“No question” over validity of Giro d’Italia win, insists Chris Froome

Yorkshire wallet wrote:

So if Froome gets punished will they take anything Vuelta and onward away? 

My understanding is that due to the nature of the infraction, he will lose his Vuelta result only. 

This is based on the premise that Salbutamol is not recognised as performance enhancing and its control is about managing athlete health. Froome if found guilty, risked his health by overdosing on the drug, and therefore will be stripped of the relevant title and banned accordingly. 

His other results will not be seen to be achieved with the benefit of doping and are therefore vaild. 

Not sure how I feel about that if I am honest.

What I am sure of is that Froome should not be racing with this hanging over his head. Aligned to this, the delay in process is reaching farcical levels. I would love to know where the delay is being generated. I would say that its in Sky's interest to time this out until after the Tour however.

Bag the tour title, then accept a six month sanction (at a time when he would be long overdue an extended rest) and we all start again next march. Boom no harm done!

As for Sky and Froome in general. There is a stink of USPS about this. By that I mean that the 'lie' is now so seemingly big, that its very size is the one thing giving it credibility. 

Would Sky make these huge, bold claims if they were really implementing a strucutred doping programme? 

Looking at Frooms performance post last rest day, him and his team rode exactly as though they'd had a blood transfusion on the day off... like the good old days. 

I can't believe they'd be doing this and all the while talking shit like they do. It really is starting to look like a repeat of the greatest doping scandal the world has seen.

Or they are not doing anything... and they are indeed being wrongly castigated. Whilst there are indeed similarities, there are some big differences too. No Ferrari, no high profile ex teammates getting popped. 

Jimmy Ray Will wrote:

What I am sure of is that Froome should not be racing with this hanging over his head.

Tell that to the UCI and WADA.

Jimmy Ray Will wrote:

Looking at Frooms performance post last rest day, him and his team rode exactly as though they'd had a blood transfusion on the day off... like the good old days. 

You mean the time trial - the one where Dumoulin and 4 other riders were faster than Froome?

Or are you mentioning it because De La Cruz and Kiryienka were 9th & 10th (having untypically not had to lead the peloton for a week or more). The next Sky rider was Poels, over 2 minutes down.

How is that proof indicative of blood transfusions?

Meanwhile no lingering noise about Aru's performance that day - 8th. Before that uncharacteristically stellar TT performance he was already 25 minutes behind Yates overall and threw in the towel a few days later. And without that I can tell you that a bloke who doesn't time trial well cannot leap that far up the results solely by drafting over a rolling 34 km course with a tailwind.

Nobody doubted Nieve's solo win on stage 20 after spending much of the previous 3 weeks working for Yates.

What about stage winner Chaves' sudden evaporation of form? At least the team didn't claim it was food poisoning, as PDM once did.

I'll quote you a comment from an article I read earlier (and no, not Philippa York's disappointing diatribe):

"They say the quality of your win lies in who you beat, and Froome didn’t exactly slay a decade’s worth of top rivals with his now-famous ride on Friday."

Pinot contracted pneumonia; Yates burned his matches in the first two weeks; Lopez & Carapaz are young guns with no serious GT history; 5th, 6th and 7th places were filled by Pozzovivo, Bilbao and Konrad. 8th was George Bennett while Sunweb's Sam Oomen, supposedly a mountain domestique for Dumoulin, was 9th.

US Postal mk II? Really?

Simon E wrote:

You mean the time trial - the one where Dumoulin and 4 other riders were faster than Froome?

<snip>

Simon,

Stop talking sense. Stop not sounding like a gnarly arsehole who thinks he knows it all. Stop not throwing down your opinion as if it were cast iron facts when it actually bares no resemblance to reality.

It will never catch on around here.

handlebarcam wrote:

Quote:

...only the third, after Eddy Merckx and Bernard Hinault, to have been champion of each of them at the same time.

Sadly, in future books of cycling history, this will always come with an asterisk. Whether that asterisk points to a footnote that says, "but he was stripped of his Vuelta jersey", or "all but his TDF victories were voided", or just "however, these were won while part of the widely discredited Sky team" depends on the outcome of pending hearings.

Pity, because he seems a nice-enough fellow on the surface.

Yes a real shame - why are people not putting an asterix against victories of Merckx and Hinault, mentioned here, who both had their brush with the drugs testers? Are they, and / or their teams not discredited too?

700c wrote:

handlebarcam wrote:

Quote:

...only the third, after Eddy Merckx and Bernard Hinault, to have been champion of each of them at the same time.

Sadly, in future books of cycling history, this will always come with an asterisk. Whether that asterisk points to a footnote that says, "but he was stripped of his Vuelta jersey", or "all but his TDF victories were voided", or just "however, these were won while part of the widely discredited Sky team" depends on the outcome of pending hearings.

Pity, because he seems a nice-enough fellow on the surface.

Yes a real shame - why are people not putting an asterix against victories of Merckx and Hinault, mentioned here, who both had their brush with the drugs testers? Are they, and / or their teams not discredited too?

Indeed - I guess there are plenty of new fans to cycling who think the doping is new; here's my 'doping in cycling' overview timeline; http://bikeby.bike/bikes/cycling-drugs-timeline/