Team Visma LAB

[ChewbaccaDefense]

Man, peoples be touchy.

 

[pastronef]

Yup.
Also, there's so much talk about mental health in professional cycling and sports in general, then an athlete calls it quits before burning out and he's deemed unprofessional. Or worse someone who belongs in the clinic. I don't get it.

true

 

[Libertine Seguros]

Please connect use of a bronchial dilator in @2015, 2016 with made up diabolical retirement plan, tough if not impossible to connect the dots.
Yates is a great, great bike racer and the level of internet ugly just grows and grows and grows. As podcasts and blogs grow like cancer, so do angles for every action of everyone, everything. There is nothing that will not birth a conspiracy theory, times a million. Everyone is searching for clicks, trying to title things to get attention.

Alternate less attractive headline

33 year old cyclist retiring after highly accomplished track and road racing career.

The question was open-ended though; "what could you possibly accuse Simon Yates of?" In that context, the fact that he has had a doping ban, no matter how inconsequential, is a material fact because it is something you can accuse him of, even if it isn't really relevant to his retirement. Jono's post doesn't purvey any conspiracy theory; it just highlights that there actually is something you can accuse Simon Yates of, regardless of whether relevant at this point in his career.

Frankly, about the second part, I think it's the reverse of what you're talking about, things like this are far more accepted than they were ten to fifteen years ago. If a two-time former GT winner with a doping suspension in his history, riding for one of the most dominant teams in the sport, retired out of nowhere on the eve of the season in 2011, you'd have seen a lot more shade being thrown at them than Yates' retirement has attracted. I'd point out that this thread is in the Clinic; if you don't want to see people raise doping stories around riders you like, then you might be in the wrong place.

Another thing is that typically at the moment riders are more successful young than they were in that era, and so are riding WT calendars at a younger age, and therefore have more miles on the clock by the time they hit their early 30s than riders used to. We may start to see this more often going forward.