2014 Pro-cycling season thread

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  • Given a choice between those kind of riders and people who have profited, in every way, in the past from cheating I know who I will be rooting for.

    Yeah but given the binary choice of Froome or Contador, I know who I will be rooting for.

  • I feel for Froome if he had a nasty chest infection, especially as someone with asthma. I had a really bad one this winter (fluid on the lungs and everything) which destroyed my winter/early spring riding, I'm still getting over the aftermath now. Being asthmatic really didn't help.

    They still shouldn't have bent the rules for him though.

    Note that the prednisolone (oral corticosteroid in tablet form) he was on during the Tour de Romandie is different to the Salbutamol inhaler he was using more recently. Apparently he doesn't need a TUE for that as he uses it regularly to treat his asthma (same here).

  • It's just the sort if thing that reminds people of the UCI's complicity with Armstrong, if it's true it doesn't make anyone look good.

  • Yet no one seemed to feel the same about a cleaned up Armstrong or a cleaned up Valverde.
    I don't know what, if anything, Contador is up to now. It's not as if his form ever dropped off in an Andy Schleck way; he has won the Vuelta and been fourth in the Tour since his ban but this year he is certainly better again. It's not possible to blood dope in the way it was in the past but marginal gains through cheating must still be there. Thomas Voeckler springs to mind. Chris Froome and Wiggins and Talansky and Evans and Kelderman don't.
    Given a choice between those kind of riders and people who have profited, in every way, in the past from cheating I know who I will be rooting for.

    Agreed. I suspect Contador is riding clean now, he doesn't seem untouchable in the way that he did, and his subsequent wins seem often to have been the result of tactical nous.

  • Regarding that, I just think any line you draw in the sand is pretty arbitrary, and is different from fan to fan for gazillions of different reasons. People warm to Contador for the same reasons they did Pantani, for how he swashbuckles his way up those mountains. Him and Froome are chalk and cheese, which adds extra spice to their battles.

  • It's just the sort if thing that reminds people of the UCI's complicity with Armstrong, if it's true it doesn't make anyone look good.

    Well, quite. There are good reasons for using the steroids in this case, but if you don't follow the rules it looks well dodge. This is why the MPCC not allowing member teams to field riders on corticoids seems overkill to me, if you've been suffering with a chest infection or you've got asthma or whatever this could stop you competing when you're already at a disadvantage.

    The thing is Froome is the first to get angry at anything that could suggest doping: e.g. not testing tour contenders training on Tennergrief.

    But he must have known that they were fast tracking the prednisolone TUE, surely?

  • Just read this elsewhere:

    emergency TUEs are always granted for exacerbations of asthma:

    he is asthmatic, he had a respiratory infection

    a respiratory infection in asthmatics can lead to an acute exacerbation of asthma

    and acute exacerbations of asthma are no joke, they can send you straight to accident and emergency if badly treated or not treated at all

    therefore, athletes with an acute exacerbation of asthma have the right to an emergency TUE, in fact they even have the right to a retroactive TUE if necessary. this is clearly stated in the WADA paperwork

    http://www.wada-ama.org/Documents/Sc...hma-5.0-EN.pdf

    so i'm surprised they are making such a fuss about it

    ... unless this is to do with his status as an asthmatic either not being registered or not having been renewed, which is another story altogether

    It won't stop the trolls but this sounds legit

  • Everytime I try to watch scheduled stage of Criterium du Dauphine on Eurosport they're showing something else, unrelated. And none of the stages are available on demand.

  • Shit be all interesting and shit

  • dis^

  • <3 Bert

  • Froome looks better in green anyway

  • Wow, the race exploded

  • Agreed. I suspect Contador is riding clean now, he doesn't seem untouchable in the way that he did, and his subsequent wins seem often to have been the result of tactical nous.

    Watching him just now I'm tempted to take that back

  • Froome dropping out of top 5?

  • Can Talansky hold on and snatch the GC?

  • WHAT a race

  • Get in! Great race.

  • Fuckin hell, didnt expect the time gap back to froome to be that huge

  • Froome looks smoked too

  • Froome dropping out of top 10

    ftfy

  • Incredible effort by yates too

  • Tell you what, that's one of the most entertaining week long stage races I ever saw. Brilliant stealth attack by Garmin, great ride by Nieve to take the stage, shame Yates couldn't win one, but brilliant climbing throughout by him.

    What happened to Froome though, the crash? Or did he burn himself out.

  • ftfy

    Incredible effort by yates too

    Officially better than Nibali.

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2014 Pro-cycling season thread

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