Cycling Commentary - Why I Believe Chris Froome Is a Doper - Part II

Introduction

In my last post, I laid out the first half of my case against Chris Froome: that is, why I think (and have long thought) he’s a doper. My aim isn’t to change anybody’s mind on this—I doubt that’s possible, and actually I don’t really care—but rather to explain my position, lest any Froome fans read my biased blow-by-blow race reports and decide I’m a jerk. (I’m not actually out to inflame anybody with this blog.) So in this second and final post on the topic, I finish the effort of humbly explaining my position. I hope you’ll conclude I’m a more or less reasonable person, even if you don’t happen to agree with me about Froome.

In my previous post I countered the following two challenges to my position, taken from a debate I had with a friend: 

• Why suspect Froome just because he’s “too successful”?
• Doesn’t Froome’s consistency demonstrate legitimacy, as opposed to the erratic performances of, say, Floyd Landis?

In this post, I take on my friend’s other two challenges:

• The Lance era is over – why shouldn’t we trust the UCI’s decision on the salbutamol case, and use Froome’s essentially clean slate as the basis for our own assessment?
• How would a positive test for salbutamol suggest a wider doping program anyway?

Before we dive in, let me be clear: of course I cannot prove that Froome is a doper. If nothing less than a giant body of irrefutable evidence is what you’re after, don’t even bother with this—go read something else.

The Lance era is over – why shouldn’t we trust the UCI’s decision on the salbutamol case, and use Froome’s essentially clean slate as the basis for our own assessment?

First of all, the Lance era wasn’t the result of one guy (and his team) getting away with murder. The rampant doping throughout those years demonstrated a fundamentally flawed system of enforcement. The last Tour title to be stripped (retroactively) was 2010 … not that long ago, and three years after Postal/Discovery released its grip on the Tour. The sport has a deep, deep hole to dig out of.

How deep a hole? To make the math easy, let’s round down and say that 10 dopers were exposed by the USADA investigation without ever having tested positive. Let’s say each rider was tested 10 times a year for 10 years. That’s 1,000 false negative samples. When you consider all the different substances riders were tested for, across these 1,000 samples, and when you factor in the wide variety of PEDs these riders ultimately admitted to having used, the number of false negatives snowballs even further. And yet when’s the last time you heard of a bona-fide false positive?

Clearly, the drug testing system has been woefully ineffective, erring radically on the side of false negative tests. For us to believe Froome’s salbutamol test was a false positive flies in the face of this reality. (Frankly, there isn’t a single rider in the peloton today whom I’d give the benefit of the doubt if he tested positive for anything. I’d say, “What a shame, I’d hoped he was clean.”)

So why should we trust the UCI’s decision regarding Froome? After all, they based their ruling on WADA’s findings, and there are plenty of signs that WADA is still not doing a good job of policing the sport (click here and here). The UCI’s refusal to share WADA’s reasoning in clearing Froome is making things worse. What we need is transparency but what we’re getting is, “We got a lot of documents from Sky … it’s all good, trust us.”

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think the whole peloton is doped, and I’ll allow that perhaps things have improved a bit, but I reserve the right to be suspicious of this or that rider whose performance looks a little too good to be true. When the rider in question is Froome, the suspicious signs start to pile up, as I discussed in my last post.

Note that even if we decide to accept the veracity of the UCI’s recent decision on Froome’s positive test, this shouldn’t put our every suspicion to rest. If we conclude Froome is a clean rider just because the UCI cleared him for salbutamol, we would be committing the logical fallacy of “denying the antecedent.” The fallacy goes like this: 

• Premise: If A then B
• Premise: Not A
• Conclusion: Not B

It is easier to see how this is a fallacy if we consider a simple example:

• Premise: If it rains, I will bring an umbrella
• Premise: It is not raining
• Conclusion: I am not bringing an umbrella

Of course this conclusion does not necessarily follow. Even if it’s not raining, I could bring an umbrella for another reason, such as rain being forecast. For the second premise to be true is not a necessary condition.

Broken down into its simplest form the “Froome must be clean because the UCI dismissed his case” argument would run like this:

• Premise: If the UCI finds Froome guilty of doping, he is a doper. 
• Premise: The UCI did not find Froome guilty of doping. 
• Conclusion: Therefore, Froome is not a doper. 

Denying the antecedent is a universally recognized fallacy. That is, arguments of this form are automatically classified as invalid. To put it more bluntly, just because Froome found his way out of this salbutamol mess doesn’t mean he never doped. Plenty of riders have cheated and gotten away with it. (In like fashion, we don’t conclude Al Capone wasn’t a murderer just because he was convicted only of tax evasion.)

Lance Armstrong employed this fallacy for years, defending himself on the basis of being “the most tested athlete on the planet.” Arnaud Démare used it as well after hanging on to the side of his team car up a key climb in the 2016 Milan-San Remo race, stating afterward, “‘There are judges in cycling. If I had done something forbidden, I would have been disqualified.’” I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised that my friend stumbled into this fallacious argumentative form in defending Froome, and perhaps other Froome fans are also falling prey to it as well.

How does the positive test for salbutamol prove anything? How does it suggest a years-long sophisticated doping program? How would salbutamol help Froome win four Tours? Why would he deliberately use more than he needed if it doesn’t enhance performance?

Here I will lay out, in clear logical terms, the reason I think Froome’s positive test suggests a wider doping program. 

• Premise #1: Willingness to cheat via one substance indicates a willingness to cheat via others
• Premise #2: You cannot accidently go over the legal limit on salbutamol, because the legal limit is so high; i.e., a positive test indicates abuse, typically through oral or injected dosing
• Premise #3: In sufficient quantities salbutamol will enhance performance, so a rider can gain an advantage from abusing it
• Premise #4: Froome went over the legal limit
• Conclusion #1: Froome didn’t accidentally inhale an amount of salbutamol that exceeded the legal limit (i.e., he lied about how he took it)
• Conclusion #2: Froome deliberately abused salbutamol to gain an advantage
• Conclusion #3: By abusing salbutamol, Froome has demonstrated a willingness to abuse other substances; i.e., this positive test gives us valid reason to be suspicious of him generally

The conclusions above proceed naturally from the premises; that is, the argument is logically valid by the prepositional form modus ponens, which goes like this:

• Premise: If A then B
• Premise: A
• Conclusion: Therefore, B

In other words, if we assume that a positive test for salbutamol automatically indicates abuse (Premise #2), and that abusing salbutamol can provide an advantage (Premise #3), and that Froome did test positive (Premise #4), then we can logically conclude that Froome abused salbutamol to gain an advantage (Conclusions #1 and #2). If we assume that abusing one drug indicates a willingness to abuse others (Premise #1), and that Froome abused salbutamol (Conclusion #2), then Froome can be reasonably suspected of abusing other drugs.

