Soon after midday tomorrow Dave Brailsford will walk to the Thatcher Room in Portcullis House, part of the Parliamentary Estate at Westminster. He will sit at a table and then from a select committee of MPs the questions will torpedo his way. Officially a witness, Brailsford will feel like the accused.
Attitudes towards him have changed. Brailsford was once the man with the winner’s touch, leader of the track cycling team that overwhelmed all rivals at the Beijing and London Olympics. And that was just a prelude to greater achievement as he created the team that won the Tour de France four out of the last five years.
From the beginning, he said Team Sky would do it in the right way. That meant a zero tolerance of cheating. They wouldn’t just be the best, they would be the cleanest. Judge us, he said, by the highest standards.
This is why he’s a witness tomorrow. “Combatting Doping in Sport” is the MPs’ agenda and they’ve invited Brailsford along to figure out if he’s part of the problem or part of the solution. They know about Bradley Wiggins’ pre-Tour de France steroid injections in 2011, 2012 and 2013, and about a mysterious medical package delivered to the team in June 2011. Judged by the highest standards, the injections and the unidentified package stink.
The select committee wants to know what exactly was going on but doesn’t have the means to find out. Witnesses do not speak under oath and need not fret over the consequences of lying. The last fine was imposed in 1666 and the last incarceration happened in the 19th century. Usually, select committee hearings deliver less than they promise.
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Brailsford will prepare assiduously because some of the questions will not be easily answered. He’s good in these situations, an MBA graduate from the University of Sheffield and a master of the eloquent and lengthy response that often doesn’t answer the difficult question. Time and again his inquisitors will want him to get to the point but he will say only what he wishes to say.
The fluency, the softly delivered logic and the earnest assertions of innocence will be the stuff of plausibility. Through this ordeal Brailsford hasn’t always been plausible.
Matt Lawton, chief sports reporter for the Daily Mail, heard the words a journalist loves to hear. “You don’t know the half of it,” said his source. This was September last, days after the Russian hack site Fancy Bears had leaked medical information about Bradley Wiggins’ use of therapeutic use exemptions (TUEs).
The leaked documents showed Wiggins had been allowed to use a banned corticosteroid before the three biggest races of his career with Team Sky. According to the leak, Wiggins was granted medical exemptions to use intramuscular injections of triamcinolone acetonide to treat pollen allergies shortly before the Tour de France in 2011 and 2012, and the 2013 Giro d’Italia.
Kenalog or kenacort to generations of bike riders, triamcinolone is a known performance-enhancer. Two recently retired riders, David Millar and Jorg Jaksche, admitted to abusing it in their careers and insist it was a significant aid to performance. Wiggins’ use of triamcinolone was at the very least suspicious.
“Brailsford hasn’t always been plausible through this ordeal
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His PR company issued a short statement denying wrongdoing, as did Team Sky. For 10 days neither Wiggins nor Brailsford spoke about the leaks. Rabbits in the centre of the road, they waited in vain for someone to switch off the headlights.
“Here’s what happened,” said Lawton’s source. British Cycling’s women’s coach Simon Cope travelled on June 12, 2011, from Manchester to Geneva and then onto France with a medical package that he handed over to Sky doctor Richard Freeman at La Toussuire in the Alps. The source then alleged that Freeman had treated Wiggins in the closed-off area at the back of the team bus.
Lawton contacted Wiggins, telling him what he’d found out about the package and the private consultation with the team doctor at the back of the bus. Wiggins denied receiving an injection from Freeman. This was and remains a key point: if Wiggins had received an injection it would have contravened cycling’s ban on needles during races, leaving him open to a two-year suspension.
Soon Brailsford and Lawton were exchanging text messages, the team boss suggesting they go for a bike ride together in advance of an informal, off-the-record briefing. Lawton had never known Brailsford be so friendly. An intermediary who’d spoken to Cope would tell Lawton his information was wrong: Cope had travelled to France to see Emma Pooley, a British rider he helped coach.
A quick check revealed Pooley was racing in Spain on the day Cope travelled to Team Sky in France, and therefore could not have met her coach. Lawton knew the intermediary’s information was false. He met Brailsford at a coffee shop in Alderley Edge outside Manchester on the morning of Tuesday, September 27.
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Team Sky’s boss seemed agitated, stressed even. He asked the journalist how he could write something without apparently being able to prove that it had taken place.
Lawton thought that maybe Brailsford didn’t know about the medical package but discounted that view when the team boss repeated the line about Cope travelling to France to see Pooley. “I’ve got to put you right on that, Dave,” said Lawton. “Emma Pooley was almost 700 miles away racing in Spain that day.”
