Dear Wiggo said:
Is that because you believe the peloton is a dope-free environment, or because you believe clean performances can trump doped ones?
Because Froome 2013, strictly speaking, as well as Wiggo 2012 did not have just "results", they annihilated the peloton for 6 months straight.
The Sky defense ALWAYS invovles ignoring the wider picture and focusing on one tiny detail that really only forms a tiny part of the whole sky is doping case, and explaining why that could be clean.
Hence destroying the TDF 2 years in a row gets brought down to - "achieving results", as if we were talking about some guy who finished 7th in the Tour Down Under rather than won every race he entered for 6 months.
Notice how in the same post he says he believes that what Froome is doing is possible clean.
Of course in isolation, that might even sound reasonable. A simple belief that a rider can achieve certain speeds clean. Its heavily debatable of course, and some don't believe it for a second. But at least there is a case to be made. Hell if it was jut Froome riding fast with nothing else, I myself would most definitely allow for the possibility that he is clean.
But in reality if it was just a case of a rider riding super fast then there wouldn't be all this controversy against Sky and I think timmers knows it.
We are talking about a rider who has found out how to lose weight without losing power, just at the time that drugs designed to lose weight without losing power, have come into the sport
who midway through his career was not even considered good enough to make the team in 3 straight tdf's dominating them, and who is either lying or being lied to about the disease that is supposed to explain his transformation.
On a team that has never shown an ounce of genuine anti doping commitment, yet claims to be anti doping, which as Merckx index pointed out in that great post, doesn't even have any interest whatsoever in looking into what makes Froome so special.
A team that team that just happens to have produced the only other clean Tour de France winner, who also found out the secret to losing insane ammounts of weight while gaining power.
That's not even mentioning Leinders, Dodger's return to EPO levels, Wiggos omerta, his score on the UCI index, the use of pillows and washing hands as explanations, Porte on Bonsacre and loads and loads of other stuff.
But of course looking at the
whole argument, kind of dams sky. So their defenders, only ever look at one or two sub arguments, minimize them and try to explain why that particular thing could in theory have been clean, without looking at the whole picture.