Well, I feel somewhat embarrassed by the compliments paid. I was simply trying to right a wrong; thank you for so many kind words.
Some of you have also been good enough to purchase Nicole’s book. You will read it and make up your own mind about the content. I post here a review that is, again, relevant to Leg’s comment; another individual whose actions were influenced at the time by all the bad mouthing.
Three facts are critical to why all this bad mouthing took place. 1) Nicole was an outstanding female operating in a sport that gave scant regard to its female competitors. 2) The sport of cycling has an endemic and long standing problem with PEDs. She, and I, came into direct contact with that very quickly. I first went to UKAD in 2003; at that time it was still in the UKSport building and called “Drug Free Sport”. I was tasked with expressing Nicole’s experiences in this regard. I informed Brailsford that I had gone there and the purpose of that meeting. As a consequence, Nicole & her father were clearly a threat to those who chose to gain performance advantage from a syringe and their enablers and supports on the sidelines. 3) The quality of some, not all, of the staff at British Cycling supporting the elite riders, who were so well described by their one time manager Ken Mattheson, as I quoted in my first post.
That is some heady mix there and it is easy to sympathise with those of good character who were swayed into poor actions based on a convincing, but entirely false, narrative, exactly like the reviewer on Amazon. Burnt into my memory is a meeting with the Head of the Commonwealth Games Federation for Wales and the Chairman of the Welsh Sports Council. I was granted the meeting after Nicole objected to preparations for a Commonwealth Games in direct conflict with long standing plans she had put in place and been shared completely, well in advance (over a year), with Welsh Cycling, such that Welsh Cycling had even sent a draft of a press release they had in process supporting the very program now being cancelled! All had been thrown into turmoil because Shane Sutton, the BC senior coach no less, had engaged the Chairman at a luncheon and had told him to cancel the program. The Chairman acted, in all innocence, but in ignorance, exactly as Sutton advised. The meeting was very difficult with no tangible, positive outcome whatsoever.
Nicole’s book in draft form was well beyond the size the commissioning publisher requested. It ended up somewhat larger than the publisher originally sought but much material never made it to print. There was, of course, the issue of content. People with a cultivated interest in a topic, a sense of self knowledge approaching that of “expert” status, about that subject, cannot be moved too far in any one step, at any one point in time. At the meeting I have described above, I introduced the Chairman and Head to concepts incompatible with their perceptions and they chose to doubt my word. Sutton was after all, their previous employee, their Welsh Coach of the Year, their brightest in the field, who had gone on to become the UKSport coach of the year. At the time of presenting the draft of the book to the publisher in 2013, the BC/Sky star was at its zenith.
Now we are in a different place. A tribunal with significant legal powers, has read and listened to much evidence presented by two QCs and come to a decision that an employee of BC did indeed obtain testogel for the purposes of using it with athletes with the intent to enhance performance, rather than for medical purposes. We have the tools of the crime laid out at the scene but as to who was doped – the tribunal outcome gave us no clue. A doctor has lost his career.
Nicole and I talk about what portion of those draft chapters that never saw the light of day could now be made public. A possible project for the future. But certainly, if writing now, the book would be different. At that time, the two interlocking foundation issues Nicole opted to prioritise were that the BC story that the cycling centre was a palace of total excellence, without fault, was a myth and the sport of cycling practised discrimination against its female competitors in manner that had been made illegal in regular employment, decades before. Why was sport exempted?
However, there is much else to entertain and I trust those who purchase the book find it a worthwhile read.
Once again, thank you for the kind comments.
