I didn't reply to this at the time because I thought I'd covered these points in a reply to someone else but, on reflection, there are additional points to make...
Bala Verde said:
OK. Understood.
I am sorry; I don't buy into the 'coming from outside the sport' makes you look at things differently. Or perhaps it does [looking at things differently], but the real issues is that actually implies that without those outsiders, things wouldn't have changed, hence improved.
It implies that, if there were innovations by people coming from other sports (or other forms of cycling), those particular innovations wouldn't have happened so soon.
It doesn't mean no-one from cycling would ever have had the same idea - and investigated it to see if it was useful.
I would find it hard to believe that not one single individual from within the cycling industry, could have come up with those exact ideas. The cycling world is not one homogenous, amorphous group where everyone has the exact line of thinking. Like in any group, there must be contrarians, inventors, traditionalists, formalists, entrepreneurs etc etc.
It seems to me that a corollary to that statement would be that every discovery that can be made (unless it's based on technology that doesn't yet exist) has already been made by someone within the sport.
In which case, there'd be no new ideas about training, diet, rest.
I don't believe we've reached that point. I think there are still many (legit) innovations to be found.
I am still wondering what could these new people bring to the table?
Innovations often come from taking an idea that exists in one field and applying it in a different field. So, it could be an idea from one sport applied to a different sport.
Of course, there's nothing that prevents a cyclist from studying other sports for ideas - and I'm sure some do.
Conversely, take someone who already knows another sport and get them to look at cycling, and you achieve the same result.
Basically, the people asking questions are the people most likely to come up with answers. And the people who are new to asking these questions, are most likely to come up with new answers.
So I reckon Sky - partly because they're new, and partly because they came in with the belief (misplaced or not) that they could conquer the sport with new ideas - are the team asking the most questions.
When you hear that Man United hires a tennis coach to help them prepare them for the season, you'd lol. (I am exaggerating
, but still.)
I wouldn't laugh out loud. It's well known that Ryan Giggs attributes his longevity in the game to doing yoga.
That's taking training methods from one area (yoga) and applying them to football.
Since he started doing it, other players have started doing it, too.
I am also wondering what sport has ever benefited from outsiders doing things differently to make (huge) improvements?
I remember hearing an interview with a defensive lineman (DL) from the NFL who talked about the defensive line getting martial arts training. The benefit was that, when an offensive lineman put up his hands to block the rushing DL, the DL could use taekwondo to knock the hands away.
Whether that idea came from someone in American football looking at taekwondo, or someone from taekwondo taking up American football, I don't know.
The improvements in bike technology seems to have come from inside the sport (look at Sais' time trial bike collection on ebay. Some weird looking bikes there; not for lack of trying). Training with HR and with Watts came from insiders. Even ricecakes and beetroot juice came from the inside...
Ideas from the inside don't mean there haven't been ideas from the outside.
As for bike tech, some will come directly from cycling - as answers to cycling problems - but some will surely come as a by-product of manufacturing non-cycling products. And some may come from motorsport.
The disgraced cycling coaches who went to Kenya to "train" Kenyan runners, did they really do something differently from running coaches who "trained" their runners?
Possibly in the area of training intervals, diet, or rest... or possibly they simply doped them up to their eyeballs.
Lastly, at Sky, who are the new people who look at things differently, and what have they given us?
No idea. If they've figured something out, they're hardly likely to shout it from the rooftops, and throw away that advantage.
Finally, I'm not saying Sky are clean. I'm not even giving them the benefit of the doubt - I still have a bad taste in my mouth after yesterday.
However, I
am saying there
are doubts. (Particularly, IMO, about Froome.)
It could be, in approaching things differently, they've taken the sport to a new level.
Or, equally, it could be that, after the failures of 2010, they concluded Wiggins couldn't win the Tour clean, so they started doping.
I think we'll have a better idea by the end of the Pyrenean stages.
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