neineinei said:
Even if it is only a 2,5-3 hour flight from Madrid to Tenerife the UCI tester will probably have to make the flight the day before the testing is to take place. It is common for riders to pick a testing hour early in the morning. For the tester to be at the hotel on Teide at 7 he/she will have to be at Tenerife the evening prior to the testing, so a hotel stay will be added to the bill. If they want to test 3 riders who are staying at different hotels and all have picked an early hour for the testing more than one testing crew will be needed. If a group of riders from one team are staying in the same hotel you can't just line them up and test them in one go, they might have choosen different hours of the day for their testing, and the tester will have to stay there all day to be able to test more than one. Not to mention that they will be alerted of the testing by the teammate tested earlier in the morning.
OOC testing is expencive. Even more so at places like Tenerife. I'm sure UCI and the Spanish Anti-Doping Agency would be happy to test Froome and anyone else on Teide if they had the recourses they needed to do so. Maybe Sky and the other teams can pay a bigger chunck of the anti-doping bill?
I'm sorry but no. You seem to be making some assumptions that just aren't true. First you are either assuming that the testers are based near the labs or in major cities. There is no proof of this. Next you are talking as if testers are based at all the possible mainland high-altitude training spots, which again there is no proof of, so the travel is still required. Different hotels? How does that differ from anywhere else?
You are also assuming that athletes generally choose early morning time slots, but it's equally likely they could choose an evening slot as they are hotel based. Do you have access to the ADAMS records or a summation of these?
Anywhere people are training at high-altitude will require either a flight, car-hire and long drive and a stay in a hotel overnight if they have to test in the morning. Tenerife is serviced by a
huge number of flights, driving costs down and making access incredibly easy for the testers.
There is absolutely no evidence that it is harder or more expensive for OOC tests to occur in Tenerife. In fact, logically, the opposite is true. With huge numbers of flights, boats, hotels, a tailor made infrastructure, it should be simple for the UCI, NADO or whoever is in charge of testing people based there to get the samples.