Sad truth is we can’t trust this sport any more

They’re all at it. how many times have you heard that said? how many times has a sport, an entire Olympic movement, been damned by presumption and ignorance?

What, all? at it? how can that be? how can an entire industry attract individuals who are, to a man and woman, uniformly deceitful? how can they all be cheats, accomplices or facilitators? how can they be wholly without redemption?

Clearly, such crass generalisations are untrue. and yet, with the news of Chris froome’s failed test at the Vuelta a espana, another pillar of cycling’s credibility falls. froome, we believed, was great but straight. Many whose cynicism has weighed heavy since Lance armstrong have found faith revived through froome.

So, this may prove a point of no return. it barely matters right now whether mitigations and explanations are plausible or accepted; it barely matters whether he is banned for nine months, a year, or even exonerated either on a technicality or another medical explanation.

The suspicion that falls on froome will remain, and will confirm in the minds of much of the public that cycling is a sport that cannot be trusted, that it will let us down in the end, that it requires too many leaps of faith to be wholly embraced.

We’re still not quite sure what was in Sir Bradley Wiggins’s parcel. We know he keeps his medals and that nothing was proven, but the lack of co-operation, the gaps in the evidence, the many hindrances to the investigative process, have left a cloud. Wiggins’s achievements are no longer as plainly admirable as they were before he became the collateral damage in russia’s cyber war. The fancy Bears have undermined our certainty, which is what they set out to do.

here there is no murky third-party interference. Some — wrongly, by the way — think the creative deployment of Therapeutic Use exemptions is merely clever exploiting of the rules. a failed drugs test, though, has a greater feeling of finality — even if froome’s transgression is also linked to a medical condition.

for the layman, for the people who really need convincing, those who crown sports personalities of the year, or take a sport from the margins to the mainstream, there are too many hard-tofathom questions.

if froome regularly takes asthma medication, how could an experienced rider get his doses so wrong? The test reading wasn’t a little over, according to what has come back from the Vuelta event, but double. a lot of people take daily medication. They know the care, the preparation, the efficiency required.

if that is the explanation for the adverse test result, they will be sceptical that an athlete with froome’s reputation for meticulousness would be so careless.

This is a huge problem for Team Sky, too, those wizards of marginal gains. for years, chiefs of other British sports have bowed at the high altar of cycling with its immaculate preparations, its dedication to detail, its focus on the minutiae of competitive sporting advantage.

and what are we now expected to believe? That daft old Team Sky does not keep proper medical records, that it does not know what is contained in its parcels, and that there is an innocent explanation for why its leading athlete competing in an event of enormous significance had a double dose of asthma medication in his blood?

imagine if these were russia’s problems? imagine if it was the odious Vitaly Mutko and not knight of the realm Sir dave Brailsford coming out to explain that what we were led to believe was the most professional and finely tuned sporting organisation in the world were in reality just a silly bunch of scatterbrains.

What we would say is, they’re all at it, and we would turn our heads in resignation and disgust. froome, Team Sky and British Cycling must hope for a more nuanced reaction to this latest scandal. Whether they deserve it, however, is quite

another matter.