I’d be more concerned if he’d done it unknowingly!I get that Dennis.... but he did it knowingly and thats not British old sport!!!
But he hasn’t broken the rules
If there’s a problem then it’s with the rules not the athletes
I get that Dennis.... but he did it knowingly and thats not British old sport!!!
Posh as **** we shared a bottle of port in the dressing room before a gameWhen I played for the Marquis of Lorne back in ‘94 in Gillingham I used to regularly sup 4 pints of performance enhancing Stella before kick off, half the team did.
Call me a drug cheat if you like, I don’t care.
Bit like Wiggers.
I’m not a Wiggins fanboy, but as far as I was aware it was administered under doctors advice. Doctors opinions are like lawyers opinions...sometimes different, but they’re all convinced they’re rightOr, perhaps, the problem is with his integrity, and that of his team management.
This drug was allowed for medical reasons only; nothing, when put under moderate scrutiny, stacks up to a proper medical need. The whole sad obscuration of the events and the way in which senior officials have clearly lied to the cameras, the enquiry, not to mention you and I, is, maybe, legal, but it is certainty distasteful and worthy of a cheat. Hugely disappointed by the sport, but not by the posturing **** in lycra.
P.S.
Yes, the rules need a review, but how does that salvage their integrity?
I’m not a Wiggins fanboy, but as far as I was aware it was administered under doctors advice. Doctors opinions are like lawyers opinions...sometimes different, but they’re all convinced they’re right
I can’t get excited about someone taking sports rules right to the wire. Most professionals will do what they can, within the rules. I suspect that if the same rules applied in football, and the medication was useful, then there would be loads of footballers on it
It’s their job, not a hobby
Yes. Every now and then that happens, and you remember them precisely because in professional sport they are so rareI see. That's a useful insight.
The performance enhancing nature of the drug was known. It had dispensation were medical needs could justify it. That can be daft or inclusive. That medical dispensation was certainly open to abuse, if your moral compass chose that route. If you choose that route and then try and obliterate your journey, and the reason for it, then you are a cheat. Mealy mouthed words and insatiable ambition don't change that.
Every now and then in sport, we see someone deny themself an advantage that the rules allow, a dubious lbw, a wrongly given freekick, an unintentional touch of a snooker ball; they concede the advantage and give their opponent that edge. Why? Because it is fair and honest and sportsmanlike.
You obviously go to the same compass store as Wiggins; et al.
I think they should allow all performance enhancing drugs, and extreme prosthetics and mutationsMartin Samuel nails it for me. And if football teams, managers, dr's, players are doing it, name the bastards. All of them. Then ban the ****ers for life.
The difference is, while the Russian government assisted a systemic doping programme, it is members of Britain's parliament that have helped produce the damning 54-page report that goes furthest in revealing the culture of deceit in British Cycling and beyond.
Full credit to Damian Collins's parliamentary committee for that. What at first appeared a vanity project to advance his personal political ambitions has delivered and has emerged as a powerful agent for change, its incriminatory conclusion on Team Sky's TUE use, for instance, going further than newspapers and broadcasters can, backed by parliamentary privilege. Its verdict is devastating.
'We believe that drugs were being used by Team Sky, within the WADA rules, to enhance the performance of riders, and not just to treat medical need.'
If that feels more measured than incendiary at first, it is because the language around drug use in sport is created by lawyers and therefore cautious — but we can translate.
Cutting through the verbiage, the overview of Britain's elite performers is dismal indeed. Put simply: if an athlete obtains a Therapeutic Use Exemption ruling that was performance-enhancing but not born of physical need, it is cheating. The World Anti-Doping Agency has several pages of wordy rules explaining this. Nowhere does it say: have one on us.
TUEs were not introduced so smart athletes, ethically loose medics or ambitious team directors could find a way around the testing system. They were there to address genuine health problems, genuine medical emergencies, genuinely chronic conditions. They were introduced in the interest of fairness.
To abuse this process, then, to make it serve an entirely selfish purpose based on the need to climb hills faster, is corruption as blatant as any attempted by more conventionally defined drug cheats.
There are always those who seek equivalency in drug cases, so let's make it plain. Abusing TUEs, certainly exploiting a medicine as powerful as triamcinolone, would make a rider little different to Lance Armstrong, given the evidence former road race cyclist David Millar provided to the committee.
Triamcinolone, he said, was 'a once-a-year drug; the stress it put on your body required time to recover. You'd be mad to take it more often or in bigger doses.'
Sir Bradley Wiggins, according to evidence before the committee, may have been given triamcinolone on as many as nine occasions in four years, and around major events.
The committee's opinion that this was cheating, rather than mere opportunism, could not be made clearer; and if there are grey areas, or certainly opaque ones in the report, it is only because organisations that prided themselves on thoroughness and those much-vaunted marginal gains, turn out to be a lot of silly old scatterbrains when it comes to keeping proper medical records.
It is like finding out that NASA's scientists did the calculations for the next Mars probe on the back of a *** packet. Then smoked all the ***s at a party and threw the empty carton in the trash.
There is, at best, a litany of incompetence, at worst something more sinister. Computers go missing and are not recovered. Packages are delivered with their contents never adequately explained. There is no reliable evidence to say it was Fluimucil in the famous jiffy bag provided for Wiggins.
Not that Team Sky are alone in this. A separate part of the report contains a worrying account of events surrounding another icon of British sport, Mo Farah.
