A day or two ago, Chris Froome talked about how tough it is to win the Tour de France, how you really can’t take it for granted that, just because you won previously, you should win the next year. Team Sky had suddenly fallen from being the future of the Tour de France for years to come, to an also-ran that appeared fatally-flawed through its dependence on a single person, an all-in plan with no backup.

Nobody else will say it, I will. Someday, somebody’s going to figure out that it ain’t so easy winning multiple TdFs, and that there’s more than just good doping required. Erasing Lance from history such that people are too scared to even mention that they’re in awe of him winning 7 TdFs… it’s just wrong. How long before somebody says “I don’t know how Lance did it…” and the conversation doesn’t turn PC and become nothing but doping?

Telekom was as doped to the gills as Postal, maybe more so. The Spanish teams were a joke, they were so gassed. Very, very few rode clean. It wasn’t just doping that won 7 TdFs (now erased). It was structure (of which doping was a huge part, yes, I get that), it was all-in for one guy, it was pushing cycling technology. Team Sky’s picked up on that, they’ve read the book, but nobody, ever, is able to admit that was the book they read. And no athlete is comfortable saying what they must be thinking.