gonetomorrow
Player Valuation: £70m
Ennis should win it. She's got star quality. I think, however, one of the Paralympians will win.
Wiggins or Murray
- Thread starter neil999
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moosed
Player Valuation: £30m
Murray because just like most cyclists Wiggins was blatantly charged up...
Consider that:
1. A ton of riders on his team meteorically improved their performances recently (Chris Froome in the past 12 months now widely being regarded as the biggest overnight transformation in the history of the sport)
2. At that same time they stopped publishing the blood profiles that they promised to post
3. They went out and signed several riders that were listed on the World Anti-Doping Agency's list of blood passport values under the "Overwhelming circumstancial evidence of doping" category AFTER that list was made public
4. His overnight transformation happened at the exact same time they replaced their team doctor with a notorious figure who's been at the head of some major doping scandals in the past
Consider that:
1. A ton of riders on his team meteorically improved their performances recently (Chris Froome in the past 12 months now widely being regarded as the biggest overnight transformation in the history of the sport)
2. At that same time they stopped publishing the blood profiles that they promised to post
3. They went out and signed several riders that were listed on the World Anti-Doping Agency's list of blood passport values under the "Overwhelming circumstancial evidence of doping" category AFTER that list was made public
4. His overnight transformation happened at the exact same time they replaced their team doctor with a notorious figure who's been at the head of some major doping scandals in the past
Fairly sure all of those are actually false.
moosed
Player Valuation: £30m
Nope, not false at all. Feel free to go and look into all of them.
I wouldn't single him out for it usually as the majority of top cyclists are charged and thus he still won relative to the other dopers but seeing as this thread is specifically about him vs murray I thought I'd mention it.
I wouldn't single him out for it usually as the majority of top cyclists are charged and thus he still won relative to the other dopers but seeing as this thread is specifically about him vs murray I thought I'd mention it.
manxtoffee
******
Brad smoking crack shocker!
No seriously, I'm a bit of tennis fan and no homeboy since arl great Fred Perry has won one of the big uns, so that within it's self is a monumental achievement by Andy Murray, nevermind the Olympics! This said I feel Brad shades it as winning the 'Tour' without the use of blood transfusions, EPO etc or more surprisingly with a crack addition must come in as the most awesome achievement known to man.
No seriously, I'm a bit of tennis fan and no homeboy since arl great Fred Perry has won one of the big uns, so that within it's self is a monumental achievement by Andy Murray, nevermind the Olympics! This said I feel Brad shades it as winning the 'Tour' without the use of blood transfusions, EPO etc or more surprisingly with a crack addition must come in as the most awesome achievement known to man.
moosed
Player Valuation: £30m
He was blatantly doping for tour de France. Just because you test clean means nothing these days as new methods of doping are constantly being used and it usually takes up to ten years to come up with a completely full proof method of testing.
This is why cycling will always have dopers, I say just allow doping, get rid of suspision and negative views surrounding it and just let them go at it.
This is why cycling will always have dopers, I say just allow doping, get rid of suspision and negative views surrounding it and just let them go at it.
I agree with the allowing of doping, I'd get rid of all drug testing for all sports actually.
The vast majority of top level athletes are using drugs, just because they pass the tests does not mean they are clean.
Look at Marion Jones, never failed a drugs test. Only got caught because the Lab ( Balco ) was turned over. I think she might have done some bird for lying to the grand court.
Performance enhancing drugs are evolving all the time, the new drugs will always be a step ahead of the testing procedures. Sport is far from clean, I think all sports at elite level are riddled.
Ok,
1. Who has massively improved their performance exactly? I'm fairly sure Froome had achieved a top 20 in the world TT as a youngster, and his progress since then has been stinted by a pretty major illness. Who else are we talking about here? Porte has been top 10 in a GT before, as had Suitsou. Rogers was a world TT champion. EBH if anything hasn't achieved the massive results expected of him yet but has always been a serious talent. You may have heard of Cavendish. He's done ok in the past too. So who has shown bizarre jumps in form exactly?
2. Just because they don't publish them to you doesn't mean they don't publish them. The biological passport is still in operation. Very hard to have drug fueled boosts in performance without your bio readings reflecting that isn't it?
3. Oh give over. That list had Geraint Thomas as one of the highest 'risk' riders. Seriously?
4. The overnight transformation that started when he finished 4th in the Tour whilst at another team you mean? You're assuming Leinders was guilty by association just because he worked for Rabobank, and therefore must be doping the riders at Sky.
