Paris-Nice, it was, well, a fairly good route for Wiggins. When they dominated Romandie, it was, well, we'll see when it comes to Tour preparation. When they dominated the Dauphiné, it was, well, everybody's preparing for the Tour, it'll be different then. When we got to the Tour, it was, well, everybody's screwed up their preparation for the Tour.

At what point do we stop making excuses on the behalf of every other team? As it turned out, it wasn't that other teams were preparing for the Tour and letting Sky win these smaller races at all! It was that Sky were just that little bit better, all year long!

Oh, did I say "little bit" better? I meant "vast yawning chasm" better.

 

[Parrulo]

So We have Roland and Horner up front
Which leaves

Schleck
Zubeldia
Scarponi
Klöden
Menchov
Valverde
Vinokourov
Leipheimer

Could they have had a bad day, or were they enjoying the Tour clean for the first time?

The only person here without question marks is Zubedia? Is there any thing on him, just curious.

interesting that you go for bad day or riding clean, i guess you could be right, schleck was so clean he tested positive for a masking agent just a couple days later, valverde decided to go clean for the tour only because he knew he was facing clean oposition there, at the vuelta he was going full blast so i guess he decided to face dirty bertie doping not to be in disadvantaged against that spanish doping cheat, bottle has been clean since 07 according to himself and michele "i would have won the 2010 giro if i had another blood bag" scarponi also decided to go clean to face sky.

oh wait. . . .

 

[ToreBear]

indeed sky doesn't has the same history as "movistar" after all Abarca sports which by the way is the true name of the cycling team, movistar is just a sponsor name, has been a team since 1980 while sky has only been a team for 3 seasons.

anyway so at the end of the day your full argument is just like i predicted: "sky are clean because they are british and movistar and doping because they are spanish, also sky said they were the clean so they must be"

you know what other team used to say they were clean,mostly their team leader? that's right US Postal, you just admitted that you are a newbie cycling fan but maybe you heard of them, they have been on the news a bit over the last couple of weeks. oh funny enough if they were found guilty of doping it would be a major loss for the fight against cancer (their own argument not mine . . .)

i also advice you to check footage from the armstrong years and how US Postal went rode and check the similarities with Sky. hell i will even provide you with a video so you get a place where you can start your research. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKI8ZPQ2kLU

This is not as simple as spanish vs. british. It's about the different roles the teams play in the different societies.

Thanks for the link! I'll do some more research.

 

[Libertine Seguros]

This is not as simple as spanish vs. british. It's about the different roles the teams play in the different societies.

Thanks for the link! I'll do some more research.

The blurred links between British Cycling and Sky Professional Cycling Team are worrisome in and of themselves, and not for Clinic purposes. It actually hurt them at first, because the commitment to a British Tour winner meant no experienced GC man would ever sign for them, and they had to bank everything on Wiggins, who had never come into a GT as team leader before at that point.

But moreover, it's a problem for young British riders, as it cuts off development opportunities. That is starting to be rectified with Endura, but the sense that Team Sky needed all the top British talent can put other teams off picking up talented young British riders, because they know Sky will come poaching before long.

 

[Bernie's eyesore]

Since when does that not count as shelling them? Does that mean that Danilo di Luca didn't shell Paolo Savoldelli on Sestrières in 2005 because he only finished about 10" up?

You posted some live ticker info from stage 11. Let me reproduce it as you seem to have forgotten it.


Oh, a group of 8, with four Sky riders in it, Rogers was on the front at this point and hey, doesn't that mean only 4 guys there?


Now down to 11, including the two who were caught. That means that the following GC candidates had been dropped:
Schleck
Zubeldia
Rolland
Scarponi
Klöden
Horner
Menchov
Valverde
Vinokourov
Leipheimer

With retrospect, it's easy to sneer at the inclusion of some of those names (Menchov and Leipheimer in particular), but that's still a pretty strong GC in its own right.


Easy, just needs to lose weight... er...

That's quite a funny list as 6 of the 10 were up the road in a breakaway and getting dropped by Kern at the time when Rogers was apparently shelling them out the back.

 

[The Hitch]

Since when does that not count as shelling them? Does that mean that Danilo di Luca didn't shell Paolo Savoldelli on Sestrières in 2005 because he only finished about 10" up?

You posted some live ticker info from stage 11. Let me reproduce it as you seem to have forgotten it.


Oh, a group of 8, with four Sky riders in it, Rogers was on the front at this point and hey, doesn't that mean only 4 guys there?


Now down to 11, including the two who were caught. That means that the following GC candidates had been dropped:
Schleck
Zubeldia
Rolland
Scarponi
Klöden
Horner
Menchov
Valverde
Vinokourov
Leipheimer

With retrospect, it's easy to sneer at the inclusion of some of those names (Menchov and Leipheimer in particular), but that's still a pretty strong GC in its own right.


Easy, just needs to lose weight... er...

Post of the year. Researched, tremendously written and argued as always, and some top comedy at the end. Ls once again proves hisself the standard that all.other internet posters aspire to.

 

[JimmyFingers]

But is that line of reasoning - applied to 21 teams - any more far-fetched than simply "Sky doped"?

When they dominated Algarve, it was a pre-season race. When they dominated Paris-Nice, it was, well, a fairly good route for Wiggins. When they dominated Romandie, it was, well, we'll see when it comes to Tour preparation. When they dominated the Dauphiné, it was, well, everybody's preparing for the Tour, it'll be different then. When we got to the Tour, it was, well, everybody's screwed up their preparation for the Tour.

At what point do we stop making excuses on the behalf of every other team? As it turned out, it wasn't that other teams were preparing for the Tour and letting Sky win these smaller races at all! It was that Sky were just that little bit better, all year long!

Oh, did I say "little bit" better? I meant "vast yawning chasm" better.

Thing is yes that is domination, and so you ask where that domination comes from. The easy answer is doping and yes without doubt it is a possibility. But also Sky were incredibly methodical in their approach: the preperation was to win those races, to get Brad in in yellow and leading for day after day of racing to get him into the mentality of winning. The preparation was meticulous, and I realise that will get sneered out and the reply is other teams prepared as well, other teams had tactics as well but if that was the case why was Cadel racing at the tour with teammates he had never raced with before? Sky pretty much ignored the classics and instead focused obsessively on the stage-races, honing their tactics for the assault on the Tour. Wiggins has said the training started in November and rather than build to peak for three weeks in July, they looked to be near the peak of their form throughout the early and mid-part of the season, so rather using races like Paris-Nice and Daupine to build form for the Tour, actually come into those races with Tour-esque performance and win them.

I realise that standard Sky PR/spin, but I do think it does have merit. The fall-off of performance from Sky post Tour and Olympics was fairly dramatic. Again I realise that can be spun as 'doper's fatigue' or it simply could be fatigue for a core of a team that had been training hard throughout the off-season.

Anyways I await the flames, but for me that is plausible riding clean. But then it is also plausible they did it dirty., There is no concrete evidence either way so it's a matter of opinion.

 

[Catwhoorg]

Oh, did I say "little bit" better? I meant "vast yawning chasm" better.

Wiggo:

Paris-Nice by 8 seconds
Romandie - 12 seconds
Dauphine 1min 17 secs (to teammate Rogers, 1:26 to Cadel)

Porte:
Algarve 37 secs

Heck Romandie basically boiled down to the Stage win bonus for Wiggo's 'sprint' on Stage 1.

A dominant team for sure, but hardly a vast chasm between them and those behind them.