la_bicicleta said:
Could it be that back then, when they hired Leinders, Brailsford wasn't that really anti-doping to begin with?
Didn't the Zero Tolerance BS came after Leinders and the reasoned decision?
The Zero Tolerance was loudly proclaimed at the inception of the team, actually. They heralded how they had turned riders down because of their biopassport. However, after their growing pains in 2010 (perhaps due to the management's inexperience at dealing with road cycling, perhaps due to the underwhelming roster, perhaps due to the difficulties inherent in finding DSes, soigneurs, mechanics and senior riders of the requisite experience without any connection to doping at all) this policy was quietly loosened ahead of 2011, which is when they started signing known dodgy guys like Mick Rogers, and when Geert Leinders joined the team, ostensibly if you believe Brailsford to treat saddle sores.
Because the Zero Tolerance policy was so loudly proclaimed at inception and then withdrawn so quietly (like a hack tabloid printing enormous accusations as headlines then the retraction in a one-paragraph small print article on page 29), many casual fans were not aware of any relaxation of this zero tolerance, which meant that in the wake of the Reasoned Decision, when riders and staff at Team Sky were mentioned (Rogers, Yates) and when Rasmussen's earlier confessions led to the investigation into Leinders beginning in Belgium and de Jongh being tied up in it, Brailsford had to pull a tearful, indignant "we were lied to!" line in order to preserve face, because many questions had been posed in the wake of their 2012 triumph and few had been answered satisfactorily by the team themselves (remember them announcing they'd do an investigation into Leinders - you know, the kind of background check they should have done in 2010 - in July, then hoping it would be swept away by the Olympic fervour, so that when Brailsford was asked about how that investigation was going on at the World Championships he - literally - ran away from the question?).
The big problem is, a rider can be jettisoned. Riders aren't always tied in to team doping programs. Steve Houanard doped because Ag2r weren't going to renew his contract and he wanted to keep the dream alive and attract other teams to sign him. Aleksandr Serebryakov had visa problems and had only met his new Euskaltel teammates a handful of times before he was busted far from where any of them were or would have been. So a rider gets tied in to something, and they can kick him out as having 'gone rogue', 'let the team down', and all those clichéd but often truthful criticisms that get leveled at such riders. Especially if, as with Rogers, de Jongh et al, the indiscretions date to times prior to Team Sky, as it gives them plausible deniability in the eyes of the public (I don't see how they can have plausible deniability in the eyes of the more seasoned fan in respect of Rogers, since his past as a Ferrari client was known, and he was named by Sinkewitz as one of the T-Mobile guys at the Freiburg clinic). A team doctor is different. The doctor's tendrils go into
every rider. Riders could even be doping without knowing it - remember Jesús Hernández telling us of the "heating massage pads" that turned out to be synthetic testosterone? The doctor's reputation can cause damage even if no doping has been committed - who would ever believe anybody saying that they worked with Conconi, del Moral, Ferrari, Fuentes, Losa or Maynar over the last couple of years and it was entirely devoid of doping? Geert Leinders was a doping doctor. Is he still? We don't know. But he was a doping doctor, and though his name was pretty obscure prior to the time he was with Sky, his name still appeared in court documents related to the subject (based on the Rasmussen case) and given that Sky trumpeted up at every opportunity their "attention to detail", stated so often it was an endless mantra, you would have thought that given how much their reputation is staked on the cleanliness of this sports team, their "attention to detail" would consist of more than Brailsford asking the boys, anybody know a doctor we can get, Steve de Jongh piping up, saying, the guy we had at Rabo was good, and Brailsford dispatching Peters for a one-off interview, before hiring him without further investigation. That's barely due diligence, let alone attention to detail.
Lots of teams have hired dodgy doctors over the years. Few of those teams have transformed their results as spectacularly shortly after hiring that doctor, and only one team has achieved this while claiming their fantastic attention to detail. That is the crux of the matter, and that is why they get jumped on as much as anything else.
Damnit, I said I was done with the over-long posts in the Sky threads in the Clinic.
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