They spoke for two and a half hours. Brailsford told the journalist that if he wrote the story there was a good chance it would be the end of Team Sky. He fretted aloud about what Lawton intended to do next while insisting that he couldn’t believe Cope had travelled to France with a medical package. The meeting ended without Brailsford being able to explain what Cope was doing at La Toussuire.
The team boss and journalist stayed in contact. Brailsford wanted the journalist to know that Dr Freeman could not have treated Wiggins in the team bus, as the bus would have left the finish area while Wiggins was attending to his post-race obligations.
That seemed plausible, for Wiggins had won the week-long race and would have had to go to anti-doping control and do media interviews. Brailsford said he’d spoken to key personnel in the team who’d confirmed the bus had departed, and he would also check the bus’s tachograph. If the bus wasn’t there, the alleged consultation couldn’t have taken place.
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Lawton was beginning to think his source had got it wrong but went in search of photographs or videos from that Sunday afternoon. He found one of Wiggins doing an interview alongside the team bus, well after the race had ended. The Sky bus had not left La Toussuire as Brailsford maintained. The possibility of a consultation with Freeman could not entirely be excluded. The game changed then as Lawton wrote the story of the attempted cover-up.
Team Sky privately complained the journalist had attributed “off-the-record” comments to Brailsford. The journalist’s response was that when high-profile sources deliberately try to mislead you they lose the right to be protected.
UK Anti-Doping has been investigating this story but without proper investigatory powers, they won’t get far. They cannot compel witnesses to testify, cannot put those they do interview under oath, they cannot seize computer files and cannot force Sky to hand over medical files relating to the team’s riders.
No matter what they are told was in the medical package, UKAD will not have the means to verify. If Cope was carrying a non-proscribed medicine that day, will there be documentation to support that? If the documentation doesn’t exist, UKAD cannot do much than give the team a gentle slap on the wrists.
Team Sky, Brailsford and Wiggins would settle for that and claim they have been cleared of wrongdoing. Suspicion will not so easily dissipate. Anyone bothering to check the TUE applications submitted by Dr Freeman and approved by the UCI’s Dr Mario Zorzoli will be perplexed by the lack of clarity and apparently contradictory information.
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For example, the 2011 application was approved on June 29, three days before the start of the Tour de France, but according to Freeman’s own notes on the form, the endoscopy to confirm Wiggins was suffering from rhinitis took place on July 2, two days after the TUE was granted. “ENT specialist performed endoscopy nasal airway 2/7/11, confirmed diagnosis allergic rhinitis,” Freeman noted.
Team Sky says the doctor just got the date wrong.
Other parts of the Wiggins/Sky story don’t make sense. In an interview published in The Guardian, Wiggins spoke about the detrimental effects of triamcinolone on his performance in the 2011 Tour de France. “The problem was that thing was catabolic and it may have disadvantaged me, I’d probably have been better without it.”
There is no evidence Wiggins used triamcinolone before his 2011 TUE and nothing to indicate that he tried it again before the 2012 application by Freeman.
Dr Freeman had a different view on how “that thing” worked for the rider in 2011. “Last year marked improvement with IM [intramuscular] triamcinolone injection,” he noted on the TUE form.
However much time the select committee devote to their questioning of Brailsford and all that was happening at Team Sky, it is unlikely to be sufficient.
Best got off lightly in horse-stopping scandal
Over the last few days I have been thinking of Matthew Hopkins. We met in Newmarket 18 months ago. He was a 22-year-old jockey who had just been handed a three-year disqualification from racing by the sport’s governing authority. According to reports at the time, his crime had been to back and lay horses, which jockeys cannot do.
Through racing’s history, many jockeys have liked a bet. Nowadays those who still indulge have the sense to make sure their bets are placed by friends and not traceable back to them. It is not difficult to get round the rules. Poor Hopkins was different. He started gambling in his mid-teens and before he rode his first winner, he was addicted.
He sat before the television, with a laptop alongside, and bet on horses, dogs, poker, online gaming machines, often two or three simultaneously. A basket case. The amounts were not significant; a fiver or a tenner, often less, but with his addiction, the losses added up.
His wages were spent before they were even received and when he started to ride winners, the losses rose.
Still he reckons the £40 he had on Treve to win 2015 Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe was the biggest bet he has ever had. His mother once travelled to Newmarket from her home in the north of the England and visited every one of the town’s 26 bookmaker shops.
“This is my son,” she said as she handed each manager a photograph of Matthew, “and he is suffering from a gambling addiction. Please don’t accept bets from him.”