Quit stating your own guesses as facts and slandering someone who I suspect works a damn site harder than you and I every day of his life to achieve what he has.
moosed
Player Valuation: £30m
Behind even amateur riders like Dave McCann. His results were awful. That's one single result that's not even good considering the competition, in years and years of racing. Youth racing: nothing. Pro racing: nothing.
An illness that he claims to have gotten over in 2009. Yet by late 2011 he still had literally zero results. Until he was told by Sky his contract would not be renewed. At which point, behold, he went overnight from a guy who in his entire career had not once posted a top 20 in a GT mountain stage, to being the best climber in the race.
There's a reason this is talked about as the most insane overnight transformation in the history of the sport.
Solely due to gaining 14 minutes in a breakaway.
Before this year, with the exception of one stage where only the last 5kms of it were actually raced (and where he still managed to lose two minutes) he had never lost less than five minutes in a mountain stage, ever.
This year he's pulling on the front and dropping elite climbers. That doesn't even begin to be a natural progression.
Who had only climbed well once, back in 2006 when witnesses have testified he was part of "the freiburg gang", getting blood transfusions on the T-Mobile team doping plan. Now he joins sky and he's beating even those performances. Not to mention his TT worlds were all during that wonderful QuickStep era. Go read Sinkewitz's statements if you want to know who was distributing the EPO in that team.
Nobody mentioned those guys. The overnight improvement was with the team's stage racing core, not the classics riders or the sprinters. Not to mention drugs are mostly irrelevant for a sprinter.
That's irrelevant. They promised to publish them, and they didn't.
That would be the WADA doing the testing. Sky's not "publishing" anything.
But since you mentioned the blood passport, go read the testimonies of any recently caught doper such as Thomas Frei. They all say the same: the blood passport is easy to fool as long as you microdose. Because even though your blood values will be very suspicious, they still can't do a damned thing about you since you didn't cross the extremely high Z-score threshold needed to charge you.
So one sentence you use the blood passport as your argument for why they must be clean, and literally the next sentence you question the blood pasport's result list. You're really grasping for straws here
And yes Geraint Thomas. The guy who was on MatxÃn's Saunier Duval team with the well documented team wide doping ring. The guy who was on Claudio Corti (a shady character if cycling has ever had one)'s Barloworld team where several riders tested positive.
That Geraint Thomas. Why, what's your argument? What do you mean by pointing out geraint thomas? That he's clean because he's from an english speaking country? This is a serious question, since that's a very widespread bias among native english speaking fans: "No english name? Doped!"
But even if that list wasn't coming from the world anti doping agency themselves, even if that list wasn't credible, you still don't address the issue: They vowed to never sign any rider even remotely suspected of doping. And they went out and signed oodles of them. Just like they broke the other three rules they promised to live by.
No, I'm assuming Leinders is guilty because he was head doctor at Rabobank and Theo de Rooy, team manager of Rabobank at the time, literally said the medical staff was overseeing the riders' doping program.
No, the overnight transformation this year where he went from a guy who won 0 important time trials in the first 10 years of his career and never lost one in his 11th year. Where for the past 12 months he has more points in the cqranking than any cyclist has ever had for a 12 month span, by an ungodly margin. A guy who in previous years had never finished a year ranked in the world's top 10, and in fact had only twice finished a year ranked in the top 100. This year suddenly he's a monster. That's overnight.
But since you mention that other team:
Wiggins' overnight transformation from guy who gets dropped even by the sprinters to stage racer coincided with another drug entering the sport. AICAR. A drug that sounds like the dream of mankind: makes you lose fat and gain muscle!
Wiggins couldn't climb with even average climbers because he had too much fat and it's literally impossible to lose that fat without also losing muscle and therefore functional threshold power which would make his time trialling way worse.
But with AICAR, it was suddenly possible!
AICAR came into the peloton and immediately reporters started to report that almost every top rider had suddenly become ridiculously skinny. So many commented that andy schleck looked anorexic. This was early 2009, which was when wiggins had that amazing transformation
Now, the proof of this would be to see if wiggins lost tons of weight at that time, right?
Wiggins' legs, late 2008:
Wiggins legs, late 2009
Heres another angle for when you have the inevitable "that has been photoshopped" reaction.
Anything else you'd like to be schooled on
Well in my rubbish amateur cycling career I've managed to increase my power and decrease my weight quite considerably. Sure if a no hoper like me can do it then the pros can do it. Heck I can still lift what I used to on my upper body, have improved my lactate threshold by a comfortable 80 watts and lost 2kg into the bargain. Guess I must be doped up or something if I can do that whilst doing it part-time. Nothing to do with training smarter and eating better.
