Sky themselves put them up in that pedestal and then the whole thing came tumbling down …
An extremely foolish thing for Sky to have done, in retrospect. On the other hand, the moral landscape has already changed so much since Team Sky’s inception that it’s unfair to judge their past behaviour by today’s standards.
Not sure how anyone could confuse Salbutamol and EPO, but you may be right.
I only mean that people will think they’re both cheating or attempts to cheat, whereas EPO improves performance while the serious people
seem to think salbutamol does not.
Fun tweet by Michael Hutchinson
here.Earlier in the thread there was some speculation about salbutamol being a masking agent (like a diuretic). The testing director at the French AFLD (national doping agency)
told Daniel Friebe it doesn’t work like that.
Any early guesses on how this will pan out? I think there’s a chance Froome will pass the pharmacokinetic test, true to his freaky nature. If he or his advisers thought there was no chance, I doubt he would have made such promising noises about the Giro.
On the other hand, I don’t think he’s already done the test (or passed it), or he and Sky would sound a bit cockier now. Probably it’s very hard to get the urine concentration to 2000 ng/ml without exceeding the 1600 μg dose in 24 hours or 800 μg in 12 hours. You’d have to assume there’s a real risk Froome exceeded the allowed dose on the day of that Vuelta stage, perhaps panicking at his asthma symptoms.
If he doesn’t pass the pharmacokinetic test, he might try to take an argument to WADA about the validity of the test. That would be messy and his reputation would be shot with large sections of the public even if he (a) didn’t exceed the allowed dose, and (b) successfully changed the rules (two big ifs).
In his favour, the UCI will be worried about being sued if they call the shots wrong or indeed if they’re found liable for the leak. They’re going to need a waterproof case here.