Wiggins had to the sport’s drug race I still can’t completely clean
we began to develop a decent rapport, enjoying a gossip early in the day before the racing kicked off properly.’
For those who had applauded Wiggins in Manchester, the love-bombing of the sport’s most controversial rider was puzzling. Was it fair to suggest that there was
Q ‘a one percent suspicion of doping’ on Armstrong’s teams?
A Three of Wiggins’s team-mates at Garmin had witnessed it first-hand.
Q Had Armstrong ‘worked with certain doctors who were under suspicion of doping?’
A Hey, even Lance didn’t deny it. Where had the great anti- doping crusader gone? Was his fourth place in the Tour that year — an outstanding achievement — a sign the problem had been solved? And so it was for the three seasons that followed. The faster Bradley pedalled, the less we heard from the angry young man we loved.
To be fair, the sport is unquestionably cleaner now than at any other time in its past but it seems a strange irony that the only time Wiggins has looked under pressure in this Tour was when he was asked about doping.
That was the press conference after the eighth stage to Porrentruy, when he was asked about the comparisons being made on Twitter between the strength of Team Sky and Armstong’s all-conquering US Postal team.
‘I say they’re just f*****g w*****s,’ he replied. ‘I cannot be doing with people like that. It justifies their own boneidleness because they can’t ever imagine applying themselves to do anything in their lives. It’s easy for them to sit under a pseudonym on Twitter and write that sort of s**t, rather than get off their a***s in their own lives and apply themselves and work hard at something and achieve something. And that’s it ultimately, c***s.’
There were no follow-up questions. Wiggins dropped the mic and left.
Two days later, during the rest- day press conference, the team informed journalists that no questions on doping would be tolerated or answered.
But then, just as we began to wonder about transparency, Wiggins addressed the subject at length in a column for
The Guardian, offering insight on his views on doping and the hard work to which he attributes his success.
‘I do believe the sport is changing,’ he wrote. ‘As that change has happened, my performances have gone up, and at the same time I’ve begun to work far harder than I did before.
‘I’m not claiming the sport is out of the woods but doping in the sport is less of a worry to me personally, it’s less at the forefront of my mind, because I’m no longer getting beaten by people who then go on and test positive or whatever. If there is a difference in my attitude now to back then, it’s that I’m more focused on what I am doing, I pay less attention to what’s going on outside my bubble because I’m not coming second to riders who dope.’
It was a fair point. And he made a lot of them. But there was one legitimate question he didn’t address.
In the autumn of 2009, three months before Team Sky was launched, I spent an interesting afternoon in Manchester in the company of the team’s general manager David Brailsford. We had been talking at length about the new team’s recruitment policy and his (in my view) surprising decision not to offer a contract to the reformed drugs cheat David Millar. He walked to a filing cabinet and handed me a copy of the team recruitment strategy.
It must have weighed half a ton. As you would expect from Brailsford, every i was dotted and every t was crossed.
Their goal was to win the Tour de France with a clean British rider in the next five years. To achieve that goal, the team would employ only British doctors who had never worked in cycling before.
The team would not employ anyone who had been associated with doping. The team would have a zero tolerance of doping. Staff would be ‘enthusiastic and positive, fit and healthy and willing to try new things’.
Three years later that goal has been achieved, but there is just one question: why did they hire Geert Leinders?
In the summer of 2007, when Wiggins was making his zero-tolerance speech in Manchester about doctors and teams, Geert Leinders was a member of the medical staff at Rabobank — Michael Rasmussen’s team. It was not a vintage year for the Dutchmen — Thomas Dekker, perhaps the nation’s brightest prospect, had tested positive for EPO and Rasmussen’s disgrace at the Tour was the final straw.
The team manager, Theo de Rooy, was sacked. In May of this year, De Rooy told a Dutch newspaper that doping was an accepted practice at Rabobank during his four years at the helm.
A FEW days after the interview was published, Leinders’s name started trending on Twitter. The bone-idle w*****s were puzzled: ‘Was this the same Geert Leinders who had spent the last two years at Sky?’ The rumours continued to build. The team were questioned by several journalists but said nothing until the rest day of the 2012 Tour when Brailsford admitted to The Times that Leinders had been employed by the team since 2010.
‘I’ve nothing to hide,’ Brailsford said. ‘There is nothing I won’t talk about. We needed some experience. That’s why we decided to go and get him. Has he been a good doctor? Brilliant. The guy really understands it’s not about doping, it’s about genuine medical practice.’
He also announced that Sky were currently investigating Leinders’s past.
But how did we get here? What happened to that weighty tome in Brailsford’s office with all those lofty ambitions and goals? What happened to zero tolerance? What happened to openness and transparency? What happened to only hiring British doctors who had worked outside the sport? Was that really too much to ask? Some 86 per cent of Tour de France winners since Tommy Simpson’s death have been tarnished or implicated by doping. There is nothing to suggest that Bradley Wiggins achieved yesterday’s historic victory through anything other than talent and hard work. But at this time of glory, why does Team Sky leave itself open to insinuation by employing Leinders?
Here’s the question again: Was this Tour de France clean? Here’s the tragedy: I don’t know if the public’s answers would have changed since 2006.