- Oct 2, 2004
- 48,332
- 47,589
- Staff
- #41
This Lacets de Montvernier climb looks very impressive
Let's hope that tit who took out Geraint Thomas is a bit more careful today. On that road he could kill everybody!
This Lacets de Montvernier climb looks very impressive
It's not just the french media though. Paul kimmage has been also asking questions. Sky haven't handled it as well as they promised when they set out.At the very least it proves that French TV's estimate of Froome's power output being over 7 w/kg was wildly inaccurate, and that his performance on stage 10 wasn't untoward for his ability.
It won't stop the French media throwing wild insinuations around, though. Perhaps we should just let a Frenchman win the Tour next year...
This Lacets de Montvernier climb looks very impressive
It's not just the french media though. Paul kimmage has been also asking questions. Sky haven't handled it as well as they promised when they set out.
They've done more than most teams have (but then no other team has faced as many constant questions as they have), and I don't recall any other team having a staff amnesty like they did a couple of years ago, resulting in their top directeur sportif leaving (and Tinkoff-Saxo had no hesitation in signing him up).
As far as today goes, Nibali is a lying little git.
He took the chance when it came. Still not going to help him though, it is that Columbian Froome has to worry about.
Today's stage is going to decide the winner of the Tour, and what a finish on the Alpe D'huez.
I know...It's the unwritten rule though, not attacking your rivals when they have a mechanical, like when Wiggo called a halt to racing when Cadel punctured because some douche had chucked tacks all over the road in 2012. Everyone did, except Rolland. I'm sure Nibali will have appreciated that no one attacked when he punctured in the first couple of km of Alpe d'Huez today.
I know...
But stuff him... Froome did a great job today, he did what he had to do and done it
Good win for the Kenyan lad...
Seems there might have been some truth to this post...Team Sky - "We still dope better than anyone else"
Seems there might have been some truth to this post...
TUEs? Which have to be ratified by the UCI and signed off by three different independent doctors. What Froome and Wiggins have done is permitted, it's a far cry from Dirty Bertie and his dodgy butcher, or Van Avermaet pumping himself full of cortisone and ozone therapy.
The whole sport is still dirty.
Olympic time trial silver medallist, Tom Dumoulin
“This is not something they do with normal asthmatics, let alone athletes who only have exercise-induced asthma. Apparently Wiggins’s injection also worked for weeks – then in my opinion you should be out of competition for weeks. That thing stinks.”
Wiggins’ former doctor Dr Prentice Steffen
“I was surprised to see there were TUEs documented for intramuscular triamcinolone just before three major events - two Tours de France and one Tour d’Italia. I would say certainly now in retrospect it doesn’t look good, it doesn’t look right from a health or sporting perspective.”
He received a corticosteroid injection just four days before the 2012 prologue in Liège. Wiggins’s version of this episode, as told yesterday ina peculiar interview with Andrew Marr, is surprising. “In June and July, I was struggling right throughout that period,” he said, describing his breathing difficulties with asthma. “I was having problems.”
A glance at Wiggins’s results over those two months in 2012 would suggest anything but a man struggling with his health.
In June, he won the Critérium du Dauphiné – only the third British cyclist in history to do so – and, in July, he accomplished his historic triumph in Le Tour itself.
He had also won Paris-Nice and the Tour de Romandie that season. What is more, there were no comments in any of his press conferences building up to the Tour de France that referred to his respiratory condition. On the contrary, he seemed brimful of confidence.
Wiggins might have hoped that an appearance with Marr, Britain’s foremost political interviewer, would lend his explanations the necessary gravitas.
He had, after all, cancelled a planned audience with sports reporters with far greater knowledge of his career and his sport than Marr.
In a bizarre six-minute exchange, Wiggins’s most memorable line was that he sought therapeutic use exemptions (TUEs) to “put himself back on a level playing field”. Never an astute choice of words, this. Especially as they are most famously attributed in cycling to a certain Lance Armstrong. “I looked up the definition of cheating and the definition is ‘to gain an advantage on a rival or foe’,” the disgraced Texan told Oprah Winfrey in 2013. “I did not view it that way. I viewed it as a level playing field.”