[Closed] Sky TUE saga. Is it some sort of witch hunt?

Not sure why the government have got involved but, sadly, Dave Brailsford, Wiggo and British Cycling have done **** all to defuse the situation

Yeh, their handling of this has been so shit that, guilty or not, people can see smoke (and journalists can smell blood)

The MPs select commitee are asking British Cycling to explain themselves
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/cycling/2016/12/19/british-cycling-chief-bob-howden-told-prove-job-mps-turn-heat/

British press seems to be a race to the bottom currently, they are mainly vipers who will say or publish anything to get ad revenue from people clicking on the latest outrage. I guess they do the maths and and the odd legal compensation they have to pay for lies and slanderous articles is outweighed by the income generated. It must be otherwise they would be out of business.

Perhaps not reacting is a good counter strategy. I read that katie hopkins 'apology' that was forced upon her was placed on the mail site in the same manner an advertisement would be, because it would be invisible to anyone running a secure browser with ad blocking. That pretty much says it all.

British Cycling has already lost some lottery funding and MPs like to ask questions about public money.

http://road.cc/content/news/213786-british-cyclings-funding-slashed-14-cent-ahead-tokyo-olympics

if you can't report a story...

make a story happen

There is a real story here. There wouldn't have been apart from the cleaner than clean image they put out. Lies from Wiggins over injections. Very dodgy use of TUEs

Personally I am very disappointed in them and I think its right they have been exposed

If you get the chance Newstalk Off The Ball radio show just had David Walsh on for an interview about this - well worth a podcast...

There is a real story here. There wouldn't have been apart from the cleaner than clean image they put out. Lies from Wiggins over injections. Very dodgy use of TUEs

Personally I am very disappointed in them and I think its right they have been exposed

There may be a story of sorts here, but there's very little sense of proportion in the way that it's being reported.

David Walsh is an imbecile!

Some of the TUE stuff just beggars belief and has no link to medicine as it would be practiced on civilians.

Sky talked a good talk but this stuff makes me feel the same way that the Simeoni affair made me feel about Armstrong.

I hate the Mail, but they aren't always wrong.

Its not just the Daily Fail, The Guardian and even Cycling News are sh!t stirring as well.

It has to be said Brailsford has handled this badly. Instead of getting out ahead of the story with full and accurate disclosure he seems to be making it up as he goes along. Arrogance or incompetence?

If SBW's medical record shows a history of chronic asthma then this is a storm in a teacup. The TUEs were maybe overkill but I can understand why it was done for risk management ahead of three of the biggest races in his career. But if he doesn't have a proven record of asthma then its a different story.

Technically Sky haven't done anything wrong, yes its close to the line but I remember in a press interview they always said they would be close but would never go over the line, this from what I understand is that close!

It seems very british to be great at something and try to destroy it, its as if we can't settle knowing we did a great job.

I'm sure Team Sky will go from strength to strength, I just think possibly the management of the team will change after this, forced by this issue.

Roadies and drug scandals follow each other around as sure as day follows night. I don't think it's so much as having broken the rules, but have stretched the interpretation of the rules to its limit. I suspect there are other sports with a bigger problem (boxing and rugby spring to mind, and maybe snooker), but cyclings problems have been high profile for so long that it just becomes an easy target.
Personally I think you would have to be out your mind on drugs to spend 3 weeks on a road bike bumbling around France. Not to mention all the great mountain biking you would be riding past.

the line
think of it a little like a rope
if you pick your foot up and step over it, you crossed the line
if you shuffle* your toes into the rope you can move it without ever stepping over it

*marginal gains

As I understood it from what I read yesterday, to get a TUE Sky run it past their doctor, an independent doctor, and then the UCI. Seems far more complicated than I expected it to be, but if correct, my view would be that the system of getting a TUE is pretty robust. Sky's handling of the story has been an absolute shit storm though.

I find it remarkable the amount of people who manage to get to top level elite sport with severe asthma.

Just saying.

bensales - Member

I find it remarkable the amount of people who manage to get to top level elite sport with severe asthma.

Just saying.

Exercise induced Asthma?

Funny how injectable steroids seem to be the answer to some medical problems in cycling, but not in real medicine though...

there is no smoke without fire, having said that it's likely sky have acted within the 'rules' which of course are massively flawed but without doubt have been unethical in implimentation. Within the cycling family we all knew about TUE's but to the average Joe on the street they just think ' Lance Armstrong' 'Drugs' and 'Cheating' which i guess the way that the press (the same press that lauded them when winning olympic golds i may add) are reporting it.......all a bit base to be honest. 🙁

I find it remarkable the amount of people who manage to get to top level elite sport with severe asthma.

