Riding in circles?

Yesterday, I watched highlights of Chris Froome’s latest spectacular Tour de France mountain ascent, where he burst clear from the pack with over 6km left, gaining huge chunks of time right until the end and echoing his mountaintop stage wins in the 2013 Tour. This morning, I sifted through the online postmortem discussions, where the overriding consensus was clear: this guy must be doping.

Not only that, but Froome’s Team Sky colleagues Richie Porte and Geraint Thomas also produced stunning rides, beating established team leaders in the process who didn’t have anybody else to work for. Accepted wisdom in cycling says that whole teams can’t be this dominant over the rest of the field without chemical assistance. My favourite is this race from the dawn of the EPO era when three Gewiss riders casually destroy the field at a frightening speed.

  

Yesterday’s other big story was that somebody appeared to have hacked into Sky’s data logs and had uploaded footage of Froome’s 2013 climb of Mont Ventoux overlaid with his power and heartrate readings. The material was taken down quickly, with Froome and team boss Sir David Brailsford dismissing any conclusions which people might draw from the data, Froome referring to ‘clowns’ who make such interpretations without understanding their full context.

The analysis poured forth nonetheless. Particularly troubling to some was the relative lack of movement in Froome’s heartrate, even when his power output soared as he accelerated to attack. Others pointed out that Froome has a naturally low heart rate, and its steadiness may simply be down to an exceptional genetic anomalies rather than artificial enhancements.

The same was always said of Miguel Indurain. I remember first getting into the Tour on Channel 4, and watching the Spaniard destroy the field in the time trials and still look incredibly strong on the climbs as he won the race for five years straight. Based on what we know now though, he may well have been doped to the gills.

What to believe about Froome?

David Walsh, the Irish journalist who fought a lonely battle in print against Lance Armstrong for years, and was finally vindicated when the Texan ‘fessed up, embedded himself with Team Sky in 2013, and concluded that they had made mistakes recruitment and PR-wise (taking on people with doping pasts after saying they wouldn’t, although it would have been pretty impossible in cycling to find top people who haven’t been involved with drugs in the past), but found no evidence of any doping.

Walsh sounds like a man of integrity, you might think. Ah, the naysayers point out, he works for the Sunday Times, part of the same Murdoch empire that owns Sky. He’ll have been bought off by the Digger! Such conspiracy theorising is a popular internet pastime, of course, but that doesn’t make it impossible that Walsh has turned.

Somewhat more likely is the possibility that Sky are and were doping, and were able to keep it hidden from Walsh. All that budget, ostensibly to pay for the best technology and scientific minds, and the secrecy required to protect it from falling into rival teams’ hands, could just as easily be channeled into a systematic doping programme.

The problem here is that you can counter every argument with a retort. As Brailsford says, ‘The question of how to prove a negative is always going to be a difficult one.’ Sure, yesterday’s Sky dominance is reminiscent of US Postal/Discovery’s in the bad old Armstrong glory days. But the big budget, sports science and marginal gains could be an equally valid explanation for that.

Ultimately, there are plenty of internet naysayers who seem to follow cycling purely to trash it, actively pushing for its destruction. And I’m fascinated to read their opinions, and recognise that what they’re saying now echoes precisely their views on Lance, which have since proven to be depressingly accurate.

Still, there’s always the idealistic part of me that gives people the benefit of the doubt. It’s easy to be cynical. Only a fool would believe that every single professional athlete is clean – so if you suspect everyone, then nobody can accuse you of being a sucker when the latest scandal breaks. But it’s not a very nice way of looking at the world.

My instinct is that Froome and his teammates are exceptional athletes being manipulated by the best doctors and scientists that money can buy – pushing and bending the rules as far as they go without quite breaking them. And I’m pragmatic enough that if a great sporting achievement is struck from the record somewhere down the line, I won’t feel cheated that I wasn’t watching a clean athlete, because I still enjoyed the show at the time.

Is the syringe half full of blood that’s just tested negative for doping, or half empty of new  blood that’s just been pumped back in by Dr Ferrari? Hopelessly naive or not, I’ll go for the former.