Because the reasoning is valid (i.e., follows the standard logical rule modus ponens), you can only attack the argument by showing that it is not sound; i.e., you’d have to declare that one or more premises is/are untrue. So let’s look at each premise in turn.

Premise #1 is something I happen to believe, even if I can’t prove it. A rider may decide to be clean because he’s afraid of being caught, or he’s afraid of side effects, or he is a moral person and/or his ambitions in the sport are noble. If a rider has no moral problem with doping, and isn’t afraid of the drugs, and thinks he can get away with taking them, he’ll generally do it, and will not restrict himself to one substance. I mean, why would he? Look at the all the USADA-snared American dopers who confessed (along with other admitted dopers like Michael Rasmussen, David Millar, Frank Vandenbroucke, and Marco Pantani): none of them stuck to a single PED. They all took a variety.

(It is certainly the case that a rider might eschew a particular PED or practice on the grounds of safety; for example, a rider might use testosterone because it’s common, but avoid blood boosting because hotel-room blood transfusions are dangerous. A drug like salbutamol is probably less scary than a lot of PEDs and I wouldn’t be surprised if taking a variety of more commonplace drugs like clenbuterol, triamsinolone, salbutamol, and/or corticoids in combination is a popular alignment with the “marginal gains” ethos that seems to define the modern sport.)

(By the way, here’s Froome’s therapeutic use exemption for prednisolone, a corticosteroid.)

Premise #2, about it being impossible to go over the legal limit of salbutamol via an inhaler, I believe based on my firsthand experience with salbumatol, and from having discussed the matter with a pulmonary M.D. who also happens to be a former professional road racer. You don’t get any performance benefit by inhaling salbutamol because that doesn’t deliver a high enough dose. For the same reason, you won’t test positive by inhaling the drug—you’d have to take a ridiculous number of puffs (18 to be precise). I have a blog post dedicated to this topic, where I’ve done the math. To get the benefit, and to test positive, require either orally ingesting or injecting the drug.

Premise #3 is widely established: using high quantities of salbutamol can give you a performance advantage (click here and here). The fact that this substance is regulated strongly supports the notion that it can confer performance benefits in sufficient quantities. “We have an upper limit because we have multiple publications showing that systemic use of beta-2 agonists, including salbutamol, can be performance enhancing,” WADA senior director of science Olivier Rabin explains here. 

Premise #4 (the positive test for salbutamol) is not disputed by anybody.

If you don’t agree with one or more of these premises, that’s fine, but don’t conclude that I’m a knee-jerk blowhard who bases his conclusion on nothing at all. I hope that, whether you agree with these premises or not, you can see why I’d put stock in them. On the other hand, if you agree with these premises but not the conclusions they produce, then you are not a logical thinker and are reading the wrong blog. Please, go somewhere else.

In case you’re thinking of dismissing one or more of my premises out of hand simply because you can’t imagine Froome cheating, consider this: when asthma is poorly controlled, the sufferer cannot perform as an athlete. I know this from experience. (If you have asthma, you know what I’m talking about. If you don’t, take my word for it because I’m an asthma sufferer and a cycling coach, or go ask an asthmatic athlete or a coach.) To win a grand tour, you have to not only be a top rider, you have to be functioning at close to 100%. An insufficiently mitigated asthma attack takes you way below 100%. By the time I start wheezing, I’m crippled. Any athlete is. And when you get to that point, it’s really too late to try to correct with salbutamol: your race is ruined. My doctor cautioned that for exercise-induced asthma, salbutamol is a prophylactic measure—you take it before the exercise, you don’t wait until you have a problem. Thus you wouldn’t wait until after the grand tour stage, during which you padded your GC lead, to take more of the drug. Froome breathed well enough to put time into his GC rivals on that day at the Vuelta, so he should not have needed extra salbutamol post-race.

It’s also worth noting that a therapeutic use exemption (TUE), such as Froome has for salbutamol (and has had for prednisolone), is not universally acknowledged as an automatically legitimate justification for an ongoing regimen of a prescribed drug. The British House of Commons did a deep investigation into TUEs leveraged by Team Sky, and concluded, “The use of triamcinolone at Team Sky during the period under investigation … does not constitute a violation of the WADA code [because a TUE was in place], but it does cross the ethical line that David Brailsford says he himself drew for Team Sky. In this case, and contrary to the testimony of David Brailsford in front of the Committee, we believe that drugs were being used by Team Sky, within the WADA rules, to enhance the performance of riders, and not just to treat medical need.” Froome himself has acknowledged the slippery nature of TUEs: according to this article, “In 2015 at the Tour de France, Froome explained that during the race he had a medical condition which could have been treated with a TUE. However, he objected to using a TUE, explaining in January 2017 that, ‘I didn’t feel having a TUE in the last week of the Tour was something I was prepared to do. It did not sit well morally with me.’” (Obviously his TUE for sulbutamol during the Veulta did extend through the last week, as his positive test was after stage 18.)

To reiterate, this salbutamol positive is not the cornerstone of my belief that Froome is a doper. What it does do is increase my skepticism that WADA has turned the tide and is now able to enforce their rules.

A final note

Again, this two-part post came about because a reader suggested it’s unfair or at least unbecoming to bag on a rider on my blog just because I think he’s a doper. I’m not too concerned about that ideologically. If I advertise my race coverage as biased, and acknowledge that my aspersions are speculation, and in light of the fact that this guy put himself in the public eye through his choice of career, why should I spare him my public indictment? My blog is a medium that anybody can choose to ignore as he pleases (and most do). I don’t get enough pageviews to make a tiny blip in Froome’s reputation, nor will Froome’s fans be moved to change their minds. Plenty of more mainstream media, along with countless cycling fans, are denouncing him already.

