MattFoley

I don't really care about the doping...I just care that Froome's dominance has made the race sort of boring (with the exciting moments being when the other teams make a successful move). It was kinda fun on Ventoux when the group was together at the front and maybe Contador would make an attack, but as soon as Froome moved to catch Quintana, I basically just zoned out. If the Alps end up being more of the same, I'll be disappointed.

bengreen79

After watching the stage, reading this thread, and going back and forth on it a few times myself, I've decided that regardless of doping, all I really want is a more exciting Tour de France. The current 4+ minute gap makes it less interesting. At least there's a good contest for the rest of the podium.

danielrbaer

https://velonews.competitor.com/2013/...er-data_295268

boniek1982

+1!

Chris Froome, what a nice guy compared to a-holes Lance and Wiggins.

As for the doping accusations and time gaps, oh well. I will assume he is "clean enough" until he gets caught. The Tour will remain exciting for me until the Alps are over. Anything could still happen. Guys crash. Guys bonk. Chains fall off. More Sky guys may drop out. Maybe some alliances will form against Team Sky.

I am sure we havent seen the last of the little Columbian. Btw where did he come from? Who are the two Belkin boys? My personal favorite Mr. Kwiatkowski is another up and comer and so is Talansky. Are they on dope? I am seeing a changing of the guard and Froome just happens to be the Senior competing against the Freshmen and Sophomores. All other pre-race favorites look done - Evans, Valverde, Rodriguez, TJ and even Contandor. Froome was the favorite to win this year for a while - actually going back to last year's TDF. His dominance should not be a surprise.

canam73

Love it. Fat, old, crazy, fouled mouth kook. Go Greg!

Grumpy McTrumpy

OJ Simpson looked like a really nice dude on TV too.

Keith99

After reading the negative comments in this thread I rewatched the end of the stage.

First this is Froome looked anything but comfortable.

Second was that after Quintana went Sky let some others push the pace for a while. That 'rest' may well have been very important in Porte being able to close most of the gap to Quintana.

Sky is making a lot of subtle decisions. This year they are little like the teams of Lance who seemed ot have resources to burn. They have been managing their resources very well.

bsektzer

If you wish to poison your experience of this year's Tour, that's your choice. You have as much right to that option as the Sky team had to their last musettes yesterday.

As for myself, I'll enjoy it for what it appears to be until such time as there is real evidence to the contrary. No, that's not naivete. It's simply a matter of understanding that, like all professional sports, this is entertainment, not a morality play.

What I find most tragic about this entire thread is that, given recent history, it is as inevitable as it is predictable. If someone else were wearing the yellow jersey right now, the only thing in this discussion that would change would be the name of its subject. It is sad indeed that the legacy of this sport is that no one will ever be successful at it without being accused on some form of cheating.

Thank goodness none of this has anything whatsoever to do with my personal participation in and enjoyment of cycling.

DiabloScott

Hmmm, so there could also be sort of a Strava segment for every mountain pass and the DS's could evaluate all the other riders' numbers and use that as a strategy. Don't know why anyone would object to that.

daven1986

Agree 100%, I'm really enjoying this tour

Jed19

Not necessarily true! What is different about Froome is that he is not only destroying natural and lighter climbers like Quintana, he was also only twelve seconds behind in the ITT held so far. And he is doing it almost without a team, save for Porte. Is it talent? Or talent fueled by some illegal juice? I don't know. Let's wait and see!

And, as pointed out by some people, were Froome not to be in this Tour, it is actually a close race right now between the top 5.

RJM

I'm enjoying the tour a lot, but I have purposely forgot about Froome and am just concentrating on the green jersey, white jersey, and second and third place contests. It really is an exciting tour.

txags92

I disagree with this statement. I think if Froome were fighting out 10 seconds per stage on mountaintop finishes against guys like Contador and his overall lead was under a minute, nobody would be that suspicious. But when the guy is right on the heels of Tony Martin in a flat time trial, and then outruns a 130lb Columbian climbing specialist to the top of the mountains a couple of days later, while destroying his other GC rivals by minutes per stage, you have to be at least a little suspicious unless you are just willfully putting on blinders to the recent past of the sport. The last 2 riders we have seen who could win individual time trials and then turn around and ride away from everybody else up the side of the mountain were Lance and Contador...both of whom we now know to have been doping. Add in the "coincidence" that Froome is putting up times on the two biggest climbs so far that put him squarely in amongst the best times put up by known dopers on past stages, and you have to start to wonder don't you?

