Wiggins irked by package probe
With investigations escalating into a mystery medical package dispatched to a race six years ago to treat Bradley Wiggins, the British cycling great’s anger boiled over on Thursday (Friday NZ time).
Not over the revelation that Team Sky didn’t retain adequate records of his medication.
Nor by the discovery that British Cycling didn’t track the movement of medical supplies.
What incensed Wiggins was the presence of reporters outside his home seeking answers about a package being investigated by the country’s anti-doping agency and a parliamentary committee.
After walking down the driveway and opening a gate, Wiggins confronted a BBC television crew and snapped: ‘‘This is my house. It’s a private road. I will call the police.’’
Associates pushed the camera away as a reporter asked Britain’s most decorated Olympian and first Tour de France winner if he would ‘‘shed some light’’ on the ‘‘mystery package.’’
What isn’t disputed is that a package was couriered in 2011 to France with a product for Wiggins as he completed the Criterium du Dauphine.
It’s the ambiguity over the contents and the revelation about the absence of paperwork that, according to sports officials and legislators, is damaging the credibility of a team that trumpeted how it set new standards in cycling for winning cleanly through ‘‘marginal games.’’
Everything was supposedly monitored, logged, and refined by the Team Sky experts - from riding routines to food and bedding. Just not medicines administered to its star rider a year before he won the 2012 Tour de France.
Team Sky maintains that it was a legal decongestant, Fluimucil, a brand name for a product containing acetylcysteine used for clearing mucus.
But UK anti-doping chief executive Nicole Sapstead used a parliamentary committee hearing on Wednesday to reveal that the agency is investigating whether the product was in fact a banned corticosteroid called triamcinolone.
For Wiggins, triamcinolone would be allowed in competition only if a therapeutic use exemption was obtained, as he did three times from 2011 to 2013 - just not for this race.
If Wiggins was found to have used triamcinolone at the Criterium du Dauphine without a TUE he could have been banned and not been eligible to race and win the Tour de France the following year.