The problem is not that they said that we should sometimes question whether substances might be at play.
The problem is that they sat idly picking their noses and scratching their butts while we watch several preposterous, ridiculous transformations from people in the mid or even late 20s, and they didn't say a word, but when we get a mildly surprising performance from a 22-year-old who has shown all the pedigree from an early age that you could ever want from somebody to say that they have what it takes (Avenir win, winning small stage races, Dauphiné stage, Vuelta superdomestiquing) and is in excellent form (top 5 of Catalunya a week earlier), that's when they call BS.
That's why Chris Fontecchio, in his article, put the comparison to Phinney there. If Taylor Phinney were to win a semi-Classic, or even a secondary Classic like, say, Paris-Tours, later this season, would Schlanger and Gogulski call BS? Assuredly not. Because Phinney has shown all the capabilities to be a performer at that level. But so has Quintana.
Or, on another level, a while ago when discussing the Volta a Portugal I was discussing various young talents with ACF. It boiled down to something quite simple: ACF knew more about the young talents on BMC than he did about some of the others that I was talking about, like Kump, and didn't know Kump's results, so figured he was a nobody. Now, some of the guys ACF was talking about have turned into much better cyclists (Kristoff, for example), but then Kump had the issues of the Geox collapse and returning to Slovenia, so I've not abandoned ship on him yet. But I do think we have something kind of similar here. You pay more attention to your home talents, and also performances in the races most familiar to you are always going to stick in your memory more. One wonders what the posters who defended Jonathan Tiernan-Locke's breakout performances last season as understandable after his impressive showing in the previous year's Tour of Britain would have thought had that been, say, Sérgio Sousa, a Portuguese breakaway specialist who was 3rd in the 2011 Vuelta a Asturias, a race they probably wouldn't have had the opportunity to see.
I don't mind them admitting that questions sometimes need to be asked. And I'm not saying that we can't ask those questions about Nairo Quintana either. But them happily ignoring the likes of Porte this season but pointing fingers at Quintana on performance alone stinks of bias, and them saying that Nairo Quintana has come out of nowhere stinks of them not being well-informed enough on the subject for them to pass judgment.