BRAILSFORD SHOULD NOT SURVIVE:

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. Mo Farah was our king of the track, now we wonder if he is really all he seems. Lord Coe was the pillar of Britain’s athletics establishment: if he is tarnished, what of the rest of them, even the best of them?

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’s parliamentary committee for that. What at first appeared a vanity project to advance his 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 performanceenhancing 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 the evidence former road race cyclist David Millar provided 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 organisations 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 back of a fag packet. then smoked all the fags at a party and threw the empty carton 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.

NOtthat team Sky are alone in this. A separate part of the report contains a worrying account of events surrounding another icon of British sport, Mo Farah.

An injection of L- carnitine he received before the 2014 London Marathon from Dr Robin Chakraverty — now working for the FA as lead performance doctor to the England team — is also absent from UK Athletics’ medical records. Given the detail prevalent in modern elite sport, with copious figures kept to inform every level of performance, even daily training, these oversights are unfathomable.

Dr Chakraverty says he had never given Farah L- carnitine before. How could he then forget to register its presence? What if there were side- effects? these failings are echoed throughout the report.

Indeed, the parliamentary committee concludes UK AntiDoping may be worthy of compensation from British Cycling, given the money spent chasing leads down dead ends due to a lack of recorded evidence; there is also a call for the GMC to investigate Dr Chakraverty’s cavalier approach to recorded detail.

Neither reflects well on those administering British sport; neither chimes with the popular sell of hard work and attention to detail, of brilliant athletes going the hard yards, while technicians crunch the numbers and explore the minutiae of sporting advantage.

these tiny disturbances in the picture will bleed into other areas of British sport in time; our winter Olympians with their special suits, our curiously asthmatic, yet highly successful, swimmers. they will all be touched by suspicion, their simple, innocent explanations all too familiar from the mouths of increasingly discredited individuals. Remember when team Sky, when Sir David Brailsford and Wiggins and Chris Froome, bemoaned that Lance Armstrong had indelibly tainted their sport? Remember that Brailsford’s team were going to be the antidote to that? What is it we read across the 54 pages of this report? More contamination; more poison. Brailsford, in particular, should not survive this.

Nor does it help that the report opens with the traducing of a man seen as the most powerful figure in British sport. Long before he was head of athletics’ world governing body, the IAAF, Lord Coe was credited with bringing the 2012 Olympics to London; long before that he was the world’s greatest middledistance runner, the finest in his field in the days when gold medals did not fall on team GB like a gentle shower every four years.

Lord Coe’s initial reaction to reports of Russian doping linked to corruption at the IAAF was quite dismal. Famously, he called it a declaration of war on his sport, preferring to shoot the messenger rather than respond to the urgent power of the message. the committee reserves perhaps its most delicious criticism for him.

While the skewering of British Cycling resonates thunderously, its description of Coe’s response under questioning is waspishly understated, a stiletto in the ribs rather than a blunderbuss.

‘When pressed as to what he had done over the past eight years as vice-president, Lord Coe referred to what he had done in the last 67 days,’ the committee records.

So seven years and roughly nine months of crickets chirping at the IAAF. Some leader. ‘I don’t think there is any justification for taking medication without a medical need,’ Brailsford told the committee, who concluded he oversaw exactly that.

Lord Coe’s assertions for himself and his sport are described as ‘ risible’ and his IAAF has a ‘tattered reputation’. Shock is expressed at the keeping of medical records around Farah by a doctor operating as chief medical officer of UK Athletics. these are serious allegations, serious findings, there will be ramifications.

Witnesses may have lied to Parliament, achievements may be scratched from the records, senior figures may have to resign.

Yet the biggest casualty is emotional, not individual. the trust that was felt in British sport, its leaders and heroes, will be gone. the knowledge that we are cleaner, straighter, better, can no longer be assumed. the next time the bunting is out for another red, white and blue sporting success, we will pause, and wonder.

this is a watershed moment for British sport, one that cannot be airily ignored, one that cannot be quickly forgotten, and one from which few may prove to be exempt.

This was cheating rather than opportunism The trust that was felt in British sport will be gone