Doping confusion swirling

Suddenly the sky has darkened over the head of Chris Froome, the world’s premier stage race cyclist, and the team he has performed for so spectacularly.

Four-time Tour de France winner Froome, who has consistently maintained that doping has never formed part of his thinking on cycle racing, was named this week as having been found with twice the permissible amount of Salbutamol – the active ingredient in asthma inhalers – during a stage in his Vuelta a Espana victory, his second major triumph of the year.

Froome maintains he has done nothing wrong and took the prescribed medication under supervision and now will have separate tests to prove this.

Asthma is not all that uncommon among top sportsmen and women, with stars as diverse as David Beckham, Justine Henin, swimming's Amy Van Dyken and top athletes Paula Radcliffe and Haile Gebreselassie victims of the breathing disorder, but it is the wildly differing reactions to Froome’s negative test which have really raised the ante.

These range from the direct attack on Froome by Cath Wiggins, wife of Sir Bradley, the first Briton to win the Tour de France, which has all the subtlety of those who would have you believe Stalin had his good points, to those who fiercely believe in Froome.

Cath Wiggins has called Chris Froome a “slithering reptile”, wondering in The Telegraph whether her husband might have been “thrown under the bus” by Team Sky to cover for his old team-mate.

The revelation reopened wounds from an old feud between Froome and Wiggins. In a hastily deleted post on her Facebook page, which was put out on Twitter for public consumption by a third party, Cath Wiggins wrote that she felt “sick” after learning of the adverse finding involving Froome. “If I was given to conspiracy theory I’d allege they’d thrown my boy under the bus on purpose to cover for this slithering reptile,” she said.

Wiggins’s reputation was badly damaged last year after it emerged that he had received legal injections of Kenacort – a corticosteroid – before three of the biggest races of his career, including the 2012 Tour de France, which he won. Wiggins and Sky were accused of “gaming the Therapeutic Use Exemption system” although they were adamant the injections were to treat allergies.

It is indeed a tangled web.