I normally agree with you Ian and often think you've got excellent attitude by not dismissing every rider as doped, but I do disagree with you here.
The sceptical attitude is not killing the sport, it's cleaning it. With the change of perspective and the way the public condemns dopers now, it's good to have big pressure on the riders. It shapes their opinion to be strongly against doping as well (examples: De Gendt, Argos) and forces die-hard dopers to stay on their toes and think twice about doping.
The strong opinion of the public and the media to go against doping and to be sceptical when unbelievable performances happen creates pressure on the riders to not dope, which is good.
Of course it is cleaning it, but they are doing it wrong. Instead of annoying riders with such questions and constantly talk about it, they should however indeed gather evidence. And not just do assuming things.
Mwuhi wrote:
Of course it is cleaning it, but they are doing it wrong. Instead of annoying riders with such questions and constantly talk about it, they should however indeed gather evidence. And not just do assuming things.
This!
Of course we need to be sceptical. But it's one thing to raise the question, another to annoy the riders to death with it. Because right now, it's the Tour de Doping, not the Tour de France. Instead of seeing: "Froome conquers Ventoux" in the papers, I read: "Froome vs Armstrong".
If you're the strongest rider in the peloton you automatically get the most of the scepticism on you. It's expectable. Now if you've been dominating all year and are now dominating once again, clearly striking a gap between yourself and everyone else, the scepticism grows even further. Not only expectable, but also valid in my opinion.
Froome is on another level compared to everyone else. If he wants to satisfy the sceptics, he has to try five times as hard as the numbers 2-10 to show why he's not doping. Normal, logical, and acceptable in my opinion.
If he doesn't try five times as hard and then gets frustrated about the scepticism, well, that's his fault.
Just imagine for 1 seconds he is clean. Or wait, you imagine you're Froome and you're clean.
As a Brit (well...) you win on the slopes of the Mont Ventoux. You worked so hard for this and you did it all by yourself, winning here.
You're dead from exhaustion. There comes the press, you're ready to talk about writing history.
"Mr. Froome, are you clean?" 'Yes, next question' "Are you clean?" 'I said so, yes, next question?' "You're the first British person to win here. Are you sure you'll stay the first British person or will your victory be stripped?"
Like I said. OF course we have to raise the question. Once, twice, thrice, maybe once a day. But this is a witch-hunt.
I see your point man, from his perspective the scepticism is killing and not worth it if he's clean.
But that's a big if. A very, very big one.
I think Brailsford and Froome could have prevented the scepticism if they had been more open as to how they achieved such a massive difference in level in the first place.
One could argue that the winner should not need to show his competition his key advantage, but that only flies with me if the competitors are within reach of each other, where its a game of tiny margins and where each bit of legitimate advantage is not for the public eye. This is not the case as Froome and Sky have been mountains (pun intended) above the rest.
So then the question Brailsford asks is: Tell me then what do you want to see, instead of asking the same question over and over?
Well, the simple answer is: everything, and they should have started doing so at the start of this year when Sky already had an incredibly dominant 2012. The fact that they haven't done so is why Froome's performance is so unbelievalbe and why he is now getting so much scepticism.
Edited by ShortsNL on 17-07-2013 10:48
Okay, since you insisted, I'm imagining I'm Froome and I'm clean.
I'm now trying to understand why I'm the stupidest person on the planet who refuses to release any data that might help prove innocence, just like all the guilty ones do.
The preceding post is ISSO 9001 certified
"I love him, I think he's great. He's transformed the sport in so many ways. Every person in cycling has benefitted from Lance Armstrong, perhaps not financially but in some sense" - Bradley Wiggins on Lance Armstrong
why don't journos just ask Brailsford to explain the fact that Froome's time up Ventoux was comparable to that of Lance (who by his own admission was on PEDs) and matched into what was decribed as a withering headwind?
samdiatmh wrote:
why don't journos just ask Brailsford to explain the fact that Froome's time up Ventoux was comparable to that of Lance (who by his own admission was on PEDs) and matched into what was decribed as a withering headwind?
Because they will politely smile at you, and you will never get invited to their press conferences again, making your job really hard to do, which in turn leads to your boss replacing you for next years Tour.
