Team Sky’s shade of white grows ever murkier
Froome’s attempt to take the moral high ground is being undermined by his team’s compromised record
There was a sorrow in Chris Froome’s face, but a certainty in his words. Asked if felt his legacy was irrevocably tainted by a drug test showing he had twice the legal limit of Salbutamol, an asthma medication, in his urine, he replied: “No.”
Trouble is, it is not strictly up to him. None of us have the luxury of sole authorship of our legacies. If we did, Lance Armstrong would be committed to posterity as a seven-time Tour de France champion who spearheaded the fight against cancer.
Froome took the moral high ground with his detractors yesterday, suggesting that any criticisms were borne of a misunderstanding of how asthma worked. He can console himself with as many #istandwithfroomey tweets as he likes, but others will make the more lasting judgment.
The early portents, alas, are not promising: “Sky falls in on Froome,” screamed the front page of L’equipe, while the odds on the cyclist making the top three at BBC Sports Personality of the Year this weekend drifted out to 80-1.
Whiter than white, Team Sky purported to be, upon their inception in 2010. And yet one of their earliest decisions was to recruit – on a freelance basis – Geert Leinders, the doctor later exposed as central to the Rabobank scandal.
Maybe as Sir Dave Brailsford, the team’s principal, says they did not know the extent of his involvement in doping but this is hardly a shade of white Dulux would recognise.
Earlier this year, I met Joerg Jaksche for a coffee in Sydney. Jaksche, let us be clear, is no angel. In 2006, the German was one of nine riders thrown out of the Tour de France, having been exposed as a protagonist in Operation Puerto, the Spanish police’s investigation into the doping network of Dr Eufemiano Fuentes. By his own admission, Jaksche was a willing guinea pig for Fuentes’ bizarre methods. He even paid for the most expensive ‘Siberia’ technique, where his blood was deep-frozen in a centrifuge for months, and tried to conceal his involvement by marking the bags with the name of his deceased dog, Bella. He has no claim on martyrdom, but he is a powerful critic of cycling’s supposed reinvention in the decade since his disgrace.
“Sky, under Sir Dave Brailsford, want to present themselves in public as academic, elitist – ‘We don’t cheat, we get our advantage from our intelligence’,” Jaksche said. “But look at who they had. You cannot say that you’re intelligent and then take someone from Rabobank. It just does not match.”
Jaksche’s beef with Sky is personal. At 41, he has moved to Australia to pursue a masters in business at the University of New South Wales, looking for an identity as something other than a drugs cheat. But he cannot help to resent the degree to which he championships in Bergen later that month. “Our credibility is at stake,” Martin said.
Such credibility, sadly, is no longer safe in the hands of men like Brian Cookson. Last week, at the launch of the Tour of Britain, the deposed president of the UCI, the sport’s world governing body, blithely declared that Team Sky and, indeed, the entire sport of cycling should have their reputations “restored” after the closure of inquiries into Sir Bradley Wiggins and the mystery Jiffy bag at the 2011 Dauphine. Seven days later, the Froome news broke, and the stunning naivety of Cookson’s comment was laid bare.
It is as if the power brokers have already forgotten what went on under their noses, year after year. The monuments to cycling’s shame are stark.
The last time, for instance, that there were back-to-back Tour de France winners not caught up in doping scandal? 1995. And even that year’s winner, Miguel Indurain, once failed a test for an asthma drug.
So, for now, Froome can spare us any talk of untainted legacies. His sport has the grimmest history, and it is one with which his team, Sky, have failed to make a convincing peace. As Jaksche put it: “Sky are so contradictory. They don’t accept the past. And without accepting the past, there is no future.”