Team Ineos (Formerly the Sky thread)

[The Hitch]

They should pass some of the stuff that makes Froome so good to other people in the team

What for?
why take the risk?

 

[Benotti69]

And lots don't. And most importantly, those most important, are not going to give up a cash cow like this because of "doubts".

Those 'most important' never gave a fig about doping, never have never will, it is the winning that counts.

 

[roundabout]

What for?
why take the risk?

Why take the risk of being isolated in mountain stages? And if that wasn't bad enough, they had riders dropping today even before saxobank hit the gas.

Useless in the mountains, useless on the flat. And that with the strongest rider in the race.

Apart from 30km on stage 8 this is seriously one of the weakest teams supporting a genuine GC contender that I have witnessed during all the years of watching the Tour.

 

[Cycle Chic]

Why take the risk of being isolated in mountain stages? And if that wasn't bad enough, they had riders dropping today even before saxobank hit the gas.

Useless in the mountains, useless on the flat. And that with the strongest rider in the race.

Apart from 30km on stage 8 this is seriously one of the weakest teams supporting a genuine GC contender that I have witnessed during all the years of watching the Tour.

well you summed it up nicely - UNBELIEVABLE.

 

[The Hitch]

Why take the risk of being isolated in mountain stages?

Because Froome is so so far ahead of everyone else.

 

[roundabout]

Because Froome is so so far ahead of everyone else.

Yes, and they would be relying on other people to close down attacks or not being aggressive enough.

Froome is good, but even now he would probably prefer to have a rider or 3 with him after the Madeleine next week.

 

[Benotti69]

Why take the risk of being isolated in mountain stages? And if that wasn't bad enough, they had riders dropping today even before saxobank hit the gas.

Useless in the mountains, useless on the flat. And that with the strongest rider in the race.

Apart from 30km on stage 8 this is seriously one of the weakest teams supporting a genuine GC contender that I have witnessed during all the years of watching the Tour.

Because Froome is so so far ahead of everyone else.

Froome only has 2 riders to watch in the mountains now, Contador and Quintana and he can let Quintana get up the road before having to take into consideration limiting the time, but Contador is the guy he has to sit in and follow. Belkin will blow up, unless Leinder's is back working for the Dutch team again

This doesn't take into account he may just blow everyone away again like Ax3 and after Ventoux could be nearly 5 mins up on Contador.

 

[BYOP88]

Froome only has 2 riders to watch in the mountains now, Contador and Quintana and he can let Quintana get up the road before having to take into consideration limiting the time, but Contador is the guy he has to sit in and follow. Belkin will blow up, unless Leinder's is back working for the Dutch team again

This doesn't take into account he may just blow everyone away again like Ax3

Froome is going to go full gas on Sunday. I'm hoping he blows up big time ala Armstrong on the Joux-Plane. Sadly I think he'll put more time into those he needs too.

 

[Carlo Algatrensig]

when you last see 6 guys from same team towing a group of 15 over 30km's to put 1min to 6 min in to everybody else ?

hahaha

you are so funny

If Sky is doped Saxo is 3x times more. Fact. I dreamed it last night, it must be true also.

It wasn't 6 riders from one team towing a group of 15. At some point I saw every rider bar Cav taking a turn at the front so it was actually 14 of the best riders in the world all highly motivated to ride hard that put a minute into them.

 

[User Guide]

Really im not sure how even now people still believe sky having DNS and doms crashing and or just generally being pants is some kind of smokescreen.
Wether its fanboys at one extreme or the tinfoil hat brigade on the other..
There are other options other than either they all clean as a whistle or full on team doping conspiracy somehow involving ASO/UCI the Queen and Andy Murray.
Froome being on the gogo juice(and maybe BFF Porte) and most of sky being as "clean" as the peloton don't have to be mutually exclusive.

 

[The Hitch]

Really im not sure how even now people still believe sky having DNS and doms crashing and or just generally being pants is some kind of smokescreen.
Wether its fanboys at one extreme or the tinfoil hat brigade on the other..
There are other options other than either they all clean as a whistle or full on team doping conspiracy somehow involving ASO/UCI the Queen and Andy Murray.
Froome being on the gogo juice(and maybe BFF Porte) and most of sky being as "clean" as the peloton don't have to be mutually exclusive.