I hate that the sport has made me be suspicious of these things...it destroys the whole narrative of a heroic ride and a superstar rider...but we believed in the last two superstars and they both turned out to be dopers. It will be hard for anybody to ever attain that status again without accusations of doping.

Laggard

Quintana is five years younger than Froome. Those five years are the reason Froome managed (with difficulty it should be noted) to drop him. I cannot wait to see what Quintana can do when he hits his prime.

Zinger

There may be a competitive downside to doing that but I don't think that much really at this point since he's shown what his strong points are. But if they are clean they might just have to do that just to defend against speculation that's going to be inevitable when this era of riders match or surpass ETs of the recent past.....I've been hearing that advice from guest pundits on France 24 station's sports too, lol.

atbman

The drug equivalent of the dreaded lurgy, "A thing without shape or form, what strikes without warning, and to no visible effect."

canam73

So if Froome is busted after the fact, does the Fantasy TDF get adjusted?

Zinger

Anything new would be subject to belated testing nowadays.

You can still mainline small amounts of EPO and get it past the testers. I'm not assuming that they're taking such a risk.....I do have my doubts that temper suspicions somewhat. I'm just saying that it's possible for a team that invests in everything else would probably have the ability to get that down to a science if they really thought they needed to.

I'm just not quite convinced yet that Sky needs a doping program to win this race. A little transparency on their part might be a good PR move that offsets any sacrifice in being competitive.

merlinextraligh

Also Quintana attacked very early, in an effort to gain major time on Froome. Had he been content to sit in an attack much closer to the top he might have gotten a stage win, but he also would have limited his potential time gains to seconds not minutes.

Keith99

What race are you watching? His team has set a pace that breaks the race to pieces on every climb where there is time to gain for Froome. Perhaps you need to tune in before the last 30 minutes.

Keith99

And Froome pulled back the vast majority of Quintana's lead while sitting on the wheel of Porte.

Even in hindsight my only criticism of Quintana would be after Froome caught him. At that point he should have either sat on his wheel or cut a deal for the stage win.

Quintana catching Froome was a long shot for this Tour. Worked out he lost time to Froome. But he put time and significant time into everyone else. With the remaining ITT having 2 cat 2 climbs he has a good shot at a podium due to his break.

bsektzer

Jed19 & txags92,

As I said at the very beginning of my post, you're certainly welcome to disagree with my position. However, but assuming Froome is doping for little more reason than being 'uncomfortable' with the margin he's built up doesn't bring anything new to the discussion. Maybe I should have said, "If someone else were wearing the yellow jersey and had a 4+ minute lead after 15 stages... ", but that doesn't materially change the point of what I said. I've been just as badly disillusioned by the Armstrong fiasco as the next guy, but I refuse to let it turn me into the kind of hammer that sees the whole world as a nail.

Plain and simple guys... If you need/want a hero, look to the graphic novel scene, not among the ranks of professional athletes. Meantime, I plan to enjoy the show without making any accusations that aren't empirically supportable.

