On the version of events told today by Sir Dave Brailsford regarding the notorious package, we have all been wasting our time over a piddling decongestant medicine.
Newspaper investigations have been launched, UK Anti-Doping (Ukad) investigators called into action, files at Team Sky and British Cycling pored over for weeks in forensic detail, riders quizzed, Sir Bradley Wiggins’ credibility doubted even more than before, all over something that could be bought over the counter in France for around a fiver.
“If this was the simple explanation all along, why on earth was it not put forward at the start by Team Sky?
By this version, we have all got extremely flustered over something that he could clear up with one word - fluimucil - finally uttered to a group of MPs today. Really? Like so much that has gone on since Wiggins’ three therapeutic use exemptions (TUEs) for triamcinolone became public, it simply does not add up.
Brailsford came into a parliamentary select committee today and simply replaced one set of troubling questions with another – starting with the most obvious one, that if this was the simple explanation all along, why on earth was it not put forward at the start by Team Sky instead of a whole set of convoluted explanations which quickly fell apart? Why not mention fluimucil if, as Brailsford claimed, it is so regularly used by his riders? If Sky had time to question their bus driver about that affair, surely they could get a simple and straight answer from Richard Freeman, the doctor involved?
They will say that a Ukad investigation hampered what they could reveal to anyone but two weeks passed from Sky, Wiggins and British Cycling being informed about this allegation to the launch of a formal process. All I heard in those two weeks, from supposed champions of transparency, was flannel, evasion and bluster.
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At Portcullis House today, MPs told Brailsford and Bob Howden, the hapless president of British Cycling, that this story had left a huge stain on the credibility of their sport in this country. “Untold reputational damage,” Nigel Huddlestone, the Conservative MP, said.
Brailsford responded by admitting that he had handled the situation terribly. But does he seriously expect us – and those Sky staff and riders whose own credibility is now questioned - to believe that this was all just down to badly handled PR? Even after three hours of evidence today, it still does not add up.