And for the record, I bag on Froome in particular, while going easier on other suspect riders, because he is ungracious even in victory, as I described here and here.

If you don’t agree, at least I’ve explained the rationale behind my bias against Froome. I know I can’t please everybody, but at least I’ve tried…

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Cycling Commentary - Why I Believe Chris Froome Is a Doper

Introduction

I have been doing “biased blow-by-blow” bike race reports on this blog for over five years now. My gimmick is that, not being a professional journalist, I don’t have to hold my tongue. If I suspect a rider is doping, I’ll say so. And I don’t couch my aspersions carefully, like “Chris Froome is a rider I’m a bit suspicious of though I hasten to point out he’s never had an adverse analytical finding that was upheld in the final analysis by the UCI.” My blow-by-blow reports are written in real-time as I watch the race ... I don’t have time for lots of qualifications or to make my case as I go.

And who wants to read a lot of mealy-mouthed, timid, caveat-littered prose, anyway? If 90% of my readers think this or that rider is doping, they should have no problem with shorthand like “filthy doping scumbag.” And if they don’t like my flippant style and/or think a rider is clean whom I say is doped, they probably won’t (and shouldn’t) spend much time on my post anyway. This is all according to design. I laid out my overall biased blow-by-blow format at length in my first report and have included the “biased” caveat in every subsequent report. I have never claimed to be fair or responsible.

But as a friend asked recently in an email, what about those who do disagree with me? I’m tempted to dismiss them; after all, a blogger could drive himself crazy trying to please an audience that may be almost entirely hypothetical (and which in any case provides almost zero feedback). So my guiding principle with this blog is “screw the reader.”

All this being said, my recent Tour de France Stage 1 blow-by-blow report seems to have really struck a nerve and offended my friend, and he cautions me against writing stuff on my blog that could adversely affect people’s opinion of me. Meanwhile, I got an email from another friend saying how strange it was reading my Stage 1 post while hanging out at his brother’s house, because his brother still thinks Chris Froome is legit. My first thought was to get these people together to form a support group—maybe they could invite Ross Perot, and after the Tour they could all set out together to find out who really killed Nicole Brown Simpson.

But then I figured, why not write a post carefully laying out my case against Froome in a non-flippant manner, so that at least an inflamed reader might come to understand that my position is not just a wild hunch or totally unfounded character assassination? Sure, I might still get a few stubborn readers experiencing actual indignation at my position, but hopefully the more common reaction among those who still disagree would be more like, “I beg to differ, but I guess I can see how he’d think that.”

(Perhaps even Froome himself would shrug off this indictment; after all, he has been philosophical about this kind of thing before. Cyclingnews reported, “For those who expressed skepticism, Froome says he has empathy. ‘Cycling has its troubled history,’ [he says], ‘and being a multiple Tour winner comes with a level of suspicion and questions that need to be asked.’”)

A two-sided argument

In formal rhetoric, a one-sided argument only puts forth one’s own position, with no regard for opposing views. This can sometimes be a useful approach, such as when your audience already agrees with you and you’re trying to whip them into a lather, like at a political rally. My blow-by-blow reports are obviously one-sided. My goal with them isn’t to convince, but to entertain.

In contrast, this post will present a two-sided argument, which is where you anticipate your opponent’s view. In actuality I don’t have to guess, given the protracted email debate I had with my friend on this topic, running more than 10,000 words. I have attempted to consolidate his argument into four salient challenges to my position:

• Why suspect Froome just because he’s “too successful”?
• Doesn’t Froome’s consistency demonstrate legitimacy, as opposed to the erratic performances of, say, Floyd Landis?
• The Lance era is over – why shouldn’t we trust the UCI’s decision on the salbutamol case, and base our assessment on Froome’s essentially clean slate?
• How would a positive test for salbutamol suggest a wider doping program anyway?

I will address each point in turn. And because most of the dialogue out there in chat rooms and website reader comments is pure drivel, driven by a lot of emotion and aggression and not much reason, I aim with this post do be as logical and dispassionate as possible. I hope you find that refreshing.

So here I go. Before we dive in, let me be clear: of course I cannot prove that Froome is a doper. If nothing less than a giant body of irrefutable evidence is what you’re after, don’t even bother with this—go read something else. Second, Froome’s positive test for salbutamol is not the cornerstone of my case, though I will address it; as longtime readers know, I have believed Froome to be a doper all along, way before he got popped.

Why suspect Froome just because he’s “too successful”?

Much of the Froome-bashing in the cycling community centers around the notion that when something looks too good to be true, it probably is. The way Froome dominates the sport is, all by itself, somewhat suspect. But is it fair to accuse somebody of doping just because he wins a lot? This “he’s too good” innuendo, my friend contends, “besmirches Kobe [Bryant] and Mohammad [Ali] and Michael J [Fox] and [Michael] Phelps.”

Okay, first off, “[Fox]” above was just a joke. I know my friend meant Michael Jordan. I was just testing you … did you jump up and say, “Aha! Dana is deliberately misconstruing his friend’s argument so he can readily refute it! Classic straw man fallacy!”? Good, then … you passed!

My assessment of Froome is not just based on how much he wins, but on how he wins. Nothing about his grand tour victories looks convincing to me. Why? Simply because Froome, who is built like a climber and out-climbs the entire peloton, also has this uncanny ability to win individual time trials. This does not make sense. I raced for a good many years, and have watched bike races for decades, and most racers I know have always believed that you could be a good climber and a good time trialist, but no single human could be both the best climber and the best time trialist. Climbers thrive in the mountains due to their high power-to-weight ratio. This doesn’t help on the flats where you need more raw power and your mass actually helps you push through the wind. (If you wanted to prove this you could put me and pocket-climber Domenico Pozzovivo atop the Col du Lautaret and watch me roll away from him.)

(Here’s Pozzovivo being sawed off a small group on a flat road during the Tour last week, BTW.)

