Re:
IndianCyclist said:
they came up with emma after internal review. didnot even bother to check that hypothesis with emma herself before going public. as a result egg on face and more questions
It sounds more like a scramble. I've mentioned several times back since 2012 that Sky have seemed almost ridiculously unprepared for their narrative being questioned. It can't be because they genuinely didn't think anybody would question it, can it? I mean, they did not have any plan in place for how to deal with people thinking their style of riding was suspicious, and had to scramble to put together the talking points for how it was happening before Wiggins insulted too many people. They made comparisons for two years to USPS' organization, riding style, control and professionalism without apparently any preparation for people taking that comparison and running with it to include the more 'unsavoury' side of that team. They made promises to hold Q&A sessions with the public and to do internal investigation after internal investigation on how various suspicious names had beaten their zero tolerance policy, and some of those people are still there, and the most notorious one for me was the promise of an investigation into how Leinders had ended up at the team in July 2012, with Daniel Benson asking Brailsford about how the investigation was progressing at the Worlds over two months later... with Brailsford
literally running away from the question. At least Tiernan-Locke had been self-aware enough to know that people would question his sudden emergence, but Sky seemed too trapped in their little corporate bubble to step back from it a minute and think about how it would look, not to the targeted audience of Britons who followed the sport because of being bitten by the bug courtesy of the track cycling successes, but to those in Britain and elsewhere who were already dedicated followers of the sport before their 'era' and know what previous generations of riders looked like and raced like, know that riders like Mick Rogers and Michael Barry have dubious history, and formulate some kind of explanation for how it works.
Instead, we got Chris Froome shouting on Twitter that "fans have got to get it into their heads that riding like this clean is possible now" (to which a Podium Café editor tweeted back "clean riders have got to get it into their heads that 25 years of cheating colleagues have robbed them of blind faith fans"). We got Peter Kennaugh and a camera crew going screaming in the face of Michael Rasmussen for a comment which, though clearly loaded, did not expressly question the narrative ("track rider Thomas dropping Colombian mountain goat Quintana" or words to that effect). We got Wiggins - the man who had five years earlier announced that fans would understandably question leaders and winners of the race for years to come - calling anybody who questioned him a bunch of unsavoury words. We got Brailsford running away from questions, and then going into hiding for over a week when bad news hit the press. We got bad news being carefully and quietly buried (the release of Geert Leinders being orchestrated just a few hours before the Reasoned Decision hit, Rogers being jettisoned under cover of night).
Sometimes their explanations and excuses have solid grounding, and sometimes they are just PR. But sometimes, they really seem to have an adversarial relationship with fans, journalists and everybody else. This particular example is particularly contemptuous because the team that displays "attention to detail" and "no stone left unturned" as prominent mantras (notwithstanding that these have already been debunked several times of course) conducted an "internal investigation" as to why a member of the British women's team staff conducted a day trip on BC's dime to deliver a package to Sky's team at the Dauphiné, and this "investigation" turned up the explanation that the staff member was there to visit a rider who wasn't even in the same country and could easily be verified because she was
wearing the goddamned leader's jersey at a major goddamned race that day. As Pooley raced the Giro del Trentino starting five days later, if Cope had stayed in France for a few days they may have been able to argue that Emma stayed in the French Alps for some training between the Emakumeen Bira and the Giro del Trentino. But he didn't, so they couldn't. How can an "internal investigation" have turned up a justification that can easily be debunked by any fan with access to any results aggregator like CQ Ranking, Cyclingfever or Dewielersite in under 30 seconds, and the results of that investigation become accepted enough to be repeated to journalists before they realise what an obvious fallacy it is? Do they really have
that little competence in fact-checking? Or do they really have
that much contempt for the fans' intelligence?
I know that British Cycling has had a sometimes tumultuous relationship with Pooley over the years, but surely somebody at the organization would have had
some idea of her race calendar to know that they couldn't pull that one, unless literally the only point of investigation was "who's a women's racer we have who would have a reason to be in the Alps? Who can climb?" and just picking Pooley ahead of Sharon Laws because she's more well-known (for the record, Laws was also at the Emakumeen Bira, as was Armitstead. Nicole Cooke was in the preceding one-day race but didn't finish the Emakumeen Bira). Given how much of an afterthought Nicole and Emma were at BC for several years it wouldn't surprise me if they didn't, but you know, they could always have checked online. Like Lawton did, and like any of us could have done. And, you know, if the parcel was nothing suspicious, why the need for excuses or secrecy? Why the need to formulate an excuse that anybody with access to youtube can prove false? It beggars belief.
While Sky's/BC's "attention to detail" mantra and due diligence has been shown to be farcically porous in the past (not able to check the Ras court case docs where Leinders' doping is mentioned, not checking the roadbook enough to know about the uncategorized climb in the País Vasco 2011 run-in, believing Mick Rogers when he said he'd never been involved in doping ever, signing JTL based on two tests by other teams, six months apart, and myriad other examples), this is possibly the most blatant example of showing absolutely no attention to detail whatsoever that we have seen yet. It's almost "every stone left unturned". Just farcical, it's not even funny, just sad. Sad to see these formerly proud faces that rubbed their "in the name of clean cycling" PR in the faces of every doubter are reduced to such desperate and obvious lies. Sad to see just how much contempt they held for the intelligence of the general public. And sad for Emma Pooley that after a career spent mainly being ignored, disowned or placed at the bottom of the priorities list by British Cycling, that now they're prepared to use her as an excuse to hide their suspicious activity behind.
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