Golden years of cycling success now left shrouded in suspicion

Htribunal findings cast an uncomfortable shadow over Tour de France and Olympic achievements

After all those incantations about marginal gains, we learn at last that the cult of the one percenters at Team Sky were prepared to let the odd detail slide. While they fixated on standardised saddle heights, dust-free mattresses and colour-coded water bottles, they appeared rather less bothered by the specifics of the World Anti-doping Code. When it came to the 30 sachets of banned Testogel that were delivered to the national velodrome in June 2011, their usually meticulous recordkeeping deserted them.

And so, after an almost 2½-year-long medical tribunal, it comes to this, the finding that the most senior doctor at Team Sky and British Cycling ordered a prohibited substance on the understanding it would be used to dope a cyclist. This verdict is lethal for the one-time darlings of the sport. Add the ambiguity over the cyclist’s identity to the fact that all the team’s crowning glories arrived in the wake of the testosterone consignment authorised by Dr Richard Freeman, and there is only one conclusion: that everything this team achieved lies shrouded in suspicion.

It is a particular cruelty that on what Julian Knight, MP, chair of the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport select committee, described as a “terrible day for the reputation of British cycling”, the achievements of many celebrated British athletes – including multiple Olympic champions – end up being tainted without wrongdoing.

Reflect on all we knew about them even before Freeman’s downfall. There was Sir Dave Brailsford demonstrating their “zero-tolerance” stance on doping through his decision in 2012 to hire Geert Leinders, the Belgian doctor banned from cycling three years later for multiple doping violations.

There was the unresolved controversy of what was in a Jiffy bag delivered in 2011 by Sky’s Simon Cope to La Toussuire.

There were Sir Bradley Wiggins’s injections with triamcinolone, a banned steroid, before three grand tours, under therapeutic use exemptions that, at the very least, raised ethical issues.

Now there is a tribunal’s conclusion that Freeman not only ordered up some testosterone to enhance an athlete’s performance, but that he went to extremes to cover his tracks. It is the openendedness of it all that magnifies the doubt. We do not know whether the parcel of Testogel patches was intended to be used on only one athlete. We have no idea whether Freeman, as he claims, washed them down the sink.

We are none the wiser, given that Brailsford never appeared at the tribunal, as to who else in Team Sky’s chain of command knew about Freeman’s actions. And it is unlikely that UK Anti-doping, which failed to establish the contents of the Jiffy bag, will be able to provide any greater clarity.

The ultimate consequence is that one of the greatest British sporting success stories is now wreathed in darkness. Where once cycling was at the centre of a long, glorious gold rush, these days it makes headlines for how much Viagra it sourced for riders, or for Freeman’s claim that he had requested testosterone to treat Shane Sutton’s erectile dysfunction. The memories of those years of plunder for British cycling are indelible: six Tour de France wins in seven years, after a 109-year wait for one, eight gold medals at the London Olympics in 2012, six in Rio, and a knighthood and OBE respectively for the most garlanded champions in Wiggins and Chris Froome.

The two have faced their own battles subsequently to maintain credibility, with Wiggins struggling to explain his TUES to his critics’ satisfaction and Froome forced to justify why he had recorded double the legal limit of salbutamol, an asthma drug, during the 2017 Vuelta a Espana.

But with the Freeman outcome, the ramifications are potentially vast. Just 4½ months before the Tokyo Olympics, there is an overarching question of whether we can believe anything we see now. Was a much-loved medal factory built on the type of concealment that allowed testosterone to be deposited at the Manchester Velodrome? Perhaps Freeman was, as some maintain, a rogue operative. But within a team and a British cycling culture famed for its forensic approach, that is, to put it politely, a stretch.

Instead, all we are left with is bleak uncertainty as to whether the foundations of a decade’s cycling success were rotten. The reputation for relentless sacrifice has been burnt on a bonfire of infighting, a damaged laptop and incompetence over medical records. Now the chief doctor has been found guilty of ordering a banned substance to enable a rider to cheat a year before Britain’s greatest Games. This leaves more than just a sour taste. It leaves a sense of pain that the story we were sold all along was wrong.