might be an option to guy pissing about with steel sheets

The wife wanted to watch Howards End. I am wasting time on here and reading research on Brexit …

Apparently elite sport is quite brutal if you want success.

Who knew.

I enjoyed that.

Not sure if that was an hour of my life wasted, I didn’t follow the scandal that closely, but I’m not sure I learned anything new.

Well that thoroughly annoyed me. Out of context quotes, exclude the wider context of anything (how many other riders had or have had TUES since 2012? what would the risk be to riders health if they didn’t have them?), make maximum use of over-dramatised voice-overs and music to portray the appearance of a terrible environment and drug taking.

Maybe I should ask for a documentary to be made about excessive pressure that was placed on me during my job. The clips of someone at a keyboard might be less exciting than a velodrome but it’s the same problem.

Another one perhaps I should ask them to pop along to an army exercise, one from my past that springs to mind was a promotion course – better result = more likely for imminent promotion. What did that translate to? being pushed to complete at 8 miler with 25kg around sennybridge training area in the fastest possible time whilst being encouraged with various swear words from a landrover – I remember running around it thinking ‘well, not sure if my bodys up for this but lets give it everything I’ve got, either I finish well or my body flakes out on me and I don’t finish’. Perhaps the bloke in the landy should have been saying “you know what mate lets knock this off and go get a brew”.

Bloody nonsense. No disrespect to those who chose to part company with the team, I don’t know how long I could work under the sort of pressure they were facing, but they knew what they were getting into when they chose the career.

That was an awful attempt to make an exciting programme from really boring content.

So maybe I won’t iPlayer it .. or maybe I will @wallop 🙂

Naah..wont be watching ..
from the few posts on here it sounds drop bar related and I can’t pretend to get even a little bit interested ..

Perhaps you were expecting it to be about Warner,Peaty,Ratboy,Jamie Bestwick and Andy Ruffle….eejit.

No ..I just don’t follow any rider that closely ..but would have had a passing interest if it had been mtb ..arsehole !

Watched it with the OH and enjoyed it but spent a lot of time ranting at the telly; especially when they were suggesting that the achievements were marred by the “revelations”. Bollocks! The achievements are incredible and I’d be surprised if other nations that are world leaders in sports aren’t also rather tough on their athletes.

Didn’t think much of the bit about the money spent on the women on the road either as sadly the events are less prestigious, attract far smaller crowds, sponsorship etc. Wiggo has in fairness spoken out for womens cycling before as his wife was brilliant on a bike too and they met through cycling.

The TUES thing is a crock too as lots of others have had them and it doesn’t sound in any way easy to get as Wiggins told Marr on the show they used a clip of.

I have a soon to be ex-colleague who’s a kiwi and he exhibits all of the mannerisms the Shane Sutton did when asked a question that he knows he can’t give an honest answer for.
I find the winning at all costs argument unpalatable, yes the athletes sometimes need to be pushed, but when there’s an entrenched bullying culture in an organisation is when its gone too far. And BC isn’t the only UKSport funded organisation that’s got a problem with this.
It was funny seeing them using Nicole Cooke as an example of BC’s rigorous and inclusive funding and coaching support structures.

I find the winning at all costs argument unpalatable

This is the nub of the problem. It’s sport. If you take that away, you negate the whole principle of the thing. If you’re not pushing the outer edge of the envelope, then you’ll lose, because someone else surely will be, whether that’s cycling, motorsport or any other sport you care to name.

That you can push too hard and that can have negative consequences is why you need someone regulating a sport to establish where the edge is – whether that’s having rules around medication or how powerful an engine can be. When the regulators get it wrong people die, whether it’s cyclists’ hearts giving up from too much amphetamine or drivers getting wrapped round trees because the cars are too fast.

But those should be the only boundaries. Within them, push as hard as you want. If you don’t want to push as hard as you can, you might as well go home, because no one ever won gold by giving it a reasonable shot.

Ok, I’ll further define my reservations – if sports are publicly funded then they have a duty of care to the athletes and other staff to ensure that bullying cultures don’t take hold. From my own experience dealing with BC its an organisation that has a problem with an entrenched bullying culture. Accordingly I am not a member any more, and I don’t Commissaire races any more either.

When does being pushed hard become bullying? I think bullying requires some form of taunting or derision so being pushed hard is being told to “work harder!”, “Dig in! You can do it!”, etc. whereas bullying would be “Work harder you little <expletive deleted>” and the like.

A very grey line though and apart from the above examples I wouldn’t like to adjudicate on such matters.

A poorly constructed programe, basicly Sir Dave Brailsford and Shane Sutton as leaders and impressing their management style on basicly cyclists, some managed to deal with the extra workload, some where not up to the task they got their point over like children banned from a childrens party.

The old saying, if you cant handle the heat and work, dont work in a steelworks on the furnaces.

I didn’t follow the scandal that closely, but I’m not sure I learned anything new.

