British cycling: a scandal with “a whiff of the Del Boy”
It was “one of the great British sporting success stories of modern times”, said Oliver Brown in The Daily Telegraph. Between 2010 and 2017, Britain’s cyclists enjoyed a truly astonishing run of success, winning five Tours de France out of six, eight gold medals at the 2012 Olympic Games, and six at the 2016 ones. Britain rejoiced in their achievements; Bradley Wiggins and Chris Froome became household names. And the architects of this success were two closely linked bodies known for their enlightened approaches to management and training: the Murdoch-backed Team Sky, the professional team of Britain’s elite road cyclists; and British Cycling, responsible for the sport in general and for track cyclists. The two bodies had many riders in common (as the same cyclists often compete on both road and track), and shared key back room staff – including the now notorious figure of Richard Freeman, chief doctor between 2009 and 2017.
Cycling is a sport with a long history of “dodgy doctors”, the most infamous being Lance Armstrong’s performance guru Michele Ferrari, said Jeremy Whittle in The Guardian. Now it seems Freeman must be added to their ranks. Last week, a General Medical Council tribunal in Manchester found that in 2011 he had ordered 30 sachets of testosterone, knowing they would be given to a British cyclist. Freeman did not deny that he’d ordered the banned substance – but had told the tribunal it was intended for Team Sky’s head coach Shane Sutton, who’d wanted it to help treat his erectile dysfunction. Sutton himself scoffed at Freeman’s claim – “My wife wants to testify that you are a bloody liar,” he volunteered – but more to the point, so did the tribunal, which noted that testosterone does not help with erectile problems. Instead, the GMC concluded that Freeman “knew or believed” that the substance would be used to dope a rider.
It’s hard to overstate how damaging these revelations are to the image British cycling has built up over the past decade, said Sean Ingle in the same paper. Team Sky was founded, in 2010, against a background of cycling’s multiple doping scandals, from the Festina affair of the late 1990s to the lingering suspicions over Armstrong, whose downfall came in 2012. From the start, Team Sky made a point of being different: Dave Brailsford, its visionary director (and also British Cycling’s performance manager), insisted that “zero tolerance” of doping was central to its ethos. Brailsford trumpeted a philosophy of “marginal gains”: the pursuit of “microscopic advantages in myriad areas, right down to washing hands before entering a building”. We still don’t know if doping was widespread at Team Sky, or if Freeman’s 2011 consignment was a one-off incident. Nor do we know the rider it was meant for. Yet what the tribunal made all too clear is that “for supposedly Rolls-Royce organisations, British Cycling and Team Sky had more than a whiff of the Del Boy”.
Where this will all end up is far from clear, said Matt Dickinson in The Times. And until all the facts are known, it’s important not to rush to the conclusion “they were all at it”. Nonetheless, this scandal will hit British cycling hard. There were those who said all along that the country’s cycling boom was “too good to be true”: unfortunately, it would seem they were at least partly right.