Cycling: the shame of Bradley Wiggins
“We thought he had won the Tour de France through ‘hard graft and God-given talent’”
Bradley Wiggins was supposed to be different, said David Jones in the Daily Mail. When he became the first British cyclist to win the Tour de France, in 2012, we thought he had triumphed through “hard graft and God-given talent”. After all, as the star rider for “the oh-so virtuous Team Sky”, he had “spearheaded the crusade to clean up cycling”. We were wrong, said Tom Cary in The Daily Telegraph. The publication of a damning report this week has left the reputations of both Wiggins and Sky “hanging by a thread”. Chief among the “stunning claims” made by the Commons Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee is that the cyclist used the drug triamcinolone to improve his chances of winning – and not for medical reasons, as previously claimed. In the process, the report says, Wiggins and Sky did “cross the ethical line”.
Triamcinolone is a “powerful” corticosteroid, said Daniel Martin and Matt Lawton in the Daily Mail. It allows cyclists to lose weight while “maintaining power” and can improve their pain threshold. David Millar, a cyclist banned in 2004 for taking performance-enhancing drugs, described it as the most potent substance he ever used – so potent, in fact, that it would be risky to take it more than once a year. That’s why athletes are banned from using it in competition, unless they have been granted a therapeutic-use exemption (TUE) on medical grounds. That’s what Wiggins had: Team Sky claimed he needed the drug to treat his asthma. But the Committee suggested he was treated with triamcinolone with staggering frequency – as many as nine times in four years, including in the run-up to his Tour de France victory. This went beyond “medical need”, the report concluded; it was about Wiggins “improving his power-to-weight ratio”.
Thanks to Wiggins’s TUE, that wasn’t necessarily illegal, said Martyn Ziegler in The Times. But it depends on when he took the drug. In 2011, a mysterious Jiffy bag was delivered to the cyclist at the Critérium du Dauphiné. Sky insists that the bag contained Fluimucil, a legal decongestant. But the report suggests there is no “reliable evidence” to back up that claim; to make matters worse, his former coach Shane Sutton suggested that the bag contained triamcinolone. That’s potentially very grave indeed: Wiggins’s exemption didn’t come into effect for another two weeks, so if he did take the drug at that point he would be guilty of doping.
That may just be the tip of the iceberg for Sky, said William Fotheringham in The Guardian. Between 2010 and 2013, they ordered an extraordinary 55 doses of triamcinolone. Can it really be true, then, that Wiggins was their only cyclist taking the drug? Not according to one “well-placed source”, who said that a number of riders were possibly using corticosteroids. Sky have “rejected any suggestion of widespread triamcinolone use” by their cyclists, said Martha Kelner in the same paper. But it’s hard to take the team seriously, because they don’t have the evidence to back up their claims. They didn’t keep thorough medical records; Wiggins’s records were apparently lost when a team doctor’s laptop was stolen.
This was cheating, pure and simple, said Martin Samuel in the Daily Mail. If an athlete obtains a TUE that is “performanceenhancing, but not born of physical need, that is cheating”. TUES were not introduced so “smart athletes, ethically loose medics or ambitious team directors” could beat the testing system. They were meant to address “genuine health problems” – to make the sport fairer. Abusing the process is “corruption as blatant as any attempted” by Lance Armstrong. And it’s all the more disappointing because Team Sky seemed to stand for “trust and credibility”, said Matt Dickinson in The Times. Even as their general manager, Dave Brailsford, was talking a good game about “clean sport”, they were “cynically bending the rules to breaking point”. Even now, Brailsford insists he was “unaware of what was going on”. But after these revelations, “how can we believe anything that he says”? For all his achievements at Team Sky, and as the former performance director of British Cycling, he oversaw decisions that undermined “the good work” of so many cyclists. It’s time he finally took responsibility and resigned.