O’grady backs White
AUSTRALIAN cycling great Stuart O’Grady said his boss and former teammate Matt White did the right thing by himself and the sport by confessing to doping.
White stood down as OricaGreenEDGE director and national high performance coordinator on Saturday, but only after he was implicated in a US Anti-Doping Agency report into cheating by Lance Armstrong and the US Postal Service team a decade ago.
‘‘I think it was the right thing to do if he did choose to go down this avenue,’’ O’Grady said.
The veteran cyclist cited the example of GarminSharp’s team manager Jonathan Vaughters – who confessed in August to doping during his racing career and now leads an anti-doping crusade – as why White should not be lost to the sport.
‘‘There’s people like Jonathan Vaughters and David Millar who have confessed and you’ve got to look at the team they’re running now and the way they’re doing it to rejuvenate cycling in a positive way,’’ O’Grady said.
He said he did not believe White was a major player in the doping scandal and might have succumbed to pressure from teammates and officials at US Postal.
‘‘I don’t believe for a second that he did it for a long period,’’ O’Grady said.
‘‘I haven’t spoken to him about it, but I think we’ve got to look at him as a director (for Orica-GreenEDGE) and (Australia) – he’s been brilliant and I hope for Matty’s sake he’s not made an example of. He was just a small pawn in the chess game as far as I’m concerned.’’
O’Grady said he was never naive enough to completely dismiss doping allegations against Armstrong and the US Postal team, but until now refused to believe them.
He expressed shock at the extent of the US Anti-Doping Agency’s report that Armstrong’s golden era at the Tour de France was built on lies. But he said the evidence was too overwhelming to ignore and he was confident that his sport could recover from its darkest period.
‘‘ I believed that he won those seven Tours clean – I wanted to believe that like everyone else,’’ he said.
‘‘But there’s so much damning evidence against him that it’s obviously looking like this happened, and I’m as shocked as anybody.’’