BRAILSFORD UNDER FIRE
Anti-doping boss hits out at Sky chief’s testimony
DAVE BRAILSFORD’S position as principal of Team Sky was looking precarious yesterday after evidence he gave to Britain’s Culture, Media and Sport select committee was described as ‘extraordinary’ by the UK’s most senior anti-doping official.
Less than 24 hours after Chris Froome declined to give Brailsford his unequivocal support when questioned on whether his boss still had sufficient credibility to lead the professional road cycling team, the Team Sky chief came under fire from UK Anti-Doping chairman David Kenworthy.
Speaking to the BBC, Kenworthy was scathing in his criticism of Brailsford’s responses to MPs’ questions concerning the medical package ordered by Team Sky for Bradley Wiggins at the end of the 2011 Criterium du Dauphine. Kenworthy also said evidence given by both Sky and British Cycling bosses was ‘very disappointing’.
Team Sky, British Cycling and Wiggins maintain there has been no wrongdoing but Kenworthy, who has been chairman of UKAD since its establishment in 2009, said: ‘There’s still no definite answer from anyone involved. I still don’t know what was in there; I’m no nearer finding out than you are. People could remember a package that was delivered to France, they can remember who asked for it, they can remember the route it took, who delivered it, the times it arrived. The select committee has got expense sheets and travel documents.
‘So everybody can remember this from five years ago but no one can remember what was in the package. That strikes me as being extraordinary. It is very disappointing.’
Three months after trying to provide the Daily Mail with alibis that proved to be incorrect – and then attempting to persuade the newspaper not to run the story at all by offering ‘something else’ – Brailsford told the select committee that the package taken to France by a British Cycling coach Simon Cope contained a legal decongestant that could have been bought at a local French pharmacy.
Brailsford insisted Cope, now the boss of Team Wiggins, was already planning to travel to the finish of the race Wiggins won but expenses forms and other documents provided to the committee by British Cycling show flights and accommodation for Cope were booked on the day he took a train to Manchester to collect the package.
The documents also show that if Wiggins was ill during the race, as his former coach Shane Sutton told MPs, he had to wait four days to be treated. Cope collected the package on June 8, 2011 but the medication was not administered to the five-times Olympic champion until June 12, after Wiggins had secured the most significant victory of his road career thus far.
Kenworthy was particularly dismissive of Brailsford’s revelation that Dr Richard Freeman had told him the package contained Fluimucil. He said UKAD investigators had not been given any documentation to support the claim.
When asked about Brailsford’s Fluimucil explanation, the former chief constable of North Yorkshire Police responded with an almost exasperated tone: ‘Well that’s what Dave Brailsford came out with at the hearing. But actually, if you recall, he didn’t say: “I know that’s what it was.” He said: “I have been told that’s what it was.”
Cope has said he does not know what was in the package despite having it in his possession for four days. He even claimed in one interview that the package had ‘nothing to do with Brad’. When asked if British Cycling should have kept records of medication taken abroad by one of its coaches, Kenworthy said: ‘One would think so, one would hope so.’
Wiggins retired from cycling under a cloud last month and Kenworthy added: ‘One of the tragedies of all this is you’ve got probably one of the greatest cyclists that the UK has produced, who’s just coming to his retirement, and all the talk is not about the successes that he’s had, but about this package.’