Are sky clean or not?

phreak

No tA Doctor wrote:

bobmcstuff wrote:

Just read he first few pages of the Lance thread (Lord knows why) and it seems pretty clear that by the equivalent point in USPS and Lance's career there was a lot more in terms of substantive evidence (investigations, ex team members speaking out etc etc).

With Sky there's none of that, just a load of speculation on the Internet. Sky must be much better at keeping things quiet

The comparison with LA/USPostal is laughable, not just for missing the fact that there was real, solid evidence against LA but in being entirely context free.

LA's first TdF win in '99 was on the back of the Festina affair the year before. Let's just remind ourselves about that, as what was striking wasn't just the amount of riders caught up in it, nor that teams were actively organising doping, but the attitude of the peloton at the time.

Festina were thrown out. All four Spanish teams and one Italian team withdrew from the race, as did TVM shortly after. The peloton staged protests on not one but two stages. ONCE and Banesto supported a Samaranch statement calling for doping to be legalized. Only 96 riders finished the tour. Of the final top ten, six (including the entire podium) tested positive retrospectively. Of 38 riders that were tested retrospectively, 33 were positive (2 of the 5 negative tested riders have since confessed anyway).

When we talk about a culture of doping, that's what it looks like. They really were "all at it" (aside from a handful), and they believed it was their right. Police raids were seen as harassment of riders that were just doing their job professionally, as the sponsors required. Anyone that objected to doping didn't understand cycling. The only reasons any of it was secret or shady was because a) some of it was illegal and b) because nobody needs to know how the sausage is made in case it spoils their appetite.

So even when we had purely performance based suspicion (as there was for LA, before we got the testimonies) it was in a context where we knew cycling was rotten to the core, we knew there was no test for EPO, we knew it gave an absolutely huge advantage, and we knew it was rife in the peloton.

Anyone that thinks cycling hasn't changed at all has a very poor memory.

Plus we have to remember that two months prior to the Tour (and I say this as very much a Pantani fan boy), the 'saviour' of the 98 Tour was thrown out of the 99 Giro having performed the same kind of crazily over the top riding as Armstrong showed at the Tour later that year.