Then look at your best apparently clean time trialists: Fabian Cancellara, Tony Martin, Tom Dumoulin. Why do I say “apparently clean”? Not just because they haven’t tested positive, but because their performances are realistic. They win some TTs, they lose some, but moreover they’re almost never the best climbers in a race. The grand tour winners who have particularly excelled at time trials—Bernard Hinault, Miguel Indurain, and Greg LeMond among them—usually just held their own in the mountains (or got dropped). So it is with Dumoulin, which is why I have so far given him the benefit of the doubt.

Here’s a tidbit: of the World Championships time trial winners throughout history, only three were of below-average height (i.e., less than 5’10”). All three of these were 5’9”. Two of the three, Serhiy Honchar and Santiago Botero, were subsequently caught doping. The third, Chris Boardman, was no climber—his race weight was 10 pounds higher than Froome’s, even though he’s shorter. Look here at Dumoulin: he’s got the build of a time trialist. And look at Froome: he so doesn’t.

Body type matters, and historically climbers and time trialists have been at opposite ends of the physique spectrum. This can make stage racing exciting. It’s unsurprising when a great climber like Nairo Quintana finishes outside the top 50 in a grand tour ITT. That’s what clean racing looks like. On the flip side, when a twiggy pocket climber like Froome can beat a time trial specialist like Cancellara or Tony Martin in a time trial, and also beat a pure climber like Mikel Landa or Pozzovivo in the mountains, that looks suspicious. What other riders could crush it in both disciplines? Lance Armstrong, Alberto Contador, Bobby Julich, Levi Leipheimer, and Tyler Hamilton. Doper, doper, doper, doper, and doper. For Froome to lose the TT in this year’s Tour by only a second just doesn’t look right. It looks like he had some “help.”

Now, both of the friends who commented on my Stage 1 blow-by-blow have brought up Peter Sagan specifically. One wrote, “You built a perfect case for Sagan being, by your criteria, a doper. Too consistent. No one can win the green jersey that many times.” The other wrote, “I still like Sagan. If he ever has an irregular test or a non-standard test or a not-quite-normal-but-we’ll-allow-it test, I’ll be super bummed.” I like Sagan too, and I like to think he’s clean. So let’s look at his case to see how a very successful rider doesn’t automatically trigger my doper-alert response.

Certainly Sagan has won a lot of races. That said, he’s a great sprinter, and sprinters end up with a lot more opportunities and thus a lot more wins than stage racers, for the obvious reason that it takes three weeks to notch a single stage race victory.

But Sagan has also lost a lot, when you are counting the number of races he tried to win vs. the number he actually did. (That is to say, a stage racer might target two or three races a year, whereas a sprinter targets dozens.) I can’t be bothered tabulating Sagan’s win/lose ratio, but he doesn’t completely dominate in his métier, like Froome does. Sagan has failed seven times to win Milan-San Remo. He failed to win a single stage in the 2014 and 2015 Tours. He does appear to be human.

As for the green jersey, not all sprinters prioritize it over getting Tour stage wins. Once a sprinter falls sufficiently far behind in points, he’s probably going to focus on a few key stages he’s really confident he can win, and not worry so much about the green jersey. Meanwhile, a fair number of sprint specialists miss the time cuts on mountain stages and never make it to Paris. So Sagan’s string of six victories in that category is not unbelievable.

Meanwhile, Sagan is a very clever rider, and winning sprints takes a lot of tactical savvy. My best-effort assessment is that doping doesn’t make as much difference in one-day races as in stage races, so I’m less suspicious of sprinters in general. (Okay, I guess you could suspect Sagan of abusing Adderrall.) (Yes, that was a joke.)

Doesn’t Froome’s consistency demonstrate legitimacy, as opposed to the erratic performances of, say, Floyd Landis?

It’s easy to confuse consistency with believability. Yes, a rider whose performances are totally erratic and unpredictable may arouse reasonable suspicion. But unusual dominance should not be confused with consistency.

Any rider who can win a grand tour is consistent—that’s what a GC victory indicates. To get there requires massive preparation and sacrifice. For a rider to win a single grand tour in a single season—indeed, in his whole career—is a remarkable feat. But for a rider to absolutely dominate in the grand tours is incredibly difficult. Since joining Team Sky team in 2010, Froome has finished 12 grand tours. He won half of them, and finished on the podium in 11 of them. Not even Eddy Merckx had such an amazing run. Even if you gave Lance Armstrong back his victories, he wouldn’t have that astounding a track record. Froome’s achievement is all the more incredible when you consider that modern riders often build an entire season around a single grand tour, vs. the era Merckx, Hinault, and LeMond raced in, when riders were expected to get results throughout the season.

And what other riders, besides Froome, have won all three grand tours consecutively? Only Merckx and Hinault. Last year Quintana tried to do the Giro/Tour double (i.e. win both in the same season), but was so tired coming into the Tour he ultimately lost 15 minutes to Froome. In 2011 Contador tried to do the Giro/Tour double and (possibly due to riding clean, though this is only conjecture) managed only 5th at that Tour.

Froome hasn’t managed the Giro/Tour double yet, but last year he handily pulled off the Tour/Vuelta double which is exceedingly rare. (The last rider to do it was Hinault in 1978.) Froome’s unusual ability to recover from one grand tour in time to win the next is indeed suspicious, because recovery is exactly the challenge that EPO and blood bags help with. Again, Froome’s unprecedented consistency, in the absence of any other suspicious factors, doesn’t automatically suggest cheating … but combined with his improbable dominance in both climbing and time trialing, and his positive drug test, it doesn’t look good.

Now let’s look at whom Froome has beaten in some of these grand tours: Alberto Contador, Alejandro Valverde, Andres Kloden, and Denis Menchov, all of whom are convicted dopers. Since EPO hit the scene, what ostensibly clean rider (by which I mean a rider who hasn’t tested positive) has won the Tour de France with any regularity? Until Froome, no clean rider since Miguel Indurain (23 years ago) won more than a single Tour. This isn’t because Froome’s competitors are weak, and this isn’t “erratic” performance on their part. In the modern era, to win even one grand tour requires perfect preparation, great health, a solid team, and some luck. I can believe in Cadel Evans’s Tour win because he was so good for so long, and had so many near misses until finally all the planets lined up and he managed to win.

