Chris Froome, the 2015 Tour de France champion, last week released physiological data from testing that was done on him earlier this year. The testing, conducted in response to understandable scepticism faced by any Tour de France champion thanks to 50 years of doping precedent (it wasn't just Lance), was intended to provide evidence that Froome was a believable, clean champion.To help do so, it had to answer two questions. The first was whether his performances were credible, given what we know about the limits of human physiology?Secondly, would testing provide evidence to support the transformation that saw him become a dominant Tour champion, when, as recently as 2011, he was on the verge of being released from his professional contract as a result of mediocre performances?The answer to the questions is "yes, but with fine print" (who honestly thought it would be that easy? It's professional sport - nothing is as it seems).To question one, unsurprisingly, his physiology, while extreme (as it should be for a Tour de France champion) falls within known plausible limits.If you think of a cyclist as a high-performance sports car, you can make a fair guess of what its engine and other specifications will be if you have already measured its top speed and acceleration, for example. All any tests can do is confirm this, and so anyone hoping to condemn or exonerate Froome on physiological data alone was heading for disappointment.To the second question, what his results showed is that back in 2007, when he was tested as a young professional in Europe, he had the physiological attributes of an elite cyclist. South Africa's Dr Jeroen Swart was involved in the testing, and he put it succinctly and accurately when he said "the engine was there all along".At face value, then, the transformation between 2007 and 2011 can be accounted for by these numbers.So that's two out of two questions answered. However, the problem is this: For every answer, more questions have been asked, and it's the lack of supporting data to those questions that mean the entire exercise, designed to induce trust, that will likely polarise opinion even further. Those who believed that Froome is clean will be convinced even more by this apparent show of transparency, and those who were sceptical can find good reasons to double down on their scepticism.The main suspicion boils down to timing. Froome clearly had the physiology of a champion eight years ago, but his performances between then and 2011 gave no indication at all of what lay "under the hood", so to speak. Part of that was his mass - at 76kg with 17% body fat (incredibly high for a pro cyclist), he was carrying unnecessary weight which would impair performance.Even accounting for this, Froome did not express that physiology (as an aside, it is remarkable that no team recognised quite what potential they were looking at during this period).The bigger issue, however, is that four years either side of what has to be one of the most dramatic transformations of a professional sportsman in history, we are left with a black hole of information. How did he lose the weight? When did it happen? Why in 2011? Froome has attributed his sudden emergence to the diagnosis and treatment of bilharzia, but where it gets murky is that he himself has claimed it was only cured in 2013, which means his dominance preceded its eradication.More to the point, bilharzia is known to affect blood values, and so biological data, best thought of as a 'shadow' or footprint of the disease, could provide context and support his explanation. Only three blood results were released along with his physiological test results.That the key period of 2011 remains "dark" is confusing (if the data exists to explain the performance, then releasing it is only helpful), and means that effectively, we have been provided with two (blurred) snapshots, eight years apart, of a movie whose major plot twist came right in the middle.People will guess at the plot and its characters, and that means, unfortunately, more of the same, despite this arguably being a step forward for transparency...