A syringe pumping its 40mg charge of triamcinolone acetonide into the buttock of an athlete does not, on the face of it, have much in common with an Su-24 attack plane unloading its 500kg bombs on a convoy of vehicles in Syria. But as the world slides, inch by inch, towards something that appears potentially much worse than the old Cold War, we are being forced to see Bradley Wiggins as playing a small but not entirely insignificant part in the grim process.
Wiggins’s employment of therapeutic use exemptions was revealed in its full extent by the hackers from the Fancy Bears website, whose name teases observers into detecting the hand of the FSB, Russia’s main security agency. And the subtext behind the conflict between the successors to the KGB and the World Anti-Doping Agency is that this is all part of a proxy war.
The revelation that Wiggins was given three officially sanctioned injections before the Tour de France in 2011 and 2012 and the Giro d’Italia in 2013 will not turn out to be the 21st century’s equivalent of the shots fired by the Yugoslav nationalist Gavrilo Princip in Sarajevo one June day in 1914. But a shot this was, nevertheless, aimed at creating not just injury but provocation and deepening wounds whose infection spreads far beyond the little world of sport.
Russia is retaliating for Wada’s support of the investigation that revealed an extensive state-sponsored doping regime, and for the Olympic and Paralympic suspensions resulting from it. They want to convince the world of the injustice of these suspensions by showing that the west is just as intent on finding ways around sporting regulations. And if it will ignore laws in one sphere, the implication goes, it will ignore those in others.
Sport has an important role in the evolution of Vladimir Putin’s New Russia. The tactics in this geopolitical game are subtler, thanks to digital technology, than those employed in 1980, when the US boycotted the Moscow Games, and four years later when the Soviet Union retaliated by staying away from Los Angeles. The hacked medical records are a small part of this new, much larger campaign.
The vast majority of the documents do no serious damage to the reputations of the named athletes, although the British hockey player Sam Quek spoke for many when she voiced a sense of outrage at the violation of privacy. But the revelations have also reawakened objections to the ethical basis of TUEs: if an athlete is experiencing a health problem, should they either accept the accompanying reduction in performance level or withdraw from competition until such time as they have recovered naturally?
Wiggins, whose own personality is not always his best friend at such moments, seems to be very poorly advised. “There’s nothing new here,” his spokesperson said in a first reaction to the news of the intramuscular cortisone injections. Nothing new to Wiggins and his team perhaps, but certainly new to the outside world, which had taken at face value his apparent support in his 2012 autobiography, My Time, for a no-needle policy and his statement that he had received injections only for the purpose of vaccination and rehydration.
These cortisone injections, taken before big events and permitted by cycling’s governing body on the basis of minimising the effect of a severe pollen allergy, were obviously intended to affect his performance by enabling him to race normally. But they might also have had the effect of allowing him to improve on the level he would have achieved naturally without either the asthmatic condition or its prescribed antidote.
Racing Through the Dark, the autobiography published by David Millar in 2011, contains an interesting account of winning the silver medal in the 2001 world time trial championship after being given an intramuscular shot of the same drug, under the pretence that he was suffering from tendonitis. “A few days after the cortisone injection I began to lose weight,” he writes. “I was skinnier than I’d ever been … Logic would dictate that I felt weaker, and yet I’d never felt so strong. I felt like I could suffer more and push myself harder than ever.” It was, he concluded, “probably the most powerful drug out there, yet with the right prescription it could be used legally”.
Perhaps this is the sort of thing Dave Brailsford has in mind when he speaks of Team Sky’s zero-tolerance approach to doping nevertheless encompassing a willingness to push right up to the limit of what is legally permitted. Wiggins seems to have been operating within the rules. But it may be that the rules are wrong.
There are certainly a lot of athletes seemingly in need of asthma medicines these days. While it may be true that intense physical exercise can exacerbate the symptoms, it is also hard to believe that quite so many extremely fit young people suffer from it badly enough to require medication in order to function.
Jonathan Vaughters has seen this issue from both sides. He was a rider with the US Postal team in 1999, when Lance Armstrong won his first Tour de France after managing to acquire a backdated certificate for the use of a cortisone cream taken, he claimed, to treat saddle sores. Vaughters is now the chief executive of the Cannondale‑Drapec team, and he was absolutely right when he suggested in a tweet this week that all TUEs should be publicly disclosed. “Any athlete would think twice unless they really needed it,” he wrote.
And if they do need it, they have nothing to be ashamed of. No one is thinking any the worse of the 19-year-old gymnast Simone Biles because we now know, thanks to Fancy Bears, that she has been prescribed Ritalin to deal with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Medical confidentiality should have nothing to do with this. If athletes want to take part in public competitions, and to profit from them in financial and reputational terms, that is the price they have to pay to rebuild public trust.
As for Wiggins, if he wants to head off into an unshadowed retirement in a few weeks’ time, he needs to tell his spokesperson to shut up and give his own explanation, with maximum clarity and candour. (It remains to be see whether Andrew Marr, on whose BBC1 show the rider is appearing on Sunday morning, will be up to providing the necessary cross-examination.) And then, imminent global apocalypse aside, we can quietly give thanks to the Russians for ensuring, whatever their true motives, that a murky subject is being dragged closer to the light of proper scrutiny.
