Should Armitstead have been allowed to race?
“It was the strangest sensation,” said Martin Samuel in the Daily Mail. On Sunday, as the cyclists crossed the finishing line in the women’s road race, I was actually relieved that a British athlete didn’t “grab gold”. A week before the race, it was revealed that Lizzie Armitstead had missed three drugs tests in less than ten months; she was suspended by UK anti-doping authorities, and was only able to compete in Rio because she won a lastminute court case. On the day, the 27-year-old finished fifth; had she won a medal, as she had been tipped to do, the “fallout” would have overshadowed Team GB’S whole Olympics.
Fifth place was “perfectly respectable” in the circumstances, said Matt Dickinson in The Times. The course was far too hilly for Armitstead, who lost “too much time on the climb”. And, more importantly, her final preparations were “so very far from ideal”: her suspension made her lose racing opportunities, as well as “plenty of sleep”. But Armitstead should never have been allowed to compete, said Oliver Holt in The Mail on Sunday. She blamed the first missed test on having left her phone on silent – if a Russian cyclist raced after offering that kind of excuse, “we’d be saying their presence in Rio was a sick joke”. Few think Armitstead is guilty of worse than carelessness. But by making a mockery of the anti-doping regime, she has damaged “the cause of clean sport”.