Brailsford feeling heat over Wiggins
THERE is a growing sense of anxiety among prominent figures at Team Sky over Sir Dave Brailsford’s handling of the current crisis.
On Friday UK Anti-Doping investigators swooped at short notice on the Manchester velodrome, demanding that senior cycling officials make themselves available for questioning in what was an unscheduled, extremely significant visit.
UKAD’s investigation, revealed by the Daily Mail on Thursday, has focused initially on Sir Bradley Wiggins, Team Sky and a so far unidentified medical package that a British Cycling official was asked to deliver to the end of the Dauphine Libere race on June 12, 2011.
It then extended to an allegation made by the disgraced former Team Sky rider Jonathan Tiernan-Locke, who said the controversial but currently legal painkiller — tramadol — was freely distributed among British riders at the 2012 World Cycling Championships. The cycling authorities have called for the drug to be banned, with the support of Team Sky as it happens.
Connecting the separate allegations of ‘wrongdoing’ is Dr Richard Freeman, who was the Team Sky doctor understood to have requested the package in 2011 and was with the British Cycling team in 2012. He remains the British Cycling team doctor and was at the recent Rio Olympics.
Both British Cycling and Team Sky insist they have not been in breach of any anti-doping regulations but Brailsford’s attempts to defuse the situation prior to the story breaking have left Sky insiders concerned and baffled.
The attempt to suggest Simon Cope — the BC official who acted as courier for the package in 2011 — went to La Toussuire to meet the British rider Emma Pooley was worrying enough when the Olympic silver medallist was in fact 700 miles away racing in Spain.
But more startling for some members of a team who have dominated the professional circuit for the last five years is Brailsford’s suggestion that it was common practice for the team bus to leave without its principal rider.
Brailsford very much set the agenda when he attempted to dismiss the allegation that Wiggins and Dr Freeman had a private meeting on the team bus after the Briton had won the Dauphine. Brailsford said he had interviewed staff members — including the bus driver — and said the bus had left before Wiggins had completed his podium, media and drugs test commitments in the French ski resort on June 12, 2011.
Indeed in a text message he said it was ‘our normal protocol when a rider is on the podium that the team and other riders return to the bus and leave.
‘At the end of the Dauphine the same duties were done.’ He said he was expecting written statements from staff to confirm as much.
A video posted by a cycling fan on YouTube proves that it was not the case. Wiggins is filmed back at the bus after the final stage of the Dauphine that year.
Since then a communications officer has argued that it was unfair to expect Brailsford or Team Sky staff to remember the details of what happened at the end of a race five years ago. Fair enough. But it was Brailsford who sought to challenge the allegation about the meeting between Wiggins and Dr Freeman by seeking to prove it could not have happened.
And, whatever did happen that day, one can reasonably expect the principal of Team Sky, someone who is so meticulous in everything he does, to know what the ‘normal protocol’ would be.
That, however, is what is now troubling senior figures at Team Sky, with one insider suggesting this week that ‘the bus wouldn’t usually leave the end of a tour when the team leader has won’. On the contrary, it would ‘wait’.
And given the success that Sky have enjoyed — they have won the Tour de France in four of the last five years and countless other races — waiting for the team leader to complete post-race duties has become a regular occurrence.
Team Sky’s image as the most respectable face of professional road cycling has already been seriously damaged. The publication by Russian hackers of medical documents that revealed Wiggins had applied for a Therapeutic Use Exemption (TUE) to use a powerful corticosteroid before his last three Grand Tours has left them open to accusations of crossing an ethical line in the sport.
One leading commentator has even said the record of Wiggins’s 2012 Tour victory should be accompanied by an asterisk explaining that he had an intramuscular injection of triamcinolone just days before the race. The same commentator has also questioned whether Wiggins and Brailsford should have received their knighthoods in 2013.
Such levels of criticism are certainly causing concern among Sky executives. Not least when Sky and 21st Century Fox provide more than half of Team Sky’s £24.5million annual budget.
But inside the actual team, too, the sense of unease is spreading. Chris Froome responded to the initial Wiggins TUE storm by stating that ‘it is clear the TUE system is open to abuse’ and the developments of the last few days would suggest he is not alone in becoming increasingly uncomfortable about the situation.
The UKAD investigation is now under way. The investigators did not turn up at Team Sky and British Cycling’s headquarters at Manchester velodrome on Friday for a cosy, routine chat, whatever Sky argued in a statement yesterday.
They also appeared to imply that they all but instigated the investigation. ‘Team Sky was recently contacted by the Daily Mail regarding an allegation of wrongdoing which we strongly refute,’ they said. ‘We informed British Cycling of the allegation and asked them to contact UK Anti-Doping. We understand that UKAD are currently investigating this as you would expect.’
UKAD launched their investigation before BC or Team Sky contacted them.