You have misquoted me, I didn't say that Lemond called Sky's training methods bollocks. I said he called marginal gains bollocks.
What is marginal gains if not a description of Sky's approach to training? The term is just management jargon anyway, it really doesn't mean anything.
It isn't just a description of training. It's a description of everything.....which is why they blat on about equipment, mattresses, pillows, etc etc.
Of course it's jargon, but it is being used to explain inexplicable performance gains.
And this is where we -and an awful lot of intelligent observers - disagree. Actually, the concept of 'marginal gains' applies to all professional sport, and will continue to do so. Changes in training technique, diet and equipment will always and continually enable people to achieve better and better results. That may spook you, but it's a fact that I - a 60 year old man with no history of elite athleticism - can out-perform an elite athlete of 100 years ago while surviving on a diet of beer and burgers, simply because the limited amount of training I do is better focussed than anything they did, and the equipment I ride is from another level of technology to anything they could imagine. Over years and years, that encapsulates marginal gains. But I've occasionally used cough and cold remedies that would have disqualified me from competition, even though they would have made absolutely no difference to the end result. But, hey-ho, I'm probably part of the problem...
Righto.
So Sky are using Pinarellos from space, unavailable to anyone else, and all the other teams are using steel Bianchis from the 1920s?
Sky are using training techniques that nobody else knows about and team staff and riders have their memories wiped clean when they move to other teams so that they can't take the techniques with them?
What people were doing 50 years ago is neither here nor there. Nobody is saying that nutrition, equipment and training techniques haven't and can't improve, but you'd have to be particularly blinkered to think that these gains are only available to one team and the benefits stop working once riders leave that one team.
Sure you can try and improve everything, but again that cannot account for the dominance of one sole team, whose Tour de France roster all seem to be able to reach the performance of their careers at the same time. It can't account for a rider like Froome, whose contract with Sky was coming to an end and unlikely to be renewed, suddenly transforming from a back of the pack nobody to the best rider in the world.
Oh, sorry. I forgot he unknowingly had Bilharzia for years and Sky (and only Sky) looked into why he was under performing and cured him with marginal gains.
You and the British media have lapped this shit up. We've seen it all before. Last time it was called CTS, the Carmichael Training System, and Lance Armstrong used it to train harder than anybody else. Nobody else thought to train a bit harder.
So now we find out that Wiggins used the drug of choice of the 1980s and won lots of races. We find that Brailsford has run out of bullshit to spout and that there is interest at Parliamentary level into what Sky have been doing.