atbman

Warning: very looong post
As I've written elsewhere, Sky's set-up is different from pretty much every team in recent history, in that it is, essentially, an arm of the UK's governing body, British Cycling, possibly the most successful governing body in the history of any sport in the UK (except, perhaps rowing)
Brief history lesson:
Sport England is the funding body for all of UK sport. It set Olympic targets, after several poor sets of Olympic results, for numbers of medals in a variety of sports, excluding those in which we had no history (UK basketball, anyone?)
Cue Chris Boardman, Barcelona pursuit gold, followed by wholesale kicking out of old guard in the British Cycling Federation (BCF), followed by appointing Peter Keen, sports scientist working with Boardman, followed by carefully drawn up plan for track medals in Worlds/Olympics. Why? Because track has fewer variables than road and training and assessment of performance improvement is more easily measured and modified.
Cue Manchester Velodrome built, BCF becomes British Cycling (BC) and moves to Manchester, carefully drawn up plans resulting in sizeable (£ms) grants to fulfill medal goals.
Hour records for Boardman and Yvonne McGregor, Sydney Games, multiple medals -> more funding -> more medals, continuous assessment/improvements to training methods, funding grants for riders removing money worries (Yvonne McG had, at one stage, been reduced to buying single carrots!) -> more medals/world records, etc.
From winning only occasional track medals we became the dominant force in track racing, thro’ acute attention to detail in training, diet, training camps, equipments, gym work, rigorous (and ruthless) talent and team selection (Hoy not selected for the sprint in 2012 Games – UK still won it!), sports psychology and physiology etc., etc.
No doubt some on this forum will say it was all down to drugs. However, consider the risk of doing this. If caught (and testing improving all the time – remember the Italian rider kicked out of the Giro for taking CERA which was, his supplier told him, so new that there was no way of testing for it?) it would have destroyed the sport in the UK, resulted in a very large number of BC staff being banned and all dreams of future success down the tubes for years as funding was taken away.
The long-term plan was always to move into road racing only after high level funding secured thro’ Olympic success. The early stages saw junior talent teams sent to live abroad and blooded in lesser continental races culminating in - Goal: TdF victory in 5 years.
Steep learning curve, mistakes made, including Leinders and old guard types like Sean Yates. Introduction of new coaching blood from swimming looking at training methods , making them more specialised, etc. resulting in Wiggins victory.
Same suspicions (understandable, given the sport’s drug record) but no proof. References made to Armstrong saying same things, altho’ not quite – I don’t remember him saying that he’d never taken drugs, only that he’d never failed a drugs test. But bear in mind that he told Oprah that out-of-competition testing was virtually unknown in his day. Random o-o-c testing now far more frequent tho’ some on this forum are saying that micro-dosing is virtually undetectable. This, courtesy of a coroner’s toxicologist, whose sports physiology qualifications are unknown and whose expertise probably doesn’t include deaths by micro-dosing. The question which occurs to me is what training effect would virtually undetectable micro-dosing have, by the way? Anyone know, by which I mean does anyone have any references to reliable studies?
So, finally, altho’ no-one can rule drugs out entirely:
1. Since this is, essentially, a British Cycling team, why would Dave Brailsford and BC put at risk everything they’ve already done, knowing it would tarnish our Olympic and Worlds success story?
2. How would they evade detection thro’ the random testing process – if you say micro-dosing, please provide validated studies?
3. If it was the individual rider and not the team, how would they hide this from the team management?
4. Is it possible, that, in a world where traditional teams are only just copying Sky by warming down on rollers/turbo-trainers, that the totality of the Brailsford/BC approach of multiple small gains across the board, tried and tested since the Sydney Olympics (and earlier) could not produce results which the previous generation could only achieve with the aid of drugs?
5. As for Froome not having achieved anything before, just consider what he did do while suffering from billharzia, a liver fluke disease, common in Africa, which causes anaemia, amongst other unpleasant, and non-cycle racing friendly things.
And yes I’m English, so I accept that I’m probably biased.
And by the way, much play has been made of Sky not releasing power output figures as tho’ this is somehow underhanded and suspicious. Hmmm, let’s see, if I’m a competitor and his coach and I know that Froome et al can produce such and such wattage on Ventoux, etc., don’t you think it might be very useful info to have when preparing for next year?

TommyBing

The strange thing is that we really aren't hearing about the multitude of novel, undetectable, gene-based chemical therapies which are already developed.

We are now into the true golden age of doping, where nothing will be detectable. Ribonucleotide reductase. That's where it's at. Efficient gene repair. Crazy how pointless these cyclists and their lives are. From pot belge to friggin' novel gene therapy, these are just sad little children who never really get to have a life, little pawns.

Lance Armstrong was playing with Duplo blocks compared to what Sky has access to.

https://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...8EF70520120315

Leinster

"2. How would they evade detection thro’ the random testing process – if you say micro-dosing, please provide validated studies?"

It's not a peer-reviewed, validated study, but tyler Hamilton's book is pretty clear that, once there was an official test for EPO, and they knew they couldn't load up with the full dose, they worked out that they could maintain high haematocrit levels by micro-dosing and not get caught. These guys were blood-testing regularly and monitoring everything that went into and out of their systems. If they say micro-dosing was helping, I'm inclined to believe them.

Unless/until WADA has worked out how to accurately detect MD (and Hamilton's book has been out long enough now that I would hope they have some ideas), there is no reason to eliminate it as a possible doping strategy in the current peloton.



As to your point about "any positive test would ruin all the work they've put in." Well that applies to any cyclist that has ever doped. It applies to the Spanish tennis players and footballers that Fuentes says he helped. It applies to Marion Jones and Carl Lewis. Brailsford and Froome are not unique in having everything to lose if it does turn out they're doping.