Those who grew tired of Team Sky’s ‘marginal gains’ mantra will have read with a certain degree of irony as leaks from the Fancy Bears cyber-hacking group spread over the internet. Bradley Wiggins and Chris Froome, two of the most successful riders in recent years, were revealed as recipients of Therapeutic Use Exemptions (TUEs), and while they did not break any rules, the leak posed several important questions for Team Sky.
Froome’s two TUEs, from 2013 and 2014, were already public knowledge, and although they caused a stir at the time, it was Wiggins’ medical forms that made for the most intriguing reading.
Well before Fancy Bears’ disclosure Wiggins had gone on record in his 2012 Autobiography ‘My Time’ stating that his only ever injections were for “my vaccinations” and “drips.” More important for Team Sky was the fact that it had said that it would pull any rider from a race if he was suffering from allergies, rather than apply for a TUE. That was in 2013, when Dr. Steve Peters had told David Walsh, “We agreed as a team that if a rider, suffering from asthma, got into trouble with pollen we would pull him out of the race rather than apply for a therapeutic use exemption on his behalf.”
ADVERTISEMENT
While it must be stressed that Wiggins, Froome and Team Sky stayed on the right side of legality, with Wiggins’s TUEs issued for asthma and pollen allergies, the team has raised questions over its policy towards TUEs, the grey area of corticoid steroid use and transparency.
If you missed the flurry of news and need a quick summation, here goes:
Bradley Wiggins was given six TUEs during his career. The first three were administered between June 2008 and December 2008, all for Salbutamol and covering long term asthma, a medical condition that one former teammate asserted was true when contacted by Cyclingnews. The second set of three TUEs were for Triamcinolone Acetonide, a corticoid steroid that was prescribed for allergies.
TUE committee decisions
Team Sky’s utopia falls apart
The Geert Leinders experiment
You can read more at Cyclingnews.com
via Cyclingnews Latest Interviews and Features http://ift.tt/2cTXo5f
No comments:
Post a Comment