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The steroid drugs would presumably require a TUE
The first line steroid for asthma in the UK is beclomethasone, which doesn't require a TUE for inhalation in normal doses. The WADA code doesn't define normal, but NICE says up to 1600μg a day. We don't know whether Froome is using that too, but there's no reason to suppose that he isn't.
there are certainly other more effective therapies for asthma that don't require industrial quantities of salbutamol
It's normal, AFAIK, for people with exercise induced asthma (alongside other triggers) to have good control of symptoms with beclomethasone (or alternative steroids) alone as long as they are more or less sedentary, but to require significant amounts of salbutamol (or other β2 agonists) if they engage in intensive exercise, especially if aggravating factors like pollen, dust or unhelpful temperature or humidity are also present. Not everybody gets good results from the long acting β2 agonists like salmeterol (a friend told me). Given the uncertainty over the pharmacokinetics, we don't really know whether Froome was taking "industrial quantities" or just normal amounts. My idea of industrial quantities would be those which require machinery to deliver, like 10-20mg a day via a nebuliser. I don't suppose your excretion rate would ever drop below 1000ng/ml if you were hooked up to one of these four times a day, but then the only time I've done that I was in hospital with the broken ends of four ribs poking into one of my lungs, so I wasn't going to be climbing any Spanish mountains at the same time :)
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gbj_tester
I havent read all the way through the thread, so apologies if anyone else has already pointed this out.
As @mdcc_tester points out, the evidence for salbutamol being performance enhancing in endurance athletes is questionable at best. Even in inhaled form it regularly causes tachycardia and can also precipitate hypokalemia, both of which are not desirable. In fact, we can give salbutamol to treat hyperkalemia in a hospital setting.
However, nobody should be requiring that amount of salbutamol to control their asthma. The British thoracic society has a very clear set of recommendations for this, including long acting beta2 agonists and inhaled steroids etc. The steroid drugs would presumably require a TUE, which after Wiggins, Sky may be keen to avoid, but there are certainly other more effective therapies for asthma that don't require industrial quantities of salbutamol.
It doesn't all quite add up. Anyone with a medical degree would not be treating Froome with all that salbutamol, so either Sky needs a better doctor or something else is going on.