How many is it then, say as a percentage of all elite athletes?

I seem to recall that a very high number of elite athletes suffer exercise induced asthma, it being triggered by the bodies heightened sensitivity when hjighly trained. Im not a doctor so cannot vouch for this nor am i going to become an internet doctor to hunt for an answer that suits my argument.
This does sound like a witch hunt to me. Sky etc have handled this badly but i guess no matter what they did there was going to be a shit storm. As it turns out wiggo saw a specialist who prescribed the medicine; i think he probably knows more about why 'x,y,z' was prescribed and should justify the prescription. It pains me how many people become experts having read about something on the internet.
Why was the drug broguht from the BC/Sky base? What would you do: pop round the corner to the local pharmacy to buy the required medicine from an unknown manufacturer or request someone bring it with them from a stock where they are sure of the ingredients? Sport is littered with contaminated medicines stories.

How many is it then, say as a percentage of all elite athletes?

Turned out a huge amount of athletes had serious heart issues until the medication was banned...

I've always been a fan of sky but their appears to be a widening gulf between the public proclamations and the private activities, that warrants investigation and challenge.

If you don't want people holding you to a higher standard than other teams, then don't set yourself up as having one.

If you don't want people holding you to a higher standard than other teams, then don't set yourself up as having one.

this pretty much sums up why they are in the doodoo

I don't have any figures to back this up, but I would be very surprised if half the riders in a grand tour had "severe asthma" which is a seriously debilitating and in some cases, life threatening, condition.
I think exercise induced asthma is much more common in elite athletes, but i think that is a milder, more easily treated condition. Salbutamol doesn't require a TUE any more, so it's difficult to know how many people are using it.

As for Sky, I don't think this is a witch hunt. They are getting some scrutiny from the press, which is no bad thing. Lawton has obviously had an inside tip off to get the story in the first place. I'd like to know if it was whistleblowing about genuine wrongdoing, or if everything is legit and someone just thought they could make a few quid by selling the package story to the DM. Perhaps we will learn more if the press keep digging.

If you don't want people holding you to a higher standard than other teams, then don't set yourself up as having one.

I think there's a point where you have to ask if the standards they're being held to aren't actually unrealistic ones being imposed by a click-driven media led by the Mail, rather than ones they've genuinely embraced.

As mentioned above, any organisation that takes lottery funding in answerable to the government.

The Sky TUE use stinks, and their defence has been laughable. Wiggins claimed to need them for allergies. Curiously those allergies only flared up [i]after[/i] he'd left Garmin, a team with a no-needle policy, and with whom he'd managed to come 4th in the Tour, and only became a problem before key races. The corticosteroid he was on is so strong that many medical bodies only recommend it for use when the next step would be hospital admission, not cycling up mountains for 3 weeks.

And he forgot about them when he wrote his autobio.

Brailsford tried to pin the jiffy bag on Pooley, except she pointed out she was hundreds of miles away. Then they said whatever it was couldn't have been given to Wiggins as he wasn't there to receive it as he'd already left the stage finish. Except there's video of him signing autographs outside the team bus. In The Cycling Podcast Brailsford claimed he didn't think of corticosteroids as performance enhancing which is laugh out loud funny as any student of the sport would remember Armstrong's infamous backdated TUE for the EXACT SAME SUBSTANCE.

Cope said in October the Jiffy bag wasn't for Wiggins, yet he didn't know what WAS in it, despite rushing it from Manchester on a day-return flight, and crossing international borders and customs with it.

Now Brailsford is saying it was Fluimucil for Wiggins.
1) it's not a banned substance so why the delay in disclosing it?
2) it is available over the counter in Europe for less than 10 euros so why rush-fly it out from the UK?
3) it's not licensed for use in the UK due to it's side effects so where did they get it from in Manchester?
4) given the side effects mean it is a danger to asthmatics, why give it to Wiggins?

Sutton's response to the select committee was eerily similar to Armstrong's famous "I'm sorry you can't dream big" speech.

Witchhunt? No. The media finally feeling emboldened to voice their (possibly long-held) doubts now they have some evidence, yeah.

