but the point is that talented riders often DO determine the outcome of the races. It's just that many of them are among the dopers, it just doesn't look as transparently ridiculous as when a rider who does not have a top record as a kid, youth, junior and/or U23 is determining the outcomes of the races. The thread was started by somebody upset that riders who had shown talent at a young age - examples being Valverde or Nibali - were not being subject to the same ridicule as riders who had undergone miraculous transformations into worldbeaters - examples being the likes of Froome.
Alejandro Valverde is a good example because he WAS a talented rider as a kid, so there is no 'transformation' of his skills, he just kept developing until he was a top rider in the world. Somewhere along the line, he became a doper. If we operate under the assumption that he is a doper, we do not know where he stopped being carried on talent alone and where he started being carried on a combination of talent and drugs (and we don't know in what proportion the talent and drugs were).
I'll use Mauro Santambrogio as my counterpoint, simply because a) Froome's not been caught for anything and b) picking Froome will only continue the arguments. Santambrogio hasn't exactly been known for squeaky clean behaviour in the past, but he had been in the peloton long enough at around the same level that we felt we had a reasonable grasp of what his expected level was, whether he was using doping to be there or not. As a result, when he suddenly started juicing and performing to a level far in excess of what had appeared to be his talent level, it looked ridiculous and everybody called it out, because we felt we knew where he stopped being carried on talent alone, and the difference was likely drugs. Ergo we can see immediately the difference that doping makes to a rider at Santambrogio's level, something we are not able to do with Valverde, because we don't know what performances of his are realistically usable as a guide to his clean talent level.