Parker said:
Once again you are treating sport as some sort of mathematicval absolute. Every rider is the same. Every race is the same. Any diversion from the model is suspicion.
Some juniors make it. Some don't. There's many things that dicatate that.
Burrow went to US Postal and his career stalled for whatever reason. Once his contract was up, had a team like Sky been there then maybe his career would have taken a different turn.
Similarly, had Sky never existed, would Froome have rotted at Barloworld or similar?
You often mention Cobo - the prime example of someone who acheived at one team and was terrible at another.
You're problem is that you have no feeling for sport - of any kind. You have no appreciation of the concepts of form and opportunity. You beleive that everyone is a robot and works as such. You are wrong - for all your hatred of Sky or HTC's scientific souless approach, you believe in it more than they ever did.
I understand the concepts of form and opportunity, and I believe that the swings in ability from Chris Froome are way beyond what I would consider a reasonable variation between poor form and good form within the same individual. He makes Andy Schleck look like a year-long peaker.
I don't need to think everybody is a robot with no variations in form and where every race is the same (although the UCI is trying its damnedest to make it that way)... but I
do feel that talent isn't something you just discover at random that you have when you're 25 or 26 or whatever, but something that will have been shown earlier.
I know that the sport's history is littered with U23 prospects who have failed to make it on the top level. I offered a couple of them earlier in the thread - Remmert Wielinga and Kai Reus. To take a more recent one, Romain Sicard. Sicard could still break through and be a big star, and we could then point to his results as a U23 and say, yes, that guy showed the potential to be a big star, and he's just had some crappy years trying to adapt to the pros. It wouldn't be looking at the Anatomic Jock Race or coming 9th in a mountain stage in Brixia, and trying to justify that that shows GT-winning potential.
It's possible to have 'breakout' performances without having to have three years of achieving sweet FA, with your only memorable performance being planting it on San Luca, then turning into a guy who rides tempo on every MTF, never drops and sends GT winners tumbling out the back. That's not breaking out, that's scorching the earth and destroying the whole building.