An injection of L-carnitine he received before the 2014 London Marathon from Dr Robin Chakraverty — now working for the FA as lead performance doctor to the England team — is also absent from UK Athletics' medical records. Given the detail prevalent in modern elite sport, with copious figures kept to inform every level of performance, even daily training, these oversights are unfathomable.
Dr Chakraverty says he had never given Farah L-carnitine before. How could he then forget to register its presence? What if there were side-effects? These failings are echoed throughout the report.
Indeed, the parliamentary committee concludes UK Anti-Doping may be worthy of compensation from British Cycling, given the money spent chasing leads down dead ends due to a lack of recorded evidence; there is also a call for the GMC to investigate Dr Chakraverty's cavalier approach to recorded detail.
Neither reflects well on those administering British sport; neither chimes with the popular sell of hard work and attention to detail, of brilliant athletes going the hard yards, while technicians crunch the numbers and explore the minutiae of sporting advantage.
Martin Samuel nails it for me. And if football teams, managers, dr's, players are doing it, name the bastards. All of them. Then ban the ****ers for life.
The difference is, while the Russian government assisted a systemic doping programme, it is members of Britain's parliament that have helped produce the damning 54-page report that goes furthest in revealing the culture of deceit in British Cycling and beyond.
Full credit to Damian Collins's parliamentary committee for that. What at first appeared a vanity project to advance his personal political ambitions has delivered and has emerged as a powerful agent for change, its incriminatory conclusion on Team Sky's TUE use, for instance, going further than newspapers and broadcasters can, backed by parliamentary privilege. Its verdict is devastating.
'We believe that drugs were being used by Team Sky, within the WADA rules, to enhance the performance of riders, and not just to treat medical need.'
If that feels more measured than incendiary at first, it is because the language around drug use in sport is created by lawyers and therefore cautious — but we can translate.
Cutting through the verbiage, the overview of Britain's elite performers is dismal indeed. Put simply: if an athlete obtains a Therapeutic Use Exemption ruling that was performance-enhancing but not born of physical need, it is cheating. The World Anti-Doping Agency has several pages of wordy rules explaining this. Nowhere does it say: have one on us.
TUEs were not introduced so smart athletes, ethically loose medics or ambitious team directors could find a way around the testing system. They were there to address genuine health problems, genuine medical emergencies, genuinely chronic conditions. They were introduced in the interest of fairness.
To abuse this process, then, to make it serve an entirely selfish purpose based on the need to climb hills faster, is corruption as blatant as any attempted by more conventionally defined drug cheats.
There are always those who seek equivalency in drug cases, so let's make it plain. Abusing TUEs, certainly exploiting a medicine as powerful as triamcinolone, would make a rider little different to Lance Armstrong, given the evidence former road race cyclist David Millar provided to the committee.
Triamcinolone, he said, was 'a once-a-year drug; the stress it put on your body required time to recover. You'd be mad to take it more often or in bigger doses.'
Sir Bradley Wiggins, according to evidence before the committee, may have been given triamcinolone on as many as nine occasions in four years, and around major events.
The committee's opinion that this was cheating, rather than mere opportunism, could not be made clearer; and if there are grey areas, or certainly opaque ones in the report, it is only because organisations that prided themselves on thoroughness and those much-vaunted marginal gains, turn out to be a lot of silly old scatterbrains when it comes to keeping proper medical records.
It is like finding out that NASA's scientists did the calculations for the next Mars probe on the back of a *** packet. Then smoked all the ***s at a party and threw the empty carton in the trash.
There is, at best, a litany of incompetence, at worst something more sinister. Computers go missing and are not recovered. Packages are delivered with their contents never adequately explained. There is no reliable evidence to say it was Fluimucil in the famous jiffy bag provided for Wiggins.
Not that Team Sky are alone in this. A separate part of the report contains a worrying account of events surrounding another icon of British sport, Mo Farah.
An injection of L-carnitine he received before the 2014 London Marathon from Dr Robin Chakraverty — now working for the FA as lead performance doctor to the England team — is also absent from UK Athletics' medical records. Given the detail prevalent in modern elite sport, with copious figures kept to inform every level of performance, even daily training, these oversights are unfathomable.
Dr Chakraverty says he had never given Farah L-carnitine before. How could he then forget to register its presence? What if there were side-effects? These failings are echoed throughout the report.
Indeed, the parliamentary committee concludes UK Anti-Doping may be worthy of compensation from British Cycling, given the money spent chasing leads down dead ends due to a lack of recorded evidence; there is also a call for the GMC to investigate Dr Chakraverty's cavalier approach to recorded detail.
Neither reflects well on those administering British sport; neither chimes with the popular sell of hard work and attention to detail, of brilliant athletes going the hard yards, while technicians crunch the numbers and explore the minutiae of sporting advantage.
I’m not a Wiggins fanboy, but as far as I was aware it was administered under doctors advice. Doctors opinions are like lawyers opinions...sometimes different, but they’re all convinced they’re right
I can’t get excited about someone taking sports rules right to the wire. Most professionals will do what they can, within the rules. I suspect that if the same rules applied in football, and the medication was useful, then there would be loads of footballers on it
It’s their job, not a hobby
Yes. Every now and then that happens, and you remember them precisely because in professional sport they are so rare
This argument is lost on many, and I think Brad has a point. If you don’t like the rules, change the rules! DO NOT imply someone has cheated when they haven’t.
Ethically bad is not cheating, yet the whole headline insinuates it is.
I don’t like the argument.