grolby

This is the problem... you can read what happened Saturday and Sunday pretty much however you want it. If you want to believe Sky's performance yesterday is definitive evidence of doping, you just say that Porte and the other Sky domestiques were told to ride badly today to prevent suspicion. If you are more optimistic, or at least more cautious in proclaiming the climb to Ax-3-Domaines as evidence of doping, you see yesterdays stage as a counterpoint, the expected result of a massive effort the day before.

I just don't think it's remotely reasonable to draw a firm conclusion either way. Personally, before Porte and especially Froome went on the rampage Saturday, I didn't think the Sky's vaunted train was looking all that impressive, and indeed if you subtract Porte's and Froome's efforts they didn't actually look to be "not normal," as a squad, not even as impressive as last year. And the domestiques who rode hard Saturday seemed to pay for it yesterday.

So I don't know what to think. I'm skeptical about the ride Froome did on Saturday, but I felt a good deal better about it after yesterday's stage. I'm also pretty skeptical about the supposition that Sky is on an organized program; most of the riders sure don't look like it. I think the biggest problem is, as discussed already, Sky's unwillingness to be transparent and release the data. They claim that it's too "noisy" and will be abused by alleged pseudoscientists, but without the data those same pseudoscientists are just going to estimate the numbers, and there's a lot more noise in those estimations. The problem with Sky is that, even if they are clean, they are acting as though they have something to hide, and that just isn't going to help them in the modern environment of skepticism and suspicion.