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  • He's a dickhead. In 2012 he basically endorsed Sky as a clean team, then has steadily back-pedaled. He was challenged about this on Twitter recently, and threw up some guff about speeds increasing. I think he enjoys the attention on Twitter criticising Sky gets him, and so has thrown his lot in with the clinic trolls like digger, and also professional troll Antoine Vayer.

    He also made some claim that his scepticism was due to talking to 'insiders' but ignored my request to elaborate on who they may be.

    The evidence against Lance was there early on, he just spent his time using the courts to suppress it, but Kimmage and Walsh were investigating and there were a lot of people willing to talk. Is there the same about Sky? There is nada. There's Leinders and that is about it. No-one that has left the team has made any insinuations, and the one 'positive' they have had in JTL wasn't when he was racing for the team, and you would have thought he might have said something considering how bitter he was. But silence, just a brief association with the Rabobank doping doctor and the fact they win races, that is all the accusers have.

    And the reason Sky get shouted about loudest is because people don't like them, they don't like them because they are British, rich, sponsored by Murdoch and they win races. So even though many believe all cyclists are doping, you get good dopers and bad dopers. The good dopers are teams like Astana, because apparently they don't pretend they are clean. Bad dopers are any anglos, i.e. from non-traditional cycling countries, and ones that maintain they are clean, so Sky with its ZTP and marginal gains really pisses them off.

    There is a thread in the clinic titled 'More lame Russia bashing' with perfectly illustrates this, supposedly anti-doping people bemoaning Russia's current treatment by the IOC and others. Because Russia are good dopers, while the Brits and Aussies are bad dopers.

  • It's very peculiar all round really. Double standards and all the rest.
    Often brought up is Froome's supposed 'transformation' aged 26 into a world class rider, ignoring the fact that until incredibly recently it's been nigh on impossible for a rider to come out of Africa aged 18 and join a euro/world pro team. Often this is accompanied by a mocking picture of a young Froome looking chunky, as if this backs up their statement rather than giving a huge reason for why he went from a rider getting dropped on climbs to one leading up them. The Bilharzia thing is dismissed out of hand as a lie.
    I can understand the scepticism - there's been past cases where athletes have transformed with doping. Lance, Michelle Smith, even Landlord Christie (i'm leaving that autocorrect in) becoming the best sprinter in the world when he was 32 - but all of those were either exposed as cheats fairly soon after, or had huge simmering evidence to suggest they were cheating.
    The only thing used to beat Sky with are power numbers, the limits of which seem to be set either by doctors who doped athletes heavily (Ferrari) or 'Coaches,' using that term incredibly loosely, like Antoine Vayer who last worked with top riders in, what, the 90s, at Festina? Who would also have been doped. Some of it seems to come from ego - "I never made an athlete that good, so whoever else can is obviously cheating". What else? Attention? Tucker always comes back on the 'i'm a really good scientist' argument, but one could push back on that - if he's so good, why is he shouting and blogging instead of coaching the world's best? Since he's so great, obviously the world's best are using doping doctors.
    Ad infinitum.

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