It is amazing to consider that since the upheaval caused by doping scandals in recent years, there has been a shift in the way climbing is being looked at.
Rather than ever incrementally decreasing times up specific climbs at Le Tour, sports scientists are now comparing climb-times of current GC riders to those of GC riders of ten or twenty years ago and finding they have increased. Finding an outlier—a time that compares with that of the Festina era (onwards, of course)—has been touted as an indication of potential doping.
More info on this interesting shift of paradigm can be found at the New York Times by going here.