Wada considers banning Wiggins drug
Corticosteroids use to be reviewed by world body Ukad welcomes decision after years of lobbying
A blanket ban on the controversial drug used by Sir Bradley Wiggins before his 2012 Tour de France triumph was being considered last night by the World Anti-Doping Agency.
Wada’s director general, Olivier Niggli, revealed it had set up a group to examine the status of triamcinolone and other corticosteroids after three years of lobbying from UK Anti-Doping.
The news follows the storm over Wiggins’s use of triamcinolone before three of his biggest races, an ongoing Ukad investigation into allegations the substance was in the infamous 2011 Jiffy bag intended for Britain’s most decorated Olympian and the revelation Team Sky doctors vetoed an application for him to take it on a fourth occasion.
Triamcinolone, which convicted dopers have claimed is a powerful performance-enhancer, is currently banned in-competition but athletes can take it if they obtain a Therapeutic Use Exemption or if they use it out of competition.
Wiggins was granted TUEs to take the drug ahead of the 2011 and 2012 Tours de France and the 2013 Giro d’Italia. He has repeatedly insisted he did so to treat chronic asthma and allergies, and not to obtain an unfair advantage over his rivals.
Niggli, who confirmed Wada’s review would also consider cutting the number of medical conditions for which a TUE for triamcinolone could be obtained, admitted the current system was open to abuse because it was hard to prove whether corticosteroids had been taken using permitted or prohibited methods.
Speaking at the Tackling Doping in Sport conference in London, he said: “It is an unsatisfactory situation, we all agree with that. And we have set up a group to try to come up with better proposal to how we can do it.
“The hope has been for a number of years that research would bring us a detection method that would distinguish the route of administration. [The] reality is that it doesn’t seem that easy to come up with a method to allow us to make that distinction.
“We are now at a stage where we need to have a number of discussions about how we deal with that. In my view, I agree the system as it is now is not good.
“In fact, only those who are being honest about what they have been doing get caught. Otherwise, you always say, ‘It was a cream’, and you get away with it.”
Yesterday’s news was welcomed by Ukad, which has repeatedly lobbied for a blanket ban of corticosteroids due to their ability to assist with weight loss.
“If they were to introduce an outright ban then great,” said the agency’s chief executive, Nicole Sapstead. “Our view is that they [corticosteroids] aren’t always being administered in a way that’s reflective of an individual’s actual medical needs and that can’t be right when somebody doesn’t actually have a medical problem that warrants that use because it then has some additional effects that they can benefit from.”
Sapstead was speaking a week after heavily criticising Team Sky during a parliamentary inquiry into doping in sport, revealing it had produced no evidence to back up its claim that the Jiffy bag contained the simple decongestant Fluimucil.
Ukad has also pushed for a ban on tramadol and thyroid medication amid allegations they had been abused by Team Sky and Sir Mo Farah’s coach, Alberto Salazar, respectively. Both Team Sky and Salazar strenuously deny any wrongdoing.