WHO WERE THE DRUGS FOR?

Ex-British Cycling and Team Sky doctor Freeman guilty of ordering banned testosterone gel for an unidentified rider

IT was the verdict that raised grave new doubts about Team GB’s “medal factory” – and whether a decade of success was just a grand deception.

When a medical tribunal decided former Team Sky and British Cycling doctor Richard Freeman had ordered a banned testosterone gel in 2011, believing or knowing it was for the use of an athlete, it did not just put a spoke in the wheels of a sporting fairytale.

Like a certain fugitive duchess calling out the inlaws over racism, it raised even more damaging questions. If the Testogel sachets Freeman ordered were intended for an elite cyclist, who was it?

Now UK AntiDoping want another audience with Dr Freeman, after he admitted misleading them about other matters of disrepute, will he spill the beans? And who else knew of his chicanery?

He was chief medical practitioner for both Team Sky (now Ineos Grenadiers) and British Cycling in an era of unprecedented glory on the road and velodrome track.

For him to be implicated in helping a rider to cheat – and that is the bottom line – is a sledgehammer-blow to the British Olympic movement.

Make no mistake. It was cycling that drove Team GB’s revival from a single gold medal at the Atlanta Games 25 years ago to industrial stockpiles of bullion in Beijing, London and Rio.

Predictably, Ineos – whose seven Tour de France wins since 2012 include six Yellow Jerseys for British riders Sir Bradley Wiggins, Chris Froome (four) and Geraint Thomas – lobbed the grenade back over the fence with the burden of proof.

Team principal Sir Dave Brailsford (below) was keeping a low profile but a corporate statement said: “It is very clear that Richard Freeman fell short of the ethical standards required of him as a doctor and acted dishonestly.

“However, the team does not believe any athlete ever used or sought to use Testogel or any other performance enhancing substance. No evidence has been provided that this ever happened or that there has been any wrongdoing by any athlete at any point.”

True enough, but this was not Freeman’s first controversy involving fundamental issues of doping. Four years ago, UKAD’s exhaustive investigation into the delivery of a mystery package for Wiggins after the Criterium du Dauphine – also in 2011 – petered out because they were unable to identify the contents.

Freeman maintained the medication was a legitimate decongestant, but the episode fuelled a swirl of innuendo around therapeutic use exemp- tions granted to Wiggins to take a powerful anti-asthma drug before three Grand Tours from 2011-13. The fivetimes Olympic gold medallist has always vehemently denied any wrongdoing.

MPs who want Brailsford suspended, pending a full inquiry into the Freeman affair, are whistling in the dark. But a drawn-out tribunal, where the evidence featured laptops being destroyed, allegations of Testogel being used to treat erectile dysfunction – and furious rebuttals – is not the end of smoke and mirrors at the medal factory. It may just be the beginning.