Sky seem to getting the brunt of what seems to be a UCI problem. The TUE system is dubious at best and corrupt at worst with the ability to retrospect treatments. If there is a medical need that requires a banned medication then surely an athlete should be withdrawn from competition for a period. That might be draconian, but it would sort the genuine from the 'pushing the line'.

The lack of clarity is suspicious, and the 'cleaner than clean' ethos that Sky has had has riled up other teams to put a target on their back.

But I can't make my mind up on whether this is a PR disaster or stinks to high heaven. The IM injections seem worthy of a lot more questions, but not as convinced about the Fluimucil episode. It might bave been available over the counter in Europe but I'd be surprised if this was the form that was able to be used in a nebuliser, which is one report's account of how Wiggins took it.

but not as convinced about the Fluimucil episode. It might bave been available over the counter in Europe but I'd be surprised if this was the form that was able to be used in a nebuliser, which is one report's account of how Wiggins took it.

If you were a professional cycling team why would you risk buying anything from a source you weren't 100% certain of when you could obtain supplies from a trusted source, vis, your own medical suppliers. I know that doesn't suit the media narrative, but in a sport which is routinely tested, why would you risk going outside your normal supply chain? Dr Hutch, who probably knows a but more about pro cycling than the Daily Mail or a bunch of grand-standing MPs seems to think this is a credible explanation. It doesn't seem outlandish.

But I'm sure there's a counter-argument to that as well. That's the nature of this thing. If Brailsford had announced that the package contained Marmite someone would show that Marmite is actually freely available in a chain of supermarkets in France, one of which was 10 metres from the Sky bus.

And someone else would unearth a study suggesting that Marmite increases the uptake of some minor amino acid compound at altitude and is pretty much EPO.

And then someone else will show that Lance Armstrong used to have it on toast every morning and moto-man was also known as Mr Marmite. And then David Walsh will rail that Team Sky fed him Marmite every morning and at the time he thought it was fine, but now he realises that it shows that they were actually the anti-Christ, it's just that he didn't realise at the time.

And so it goes on...

which is one report's account of how Wiggins took it.

it's not licensed for such use for in the UK

http://www.cyclingnews.com/news/what-is-fluimucil-and-why-would-wiggins-need-it/

The active ingredient in Fluimucil is N-acetylcysteine, but the trade name normally refers to the oral version of the drug. The inhaled version meeting Brailsford's description would more likely be known as Mucomyst, made by Bristol-Myers Squibb Company, in the US.

The drug is not on the WADA list of substances prohibited in or out of competition.

According to the Salisbury NHS Foundation Trust,[b] N-acetylcysteine is not licenced in the UK for use by inhalation,[/b] and this kind of application of the drug is not the first line of defence for treating conditions like bronchitis.

The product documentation warns that some patients could be dangerously and unpredictably sensitive to the drug,[b] and cautions against its use by patients with asthma.[/b]

And Wiggins' explanation for his TUE is that he suffers asthma.

They've already offered one explanation for the jiffy bag which was proved to be BS (Pooley), offered other defences that have also been rebutted with evidence (it wasn't for Wiggins and he'd already left), and now this one raises more questions than it answers.

I'm not a conspiracy theorist or a Sky hater, nor do I advocate "performance-based suspicion" and I assume riders are clean until there is evidence to the contrary. In the Wiggins case there are so many flaws and half-answers in the "innocent" case that I believe they have gamed the TUE system, which I consider cheating.

Funny how injectable steroids seem to be the answer to some medical problems in cycling, but not in real medicine though...

The product documentation warns that some patients could be dangerously and unpredictably sensitive to the drug, and cautions against its use by patients with asthma.

FWIW, we nebulise acetylcysteine into patients at the hospital I work at, licensed or not (we use an injectable product). None of those uses is "asthma" though

If there is a medical need that requires a banned medication then surely an athlete should be withdrawn from competition for a period

That's the MPCC stance in regard to cortisone levels. Sky have declined to join the MPCC, claiming amongst other things the MPCC's rules aren't strict enough when it comes to recruiting staff (though Sky's own processes didn't flag up Geert Leinders as being a concern).

scaredy, appreciate the practitioner perspective.

Not sure what this has to do with football OP, as the 'cheating' you see is in front of cameras in fitba'.

Maybe rugby with the likes of the blood capsule incident would be a better analogy... 😆

Not really been following it, figured I'd wait until there was a consensus/legal decision.

