Bradley Wiggins has said that British Cycling teammate Lizzie Armitstead has ‘no excuse’ for three missed anti-doping tests and filing errors. Armitstead almost missed the Olympic Games in Rio after a third error with her whereabouts in less than a year but was cleared to race after the first of her missed tests was ruled out.
In a lengthy open letter, Armitstead blamed in part her hectic schedule to an oversight that led to the second of her missed tests and said that an ‘emergency situation’ with her family had caused the other. These excuses didn’t wash with Wiggins, who has been racing at a senior level since 1999.
“It’s bloody hard because what happens is you miss one test, they write you a letter, they ask you to explain what happened, and you’ve got two weeks to put a case forward,” Wiggins said in an interview with the Guardian’s Weekend magazine. “If you ignore that and then you get another one, you end up having crisis meetings.
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“When you’re a professional athlete and you’re a world champion, there’s no excuse, because it’s your career. You’re setting the standard for everybody else, and to say: ‘Cycling wasn’t my priority at that time,’ is ludicrous, because you nearly lost your career over it. That’s just ridiculous. So I can’t fathom how that happened.”
Wiggins didn’t state whether or not he had been through this process as a result of a missed test himself. Other British riders have admitted to missing one test in the past, including Mark Cavendish, Nicole Cooke and Chris Froome.
Armitstead’s first missed test came in August of last year when she was at the Crescent Women World Cup Vargarda in Sweden. This was the test that was eventually ruled as being void by the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) after they ruled that the doping control officer hadn’t done enough to locate Armitstead after her hotel refused to hand out her room number. Following a spot check in November of the same year, soon after she became world champion, an error in the information she had given was recorded and a second missed test was registered.
Innuendo and accusations
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