Froome, on the other hand, won last year’s Vuelta despite (by his account) suffering major asthma problems. And he won this year’s Giro with a crazy 80-kilometer solo breakaway that erased over two weeks of relatively poor riding that hadn’t even put him on the virtual podium. So he can be erratic, too.

See my next post for part two of this polemic, when I’ll cover the last two arguments my friend presented:

• The Lance era is over – why shouldn’t we trust the UCI’s decision on the salbutamol case, and base our assessment on Froome’s essentially clean slate?
• How would the positive test for salbutamol suggest a wider doping program anyway?

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Biased Commentary - Could Chris Froome Be Innocent?

Introduction

I enjoy posting “biased blow-by-blow” reports of World Tour bicycle races. I label them “biased” because I when I think a rider is doped I can’t bear to bite my tongue like real journalists and commentators do. And, being just a blogger, I don’t have to.

Needless to say, I have never given Christopher Froome, nor his Sky team, the benefit of the doubt. And, with Froome returning an “adverse analytical finding” (i.e., a positive test) for twice the allowed amount of salbutamol, I seem to have my perennial accusations validated. Not surprisingly, Froome came right out and said, “Yes, I have been cheating all along—and I’ve let down my team, my sponsors, my fans, and my sport, and I am really sorry.”

No, of course he didn’t say that! Like so many dopers who get caught, he’s professing innocence (in the standard-issue tricky language, “I haven’t broken any rules”).  So I’m going to examine his nascent defense and the possibility that he’s actually innocent. And I’m going to be as fair as possible (with the caveat that of course I’m biased). And for those of you who (quite reasonably) are too jaded and cynical to care about Froome, I’ll examine what all this means to the sport.

In case this sounds boring and like ground that’s been covered before, I promise my analysis will be different. For one thing I’ll be pulling in some experts, like the philosophers William of Ockham, Karl Popper, and Marshall Mathers (aka Eminem).

Petitio principii

Because I’m biased, I need to be careful not to commit a classic logical fallacy, petitio principii, otherwise known as “begging the question” or “circular reasoning.” This fallacy occurs when the argument depends on the truth of a premise that is also the conclusion (usually in a disguised form). It’s an absurdly blatant kind of fallacy, but pops up surprisingly often.

Here’s how this would apply to Froome. We start with the premise that he’s a doping, cheating scumbag. Add to that his positive test. Since the test confirms what we already knew (i.e., that he was a doper), we know we can trust the test. And since a trustworthy test produced a positive, he is by definition guilty of doping.

Like many poor arguments, this one is one-sided. That is, it might stoke the coals of other Froome-bashers, but it’s not likely to win over any converts. So it’s non-useful and I won’t use it.

In Froome’s defense

Some riders have come out against Froome with statements that are lame enough to inspire a backlash. For example, Tim Wellens described his own refusal to use inhalers, even though doctors have told him it would help with his bronchial obstruction. “I could improve my breathing capacity by 7 or 8 per cent... but I'm against inhalers. If the public knew the number of riders who have an inhaler… it's enormous.” Another rider, Mathieu van der Poel, was more blunt: “Maybe asthma patients will understand the case better, but cycling and all sports in general are for healthy people.”

I’m not an “asthma patient,” but I do have bronchospasm, which is what afflicts so many cyclists. It’s not chronic the way true asthma is, but involves asthma-like symptoms during hard exercise (which is why it’s often called “exercise-induced asthma”). It’s more common among athletes than the general population, and it’s more common among cyclists than any other athlete. The reason is that cyclists move huge amounts of air through their respiratory systems, without the benefit of it going through their nasal passages to be warmed up and filtered. We can ride for hours at a time, day after day, and cold, damp, or polluted air, or very hot, dry air, can inflame our bronchial passages. (Mountain bikers have bronchospasm more commonly than roadies because of all the dust and dirt.)

I speak from experience when I say Wellens isn’t grasping the benefit of an inhaler. Without it, I will start wheezing ten minutes into my bike ride, which will hamper my performance (far more than 7 or 8 percent) for the whole ride. It’s unfair for van der Poel to accuse me, or any cyclist with bronchospasm, of being an unhealthy person. I’m totally unafflicted by breathing problems unless I’m riding regularly (which is, of course, my lifestyle).

That said, using an inhaler doesn’t give me special breathing powers; it just neutralizes a possible barrier to my normal respiratory function. It won’t give an edge to any person unafflicted by bronchospasm, any more than Viagra will make a sexual dynamo out of a person unafflicted by erectile dysfunction. As Dr. John Dickinson, an expert on asthma, states in this article, “We know that therapeutic doses of inhalers don’t touch performance, so if you’re a non-asthmatic taking a couple of puffs of salbutamol, it’s not going to do anything for you.”

Wait ... not so fast

The person I just quoted was talking about inhaled salbutamol. In the doses inhalers provide, this drug does a great job at reducing if not eliminating the inflammation that dogs bronchospasm sufferers, without conferring any unfair advantage. But taken in high doses through other means, drugs like salbutamol certainly can. According to this article, “Oral or injected beta 2-agonists can have anabolic effects and are banned in and out of competition.” Greg LeMond told Cyclingnews, “Taken orally or by injection [salbutamol] acts as an anabolic steroid, similar to clenbuterol, the drug that Alberto Contador was positive for.”

It’s not outlandish to assert that a very large dose of a drug can affect you in an entirely different way than a small dose. If you take the normal dose of Latisse, you’ll enjoy longer eyelashes. If you take the normal dose of Lumigan, you’ll effectively treat your glaucoma by lowering intraocular pressure. But guess what? They’re exactly the same drug! Only the dosage is different. So you see, one man’s side effect is another man’s performance-enhancing drug. This is why there’s a legal limit on salbutamol.

How was Froome using salbutamol?

