Martin Samuel
Damning report on perfidy of cycling’s Team Sky has challenged fans’ faith in the future of British sport, writes
It is over. The flag at the summit is tattered and torn. The heroes are besmirched, their glory tainted. We know how they got there now, the lines that were crossed, the corners cut, the deceptions, the subterfuge, the tawdry compromises.
Team Sky were going to make us believe in cycling again; instead they have challenged our faith in British sport. The next time we hear Britain win because they have the sharpest suits, the grandest designs, the finest technicians, next time we hear of a medallist’s valiant battle to overcome asthma, what will we think? We’ve heard it before and were made to feel foolish, the hypocrisy and duplicity of our sporting leaders exposed by a bunch of Russian hackers, on a mission to prove East and West are not all that different if you scratch beneath the surface.
The difference is, while the Russian Government assisted a systemic doping programme, it is members of Britain’s Parliament that have helped produce the damning 54-page report that goes furthest in revealing the culture of deceit in British Cycling and beyond.
Full credit to Damian Collins’ parliamentary committee for that. What at first appeared a vanity project to advance the MP’s personal political ambitions has delivered and has emerged as a powerful agent for change, its incriminatory conclusion on Team Sky’s TUE use, for instance, going further than newspapers and broadcasters can, backed by parliamentary privilege.
Its verdict is devastating. “We believe that drugs were being used by Team Sky, within the WADA rules, to enhance the performance of riders, and not just to treat medical need.’
If that feels more measured than incendiary at first, it is because the language around drug use in sport is created by lawyers and therefore cautious — but we can translate.
Cutting through the verbiage, the overview of Britain’s elite performers is dismal indeed. Put simply: If an athlete obtains a Therapeutic Use Exemption ruling that was performance-enhancing but not born of physical need, it is cheating.
The World Anti-Doping Agency has several pages of wordy rules explaining this. Nowhere does it say: Have one on us.
TUEs were not introduced so smart athletes, ethically loose medics or ambitious team directors could find a way around the testing system. They were there to address genuine health problems, genuine medical emergencies, genuinely chronic conditions. They were introduced in the interest of fairness.
To abuse this process, then, to make it serve an entirely selfish purpose based on the need to climb hills faster, is corruption as blatant as any attempted by more conventionally defined drug cheats.
There are always those who seek equivalency in drug cases, so let’s make it plain. Abusing TUEs, certainly exploiting a medicine as powerful as triamcinolone, would make a rider little different to Lance Armstrong, given former road race cyclist David Millar’s evidence to the committee.
Triamcinolone, he said, was “a once-a-year drug; the stress it put on your body required time to recover. You’d be mad to take it more often or in bigger doses”.
Sir Bradley Wiggins, according to evidence before the committee, may have been given triamcinolone on as many as nine occasions in four years, and around major events.
The committee’s opinion that this was cheating, rather than mere opportunism, could not be made clearer; and if there are grey areas, or certainly opaque ones in the report, it is only because bodies that prided themselves on thoroughness and those much-vaunted marginal gains turn out to be a lot of silly old scatterbrains when it comes to keeping proper medical records.
It is like finding out that Nasa’s scientists did the calculations for the next Mars probe on the bag of a fag packet. Then smoked all the fags at a party and threw the empty packet in the trash.
There is, at best, a litany of incompetence, at worst something more sinister. Computers go missing and are not recovered. Packages are delivered with their contents never adequately explained. There is no reliable evidence to say it was Fluimucil in the famous jiffy bag provided for Wiggins.
Remember when Team Sky, when Sir David Brailsford and Wiggins and Chris Froome, bemoaned that Armstrong had indelibly tainted their sport? Remember that Brailsford’s team were going to be the antidote to that? What is it we read in this report? More contamination; more poison. Brailsford, in particular, should not survive this.
© Daily Mail