Questions over Team Sky’s ethics have dominated the news cycle ever since the cyber hacking group Fancy Bears revealed that Bradley Wiggins had availed of a therapeutic use exemption to receive injections of the powerful corticosteroid triamcinolone acetonide in 2011, 2012 and 2013, and continued on Friday as UK Anti-Doping began an inquiry into “allegations of wrongdoing in cycling,” which is understood to concern both Sky and British Cycling.
Morale can hardly have been high among the Sky contingent that rode to fourth place in Sunday’s team time trial at the UCI Road World Championships in Doha, though Nicolas Roche told Cyclingnews after the finish that the weighty issues involving the team had not affected the sextet in Qatar.
“It’s related to 2011, when I think two-thirds of us here today were not even on the team. It’s something we have more info on from reading the media than anything else. We learn about it on Twitter and the internet. That’s how much we know about it. You just get the info at the same time as everybody else,” Roche said.
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Even before the Fancy Bears information leak brought the issue into sharper focus, however, Roche expressed concern at the existing system of granting TUEs, telling the Sunday Independent last year that it was “the number one fight the UCI have to pick up on.” The revelation that his former teammate Wiggins benefitted from that system has not swayed his thinking on the matter.
“Like I said already on my Twitter a few weeks ago, when WADA was hacked the first time and before the Wiggins story, there is a major problem with TUEs,” Roche said. “There is a problem with the actual system. Again, you can do whatever you want against Wiggins, but unfortunately, as far as ethically it’s wrong, he is within the rules. It is wrong that these rules are like that. That’s where the main problem is. Once we get those rules right, there won’t be any abuse, but that’s the priority.”
Wiggins’ use of cortisone, and the apparent inconsistencies in Sky’s ethical stance, have rightly generated the bulk of the headlines, but Roche feels the entire system of granting TUEs, in cycling and in other sports, needs to be revised. His 2016 season, for instance, was blighted by illness, yet he never required a TUE for treatment.
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Team time trial
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