Doping

That helps but EPO didn't turn donkeys into race horses. It just turned race horses into faster race horses.. that might die in the middle of the night.

promptly go on holiday and start fucking the locals

That's verbatim from an Australian Thomson Travel slogan.

At least not without an inhaler.

the ones punished for being over Salbutamol threshold before Froome (from http://www.cyclisme-dopage.com/)

Trentin, didn't know that

@hippy Just looked it up, strange because he was a junior then?

Only Diego Ulissi in the last 10 years though. How many have had an AAF but didn't get suspension since? Thats the context that I suspect we're not going to get.

some transparancy would be nice

That list is somewhat inaccurate, Trentin was banned for 2 months, and Petacchi for 9 months.

That's probably why I'd never heard of it, although my memory ain't great.

punished for being over Salbutamol threshold

Is that true, or were they punished for having any salbutamol in them without a TUE? It used to be "TUE required" until some time after 2011, so of that list only Ulissi would come under the current regime.

I don't know. Would the threshold have been adapted after TUE was no longer required?

Would the threshold have been adapted after TUE was no longer required?

The threshold was introduced alongside the general permission to use the stated doses without a TUE. Before that, you either didn't have a TUE and the "threshold" was the lower detection limit of the test, or you did have a TUE and presumably there was some guidance for the labs about what excretion rate was consistent with the dosage specified on the individual TUE, e.g. mine said 1200µg per day, so if they were using the same pharmacokinetic model as they used to set the threshold, then I'd have been under investigation for overdosing with an excretion rate of only 750ng/ml.

I still believe in Chris #meFroo

Not necessarily for Salbutamol but I heard that 56% of AAFs are cleared, and by indication on similar premises as Froome has been. Of course we never heard about any of those because the investigation is done in secret while this one was leaked.

Surely, given the hoo haa, they could release some kind of general figure, naming no names.

Something like, since 2015 XX AAF have been returned for salbutamol and XX have not been taken forward to an ADRV after assessment of mitigating evidence provided through the standard due process.

The amount of misinformation that is out there on what AAFs are and what they mean is the biggest problem here. Its does no one any favors to be so secretive. Releasing anonymised details like this would help everyone understand how the system works. It would also allow people to review the AAF to ADRV conversion rates for different situations to hold WADA / UCI to account for how they test and whether their tests are appropriate.

It just seems like loads of this could be more publicly available, without compromising individual athletes.

http://inrng.com/2018/07/much-ado-about-something/

Every big name in cycling ever has some sort of doping related taint, yet for some reason they all ok but Froome isn't.

I think history tends to be kinder to them eventually. Merckx was disliked during his time and was infamously punched by a spectator in the 1975 TdeF for instance.

While Froome is winning everything and Sky are so dominant in the Grand Tours haters gonna hate. Not helped by Sky and Brailsford being so fucking awful at PR.

I do like the first comment.

Everyone seems to forget Merckx was a doper. Froome isn't (that we know of).

Rightly or wrongly I think that people view the brandy and amphetamine era of doping as being something entirely different to today's equivalents though...

I think a rider's popularity plays a lot into how history judges. Indurain remains high on people's shit list for being an early adopter of EPO and time trialling to his TdF wins, Contador and Pantani are celebrated for their swashbuckling style, like Merckx.

Sky and generally successful British riders, like the Americans before them, are seen an interlopers by a lot of traditional cycling fans, who only seem to like riders from traditional cycling countries, and riders from Southern Europe best of all.

Speaking of Mig, not-so big Dave B beat him in his Maratona dles Dolomites age group at the weekend.

"He always had the engine, just needed to lose the weight" as someone remarked

I view cheating as cheating.

I'm all for getting stuck into the brandy though.

Interesting interview- https://m.facebook.com/1481917892086163/posts/2094926427451970/