Cycling thread 2015

[Eggs]

Porte catching Quintana, trying to snatch some bonus seconds.

.....impressive from Porte. Not an avid watcher but really enjoy the TDF, amazing sport.

 

[admirschleck]

"Marginal gains" lol.

 

[Bruce Wayne]

Yates and Thomas also well up. 2 minutes to van Garderen though. Contador @ 2m51

 

[Bruce Wayne]

Nibali a good 4 minutes down.

 

[Frank Gallagher]

ive not witnessed dominance in the mountains like that sine .. ermmmmm, lance Armstrong.

froome kicked with 7km all up hill to go and dropped quintana by a whole minute (in 7kms) and people like contador, valverde, NIBALI (by 3 mins+)


its a helluva ride and i dont think anyone will get anywhere near him now.

it just begs a question.....

 

[Bruce Wayne]

Froome with 3 minutes on his nearest rival on GC now, with Thomas in 5th spot!

 

[Bruce Wayne]

That certainly looks good from a British perspective!

 

[Frank Gallagher]

is it possible to make the whole GC contenders blow up in one day? the odds of that must be quite high. NO-ONE had ANYTHING for him. ive not seen the peleton blow up that easily before. especially on the first HILLY stage.

fair play to froome for attacking like he has. suppose we'll see if it will affect him in the next couple of pyrinees stages. maybe the others are holding back (highly unlikely tho having seen the state of them. Nibali could hardly peddle at one point)

and with richie porte beating quinatana too.. ?????? that is quite unbelievable, porte is a domestique who would have put the hard miles in before today, whereas quintana is getting lead up to the mountain. ???????? !!!!

 

[admirschleck]

Do you believe sky riders use peds? Ive always questioned them. Is dave brailsford a fraud??

Also, team skys wins in the tour arent too far off the times set by superhuman lance armstrong. Is this at all possible by just using different training methods and machinery, marginal gains as dave puts it?

Here is an answer for you from a cycling forum I am part of. All credits to the guy who wrote this (not me). NOTE: It really is a LONG post, so enjoy.

Well, I'm not going to tell you to read the full Sky Doping/Hate Thread, since it's already quite long and there's waaay too many unuseful posts (read = pure speculation against Sky without any real indication, or, mostly, biased fanboy posts in favor of Sky which are even worse in terms of lacking evidence). That said, there are also several well written posts, you just have to dig for them. Anyway, to complement on Aquarius' post, which states mostly recent facts, here are a few other ones:

Back when they were created, Sky signed by a list of principles. Here's a quote by Paul Kimmage on that:
It must have weighed half a ton. As you would expect from Brailsford, every i was dotted and every t was crossed.
Their goal was to win the Tour de France with a clean British rider in the next five years. To achieve that goal, the team would employ only British doctors who had never worked in cycling before.
The team would not employ anyone who had been associated with doping. The team would have a zero tolerance of doping. Staff would be ‘enthusiastic and positive, fit and healthy and willing to try new things’.


Soon they'd start breaking most of those anti-doping principles. When they hired a new doctor in 2011, not only it wasn't a British one, nor one who had never worked in cycling before, and definitely not one who had never been associated with doping, much to the contrary - Geert Leinders. Somehow, Leinders entering the team staff came just a bit before Sky started to be a dominating force in the stage races, and eventually GTs. Not long after, they started working with another curious doctor (iirc as a replacement for Leinders), Fabio Bartalucci. Italian, had worked with cycling and, most importantly, another one linked to doping after the 2001 San Remo doping raids during the Giro.

Apart from that, they also had a huge change in transparency. Neither Leinders nor Bartalucci appeared among the staff on Sky's website; it took long for Brailsford to confirm that Leinders was working with them; they had claimed they would be releasing all useful data to try to confirm they are clean, but when they were asked to do so Brailsford came with an extremely lame excuse, to quote: "There is so much pseudo science out there right now. If you release the data, there are very few people who can properly interpret and understand that data. All you’re going to do is create is a lot of noise for people who are pseudo scientists."

