tue take three
I’ve commented in the past about Team Sky TUE (therapeutic use exemptions) debacle and Sir Bradley of Wiggo’s supposed asthma condition and was intrigued to see if the Beeb’s documentary ‘Britain’s Cycling Superheroes: What Price Success?’ was going to shed any more light on the murky subject. And do you know what, it did, but not perhaps in the way British Cycling wanted it to.
David Brailsford, describing himself as ‘comfortable’, stayed religiously on-script, justifying Bradley’s use of triamcinoloene acetonide by explaining all the relevant & necessary bodies had been correctly notified and had signed-off the use. Comfortable with the permission as opposed to the request, me-thinks, which remains highly spurious. Shane Sutton, Brailsford’s enforcer, however was much more forthright and, IMHO, honest: “If you have an athlete who is 95% and the TUE gets him to 100%, yeah, of course you would, because the rules allow you to do that.” Truth be told, I quite liked Shane as you could see his win-at-all-costs mentality had turned him into something of a gold medal junkie and didn’t he just hate being hauled over the coals by the parliamentary select committee.
The most telling commentary came from the once-bad-boy of British cycling & convicted EPO drug cheat, David Miller, who described Bradley’s drug of choice as being the most potent he had ever used and accused Team Sky of blatantly and cynically “gaming the system.” Having believed Team Sky were truly different and racing completely clean, Miller appeared genuinely crestfallen and admitted that “a little bit of me died the day this came out.”
Unsurprisingly, the mystery concerning Wiggo’s French ‘Jiffy bag’ remains unsolved as the will-he-won’t-he-testify Dr Richard Freeman again declined to speak forth. Ditto, the Lancashire-based medical supplies company that sent a batch of testosterone patches to British Cycling HQ in 2011. Rural Lancashire? Isn’t that where our Brad lives I hear you cry!
So, there we have it. Team Sky didn’t cheat, they broke no rules. Sir David Brailsford is a sincere and honourable leader and Shane Sutton a feisty, irascible character who never crosses the line into deranged megalomania. Bradley Wiggins suffers from a combination of shocking asthma and allergies and has never doped in his life. His 2012 Tour de France victory remains untainted and the whole team are Persil-clean. Probably…