They stuck Hopkins’ photo on a wall behind the counter and tried to remember his face. He continued to bet online. When eventually the authorities got wind of his activities they sent an investigator, who asked why he had accounts with so many bookmaking firms. He replied that he signed up to avail of the free bets, a tactic used as a carrot to attract new customers.
Matthew felt badly about the pain he caused his family. They could not understand why he just wouldn’t stop. He tried to explain why it was so hard.
“You don’t look ill. It is your mind that’s gone. I broke down a few times in front of my family, crying, saying I just can’t stop. ‘Just stop,’ they’d said.
“I wish it was that easy but I know the second I get my hands on some money my mind will be on fire. It is all you can think of and that feeling of being on fire is only relieved by having a bet.
“Once you do it you are relaxed again, you feel calm because that rush has come back. It is like any other addiction really, it is your mind that goes.”
He talked about the help he was getting from Joe Carter at Racing Welfare in Newmarket but reckoned it might be better for him to give up on racing and join the army. I reminded him that he had had 27 winners from 309 rides, which was a respectable strike rate. I suggested he could serve his time and come back stronger, but he had been hurt by what he believed was an unjustly severe sentence.
At his hearing the disciplinary panel admitted that Hopkins’ case was not related to corruption. He wasn’t stopping horses or betting against horses that he rode, or trying to cheat the system. The only person who got hurt by Matthew Hopkins’ gambling was the young jockey himself.
It was the Jim Best case that reminded me of Hopkins’ treatment by the authorities. Best is a racehorse trainer who was accused of “stopping” two horses by telling his jockey Paul John that he was not to win.
The evidence was provided by John and accepted by the British Horseracing Authority panel, who initially banned the trainer until 2020. Best appealed and last week his suspension was reduced to six months. He is suspended, not disqualified, and can attend race meetings and continue to work in the industry.
His wife Suzie has applied for a trainer’s licence and if that is granted, Jim Best’s training operation can continue more or less as before. Hopkins, a young man with a serious addiction and no desire to cheat anyone, was the one treated like a criminal. You may be capable of making sense of these two cases. Not me.
Instead I thank Alexander Pope, the 18th-century poet, for helping us to understand how things such as this can happen. “The hungry judges soon the sentence sign, And wretches hang that jurymen may dine.”
Matthew Hopkins deserved better. And Jim Best deserved worse.
Woodward’s Paralympic bravery stands out
There are three Paralympians on the 16-strong shortlist for this evening’s Sports Personality of the Year Awards on the BBC — Sophie Christiansen, Sarah Storey and Kadeena Cox.
They all achieved big, memorable victories at the Rio Paralympics in September and Cox, a fine athlete who won gold medals in cycling and track-running, was recently voted the Sunday Times Paralympian of the Year.
My vote for Sports Personality of the Year would not go to any of the three above, and not even to Andy Murray, the world’s No 1 tennis player, but to the disabled athlete Bethany Woodward, inset, who did more for her sport this year than any of those who won gold in Rio.
Woodward voluntarily gave up her funding and her place on the Team GB squad in protest at what she believes is the widespread classification cheating that is destroying her sport.
A cerebral palsy sufferer from birth, Woodward was 18 when she became world champion and 19 when she won gold and silver at London 2012, competing in the sprint events. The brilliance of the London Paralympics was a two-edged sword as it raised the profile of the event and encouraged countries to improve their Paralympic teams.
The easiest way to do this was to cheat on classification. This is achieved by getting athletes into events where the level of their disability gives them a significant advantage over their rivals. Team GB and Australia were the countries identified as the best at exploiting the weaknesses in the classification system.
Woodward competed as a T37, which used to be seen as a cerebral palsy class. After 2012 new people came into the sport and into her event — teammates with nothing like her level of disability.
This was not the fault of the athletes themselves but of those who believe winning gold medals is good, regardless of how those victories are achieved.
Kadeena Cox was one of the newcomers to Woodward’s T37 class. Cox did not have cerebral palsy but remitting and relapsing multiple sclerosis. As the name suggests, this condition is one that flares up and then settles down.
When Woodward raced against the newcomers, she felt humiliated and overly conscious of her own physical impairment.
‘I represented my country for a long time but if I can’t compete like I used to be able to compete, because they’ve brought in people who are not like me in terms of disability, what’s the point?’ she said.
No amount of funding could compensate her and she now campaigns for fairness in disabled sport.
Integrity such as hers is extremely hard to find in sport today and I, for one, am proud to applaud it.