Wookiebiker wrote:
Power13 wrote:
You realize that is exactly my point, right? All these guys come into the Tour with the intention and desire to be on peak form. But it isn't an exact science and sometimes you miscalculate.
The reality is that AC is not performing at his normal levels for the Tour and was even off form leading up to it. Now, it may be his new "non-beef" diet or mistakes in his prep or something else, but he is not at the top of his game.
How many scarecrows did you need to abduct to come up with this strawman argument
IIRC, he was one of the people going against LA in the debates last year. you know going up against so few apologists out there.
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- You can't use climbing rates as an indicator of doping because they could have a tail wind or are drafting
- You can't use power as a measure of doping because you don't know their weight or their bike weight
for your first point, climb values
may be useful, but in most cases the confidence value isn't high enough. Some of us are scientists, and saying that you have a preponderance (51% vs 49%) of evidence can't convince many of us. Hell, we may even be 70%-30% on the matter of whether someone is doping, but being 70% sure is good enough for only suspicion but not good enough for conviction. That people are comparing VAM values from climbs of different gradients and length only dilute the strength of their argument. I will say that something is suspicious, and in my anti-doping fervor, may say that they are doped to the gills, but with a cooler head, i can only reasonably say that i'm suspicious. Contrast this to LA, where the evidence was simply overwhelming
as for your second, we simply don't have the power numbers. Power numbers from VAM estimates are notorious off. In a sport where 6-7% increase in performance is a sign of doping, the error associated with VAM is sometimes as great as 10-12%. For those who are scientifically trained, that's just not acceptable.
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It's like listening to the commentary from 1999-2005 ... same arguments, same tactics, same domination of competition, same ability to both climb and TT, Froome has a medical background story to call on, superior genetics, etc.
and that generates quite a bit of suspicion, and that's all it does warrant at the present time
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If history has told us anything ... if something looks too good to be true ... it is!
i don't disagree with that, but then again, there's nothing more substantive to convince me beyond any doubt that he's doping.
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Froome doesn't pass the sniff//eye test any way you look at it. People can delude themselves all they want and come up with every excuse they want to explain his superior performance compared to the best riders in the world and keep their head in the sand or they can realize, doping is still very prevalent and some are better than others.
All I can say is "WOW" ... just "WOW".
You sound like you'd fit quite well in the cyclingnews clinic forum, where any good performance by anyone (with or without any shred of suspicion) is deemed as evidence of doping unless proven otherwise.
On a level between naive---reasonable level of cynicism---fully cynical, you seem to be in the last group. Before the reasoned decision came out, lot of the LA supporters last November are probably in the first group, and some stayed there until LA went on Oprah. Many more of us are between the 2nd and the third group. Now, there's nothing wrong with being fully cynical, but you need to be honest enough with yourself to realize that when your prediction of someone guilty is indeed found to be true, it says nothing about your ability to reason, only that the net you cast is so wide that it ensnared everyone, including those who don't merit it in the first place. You may indeed say that pro cyclists deserve that level of treatment given the sport's past, but at least you need to be honest enough with yourself to realize that you reached your conclusion not by evidence and reason, which in the end is not too different from the people who believed LA to the very end.
Peter Flax ‏@Pflax1
Bill Strickland ‏@TrueBS