A few weeks ago a poster made a rough list of fair minded people who take part in these discussions. You have been gone for a while, but you belong in the list.

 

[Benotti69]

The so called 'tinfoil hat brigade' really got it wrong on Armstrong.

Why not Sky? Sky who until last years TdF were comparing themselves to USPostal.

 

[thehog]

The so called 'tinfoil hat brigade' really got it wrong on Armstrong.

Why not Sky? Sky who until last years TdF were comparing themselves to USPostal.

Froome promised me. 7 wins. At least.

 

[Coolair2970]

The question will remain. If Sky are worried about pseudo scientists misinterpreting the data; then why not release the actual data and explain it?

Surely they would assist in ending the speculation?

I don't care about the data. I just want the SRM's to be banned. Without it the Dawg wouldn't know where he is and the go totally mental on the climbs.

Now he can control it so it won't a fuc**** laugh

 

[Armchaircyclist]

Is it possible Kiryenka was told to miss the time frame because he might be tested positive otherwise? Maybe he overdid the juice a bit an Brailsford got nervous...

If a rider miss the time frame he doesn't get tested right?

I find it hard to beleive a strong guy like Kiryenka can't make the time.. And also he was very close to the limit so it looks ugly..

-------------------------
I wonder if there has been any statements by Kiriyenka after he missed the time limit ?
It almost seemed like all of sky except Froome had been told to go slow, to make the team seem human, after the superhuman performance the day before. maybe Kyri did not like to get the go slow, and just decided to go a little too slow ?
Anyway, the team spirit seems kind of low in Sky, even though Stannard was rather cocky after last stage, even if they lost over a minute to Alberto and the others. Porte rides hard in ITT and is useless as helper the next day, and the sky-"train" is reduced to next to nothing, a powerless city-tram at best. Still hard to beat the alien, but anyway, without a team there is hope.

 

[martinvickers]

A few weeks ago a poster made a rough list of fair minded people who take part in these discussions. You have been gone for a while, but you belong in the list.

I'd love to see that list ;-)

 

[User Guide]

The so called 'tinfoil hat brigade' really got it wrong on Armstrong.

Why not Sky? Sky who until last years TdF were comparing themselves to USPostal.

Well I would of replied, sky may well have a team wide dope program, I dont know.My point being that there are many in here that fit the facts too prove their point whatever the facts may be and whichever extreme they are on.(and its usually an extreme in here)

 

[Coolair2970]

that's the best you can ?

1. sprinters teams take turns
2. sprinters teams don;t drop anyone on flat stages

seriously, try harder

You absolutely make my pi** boil. Have you ever seen a bikerace before.
In crosswind even the worst team in the peloton can drop the best riders with the right move.

If Riis is the best doping his riders he is absolutely the mastermind when it comes to crosswind attacks. You wouldn't be so surprised if you had seen an interview with OPQS DS Brian Holm on thursday.

He told everybody, If there is crosswind Saxo will attack somewhere at the stage.

If this little move makes you believe that doping is hard on Saxo, the tell me why, Quickstep had 3 guys in the group after pulling all day and dropping 130 riders, Belkin had there 2 top riders in the group. Sagan was there with a teammate.

Just think back to 2009 when HTC made the same move. At that time the group was a little bit bigger and Armstron saw it and was the last guy to get in the group.

The guy you agree about was glowing at the time Contador missed it. Andy and Frank Schleck missed it, I think Evans missed it. But you maybe also think a Stapleton team was doped to the hilt. The guy would have walked away even at the slightest suspicion.

Just open you eyes and admit, that the Dawg was done. He tried to close the gap but blew up. He franticly reach for his radio and shouted for teammates to help him, but was not even able to hold there wheels and help in the chase.

The dawg is done and if he want to win the Tour he have to go mental on Tourmalet, and the he will really blow it. Nobody will believe a 55 minutes time.

 

[skidmark]

I do wonder what would have happened if Wiggins had not crashed the 2011 Tour.

Sky Wiggins and the British media were saying he could win the Tour. Of course i and others dismissed it, but looking at in in hindsight he won the Dauphine and if he was as good as in 2012, the way the mountains were raced it would actually have been very possible.

Of course even if he had merely podiumed, he would not have done the Vuelta.

Froome however would. And without wiggins to wait for he would have won it easy.

And we would have been spared all this BS about Froome gradually improving. It would have gone down as the most shocking GT victory in modern times.

