A strange thing indeed
The sport of road racing version of professional cycling – absolute pinnacle in the minds of sports fans generally around the globe the Tour de France – has long had a relationship (or indeed a series of them) with the murky dark waters of performance-enhancing drug taking.
The former British team of Sky Sports – now morphed into a new unit called Ineos Grenadiers – is still under the direction of Sir David Brailsford, sometime performance director of British Cycling.
He is the inventor of the famous concept of “marginal gains”, i.e. that one route to ultimate success in sport can be via sheer hard work in dissecting every aspect of training, preparation and performance into minute sub-sets and seeking to improve each of them by just 1%.
The system undoubtedly has an enviable record of success.
Yet it also attracts plenty of scepticism as to whether all of its “marginal gains” have indeed been attained by straightforward “attention to detail”. Rumours have surfaced that some may have been achieved by either ‘bending the rules to their utmost without actually breaking them’ and/or playing fast and loose with sporting moral integrity.
Let’s just leave it at that for now – and, in order to be totally fair, I should add Brailsford has always maintained that neither he, nor indeed anyone on any of his teams, has ever broken a rule.
However.
One of the minor characters in the story is the doctor Richard Freeman who [and here comes a disclaimer that I haven’t done my research well enough this morning to be able to give Rusters a set of full accurate details] is alleged to have been historically involved in ordering certain ‘medical’ substances for Team Sky that strictly may have not been actually intended to deal with genuine conditions from which certain famous cyclists were then suffering, but instead to give them a performance-enhancing boost before and during major events.
He has been summoned several times to appear before the sport’s administrative/disciplinary authorities and indeed also a House of Commons committee but has had a patchy record of giving evidence. He has fallen prey on several occasions to anxiety or other conditions which have given him a degree of ill health that has rendered him unable to do so. He has also – at other times -made strange and/or contradictory public statements about what he did or didn’t do.
In case interested Rusters have missed them, here’s a link to a report by Mike Keegan upon Freeman’s latest developments as appears today on the website of the – DAILY MAIL