According to this article, “Froome will argue that he took three puffs of his inhaler just before providing his sample to anti-doping after stage 18 of the Vuelta.” I’m not sure exactly where this assertion came from but it’s backed up by this quote from Froome: “I have a clear routine when I use my inhaler and how many times I use it. I've given all that information to the UCI to help get to the bottom of this." (Click here for the context.)

Naturally Froome would like us all to believe he took this drug the normal, therapeutic way, by inhaling it. As Cyclingnews explains, “Inhaled, [beta 2-agonists] are not considered performance enhancing. Inhaled doses are allowed in competition without a TUE at doses up to 1600 micrograms over 24 hours or 800 micrograms every 12 hours.”

Froome’s adverse analytical finding (AAF) is the result of having double the allowed amount of salbutamol in his system. That’s a lot, because the legal limit is very generous. I can say this with some authority because the amount of albuterol I need is just 180 mcg—less than a quarter of the legal limit.

Beyond my personal experience, I’ve been around road and mountain bike racers for decades, and I’ve done some calculations based on the most salbutamol I have ever known a person to take. During a full-blown bronchospasm attack, clearly audible to anybody in a 50-foot radius, this person needed two 90-mcg puffs, having taken the standard 2-puff preventive dose before the exercise. So that's a total of four puffs, which is 360 mcg. (All these inhalers provide the same dose.) Simple math tells us Froome would have had to take 18 puffs on his inhaler to reach twice the legal limit.

Giving Froome the benefit of the doubt, let’s suppose he really did get all his salbutamol via inhaler. What might that look like? Suppose he took two preventive puffs before the race, and then forgot he’d done so, and took two more. And let’s say that for some reason he had some breathing problems anyway, but that nobody heard him wheezing, maybe because of all the cheering fans, and nobody saw him use his inhaler during the race because he’s always surrounded by and thus eclipsed by his Sky teammates. So he was able to take a couple more puffs without being seen. That’s six total. And that’s a lot. The person I witnessed having four puffs total suffered jitters and shakes and was not comfortable and probably would have hesitated, to say the least, to take any more salbutamol.

But let’s say Froome is just tough as nails and shook off these side effects ... we’re still only at six puffs. Remember, the legal limit works out to 18 puffs ... so we’re supposed to believe that he took a dozen more puffs, all without anybody noticing, because the wheezing still wasn’t controlled? This seems pretty damn unlikely. Froome would like everyone to believe that the legal limit is really low, so an accidental overuse of the inhaler (e.g., one puff too many) could put him over ... but the numbers say otherwise.

Drug level detected vs. ingested

The rest of Froome’s defense centers around a possible discrepancy between the amount of salbutamol detected in his urine and what he actually used. As described here, “The threshold of 1000ng/ml was set by a scientific study, but metabolism of the drug varies greatly from person to person. In cases of an AAF exceeding the threshold for inhaled salbutamol, athletes can submit to a pharmacological study of their metabolism of the drug to try to prove exceeding the dose was unintentional.”

The logical explanation for a higher concentration of the drug in a rider’s urine (mentioned in two of these articles) is dehydration. Is it plausible Froome was just really, really dehydrated on stage 18 of the Vuelta, when he returned the AAF? Well, two circumstances suggest otherwise. First, he had a great race, cementing his lead over Vincenzo Nibali. I, for one, do not ride well when I’m so dehydrated as to return double the concentration of any substance I could (hypothetically) be tested for. Second, according to the Cyclingnews blow-by-blow report, the temperature was only 20 degrees Celsius (68 degrees Fahrenheit) that morning, and two other riders commented on it being generally rainy toward the end of that Vuelta. (That’s about all I can glean about the weather.) If Froome has always meticulously followed the same salbutamol dosing regimen—“I have a clear routine when I use my inhaler and how many times I use it,” he told Cyclingnews—then how has he not had an AAF for salbutamol at any time in his decade-long career when he’s surely been tested after very long, hot days on the road that would have left him dedydrated?

But you know what? We could spend an eternity considering the various possible factors that could lead to the test results being so far off, and that’s the wrong approach. If you’re asking, “Who says?” then my answer is, “Philosophers.”

Ockham’s razor

Scientists—including Max Planck, Werner Heisenberg, and Albert Einstein—have long made use of a heuristic principle known as Ockham’s razor, devised by the philosopher William of Ockham. As described by Wikipedia, “His principle states that among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected or when you have two competing theories that make exactly the same predictions, the simpler one is the better.... One justification of Occam’s razor is a direct result of basic probability theory. By definition, all assumptions introduce possibilities for error; if an assumption does not improve the accuracy of a theory, its only effect is to increase the probability that the overall theory is wrong.” 

If we apply this principle retroactively in assessing past doping cases, its reliability is almost comically obvious. What makes more sense: the complicated notion that Tyler Hamilton had a chimera (i.e., a vanishing twin that got lost in the womb) that produced a false positive for foreign blood population—or that he doped? Which seems more probable: that Alberto Contador got clenbuterol from beef brought to him all the way from Spain by a friend—or that he cheated? Which better passes the sanity test: that Floyd Landis drank over 60 bottles of water during a single Tour stage because he was just really, really thirsty, and he returned a positive test because the lab was totally incompetent—or that he doped?

Theories that defy the Occam’s razor principle usually start with some version of, “Wait, there must be some other explanation.” Let’s look beyond cycling history. Consider the song “Guilty Conscience” by Eminem. A scenario is laid out: “Meet Grady, a twenty-nine year old construction worker. After coming home from a hard day’s work, he walks in the door of his trailer park home to find his wife in bed with another man.” Eminem has an interior debate with his conscience, which is voiced by Dr. Dre.

Dr. Dre: “Wait! What if there's an explanation for this shit?”

Eminem: “What? She tripped? Fell? Landed on his dick?!”

Here again, the most likely scenario is also the simplest. Grady’s wife has cuckolded him.

How applicable is Ockham’s razor to Froome’s defense? Well, considering that Froome’s urine level showed twice the limit, and that the limit is so very generous to begin with, and that he hasn’t yet advanced any specific counter-theories for the test being so far off, and that the obvious dehydration explanation doesn’t match the circumstances of the race, doesn’t the idea that he’s somehow innocent seem a lot more complicated than the very simple notion that yet another pro cyclist cheated?

