JimmyFingers said:
JTL hasn't turned a crank in anger yet on a pro-tour and he's already getting snide accusations flung his way. He is a good talent, as shown by success last season and getting the nod as team leader for the British WC team, but no doubt since he's British and rides for Sky the knives will be out in force. Quel surprise
JimmyFingers said:
He's had three years out: what are you basing this increase on?
The snide accusations began when he made mincemeat of a stronger field than he'd ever faced before, in February. They certainly weren't helped by Dan Martin's ambiguous tweet about a lack of testing at those races, as in 140 characters it was difficult to specify whether he meant that
he or his team had not been tested, or that there had been no testing
in general at those two races. Clean or otherwise, that put fuel to the fire of suspicion around JTL.
The guy has justifiable reasons for late blooming - his having mononucleosis or whatever it was that caused him to give up, university etc and having not been riding competitively for three years mean that his breaking through at 27 or 28 is not as surprising as somebody who has been riding on a pro team completely invisibly, like Froome.
Or rather, it
is surprising, but can be much more easily explained away convincingly. People who tell you that they predicted Tiernan-Locke's dominance in February and early March are liars. They may have thought 'look out for this guy, he could break out' after his performance in the Tour of Britain with Rapha the previous year, but he didn't show that he had this in him until he was at Endura. You could have thought he'd show well, but I don't believe anyone who said they reasonably believed JTL would win the Tour Med and Haut-Var and podium Murcía in quick succession unless they were a blood relation. Believe that he
could, sure. But that he
would, no way.
I pointed out at the time that while there isn't enough on Tiernan-Locke to say that he was doping, it's rewriting history to say that it wasn't a big jump up in performance or that it wasn't surprising. I was asked, what more would he have needed to do bearing in mind at Rapha he was mostly racing .2 races. I said "actually win some of them". He went from being a good rider in .2 races (let's not pretend he was pack fodder, that's unfair), to a guy who wins .1 races against much stronger fields, and not through lucky breakaways like the ones that let guys like Gustavo César win World Tour events, but by being clearly the strongest rider.
Tiernan-Locke himself admitted that to the sceptical fans his rise would look pretty suspicious. Again, not suspicious enough to say there's definite doping involved, because the guy had his various reasons for coming to prominence at a later age than most. But still, enough for fans to have some doubts. I compared to a few guys who'd had a couple of spectacular months out of seemingly nowhere, to see how they'd fared. A guy like Pecharromán, for example, or Murilo Fischer, who back in 2005 had that stunning late season when he won a ton of Italian .1 and .HC one-day races and finished in the CQ top 10 of the year despite riding for a ProContinental team, and never came remotely close to that performance again. We won't know until a couple of years down the line.
Tiernan-Locke riding for Sky does not create the scepticism - his extremely strong breakout season does. He was being suspected long before he signed for Sky. But not
that long before, because unless you followed the British domestic scene or could remember every prospect on the French scene half a decade ago, you'd probably never heard of him until last September at the earliest.
A lot of others may buy the transformation, but like I said about Froome's bilharzia, find the timing of it a bit convenient - after all, with the UCI openly stating that the catching-on of cycling in Britain is a good thing, all of a sudden these super-talents start appearing from out of nowhere! At this rate I won't be surprised if we'll see in a couple of years' time, a 30 year old who's never raced outside the UK will suddenly start destroying the Continental scene, and we'll be trying to work out whether to believe that being 5th in the Vuelta a Dorset showed that he had the potential to beat Peter Sagan and Moreno Moser.
Jonathan Tiernan-Locke is clearly a talented cyclist. His transformation is way more believable than Froome's. He's had far more chances to race the kind of events that suit him with Endura than he ever had with Rapha and before. But he is still a guy from a country that has very little in the way of a national scene, who had few results to speak of prior to 2012, who nevertheless exploded internationally in the course of less than a month, and whether clean or not, that Dan Martin's comment implied to many that there was no drug testing at his breakthrough events, and that as a rider on a Continental-level team he was not subject to the biological passport, it is not surprising at all that questions were raised.
Tiernan-Locke himself wasn't surprised that the questions were raised, so at least he's more self-aware than Wiggins.