Cycling has again set fire to its own image
Froome has plenty of explaining to do as his beloved sport careers into yet another crisis
Interesting, is it not, that so many asthmatics decide to pursue one of the world’s extreme sports. It is clearly the condition du jour for the stars of Team Sky. First Sir Bradley Wiggins explains his pattern of Therapeutic Use Exemptions by saying that he has lived with asthma since he was a teenager, and now Chris Froome, who has used an inhaler for years, is found to have double the legal amount of salbutamol in his body.
The link between asthma and aerobically intense sport is well documented.
Take in lungfuls of dry, sometimes polluted air on the roads, and you increase the chance of an inflammatory response. Still, one would hardly advise anybody with acute respiratory conditions to bomb up mountains for a living.
Froome’s insistence that he monitored his salbutamol dose with the utmost care at this year’s Vuelta a Espana takes some crediting. His urine sample returned a reading of 2,000 nanograms per millilitre – that is 51 per cent more than Alessandro Petacchi registered for the same substance in 2007, when the Italian was banned for a year and stripped of five stage victories at the Giro. For a cyclist whose success has been ascribed to such tiny variables as where he positions the water bottle on his bike, it is some oversight.
Eight long years ago, Sir Dave Brailsford marked Sky’s launch with one simple promise, to “create a team in which riders are free of the risks of doping and in which fans – new and old – can believe without any doubt or hesitation”. Today, surely, those who took that pledge as read can consider themselves betrayed. Damian Collins, chairman of the Culture, Media and Sport committee, was accused in some quarters of grandstanding, of jumping the gun, when he declared this year that Team Sky’s reputation lay “in tatters”. It turns out that he merely had the gift of prescience.
The Sky credo of “marginal gains”, invoked with such solemnity that it might as well have been inscribed on a tablet of stone was always a misnomer in any case. The shift from zero British Tour de France triumphs in 99 years to five of them since 2012 is, by any gauge, rather a massive gain. Even so, the easily credulous told us that we could trust “Wiggo” and “Froomey”, that it was sacrilegious to depict Team Sky as anything other than emissaries of sporting excellence. And who better to convince us than Sir Dave himself, who hand-picked journalists to travel aboard the jet-black battle bus with an assurance he would show them everything – or, as it is perhaps wiser to put it now, everything he wanted to show them.
Froome has much explaining to do. According to Sky’s version of events, their No 1 rider needed extra salbutamol after the Vuelta climb to the summit of Los Machucos, a highly irregular ascent with gradients as steep as 26 per cent. On that day, Vincenzo Nibali, one of Froome’s chief rivals, gained 42 seconds uphill. The next day, the day of Froome’s abnormal test result, Nibali lost 21 seconds uphill.
“It’s a big blow to cycling,” the Italian said of the champion’s possible doping infraction. “If the positive is confirmed, no one will be able to give me the emotion of winning the Vuelta again.”
Was Froome intending to enhance his performance? He
Cycling remains a realm where we can believe none of what we hear and even less of what we see
denies any such aspersion, and we must wait for the outcome of his investigation, but it is intriguing to refer to some of his past comments – especially one to The Sunday Times in 2014, when he admitted to using an inhaler before “big efforts”.
We can be sure, though, that cycling has failed in its attempts to burn bridges with its filthy past. Team Sky, from their use of Geert Leinders – the Dutch doctor banned for life for a string of doping violations at Rabobank – to their lack of a paper trail for the mystery package delivered to Wiggins at the 2011 Dauphine, have long since forfeited the right to be taken seriously as the unquestionable guardians of clean sport. By the same token, cycling itself, a sport in a state of collective amnesia, continues to set fire to its own image.
The business is broken. There are no white knights. Cycling remains a realm, sadly, where we can believe none of what we hear – and even less of what we see.