If he is the true architect of Britain’s medal factory, why isn’t Brailsford the one under pressure now?

CYCLING’S betrayal by Team Sky, now Ineos Grenadiers, cuts deeper than many of the other betrayals that litter the sport because they arrived in it 11 years ago promising they were different. Yes, I know, you’re right: that’s what they all say.

They all say they’re different. They say they’re here to clean up the sport. They say they will win fairly. They say they will not compromise their principles. They say they are not like the rest and that they never will be. It’s the first layer of pretence. The top coat of the veneer of deception.

And when the Medical Practitioners’ Tribunal Service (MPTS) handed down their ruling at a hearing on Friday and found Dr Richard Freeman, a central figure in the dominance of Team Sky and British Cycling throughout much of the last decade, guilty of ordering banned testosterone ‘knowing or believing’ it was to be used to dope a rider, it redrew the history of sport in this country.

For so long, we were force-fed the idea that the dominance of Team Sky and British Cycling was based on the blue-sky thinking of people like Sir Dave Brailsford and the science of marginal gains, but the illusion of marginal gains has finally and irrevocably been debunked by this ruling. It should be expunged from our lexicon, except as a prime example of how to dupe the willing.

WE wanted to believe it and so we did believe it. But the fear now, the fear that stalks British sport and haunts the memories of so many golden nights in air-tight velodromes that sealed in the cheers and sun-dappled afternoons in France, is that we were just as bad as all the rest. The fear is that our successes were built on sand. That they were fuelled by illegal performance-enhancing drugs.

Dr Freeman, the MPTS decided, realised that the best way of getting a gain — that may or may not have been rather more than marginal — was to order a shipment of Testogel sachets. He has been painted in the hours since the verdict, by Ineos Grenadiers among others, as a rogue operator, a lone wolf. Which is convenient. And which also defies credulity.

‘It is very clear from their report,’ an Ineos Grenadiers statement said on Friday, ‘that Richard Freeman fell short of the ethical standards required of him as a doctor and acted dishonestly. However, the Team does not believe that any athlete ever used or sought to use Testogel or any other performance-enhancing substance.’

The statement reminded me of a song lyric that goes ‘I’m covering my ears like a kid.’ Sung by Naughty Boy. The thing that puzzles me above all others about the torturous fall of Freeman, once the medic to the stars at British Cycling and Team Sky, is that he is the only one who has felt the heat. Don’t forget that a big part of the ethos of Brailsford’s reign at the head of both organisations was a fanatical and microscopic attention to detail.

That was why, we were told, both organisations enjoyed such stunning success. That, we were told, was the revolutionary part of it all. Remember how everyone got suckered by marginal gains? We were beating everyone else because Sir Bradley Wiggins was sleeping in a bed with a comfortable mattress and a magic pillow? And our riders were wearing thinner jerseys than the Aussie cyclists? And we bought into all that. Because we wanted to.

In reality, marginal gains started to be viewed as crowd-pleasing guff some time ago when it became apparent that Team Sky had pushed the boundaries of sporting ethics with unabashed cynicism. They played the system. Wiggins was given (legal) therapeutic use exemptions, or TUEs, for triamcinolone injections in 2011, 2012 and 2013 before three grand tours.

That is one thing. The MPTS ruling on Friday takes disillusion to a different level and faith in what was achieved by British cyclists is an inevitable casualty. The point is that, in an organisation that prided itself on attention to detail, that was said to be the sporting world’s best at it, how is it feasible, how is it even remotely possible, that Freeman was acting alone without the knowledge of others? That idea is an insult to the intelligence.

Maybe Brailsford did not know about that Testogel delivery at the Manchester Velodrome in May 2011. Maybe he did not know about the infamous Jiffy bag delivered from British Cycling’s headquarters to the Team Sky bus at the 2011 Criterium du Dauphine and its equally infamous unknown contents. Maybe his leadership was so weak and ineffectual that other members of these organisations simply did what they wanted without his direction. But these things still happened on his watch.

So far, he has kept his head down and his mouth shut in the apparent hope this would all go away. It is often the way he deals with awkward moments. But now that Freeman has been found guilty, none of it is going to go away.

THIS moment marks the defrocking of one of the greatest stories in British sport. It’s a ‘Say It Ain’t So’ moment. It’s the moment where the edifice comes crashing down. Brailsford was once held up as a guru of modern sports management. He was lauded as one of the giants of British sport, talked about in the same breath as Sir Alex Ferguson and Sir Clive Woodward. Some fawned over him and saw only what he wanted them to see. At the opposite end of the spectrum, others went so far as to refuse to cover the Olympic Games in Rio in 2016 because they did not want to write about achievements they did not believe in.

Some still see him as a hero but when a medical hearing decides his former team doctor, one of his inner circle, is guilty of ordering sachets of Testogel to dope one of his riders, it does not feel unreasonable to suggest that it really is about time we recalibrated Sir Dave’s reputation. Stand down, Sir Dave. Arise Sir Asterisk.