“Do you really know how to clean your hands? Without leaving the bits between your fingers?”
Dave Brailsford was on BBC Breakfast, on the last morning of the track cycling at the London 2012 Olympics. He had been asked about the “marginal gains” behind his riders. “The whole principle came from the idea that if you broke down everything you could think of that goes into riding a bike, and then improved it by 1%, you will get a significant increase when you put them all together,” he said. There was fitness, but also sleeping in the right position, with the same pillow when you are away.
Britain won seven of the ten track golds in London, the same as in Beijing four years before. The pillow idea, the BBC reported, apparently came from the Royal Ballet, and the hand-washing from talking to surgeons. Beaten rivals went looking for another explanation. The French team’s boss suggested the British wheels could not be the same Mavic wheels her riders used. Asked about these “magic” wheels, Brailsford told L’Equipe they were “round”.
Brailsford also ran Team Sky, a road team founded in 2010 with the goal of winning the Tour de France within five years. It took three. On July 22, 2012, a little over two weeks before that breakfast interview, Bradley Wiggins rode into Paris as the first British rider ever to win the Tour. From the start, Brailsford said, Team Sky had tried to hire only riders and staff with no past involvement in doping.
In September 2016, a hacking group known as Fancy Bear published records stolen from the World Anti-Doping Agency. They showed that Wiggins had held therapeutic use exemptions, or TUEs, to take triamcinolone, a powerful corticosteroid that is banned in competition without one. There were three, before the 2011 and 2012 Tours and the 2013 Giro d’Italia. The 2012 exemption was granted on June 26, four days before the Tour began. Wiggins said it was for asthma and allergies.
Parliament’s Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee took evidence. Its report quoted riders who had served doping bans on what corticosteroids could do: a rider could drop weight fast without losing power, which counts in the mountains. Brailsford told the MPs: “I don’t think there is any justification for taking medication without a medical need.” Shane Sutton, a former coach at Team Sky and British Cycling, wrote to them that “what Brad was doing was unethical but not against the rules.”
The committee reported on March 5, 2018. Drawing partly on a confidential source it described as well placed and respected, it said it believed triamcinolone had been used to prepare Wiggins, and possibly riders supporting him, for the 2012 Tour. The aim, in the committee’s view, was not to treat a medical need but to improve his power to weight ratio. That broke no rule in the agency’s anti-doping code, the MPs wrote, “but it does cross the ethical line that David Brailsford says he himself drew for Team Sky.”
Team Sky said it “strongly refutes” the claim that medication had been used to enhance performance, and called the anonymous claim “potentially malicious”. Wiggins said: “I strongly refute the claim that any drug was used without medical need.” Later that day he told the BBC that at no time in his career had they crossed the ethical line. He did concede one thing.
“Was there a performance enhancement? You tell me there was. There may well have been, yeah, but they were the rules at the time to treat this problem.”