That’s a pretty accurate summary.

I think the most interesting comment was the journalist saying that Sutton was promoted beyond his skill set. I wonder if prior to that he was held in check by Brailsford?

I only caught the end of the programme but it seemed to have little to say. Shock horror elite organisations work their people hard to achieve results. I’d love for them to go behind the scenes at a top level football or rugby club and see if it’s much different.

If you are busy and weighing up whether to watch it, here is the summary:

1. Everything was fine, until Dave went off to win the Tour a few times, leaving pitbull Sutton to make a mess of it with his 70s barking and management style. Whoever let Dave go needs a telling off.

2. There was a jiffy bag with something in it, that nobody really knows much about. It’s no big deal as Wiggins would have won the ’12 Tour anyway as Froome was on Brad’s team, and so Brad only had to beat Nibbles.

Just watched it, less content than the reports on BBC at the time. Dull.

BC must sack Shane Sutton immediately – oh hold, then already have
What about the doctor whose record-keeping is so shoddy – oh, he’s gone as well.
Well BC should at least break links with Team Sky – ah, they have done.
And the UCI should tighten up the rules on TUEs to reduce the risk of abuse – oh, that as well
Insist that Wiggins retires ?
Tell Jess Varnish not to have a baby ?

To be honest it’s only the sexism stuff that really winds me up, and that only got scant attention from the BBC or the Common’s select comm. And Sutton’s attitude was merely a symptom – it clearly run’s quite deep. Has the problem been rooted out – who knows ?

There is of course an obvious irony that it focused so much on the men and the Tour de France, but the lack of support when Armitstead won the worlds in 2015 didn’t even get a mention.

 if sports are publicly funded then they have a duty of care to the athletes and other staff to ensure that bullying cultures don’t take hold.

But if we’re going to have a publicly funded elite sports programme it has to be results based. Unfortunately you aren’t going to get that by being nice all the time.The general public want medals for their money, not a happy bunch of hard trying losers !! You put driven people like Brailsford and Sutton in charge and say win you get what we got. INMHO we got one of the best team of athletes the world has ever known. Something to be proud of not something pick holes in because winning hard isn’t quite the British way 🙁

I thought it was very interesting bit of TV. DB & SS demanded 110% – those who couldn’t give that need to put up or shut up or Vanish ( pun intended )

TUE question: Rider A gets a TUE and lets say there’s 50mg of an otherwise banned substance in it.
surely that for that substance to have performance gains much, much more over a course of time would need to have been taken than the amount noted in the TUE?
Confused.com

If you’ve not read it, give Nicole Cookes autobiography a read – it’s a broiling seething mass of resentment about Sutton and BC. Even assuming a certain amount of bias in her view, I was very disappointed.

Just remember that Wiggins was not the first Brit to win a Tour de France, Cav wasn’t the first in the modern era to be World Champion.

You put driven people like Brailsford and Sutton in charge and say win you get what we got.

The GB track programme gets waaaay more money than any of it’s rivals.

It might have had just as many winners if Big Bird and Dora the Explorer were running it.

It looks to me like BC was run along the lines of the Mourinho school of management. DB and SS had their clique, they treated the inside like gods and those outside with disdain, talent alone wasn’t enough to get you in, and those on the inside just don’t realise how different an experience it was for everyone else.

I didn’t mind it. You have to remember it’s aimed at the general public who have little knowledge or understanding of the whole thing. It’s not really for us.

Would have been nice to have seen more interviews though, with a broader spectrum of opinions, both good and bad. I do agree it was a bit one sided, but then I felt it was a relatively fair outlook of the situation.

It looks to me like BC was run along the lines of the Mourinho school of management. DB and SS had their clique, they treated the inside like gods and those outside with disdain, talent alone wasn’t enough to get you in, and those on the inside just don’t realise how different an experience it was for everyone else.

A fair assessment, Varnish was faster than anyone they have now in the squad but wasn’t in the clique

What has been picked up on Twitter is that a mystery package of testosterone patches turns up and gets spotted, the company Fit 4 Sport won’t talk to UKAD, they also supply a lot of other sports. Those records and those of other similar companies have the potential to be explosive

UK Anti Doping might have other things on their mind just now
https://www.insidethegames.biz/articles/1058192/alan-hubbard-doping-body-which-let-cycling-off-the-hook-now-faces-tysons-fury

UK Sport are busy as well
http://www.eurosport.co.uk/cycling/uk-sport-bosses-say-british-athletes-will-suffer-if-jess-varnish-wins-legal-case_sto6416632/story.shtml

A fair assessment, Varnish was faster than anyone they have now in the squad 

But she failed to qualify for Rio in the only event that she was in contention for. Obviously they didn’t like her attitude, and she was far from happy with there’s !!! Letting her go and trying to bring someone else on for 2020 is pretty logical.
Can you imagine most any sportsperson carrying on in a team after criticising their coaches like she did.