What a shame

Instead we got the widely predicted win by Cobo

 

[The Hitch]

Instead we got the widely predicted win by Cobo

Cobo was definately one of the favourites after burgos especially with no clear favourites apart from Nibali.

 

[Libertine Seguros]

Instead we got the widely predicted win by Cobo

While certainly some riders who could have been considered favourites going into the race underperformed massively - not just Nibali but Rodríguez, Scarponi and Antón spring to mind - and Cobo may have been an outsider even after Burgos where he'd been highly competitive in the puncheur stages then been the strongest of the top names in the Lagunas de Neila stage, ahead of Rodríguez, Moreno, Antón, Sánchez et al (certainly if he'd raced smarter, Menchov could probably have won that Vuelta, in which case Cobo would have been working for him), whose results are stupendously inconsistent and therefore hard to judge, but seriously... look at Cobo's palmarès leading up to August 2011 and look at Froome's, and tell me which would have been, objectively, the more shocking.

Froome's results had been mildly promising in 2008 and early 2009 then were going in the wrong direction, and bilharzia had not been mentioned yet (google cache search for Froome and bilharzia dating before 2011 Vuelta yields no results), while Froome was a former winner of País Vasco and mountain stages of the Tour and Vuelta, who had been top 10 in the Vuelta in 2009, as well as two monuments (Liège in '08 and Lombardia in '09). Yes, he'd sucked in 2010, but he'd shown that he could mix it at the top before, even if seemingly suspicious (and hey, Cobo riding suspiciously is not in and of itself unusual). Yet there we had all those people talking of how the dirty Cobo was screwing the clean Froome. Nobody was putting in marathon hours in the Clinic explaining how Cobo could do what he did clean. A lot of mud was thrown, oftentimes by people who now shriek "where's the evidence?" when Sky are accused. But really, where's the evidence against Froome? In the sense that the Sky fans want, there is none. To date, El Bisonte de la Pesa has never tested positive, never been named in an investigation, and there's no more against his name than there is against Froome's (he rode on shady teams, doping doctors in association, surprising transformation and teammates testing positive), yet he had a MUCH better palmarès to say that winning a GT (especially a Vuelta where most of the top level competition underperformed to the extreme) was feasible than Froome did.

Or to frame it another way, who would you find more surprising if they suddenly rocked the climbing world and won the Vuelta: a guy like Igor Antón, Mikel Nieve and Beñat Intxausti? Or a guy like Egor Silin and Andrey Zeits?

 

[zalacain]

When Cav saw the gap open today he knew there was only one thing to do. Sprint to get across.
I doubt whether Froome even saw it happen, he was so far back, head down studying the SRM

 

[Cerberus]

Really im not sure how even now people still believe sky having DNS and doms crashing and or just generally being pants is some kind of smokescreen.
Wether its fanboys at one extreme or the tinfoil hat brigade on the other..
There are other options other than either they all clean as a whistle or full on team doping conspiracy somehow involving ASO/UCI the Queen and Andy Murray.
Froome being on the gogo juice(and maybe BFF Porte) and most of sky being as "clean" as the peloton don't have to be mutually exclusive.

I mainly agree, or alternatively, still in the none-cospiracy side of things, all or most of Sky could be doped and some of the riders could still be getting the flu, having off days or missing splits. That is IMO much more likely than Andy Murray being involved (I do like the Queen for this though, she looks shifty).

 

[mikehammer67]

walsh is beginning to sound just like DB

christafano ‏@christafano 3h
@DavidWalshST hi david, as per kerrison quotes, what do you think about sky riders surpassing lance's times?

David Walsh ‏@DavidWalshST 3h
@christafano Kerrison believes LA's times will be beaten by clean athletes and points to his coaching Aussie swimmers to beat dopers' WRs.

clean athletes beating dopers times is the new reality huh?

 

[maxmartin]

walsh is beginning to sound just like DB

christafano ‏@christafano 3h
@DavidWalshST hi david, as per kerrison quotes, what do you think about sky riders surpassing lance's times?

David Walsh ‏@DavidWalshST 3h
@christafano Kerrison believes LA's times will be beaten by clean athletes and points to his coaching Aussie swimmers to beat dopers' WRs.

clean athletes beating dopers times is the new reality huh?

some Aussie swimmers are known dopers themselves LOL