And while still in the transparency topic, they've started to forbid journalists to ask questions related to doping; Wiggins went from being a guy who swears at dopers to swearing at journalists asking doping questions and who praises Armstrong for 'all the amazing things he has done to the sport'.

Then there's the riders. Once again the plan was to not hire suspicious riders, or riders with doping backgrounds - yet, when you look at UCI's dopingsuspicious list, you'll find several Sky riders in the "most likely doping" category (4 or above), and even other riders in the "overwhelming evidence of doping" (from 6 to 10). Also interesting to note that some riders in these categories were not with Sky at the time but would later be hired on the team, such as Michael Rogers (who also was part of T-Mobile's doping program in 2006) - going quite on the opposite direction of a "we won't be hiring suspicious riders" policy.

But of course it doesn't limit only to riders - there's their performances, of course. Or rather, their improvement. Wiggins - you certainly can't say he came from nowhere, but doing well on the track does absolutely not mean you'll do well on the road, and even more in the mountains - in fact, quite the contrary. However, in 2012, Wiggins not only improved in climbing - leaving everyone else except for Froome behind on the TdF - but also improved on time trials, not losing a single one of those that year!

Froome, however, truly comes from nowhere. I'm not even sure what his best result before 2011 would be, 2nd in the UCI B World Championships TT, being beaten by China's supreme time-trialist Ma Haijun? Or to put it this way: from 2006 to pre-Vuelta 2011, he scored a grand total of 860 CQ Ranking points. After that, in post-Vuelta 2011, 2012 and 2013, he's scored 4910 points. Now, there's the very badly told story of bilharzia and all, but:
a) it's believed he contracted it at 2010. Prior to 2010, he also had barely shown anything to even guarantee a contract with a WT team.
b) if anything, bilharzia would slow his development, not make him one of the world's best climbers weeks after he got rid of it.

Still in terms of riders' improvements, you'll notice that, mainly since 2012, some Sky riders have shown tremendous improvements - however, coincidentally enough, these riders nearly always happened to be part of the select 'mountain train' of Sky. F.e., Michael Rogers, claiming in 2012 he was putting out even better numbers than 2006; Richie Porte, going from a 7th (9th without monster breakaway) in 2010's Giro to nothing in 2011 to pulling the pack everyday in the 2012's Tour to dropping literally the whole field at some points of last year's Tour, among others. However, you mainly wouldn't see this sort of improvement that their new "training methods" and "marginal gains" offered being applied to the non-climbers, like Hagen and Flecha. I don't remember Sky dominating the classics as they did in the GTs.

But what if Froome, Wiggins weren't really riding that well and simply it was the rest of the competition that would have gone down a lot? Well, for that there's a useful analysis of watts, climbing times and all! I don't have the exact numbers by head, but in 2012, Froome/Wiggo were pulling out numbers that weren't impossible - but would require them to be pretty much the ultimate human beings adapted to cycling to do it clean. In 2013, Froome went even worse, usually staying a few % above the "threshold of credibility" line (iirc, he did ~410 normalized watts on Ventoux, whereas the threshold for a 1-hour effort would be ~390). Equally, you could take Froome's times in the records and take a look at the ones surrounding him.. not exactly riders who were never linked to doping, right? (though watts is better since it also involves factors such as wind)

There's probably more, but the post is long enough to make my point. To conclude, surely there isn't concrete evidence that would put Sky as 'guilty' in a court room, but this is cycling, a sport whose history has proven the doping'accusations' in these type of situations to be correct nearly always. In fact, considering that usually a single doping link is enough to confirm, with quite some confidence, that someone might or not be doping (that's what the sport's history has shown), it's hard to believe that upon so many links Sky is truly as clean as we wish they could be. Unfortunately, in the end it's the same story over and over.