Ian Butler wrote:
Just imagine for 1 seconds he is clean. Or wait, you imagine you're Froome and you're clean.
As a Brit (well...) you win on the slopes of the Mont Ventoux. You worked so hard for this and you did it all by yourself, winning here.
You're dead from exhaustion. There comes the press, you're ready to talk about writing history.
"Mr. Froome, are you clean?" 'Yes, next question' "Are you clean?" 'I said so, yes, next question?' "You're the first British person to win here. Are you sure you'll stay the first British person or will your victory be stripped?"
Like I said. OF course we have to raise the question. Once, twice, thrice, maybe once a day. But this is a witch-hunt.
Did you ever see in 100 years of Tour de France someone who won by 5-10 minutes (i think this will be the margin) and could be seen as clean rider? Doubt it, because in sport like cycling (especially in modern times), such a huge margins are not possible, if majority of opponents did not crash out.
If you on a second believe he is clean as you say, what do you think gives him a 5 minutes advantage.Training? Very naive, all riders train hard. He even does not have best team this year or best natural gifts for such a domination. They have money and great trainers, but on such a level to give him incredible advantage of several minutes? Impossible, in cycling for sure.
This is the hippie in you Ian.
I hope Froome will be asked and bombarded 50times a day with these questions, maybe he will collapse because of it and will stop poisoning the sport, which should be now in rebuilding the trust of public after what happened with someone who was dominant on same level, before being exposed as biggest scum ever.
Don't know if anyone has pointed to this, its a graph from an old interview with brailsford: https://www.cycles...hhires.jpg
It shows the expected progression of a rider, and where they see their riders at the moment. 1 is talents, 2 is strong riders in their prime, 3 is ageing riders still dokng well, 4 is riders well over their prime, that might be usefull do to experience but if not its time to let them go, 5 is riders that he beliebed would not become great riders but could be okay helpers. I cant recognice alle riders but notice froome...
John-Lee Augustyn, Lars Petter Nordhaug, Morris Possoni, Stephen Cummings, Serge Pauwels, Kjell Carlstrom and Chris Sutton are the other guys in Froome's group. Three of them are out of the pro-peloton already. The others are domestiques. One of them is a Tour winner..
The whole data thing is totally misleading though. I'm again not saying Sky are clean or that they aren't, just trying to balance things a little.
If they are doping, then obviously, they do not want to release the data. The problem is, this means if you don't release data people assume its because it shows dope.
However, if your team is ahead of the rest because you have applied several science methods that other teams have not thought to do, then equally, why on earth should you sacrifice that.
So your options are
1. Win the Tour clean, but get accused of doping.
2. Ride the tour clean, but probably not win the tour as your advantage is gone.
If you look it at that why, its kinda easy to see why you'd rather not give your data too all and sundry. They are happy to give it to doping control people whom should keep it entirely secret unless there is something illegal with it. The teams don't want that though.
Whether Sky are clean or not doesn't really matter to the other teams. They just want to know why Sky are so good so they can do it too.
BritPCMFan wrote:
The whole data thing is totally misleading though. I'm again not saying Sky are clean or that they aren't, just trying to balance things a little.
If they are doping, then obviously, they do not want to release the data. The problem is, this means if you don't release data people assume its because it shows dope.
However, if your team is ahead of the rest because you have applied several science methods that other teams have not thought to do, then equally, why on earth should you sacrifice that.
So your options are
1. Win the Tour clean, but get accused of doping.
2. Ride the tour clean, but probably not win the tour as your advantage is gone.
If you look it at that why, its kinda easy to see why you'd rather not give your data too all and sundry. They are happy to give it to doping control people whom should keep it entirely secret unless there is something illegal with it. The teams don't want that though.
Whether Sky are clean or not doesn't really matter to the other teams. They just want to know why Sky are so good so they can do it too.
The power and blood data won't give away anything of their training methods. Brailsford implies it would just so he can have an excuse, but it's a blatant lie.
HTC did it and their success wasn't affected in the slightest.
The preceding post is ISSO 9001 certified
"I love him, I think he's great. He's transformed the sport in so many ways. Every person in cycling has benefitted from Lance Armstrong, perhaps not financially but in some sense" - Bradley Wiggins on Lance Armstrong
this!
