Cycling: the downfall of Team Sky

“When they began to race seven years ago, Team Sky were cast as an angelic voice crying out in the wilderness,” said Oliver Holt in The Mail on Sunday. At a time when cycling had been battered by scandal, they were meant to be a “wholesome British antidote” to Lance Armstrong and the rest of the dopers. And we cheered them on as their riders Bradley Wiggins and Chris Froome won four of the last five Tours de France. But it’s now clear that Team Sky’s ethos was, in fact, a “grand illusion”. If anyone still believed it, a devastating House of Commons hearing into doping last week put paid to such credulity. Nicole Sapstead, the head of UK Anti-doping (Ukad), was scathing in her criticism; in the words of MP Damian Collins, it left Team Sky’s credibility “in tatters”. There’s no proof that Team Sky were doping, said David Walsh in The Sunday Times. The problem is, they’ve done a terrible job of proving they weren’t. Most troubling is an incident that took place in 2011, when a mysterious Jiffy bag was couriered to a race in France for Wiggins. Team Sky claim it contained Fluimucil, a harmless decongestant available over the counter. Why, then, did someone go to the trouble of personally delivering it from the UK? Ukad has spent five months trying to get to the bottom of what was in the bag – but Team Sky have given them little help. They say they have no records because their doctor, Richard Freeman, failed to upload them; and he can’t access them now, he says, because his laptop was stolen. The controversy is all the more damaging following last year’s revelations about Wiggins: that between 2011 and 2013, he received special permission to use Triamcinolone, a corticosteroid known to have been used by dopers. It was, apparently, needed to treat his pollen allergies – but that’s akin to “cracking a nut with a sledgehammer”.

No one comes out of this well, said Rod Liddle in the same paper. Not Freeman, whose excuses are laughable. And not Wiggins, who was once considered a British sporting hero. But this goes deeper than that, said Matt Dickinson in The Times. Team Sky boss Dave Brailsford was the performance director of British Cycling, the sport’s governing body, until 2014. And the organisations are incredibly close, sharing a base and personnel; it was a British Cycling coach who delivered the mysterious package. It’s true that in the “scale of cycling controversies”, these failings are “relatively minor”. But after promising to do things “to the highest standards”, Team Sky must be judged accordingly. None of their riders will escape suspicion now, said William Fotheringham in The Guardian. Froome will face questions, even though there’s “no evidence of anything untoward in his three Tour wins”. Brailsford can’t come back from this – he should do the decent thing and “fall on his sword”.