 

[Bruce Wayne]

is it possible to make the whole GC contenders blow up in one day? the odds of that must be quite high. NO-ONE had ANYTHING for him. ive not seen the peleton blow up that easily before. especially on the first HILLY stage.

fair play to froome for attacking like he has. suppose we'll see if it will affect him in the next couple of pyrinees stages. maybe the others are holding back (highly unlikely tho having seen the state of them. Nibali could hardly peddle at one point)

and with richie porte beating quinatana too.. ?????? that is quite unbelievable, porte is a domestique who would have put the hard miles in before today, whereas quintana is getting lead up to the mountain. ???????? !!!!

Nibali was a surprise. Fuglsang said he cracked mentally and practically gave up today. Contador is perhaps less of a surprise given he had a hard Giro in his legs. Uran had an even worse day so that is perhaps indicative.

Quintana wasn't that far behind, and we have to remember that Porte was in superb form in the early season and has largely taken it easy in the first week, whereas Quintana has struggled to stay up on the 'classic' style stages.

 

[Frank Gallagher]

Nibali was a surprise. Fuglsang said he cracked mentally and practically gave up today. Contador is perhaps less of a surprise given he had a hard Giro in his legs. Uran had an even worse day so that is perhaps indicative.

Quintana wasn't that far behind, and we have to remember that Porte was in superb form in the early season and has largely taken it easy in the first week, whereas Quintana has struggled to stay up on the 'classic' style stages.

quintana was hottly tipped to win today tho and close the gap on froome.. (even talk of him taking the yellow) ... instead he finds himself further behind. its not just the time difference now, its the mental edge that froome has shown.

 

[Bruce Wayne]

quintana was hottly tipped to win today tho and close the gap on froome.. (even talk of him taking the yellow) ... instead he finds himself further behind. its not just the time difference now, its the mental edge that froome has shown.

Oh for sure, Froome has socked it to them big time here, and the mental blog of Porte coming back and snatching 2nd spot can't be under-estimated. It isn't that surprising though as Quintana has had a very quiet year thus far wit a win in TA being his only real performance of note, and that was a race where Steve Cummings was only 40 seconds back so it wasn't really a high quality field.

Movistar made a boob with their tactics I think as they shed most of their team early on, and the Valverde attack was a bit weak. Left the way open for the Sky train to put the hurt on.

It's worth remembering that even with the 2nd spot today, Richie Porte is 79th on GC, some 45 minutes back. He's taken it really easy in the first week so should be fresh really.

The surprise for me was Thomas. He's shown he can be there in the classics this season but has never really climbed as well as this before. He's been the key man for Froome thus far, helping him through the classics stages and now being there at the sharp end in the mountains. Very impressive.

 

[Frank Gallagher]

Oh for sure, Froome has socked it to them big time here, and the mental blog of Porte coming back and snatching 2nd spot can't be under-estimated. It isn't that surprising though as Quintana has had a very quiet year thus far wit a win in TA being his only real performance of note, and that was a race where Steve Cummings was only 40 seconds back so it wasn't really a high quality field.

Movistar made a boob with their tactics I think as they shed most of their team early on, and the Valverde attack was a bit weak. Left the way open for the Sky train to put the hurt on.

It's worth remembering that even with the 2nd spot today, Richie Porte is 79th on GC, some 45 minutes back. He's taken it really easy in the first week so should be fresh really.

The surprise for me was Thomas. He's shown he can be there in the classics this season but has never really climbed as well as this before. He's been the key man for Froome thus far, helping him through the classics stages and now being there at the sharp end in the mountains. Very impressive.

thomas has shed as stone over the last year and it wouldnt surprise me to see him leave for another team to go for the GC next year.

porte is already leaving for BMC.

if froome wins this year i cant see him riding for Thomas as a domestique... unless froome moves on to another team and sky go with Thomas. i like that idea personally

 

[sbbefc]

Geraint is an absolute beast. Has to be the best all round rider in the world, classics winner and has shown he more than holds his own in the mountains, even after a whole 8 days of riding at the front.

 

[Frank Gallagher]

Geraint is an absolute beast. Has to be the best all round rider in the world, classics winner and has shown he more than holds his own in the mountains, even after a whole 8 days of riding at the front.

after today he about 6th overall!