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Froome: Cycling is moving on from doping

‘You are not going to have any friends in the bunch if you come back from a two-year doping ban.’

CHRIS FROOME IS ready to lead Team Sky in this year’s Tour de France and prove the days of doping to win are over.

After supporting Bradley Wiggins with his win in the Tour last year, Froome is keen to continue the work done by his team-mate and show that doping is not required in order to be successful when he leads the team this time around.

The revelations surrounding Lance Armstrong’s past victories brought a dark cloud over cycling, and with two riders, Mauro Santambrogio and Danilo di Luca, testing positive for EPO during the Giro d’Italia, the problems appear to still be present.

However, Froome believes that there has been a change in attitudes and insists that those wh are doping, are no longer likely to gain an unfair advantage.

“There is still a lot of criticism out there, scepticism out there and a lot of fans have been let down,” he told The Independent.  “I think the sport is in probably the best place it has been in the last 20, 30 years in that respect. Moving on from the revelations we had from Lance last year has now given us the opportunity to show people that the sport has changed.

“I certainly know how I work for the results I get and I know that my results aren’t going to be stripped in five, six, seven years’ time.

“It almost feels the better we do our job the more people think we’re doping. I’m expecting to have to answer questions about doping, but I’m really confident the races I’ve done building up to the Tour, being able to get the results that I’ve got, show that cycling really has changed. If people are doping it’s not working – they’re not winning the races any more.”

The 28-year-old believes that the punishments handed out to riders who have tested positive are so severe that others are not considering it due to the damaging impacts it can have.

“Anyone now who does it, it is not only costing them their career, it is potentially taking down a whole team of cyclists plus the 50-odd support men,” he added. “I was happy to see the response to (the Giro cases) – that it is just not accepted any more. “It is clear that those guys are acting on their own. They are the absolute minority and it’s great that the tests have picked them up.

“It’s something you can see is just not accepted any more. Simple as that. You are not going to have any friends in the bunch if you come back from a two-year doping ban.”

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