I don't think it's so much as having broken the rules, but have stretched the interpretation of the rules to its limit.

But yeah, sky, from the snippets I have heard, seem to have handled it all appallingly badly.

I think there's a point where you have to ask if the standards they're being held to aren't actually unrealistic ones being imposed by a click-driven media led by the Mail, rather than ones they've genuinely embraced

Agree, I'm not convinced we are at that point yet. And if we are then the government has fallen for it too. Just because the mail is a right wing hate paper it doesn't preclude the fact that they could be on to something.

A separate issue is that cookson/UCI have really failed to take the initiative on doping they promised, or if they have then their PR strategy is hopeless.

don't a lot of sports people/teams do this? Weren't gears considered unsporting originally? Some probably consider energy gels/supplements against the general principles. If it's inside the rules it's legit, if the rules are shit then sort them out.

But yeah, sky, from the snippets I have heard, seem to have handled it all appallingly badly.

They do, but if you are Team Sky and you are set up on a clean premis that you will not employ anyone who is a past doper. Then if it subsequently turns out that you have been using drugs obtained under TUE for performance enhancing reasons, then that is a major issue worth investigating.

If they want to use non banned drugs for performance enhancing reasons because it is legal currently to do so then fine, just don't pretend that you (sky) don't with obfuscation.

Weren't gears considered unsporting originally?

indeed, go back to the 19th/early 20th century and there's a completely different attitude to drugs as well. numerous newspaper articles of "athletic men and modern chemicals working together for progress" sort of thing.

The anti drug stance is quite modern.

all this criticism yet none made of teams who employ riders who are convicted drugs cheats and are still getting the benefit of that cheating. Some are even team leaders.

As per Nickc's comment, and from the 1950s

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fausto_Coppi

Bartali and Coppi appeared on television revues and sang together, Bartali singing about "The drugs you used to take" as he looked at Coppi. Coppi spoke of the subject in a television interview:
Question: Do cyclists take la bomba (amphetamine)?
Answer: Yes, and those who claim otherwise, it's not worth talking to them about cycling.
Question: And you, did you take la bomba?
Answer: Yes. Whenever it was necessary.
Question: And when was it necessary?
Answer: Almost all the time!

As for

all this criticism yet none made of teams who employ riders who are convicted drugs cheats and are still getting the benefit of that cheating. Some are even team leaders.

Not sure that's true. Teams and riders with a dirty reputation get discussed and criticised all the time, but unless it's a new development why would it be considered news? Sky set themselves up to be whiter than white, all about not crossing 'the line' which made up part of their kit design, and they have been found wanting.

On the subject of MPs asking questions, 20 years ago the old British Cycling Federation had its problems
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/sproat-puts-a-spoke-in-cyclings-big-plans-1312454.html

http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm199697/cmhansrd/vo961121/debtext/61121-22.htm

But some rebranding to British Cycling and it was all fine
http://www.bikebiz.com/index.php/news/read/bcf-to-rebrand-itself-as-british-cycling
https://spokeydokeyblog.com/2016/05/01/the-20-year-scandal-cycle/

SKY could have them set themselves up as just another cycling team , but decided to be this totally pure team that succeeded on nothing other than perfect training and finding new marginal gains, sadly they have visited a grey area and spent far too much time in it, does it just proove natural talent and shed loads of effort can not win anything sporting now?

Can't believe I missed this... 😉

The problems are many. As CTM has pointed out this is the explanation v.3. The other two previous have been rubbished. And yet some people think everything is coming up smelling of roses. I'd lay money on v3 being bullshit too. And nice little 'separation' from the affair by Brailsford. Just like with Lieanders...

Sky claim to accountable and transparent when they are plainly neither. I too believe they've gamed the TUE system and that is cheating in my book.

The cockup vs conspiracy would be all well and good if sky weren't claiming all this marginal gains, no stone unturned bullshit. Brailsford looks like a bumbling idiot at times. Doesn't square with his 'mastermind' behind it all image.

And what is also shocking is that a women's coach employed by BC suddenly becomes errand boy for Sky. WTF is all that about. No wonder some in the women's squad complain bitterly about their treatment. They should be bollocked on high for this, failure to separate the corporate from the national, it's public money after all....

Oh and 'witch hunt', sounds a bit, well, you know, [i]Armstrongy[/i].

Matches Shanes pity you don't believe in miracles speech to a t. 😆