Karl Popper

Karl Popper, a widely esteemed philosopher of science, weighs in on Ockham’s razor in a way that provides more food for thought on the topic of drug testing in sport. Again according to Wikipedia, “Popper argues that a preference for simple theories ... may be justified by its falsifiability criterion: we prefer simpler theories to more complex ones ‘because their empirical content is greater; and because they are better testable’ (Popper 1992).”

“Falsifiability” is a key concept to have in mind when we consider doping in sport. Falsifiability is the idea that a proposition is more believable if its veracity can be determined simply and equivocally through a test. For example, the statement “all swans are white” can be proven false by producing a black swan. Popper cites falsifiability as the “demarcation criterion,” such that “what is unfalsifiable is classified as unscientific.”

Team Sky principal David Brailsford made a grand statement that doesn’t begin to meet the falsifiability standard: “I have the utmost confidence that Chris followed the medical guidance in managing his asthma symptoms, staying within the permissible dose for salbutamol.” Brailsford is countering the existing falsifiable evidence with sheer emphasis, without employing any falsifiable evidence of his own, because nobody has even begun the process of creating a convincing alternative explanation to the AAF. His defense, strident though it may be,  is utterly theoretical at this point, so it’s not even as solid as “She tripped, fell, landed on his dick.” Drug testing is built on the principle of falsifiability, but guys like Brailsford get to counter them with vague what-ifs.

Returning to petitio principii

Look, I’ll be honest: I love the idea of Froome being given three puffs of salbutamol, starved of water, and then placed in a sauna—and then having this procedure repeated over and over again until he manages to produce a urine sample with twice the legal limit of salbutamol. I’d rather watch him do that than win another bike race, frankly. But it’s wrong to indulge him.

Why? Well, I started this essay by promising not to engage in a petitio principii argument that conflates the conclusion with a key premise. But that’s exactly Brailsford is doing by assuming that if Froome’s test returned an AAF, the fault must be with the test. The credibility of Brailsford’s whole team suffers when he automatically takes Froome’s side instead of suspending him from competition. Meanwhile, the credibility of cycling suffers when a rider who fails a drug test gets to keep racing because he is on a wealthy team and has a loud, powerful boss. (Whether or not that is exactly what is going on here is immaterial; this is how it looks to the world.)

No rider above the legal limit for salbutamol has ever escaped suspension by successfully establishing, after the fact, that he could produce an AAF after taking a legal dose. And no rider has surpassed this legal limit as egregiously as Froome. I look forward to the day Froome is finally brought down, but the circus we spectators will have to endure in the meantime will be even uglier than his doped-to-the-gills race “victories.”

Oh, and one other thing: doped or not, Froome is a jerk.

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Biased Commentary - Did Démare Cheat in the 2016 Milan-San Remo?

NOTE:  This post is rated R for mild strong language and pervasive crude humor.

Introduction

If you care about the sport of cycling, then you must have seen my recent blog post covering the 2016 Milan-San Remo, a race which is one of the “monuments” of cycling.  If you don’t care about the sport of cycling, you’ll certainly want to skip this post, in which I assess the scandal following the outcome of the race.

I was alerted to this scandal by one of my readers, who posted a comment below my Milan-San Remo post.  The comment was from jianbino311 and read, “nike air max michael kors outlet air max 2016 rolex watches camisetas futbol baratas giuseppe zanotti outlet wallet sale kobi 9 tods outlet.” 

Just kidding.  I don’t know why I get so many comments like that, but the one I’m actually referring to was from Darwinian and read, “We’ll need a follow-up post of course, given the allegations of Démare having taken a tow from a team car, and the whole question of whether his Strava data helps or hurts his insistence that he did nothing wrong.”  Darwinian, ask and ye shall receive!

The basic facts of the case

Milan-San Remo is quite long and features just two climbs, both very close to the finish, which sometimes keep the race from being decided in the last 500 meters.  The climbs are rather short but never fail to eliminate several top sprinters.  This year there was a crash less than 30 kilometers from the finish, before the first climb, the Cipressa.  This crash eliminated some of the favorites, who either couldn’t catch up or wore themselves out doing so.  After several breakaway attempts, the peloton came back together and the sprint was won by “some random FDJ guy” (as I put it in my coverage), who turned out to be a young upstart named Arnaud Démare.

Shortly after the race, two riders—Matteo Tosatto (Tinkoff) and Eros Capecchi (Astana)—came forward and said that they saw Démare taking a tow from his team car on the way up the Cipressa.  The race judges decided not to sanction Démare because there was no video evidence of his being towed.  Under questioning, Démare’s FDJ directeur sportif, Frederic Guesdon, who was driving the car that allegedly provided the tow, surprised everybody by saying, “How should I know if Démare took a tow?  I was watching the road!  But he probably did cheat because he’s actually kind of a dick.”

No, of course Guesdon didn’t really say that.  He apparently saw the whole thing—that is, saw the tow not happen—and said so to the press.  Then Démare himself denied the accusations, and it might have ended there, but people kept asking to see Démare’s power stats, which would presumably show any anomalies (i.e., setting a world-record pace up the Cipressa while putting out less than 100 watts).  Guesdon said, “If there’s really a polemic about this, we’ll ask Arnaud to release his power files.”  The files were never released, so everybody flocked to Démare’s Strava page, only to find that the file for this race had been removed.

But wait, there’s more!  A Dutch journalist captured a snapshot of the Strava file before it was taken down, and discovered that Démare had achieved the Strava KOM for the Cipressa—that is, he went up it faster than any Strava member in history.  Subsequently, Démare put the Strava file back up.  Alas, the file does not include any power or heart rate data.  It’s been over a week and nothing official has happened, so it appears Démare will keep the win, but with a huge asterisk in the eyes of many fans (which sounds painful, doesn’t it?)

Evidence in Démare’s favor

Is Démare an unfairly accused champion, or an asshole?  I’ll attempt to get to the bottom of that question, starting with the evidence in Démare’s favor.

