I'm bored out of my mind on a train so fuck it, here goes.
Where to begin?
I'll preface this by saying I know exactly what reaction some fans will have to this. 'It's all circumstantial'. It's the same reaction fans of the team or person in question had when such evidence was presented towards MG-Maglificio, Gewiss, USPS, Saunier, Lampre, etc.
This particular breed of duck always walks, talks, looks and quacks in the exact same way. And everyone can see it except the fans of the person or team in question who tend to insist it's a goose. When it's pointed out that this is exactly the same as every previous case they will inevitable answer 'yes, but this time it's different because.....' and then proceed to list the same reasons previous fans also claimed the other cases were different
Feel free to tell me I'm wrong, but I've seen this a billion times before. Since you haven't been a cycling fan for long, believe me when I tell you that was one case among so very many.
The script never changes. This keeps happening over and over and I and many others keep repeating ourselves: nothing changes, people always claim it's somehow different. It never is. If there's smoke, something's on fire.
Now that that's out of the way:
Sky promised transparency. They've trumpeted their own transparency far and wide, but they haven't actually shown any. When Paul Kimmage offered to quite simply room with the athletes to see that they weren't doping because he'd be effectively living with them, Sky baulked at that. Because it's fine to say you're transparent, but actually going throught with it? Not so much.
They promised the blood values of all riders would be constantly available. It's been a decade, they have yet to release a single shred of blood data under the hilariously thin excuse designed to be swallowed up by the casual fan with little knowledge of the sport: 'it would give our competitors an advantage'
They promised power values of all riders. They have also not released nearly any. "Nearly" because there is one exception. To 'prove' that Froome's transformation is legitimate they could do it by either showing blood values or by showing comparative power data of both before and after the insane transformation to show that he was indeed having such performances in training for years before, just not in races, as they claim he was. Mind you, this continues to be the crux of Froome's "origin story" despite several sources within the team such as Sean Yates or Steven de Jongh making it clear that Froome was seen the lowest of the low, lower even than career domestiques. Just a guy who had a british passport and thus was a warm body to fill a roster spot until youngsters came through.
They didn't do that though . They released only power data, and only from after his transformation to make any comparison impossible, which proves absolutely nothing except that the Froome we see on TV isn't a CGI special effect, he's actually a living creature. Not exactly something that needed to be proven
When they hired the infamous Dr Leinders (now banned for life from the sport) as team doctor, team manager Dave Brailsford was questioned about it and kept saying they would 'conduct an internal investigation after the Tour'. Then nothing. It got to the point that when journalist Daniel Benson asked him about it at the World Championships, Brailsford ran away rather than answer questions. I'm not being facetious, he literally ran away.
Or, for example, the Q&A Brailsford said they would have in Manchester where the fans and journalists could ask anything they wanted and be answered fully......when people got there, only pre-aproved questions were allowed of course
But enough about Sky's complete lack of transparency. You wanted Froome specifically?
Froome's transformation overnight from guy who hadn't done anything of even slight promise in his entire life, to one of the greatest riders the world has ever seen, occurred precisely when they hired as team doctor a shady figure known as Geert Leinders. From one race to the next, Froome was a zero at the Tour of Poland, and he was a god among men at the Vuelta days later, just as Sky hired a man fingered by many of his former athletes as not only part of teamwide doping programs, but indeed the mastermind in charge of them. Including supplying the drugs. As Brailsford himself said a while before Froome's ludicrous transformation: "The clean riders, their progression is linear, you can graph it. Those who go up in a spike usually test positive. There are no secrets, it's basic stuff". You'll never find a bigger career spike than Froome's, this was a guy who despite his claims to the contrary was midpack fodder in low level south african races
Brailsford claims he had no idea Leinders was shady. No idea. No clue. This team that constantly - and I do mean CONSTANTLY - bandies about at every turn how they win because they 'do homework' so much more thoroughly than any other teams and are so, to use their own term, 'detail-oriented', had no idea who Leinders was. They hired him thinking he was some random doctor off the street apparently.