Re Froome. His first TDF in 2008 he finished 84th, and 12th in the young rider comp. The next year he finished 36th in the Giro. Considering he was in a poor team and was severely hampered in his training that's hardly a bad record in his early years in the pro ranks. If you read around his illness he missed large chunks of last year to it, which is why he didn't ride the Tour last year. It certainly wasn't cleared up by 2009 as you suggest.
Re the passport. If you don't want to believe in the testing, just look at the performances on the road. Times up the major climbs are minutes down on the record ascents of the late 90's/early 00's. Power readings are down. Gone are the 'spectacular' attacks of a Pantani or Armstrong that would see minutes being put into rivals.
In their place is either tempo riding at a constant pace, or attempted attacks near the summit that at best gain a few seconds rather than minutes. If the riders are doping then they're clearly not doing it very well if they're so far down on riders of a few years ago.
Re Wiggins record. If anything it's probably been a perfect storm for him. The Tour parcours was tailor made for him. Contador was obviously not around, Schleck had a shocking year, Basso is largely past it, and few others have been able to challenge. Add to that the fall in Cancellara as a time trialling force, and injury problems to Tony Martin and is it really so surprising?
Re Thomas, he was at Saunier Duval for a matter of months. Reading most stories of doping it's far from uncommon for young riders to enter the sport thinking they can do it clean before reality bites, so it hardly seems impossible that he'd have been clean.
It just sounds to me like you would rather be cynical about it than have any faith whatsoever. That's down to you, but be even with it. Footballers, tennis players and a range of other athletes were found in Operation Puerto too, so why not aim your bile at the tennis guys too. Longest US Open final ever on Monday. Must be doing to drugs right? The Spanish football team suddenly dominating the game, can't be down to skill, must be dope. No one is making those accusations but they have just as much right to as you do in accusing Wiggins.
Tell me, what are you like on a bike?
Re Froome. His first TDF in 2008 he finished 84th, and 12th in the young rider comp. The next year he finished 36th in the Giro. Considering he was in a poor team and was severely hampered in his training that's hardly a bad record in his early years in the pro ranks. If you read around his illness he missed large chunks of last year to it, which is why he didn't ride the Tour last year. It certainly wasn't cleared up by 2009 as you suggest.
Re the passport. If you don't want to believe in the testing, just look at the performances on the road. Times up the major climbs are minutes down on the record ascents of the late 90's/early 00's. Power readings are down. Gone are the 'spectacular' attacks of a Pantani or Armstrong that would see minutes being put into rivals.
In their place is either tempo riding at a constant pace, or attempted attacks near the summit that at best gain a few seconds rather than minutes. If the riders are doping then they're clearly not doing it very well if they're so far down on riders of a few years ago.
Re Wiggins record. If anything it's probably been a perfect storm for him. The Tour parcours was tailor made for him. Contador was obviously not around, Schleck had a shocking year, Basso is largely past it, and few others have been able to challenge. Add to that the fall in Cancellara as a time trialling force, and injury problems to Tony Martin and is it really so surprising?
Re Thomas, he was at Saunier Duval for a matter of months. Reading most stories of doping it's far from uncommon for young riders to enter the sport thinking they can do it clean before reality bites, so it hardly seems impossible that he'd have been clean.
It just sounds to me like you would rather be cynical about it than have any faith whatsoever. That's down to you, but be even with it. Footballers, tennis players and a range of other athletes were found in Operation Puerto too, so why not aim your bile at the tennis guys too. Longest US Open final ever on Monday. Must be doing to drugs right? The Spanish football team suddenly dominating the game, can't be down to skill, must be dope. No one is making those accusations but they have just as much right to as you do in accusing Wiggins.
Tell me, what are you like on a bike?
evilwebby
Player Valuation: £50m
Tbh it is nigh impossible to pick just one sportsman this year. Any one from A dozen or more names would make very worthy SPOTY.
Perhaps if you were to ask me I might go for Ainslie, in recognition of lifetime achievement. Honestly, sailing isn't a sport that gets coverage other than every 4th summer, but to be the greatest olympian of all time in your chosen sport is very very special indeed. Not just the best, but the best in history.
Perhaps if you were to ask me I might go for Ainslie, in recognition of lifetime achievement. Honestly, sailing isn't a sport that gets coverage other than every 4th summer, but to be the greatest olympian of all time in your chosen sport is very very special indeed. Not just the best, but the best in history.
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