D Reilly

The shame of Britain’s sporting heroes

The comedian Richard Pryor famously advised any man caught committing adultery by his wife to deny everything and instead to ask: “now who you gonna believe – me or your lyin’ eyes?” This would be a good motto for British sport.

For years, sports fans in this country have been impelled to disregard the evidence our lyin’ eyes, for example, about why so many top level British endurance athletes seem to have debilitating asthma, or why the bikes used by Team Sky are heavier than those used by their rivals, or how it could be that plucky Britain with its smaller population finished higher in the medal table at the London 2012 Olympic Games than Russia, with its supposedly state-sponsored Putin-approved doping program (according to the McLaren report the London Games were “corrupted on an unprecedented scale” by those villainous Ruskies). 

On Monday, some five and a half years after London 2012, a tsunami of ordure finally crashed over British sport. The release of the Digital, Media and Sport (DCMS) select committee’s two-year report into doping in UK sport at last put paid to the ludicrous idea that British sportspeople are somehow inherently morally superior to filthy cheating foreign athletes, or any less interested in lorry loads of lolly. In its aftermath, it’s hard to see how the reputations of our ennobled sporting heroes Sir Bradley Wiggins, Sir David Brailsford or Lord Coe will smell sweet again.

In the report we read page after page of findings based on painstakingly collected testimony indicating, amongst other things, that Britain’s most successful Olympian and Tour de France winner Sir Bradley Wiggins took triamcinolone – a corticosteroid that just happens to facilitate rapid weight loss without loss of strength – not once but up to nine times. He denies the allegation. The drug was used “to prepare Bradley Wiggins, and possibly other riders supporting him, for the Tour de France… not to treat medical need, but to improve his power to weight ratio ahead of the race”, the report said.

We also read that doctors at Sir David Brailsford-run winning machine Team Sky apparently thought medical record keeping was such a faff they often didn’t bother, meaning it was impossible to ascertain what was in the famous jiffy bag spirited from Manchester to La Toussuire in 2011, where Wiggins was competing in the Critérium du Dauphiné race.

We read, too, that Lord Coe, the magnificently glossy haired head honcho of global athletics and mastermind of the London 2012 Olympic Games, now stands accused of misleading parliament over when he first knew of large-scale corruption allegations against Russian athletics.

And we also saw that Sir Mo Farah was given an injection of permitted fat burning drug L-carnitine by another doctor – Dr.

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