Despite the fact that Leinders had been at the center of the 2007 doping controversy that saw the race leader and odds-on winner of the Tour de France ejected close to the end of the race, which at the time prompted Bradley Wiggins to say of Leinders that 'teams who employ such doctors should not only not be invited to the Tour (...) they shouldn't even be given a racing license". But sure, Brailsford lived in a cave on Mars, he had no idea who Leinders was...
Froome has had many excuses for this incredible transformation. As each one had holes poked in it publicly, he kept switching. The first one was the funniest. He claimed that growing up in Africa he didn't have the bike handling skills to ride in a peloton and thus wasted a lot of energy impacting his results. Setting aside the ridiculousness of this excuse that apparently only affected him and no other african cyclist, it's instantly shot down by the fact that he wasn't good in time trials either, where one is riding alone without a peloton to navigate and thus no energy is wasted.
My personal favorite among his excuses is that he didn't have cycling shoes. He says this in his biography, right next to a picture of....him as a teenager racing in cycling shoes. The lies are just so transparent
Eventually he settled on the excuse of Bilharzia. A disease that he claims lowered his blood cell count, causing the lower performance. But....bilharzia isn't a nematode, it's a trematode! It doesn't affect the blood cells, but the blood vessels!
But hey, let's accept for a second there that this disease really affected his performance. He claims he caught it in March 2010....so why did he suck in 2007, 2008, 2009?
And that's not the only blatant inconsistency in his story. It was discovered later that he's also a lifelong asthma sufferer, which he successfully hid for years. Now that's odd, as it's well established that you cannot have both. In fact, for a few years there were attempts to weaponize the bilharzia parasite as a cure for asthma
The Times journalist Owen Slot tweeted after interviewing Lance Armstrong's drug supplier Philippe Maire (aka Motoman) that Maire had confessed to working with Chris Froome and Richie Porte (another silly transformation once he joined Sky and started working with Leinders). When the tweet was removed and that quote by Maire didn't appear later in the published interview, Slot was asked why and replied only with 'Who owns The Times?'. The answer of course is Rupert Murdoch, who also owns Sky.
Brailsford promised 'a british Tour winner within 5 years'. This is the same as Gareth Southgate promising an english World Player of the Year within 5 years, it's not something you can promise, it's dumb luck that one will exist at that period in time....unless two british (well...kinda. long story) nobodies with long and completely unstoried careers suddenly transform into the unbeatable superstars known as Wiggins and Froome. Convenient how that happened, huh?
Two Sky riders have been sentenced for doping. Not just Michael 'I doped at US Postal, then I stopped, honest to god' Barry, I'm talking about Morris Possoni in the Mantova investigation for doping and working with Dr. Ferrari while riding for Sky, and Jonathan Tiernan-Locke
Speaking of JTL. Sky fans will be quick to point out that JTL's over the top blood value fluctuations that got him nailed are from before he joined Sky. In a sense that's true. In a more accurate sense it's not. He had been training with Sky, following their training programs, attending their camps, and was for all intents and purposes a Sky rider since May 2012, as Brian Smith points out. Even at the time Sky apologist Richard Moore admitted to this.
In the early 90s when EPO - the first drug to have gigantic effects on performance - use became widespread, the times riders did up the big mountains, that had remained constant for nearly a century only changing when unpaved climbs were paved, suddenly improved by 10-15% to the point where even the most talented riders to ever live - Fausto Coppi, Eddy Merckx, Bernard Hinault, Greg LeMond, etc - suddenly would fail to come in the top 40 of any mountain stage
Now Froome is equalling those times and in many cases beating them. He climbed the Ventoux faster than EPOed up Armstrong and the rest of the blood vector brigade. This is only explainable either by doping.......or by installing an engine on your bicycle which I think most can agree is not something he's done. 10-15% is not negligible. It is not the difference between the best of all time and the best in the world at a given moment, it is the difference between 1st and 50th, it is massive.
To put it into perspective, if you believe that Froome is clean, then you are stating that if he were to dope like some of the guys he's beating (who are convicted dopers) he would literally be winning every stage by 5 minutes, because that is 10-15% on a final climb. You can't seriously believe that.
