I got talent-spotted for the GB cycling team at a race in spring 2000. Talent-spotting is something you normally associate with junior athletes, but I was already 26. It was at the beginning of the revolution in British Cycling; the team suddenly had Lottery funding, coaches, its own velodrome. What it didn’t have in huge numbers was riders. So, with a program called into sudden existence, they badly needed to fill the roster.
I trained with the squad for a couple of years on and off, and did the odd race. But I never quite made it. I couldn’t hit the target times needed to get the full-time contract. By 2003, I was out again – it was a ruthless system.
I learned a lot though, more than I knew at the time. I could see what they were trying to do – the clichéd “marginal gains” concept hadn’t yet been named, but it was there. I remember a coach asking one rider to fit a powermeter to his bike for a six-day track race, so the coach could log the performance data to see exactly what the demands of the event were. It was an unconventional suggestion, and the rider refused. “No one uses a powermeter at a six-day. I’ll look like a dick,” he said.
“What makes you think my priority is whether you look a dick?” said the coach. The powermeter went on the bike. There was a pursuit of detail and a determination not to be constrained by tradition. It changed how I viewed cycling, and how I approached trying to get faster.
It seems a long time ago now. It seems all the further away following the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee report into doping in sport, which concluded that while Sir Bradley Wiggins and Team Sky – the direct offspring of the GB program – might have stayed within the anti-doping rules, nonetheless they had “crossed an ethical line” by claiming they were using the drug triamcinolone to treat the rider’s pollen allergy under the therapeutic use exemption (TUE) system, when the real motivation was improving performance.
Triamcinolone is a corticosteroid that has a powerful anti-inflammatory action, and the side-effect of dramatically reducing an athlete’s body fat while not killing their power output the way a diet would. The first is very useful for asthma and allergy sufferers. The second is the holy-grail of the Tour de France cyclist – hence the problem.
You can breach the ethics without breaching the rules because the ethics and the rules have drifted apart. Historically cycling’s attitude to the ethics around drug use was to regard them not so much as a mystery as an irrelevance – thirty years ago you could breach the rules, which were not much different from today, before the ethics even came over the horizon.
Now, revelation after revelation about doping in sport has left so many athletes and fans demanding higher standards. The Movement for Credible Cycling specifically requires teams that have signed up to its voluntary charter to remove riders treated with corticosteroids from competition. There’s a clear demand for tighter rules.
In some ways the current regime is a hangover from an era, typified by Lance Armstrong, of hard-core doping – EPO, growth hormone, and blood bags in coolers. Reforming the TUE regulations would have opened the anti-doping authorities up to the accusation that they were going after the fleas rather than the bear.
And perhaps that’s a trap that Team Sky fell into? Started in 2010, in the aftermath of a decade of almost constant doping scandal, maybe Team Sky felt that playing a bit loose with the TUE system wasn’t “proper” doping? That it was still left them as the “cleaner than clean” outfit they promised to be? They might even have found support for that view easier to come by seven years ago.
TUE abuse has been becoming more and more of an issue. The squeeze on traditional doping from new testing methods (like the biological passport, which monitors athletes’ blood values to spot the actual consequences of doping, rather than looking for minute traces of drugs) was pushing teams into looking for less brazen pharmacology. But the psychology is the same – it’s looking for an advantage that you know you shouldn’t have. Team Sky’s own rhetoric had helped to make that clear.
Legally you can even argue that a TUE applied for in the knowledge that it wasn’t strictly necessary for the declared purpose is invalid. For the moment no one is suggesting testing this in court, but if the TUE system isn’t reformed it will only be a matter of time.
Read more: The science behind Chris Froome and Team Sky's Tour de France preparations
It’s hard not to be disappointed by the revelations of the last year. Not least because a lot of what Team Sky had done was genuinely fascinating and even inspiring. “Marginal gains” was always a rather vapid phrase, but the outlook behind it had value. It didn’t just mean looking for small improvements, it meant looking for improvement in small places. At its best it meant rethinking all the received wisdom of a 150-year-old sport.
For instance, Team Sky started getting its riders to warm-down after races on stationary trainers. It helped their recovery, and improved performance the following day. It was common in other sports like rowing or swimming, but was unheard of in cycling. In the early weeks other teams’ riders would stop to quite literally point and laugh. Within a few months they were all doing it too.
The same with training – Team Sky went to Tenerife to run training camps over terrain that had been carefully matched to the gradients and altitudes (and hence oxygen availability) of the Alpine climbs where the Tour de France would be decided. It was a degree of detail that was new, and quite exciting. It felt of a piece with what Team GB were doing in 2000.
I think there’s every chance that Team Sky could have done what they said they were going to do the way they said they would do it, that they could have produced a British Tour de France winner with no caveats or doubts. They were smart enough, they were rich enough. Their early promises did much to shift the ethics and the expectations of the sport in the right direction. It’s hard to take much pleasure in the irony of the position they find themselves in now.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