First of all, one of his accusers, Mateo Tossato, didn’t actually see Démare holding on to the car; he explained, “I didn’t see if he was on the car window or with a [sticky] bottle.” The implication is that it was one or the other, but in a sport where riders have blamed failed drug tests on a lost chimera or smuggled beef, it’s not that hard to slip between the horns of the dilemma and say Démare held neither a sticky bottle nor a car window.  Tossato simply didn’t see him holding either one—he just saw how fast Démare was going, in close proximity to his team car.

Second, the other accuser, Eros Capecchi, has the first name “Eros,” which means “erotic love.”  What kind of parents would name their child Eros?  Who knows what twisted upbringing this guy had, or what emotional scars he’s accumulated from bullies teasing him over the years?  Being named Eros undercuts his credibility even more than if he showed up to a courtroom wearing a bowtie.

The final problem with the case against Démare is that only two riders have come forward.  If Démare’s tow was as blatant as they say, how come nobody else seems to have seen it?  And how come no fans have come forward with smartphone video footage, when pretty much everything that ever happens anymore is filmed?  If, in a moment of weakness, I were to pick my nose and eat it right now, it’s a fair bet you’d see that video on the Internet within minutes.

Evidence against Démare

One big problem I have with Démare’s professed innocence is that he hasn’t produced his power data.  Guesdon did say, “If there’s really a polemic about this, we’ll ask Arnaud to release his power files,” and “If this continues, that’s something we could do.”  Well, there have been four articles about this on cyclingnews alone, generating close to 200 comments so far … is that not a polemic?  So where are the files?

There’s also the matter of Démare’s response.  His language has been a bit wobbly; he’s said nothing so clear as “I did not hang on to my team car at any time” or “I did not have sex with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.”  He has said, “I have done nothing wrong” and, worse, “There are judges in cycling. If I had done something forbidden, I would have been disqualified.” His implicit premise here is that the enforcement of rules is perfect. This is a lot like the Lance Armstrong defense: “I’m the most tested athlete on the planet.”  Démare is conveniently dismissing the possibility that he could have gotten away with cheating, as if not getting caught is proof of innocence.  He’d sound a whole lot better saying, “I didn’t hold on to the car.”

He went on to say, “I sense a little jealousy from some of our rivals after our [i.e., FDJ’s] third place in the team time trial at Tirreno [Adriatico].”  Huh?  This is both a red herring (or “red lobster” as my daughter calls it) and an ad hominem fallacy.  You’d have to be a really, really sore loser to fabricate a story about a rider cheating just because his team got third in a TTT.  Capecchi’s Astana team was all the way down in 6th place, so by Démare’s logic Capecchi would have a vendetta against all 40 riders who beat his team in that race.  Tossato, meanwhile, didn’t even race Tirreno-Adriatico!  This is a pretty weak foundation for Démare to be building a revenge theory on.  I wish I spoke Chinese because I’m told they have a very concise, pithy expression that literally translates “You talk dog farts.”

Then there’s the matter of the Strava KOM.  I saw how fast the peloton went over the Cipressa, and how fast Giovanni Visconti (Movistar Team) was going when he attacked.  I pointed out how quickly Visconti and Ian Stannard (Team Sky) opened up a gap on the peloton.  So how is it that Démare not only went over the Cipressa faster than Visconti, but set a new Strava record in the process, after more than 250 kilometers of racing?  The whole point of the Cipressa is to shed some of the sprinters, who are notoriously challenged by such climbs … and here a pure sprinter sets a new all-time record?

Even more damning, of course, is the mysterious disappearance, and reappearance, of Démare’s Strava file for this race.  Let me guess … somebody hacked Démare’s Strava account because the password was something weak like “password123” or “TTTbronze”?  Or maybe Démare tripped, fell, and landed on the delete key?  Or did he remove the file because he didn’t want to rub people’s noses in the fact that he’d not only won Milan-San Remo but also got the Strava KOM on the Cipressa?

But to me, the most important bit of evidence is that, as acknowledged by his directeur sportif, Démare did take a bottle while climbing the Cipressa.  Why on earth would he do this, if not to take a tow?  Think about it.  You’ve just crashed at the base of a critical climb toward the end of a huge race, you’ve lost over 30 seconds, you know the peloton is already lighting it up ahead of you, and your only chance in the race is to climb like a bat out of hell and try to latch on.  Wouldn’t you be ditching your bottle, to save weight?  You wouldn’t be thinking, “My, I’m in a bit of a pickle, but that shouldn’t mean having to go without some refreshment later on.”

The only reason to take a bottle is to get dragged along a bit.  As far as I’m concerned, a tow is a tow, whether you’re holding onto the car window, a bottle, or your coach’s dick.  (Well, actually, that sounds really dangerous for the coach … but I digress.)

I’ve about had it with all this nonsense I’ve been reading about “sticky bottle” and how it’s just a wink-wink nudge-nudge part of the sport.  I’d never even seen the phrase “sticky bottle” before and now I see there’s even a website by that name, and all these fans saying that getting a tow via a bottle handoff is a widely tolerated part of the sport, to help out those poor unfortunate riders who took a spill and need to get back on.  I don’t care who tolerates it—it’s bullshit, particularly for somebody with designs on winning a major classic.  Asking for a bottle at that point in the race was premeditated cheating, and whether or not Démare deserves to be stripped of the victory, my verdict is that he’s douchebag.

My other verdict

My other verdict in the case is, who the hell cares?  It’s not like this is the first time a pro bike racer has done something douche-y.  It’s ridiculous how many fans have taken to the comments section on cyclingnews to debate Démare’s case back and forth, often attacking each other in the process.

Oh, and now you’re calling me a hypocrite!  Look, I’ve investigated this scandal for one purpose only:  to entertain.  I really couldn’t care less who likes Démare and who doesn’t, and whether or not anybody was swayed by my argument.  I wrote this to make you laugh, to make fun of Eros’s name, to put words in Guesdon’s mouth, and to speculate about how Démare’s Strava file got deleted. If I’ve failed to make you laugh, you can judge me on that basis, but please don’t assume I really care whether or not yet another bike racer cheated.  There are far more pressing debates to have about this sport … and watch these pages, because my next post will tackle a topic truly worth pondering and debating!

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