Transparency – and smoke, fire and maybe mirrors

Regular Rust readers will be aware that on the proverbial sports desk we take a uniformly tough line on the use of performance-enhancing drugs by athletes, irrespective of their sport or game.

Our robust attitude does not quite reach ‘guilty until proven innocent’ territory but – because history has taught us that whatever drug-taking is actually admitted by the transgressor, or eventually proven to any degree of legal certainty (never mind beyond a reasonable doubt), it is always widely agreed to be but the tip of an iceberg – we feel entitled to hold a hefty degree of cynicism across the board.

It’s all about transparency and being able to believe that what is presented to us as modern elite sport does actually consist of ‘level playing field’ contests.

That’s why, despite the understandable anguish, frustration and indignation of those who are publicly accused of drugs offences when they are genuinely innocent (or honestly believe themselves to be), we tend towards a ‘black and white’ approach.

We have no problem at all, for example, with the proposition that – whenever a track and field athlete has failed to make themselves available for random testing on (is it?) three consecutive occasions – they get tarred with having committed a drugs offence, even when (one might justifiably argue) this is in technical terms only.

However, if the relevant sporting (and drugs-chasing) authorities have set out their stall by announcing that missing three consecutive random drugs tests constitutes a drugs offence, to our mind, it is a drugs offence … end of message.

It doesn’t matter how convoluted, detailed, heart-wrenching or far-fetched an athlete’s ‘explanation’ of how they managed to miss the successive tests is (featuring as it might the ‘facts’ that they had been in their hotel room on one or all of the occasions in question but happened to fall asleep and didn’t hear their phone ring, or that their phone battery was on ‘charge’, or that there’d been a family bereavement, or that a vision of Pinocchio had appeared to them in a dream and whisked them away to La-La Land). If an athlete misses three consecutive random tests, then bingo! … They’re a drugs offender as far as the world is concerned – or ought to be.

Which brings me to the Sir Bradley Wiggins interview upon the Andrew Marr Show yesterday.

I hadn’t realised in advance that it was coming up, but suddenly there it was. Hitherto all I had known about the Wiggins allegations had come from media reports and newspaper articles and my initial impression was that something wasn’t quite right and needed explaining at the very least.

I hadn’t a clue as to whether what was alleged, even if only by implication, amounted to ‘a case to answer’, but when several respected sports journalists (one of whom had been embedded with Team Sky for a period of months at Team Sky’s own invitation) were stating their unease at the situation, my antennae were stirring, if not actually twitching.

British cycling generally has been in a good – one might say dominant – place for over a decade now. Sir David Brailsford (and those around him, including his successors) with their philosophy of no stone unturned and the quest for ‘marginal gains’ have been at the core of it.

They have been rightly praised for their culture, outstanding attention to detail and steely determination to extract every advantage they can from the intensity of their training and recovery methods, their psychological training, their tactical planning and their eternal commitment to providing the best possible equipment and facilities, all calculated to remove distractions and concentrate the athletes’ bodies and minds upon one thing – victory.

It is only to be expected, especially in a sport like cycling with a well-documented historical ‘dirty’ reputation when it comes to drugs-use (whether systematic, individual or even possibly in a few cases accidental or innocently-motivated), that others – whether teams, nations, administrators and/or fans – will be sceptical about one country (in this case Britain) becoming so apparently pre-eminent when the gongs and titles are being dished out.

After all every team, every national cycling federation, in the cycling world is also doing its damnest to ape or emulate the British approach. As with Formula One, in cycling it’s not exactly easy to steal a march on your opponents in equipment terms. That’s why you often see Formula One teams shielding their cars from view … and also why you see ‘spies’ from other teams innocently walking by the garages of their opponents just checking to see whether anyone is developing some technical gizmo that might give them some temporary advantage. As sure as eggs are eggs, if some Tour de France team ever comes up with an experimental new widget or bicycle-chain system, you can be sure that within days their opponents will have developed something similar, or at least tried to do so.

So that’s why, towards the end of the 2016 Rio Olympics, some other countries were expressing doubts over Team GB’s extraordinary successes. After all, they were all trying just as hard to achieve ultimate excellence – how on earth were the Brits doing it again and again? Could it possibly be the very-well-disguised use of drugs?

When you think about it, it would have been odd if someone, somewhere, hadn’t raised the spectre of some form of skulduggery being used by Team GB to achieve its outstanding results.

Which brings me back to the British icon Sir Bradley Wiggins.

As I understand it – somewhere along the line – coincidentally just before three major events in which he was entered, he obtained (or someone obtained for him) an exemption – under what is called a ‘TUE’ – so that he could be injected with some drug or another designed to fend off asthma (which, as it happens, could possibly also help to enhance performance).

Someone I spoke to yesterday, who knows more than I do on this subject, said that one year on the Tour de France Wiggins was crucified in the mountains. The following year, as we now know after one of the above TUE injections, he wasn’t crucified in the mountains but held his own.

Coincidence?

All I know is that apparently – in his recent autobiography – Wiggins stated he had never been injected with anything throughout his entire cycling career. Yesterday during his interview with Andrew Marr, he elaborated on that. He said that he had not meant by that statement that he had never been injected at all … just that he had never been injected with any performance-enhancing and/or prohibited drugs.

This was an important distinction to make and one might venture to suggest (if one was of a suspicious mind which of course I am not) that it is also a somewhat of a ‘nit-picking’ distinction to draw, given the blunt blanket assertion that Wiggins had previous made in his autobiography.

The other aspect of this story that occurred to me yesterday was that – with so many controversial issues that arise in the modern world of social media, celebrity, sport and politics [without getting too precious about it, think the current crisis in Aleppo (Syria), the marriage split of Angelina and Brad, the withdrawal for the second time by heavyweight boxing champion Tyson Fury from his rematch with Wladimir Klitschko, the battle of words over Hillary Clinton’s health in the US presidential election] – it is extraordinary how often the competing allegations and accusations are made … and then rebutted or countered … via the PR representatives of those involved. Such controversies become media ‘battles for supremacy’.

Which makes me wonder about yesterday’s interview. When rebutting allegations of this nature, you’d normally expect a sports celebrity of Wiggins’ stature to issue a written statement, or perhaps conduct a ‘back page’ (sports section) interview with a cycling correspondent.

It is therefore perhaps remarkable that he – or his PR connections on his behalf – chose instead to offer him for a ‘soft’ interview with Andrew Marr, albeit that (to be fair) Marr rarely shirks putting the tough questions to which the viewing punters might be expecting answers, as he tried to yesterday.

But (my point is) Marr is not a sports or cycling expert and could not be expected to possess the wherewithal to skewer Wiggins with his insider’s understanding of the world of cycling and its intricacies – and/or the potential contradictions in Wiggins’ different stated positions given at different times in that context.