And the most ridiculous part of the Froome monstrosity? His pedalling efficiency is awful. Let's put aside that Sky constantly claim to 'work all the details, that's why we win' and haven't addressed something as basic as his pedalling efficiency or even had him visit a wind tunnel for the first time until after he'd already won the Tour de France - their claim, not mine. Let's just look at the fact that if Froome's pedalling efficiency was even average, he'd be the most dominant rider in history, even beyond Merckx. Does anyone seriously believe that can be legitimate, especially coming from a guy who was a nobody until late 2011?
We are talking about a guy who had no problem with cutting corners, breaking into a national cycling official's email account to commit identity theft to get himself onto a World Championships startlist and getting thrown out of a race for taking a ride hanging on to a motorbike. As Sean Yates, then director at Sky, wrote, Froome's contract was up, he was about to be out the door. He was so out the door in fact, that he only went to that Vuelta because Lars Nordhaug got sick. He was straight up told by team management that he wouldn't be going because team management wanted to take someone who would actually have a future.
Among the atmosphere of rampant cheating that is professional sport, do we really think he would have changed from the guy who commits identity theft and cheats with a motorbike to become one of the most morally upstanding members of the peloton?
When a guy like that, who is about to have his career ended by having no contract offers, at that moment of having nothing to lose suddenly transforms into a superstar, something is blatantly wrong.
"If you’re a cheat, you're a cheat, you're not half a cheat. You wouldn't say, I'll cheat here but I'm not going to cheat over there; I'll cheat on a Monday but not on a Tuesday. If I'm a liar and a cheat and if my ethics and morals are all about cheating, if that's what we're doing here, lying to the world and cheating, then surely I'll be doing it in other places in my life. Not just parts." - David Brailsford
A guy like Froome won't cheat just on the identity theft, just on the holding onto cars to finish the races, just on getting a bottle inside the last 20kms of a race (all these he's done).....he'll cheat on the drug front too.
It's also the constant blatant lying from Brailsford and the whole team. He flip flops so badly on nearly everything, it's painfully obvious
"Sky would withdraw riders from races rather than apply for a TUE" - flash forward a bit, it's revealed they applied for a TUE for Froome in secret and bypassed the regulations so it wouldn't have to be approved by medical experts. (TUE = Therapeutic Use Exemption, essentially a doctor's note saying 'this rider can take this performance enhancing drug because he has a health condition that means he needs it'
I haven't even gone into a scandal like the jiffy bag and Sky's constant lies and extreme changes in story as each successive explanation was exposed as a lie. But by this point it would probably just bore you so I'll stop here.
Put simply, to quote Paul Kimmage - a former cyclist who exposed doping by cyclists from the british isles years ago in his biography, was publicly pummeled as 'a jealous liar' by the british/irish press, and gained massive respect once it turned out he was 100% accurate:
"Sky's performance is unbelievable. It's not something I can believe in"
And a lot of people subscribe to that view. In 10 years we'll be sitting here going "Oh but team X are doing this clean, they're not like Sky, they're different!"
EDIT: Since there's some debate on the Froome vs Armstrong times:
For the actual climb of 15.65kms without the previous kms of false flat approach to the climb:
Froome 2013 - 48:31
Armstrong 2002 - 48:35
Schleck/Contador 2009 - 48:57
In fact, even the 15.65 km times still include 2-2.5 kms where the group were looking around with nobody taking up the pace and therefore going slowly. Here's a comparison of the part where both Armstrong and Froome were going flat out:
last 6.15 km, 8.00 %, 492 m 2002 | Lance Armstrong: 17 min 53 sec 2013 | Chris Froome: 17 min 41 sec
That section is the wind affected one after the treeline ends at Chalet Reynard. Laurens ten Dam pointed out there was a headwind there, which makes Froome's time even more mind boggling
One last bit that usually muddles these discussions: Remember to never compare times from mountain time trials to times from road stages. Compare like with like. Tthe results from the 2004, 1999 and 1987 mountain time trials cannot be compared to Froome's 2013 road stage because those are not road stages with many kms to tire the riders before the climb. Even non climbers did faster times in the mountain time trials than Armstrong and Pantani ever did in road stages.
