Originally Posted by timcupery

This is very easily explainable without doping. So while he may have switched to doping, there's no specific reason to believe that he did just because he got better. What changed from his two previous teams, compared to CSC, is that with the previous teams he was a super-domestique in that he was riding and racing all the time. Like, 80-100 days a year. No real recovery, and certainly no peaking. And peaking is necessary to win races. With CSC, his racing schedule was lighter, such that he could come up to peak his fitness for certain races. It's a very obvious explanation, and all of the data on this point is there for us to see. So, it doesn't say that he wasn't doping, but his upturn in 2004-05 is not, in and of itself, reason to think that he started doping.