Cycling: the rise and fall of Team Sky

The once proud Sky cycling team has sunk deep into the doping mire. A commission of inquiry revealed that the team used medical exemptions to increase the performance of their superstars Bradley Wiggins and Chris Froome. Until recently, they were the shining figurehead of cycling: modern, successful, dominant. A story about the rise and fall of a team that actually wanted to stand for the new, clean cycling sport.

September, 2011. It seemed to run perfectly for a long time. After two unsuccessful appearances at the Tour de France, Team Sky demonstrated its class for the first time at the Vuelta a Espana. In addition to captain Bradley Wiggins, Chris Froome, who was completely unknown at the time, surprisingly made it onto the podium of the overall standings. It was to be the beginning of a dominant era.

I have waited a long time for this moment and I will do everything in my power to win the Tour de France “, Wiggins explained earlier – and followed up with deeds. He won, his water bearer Froome came second. Afterwards, Wiggins won the Olympic time trial at the home games in London. The reward: He and Sky team boss Dave Brailsford were knighted by the Queen and Wiggins became a superstar on the island.

The big goals of the team were finally achieved. The team should already set new standards when the team was founded in 2009. With a prominent sponsor and the highest budget of all teams, they showed a completely new professionalism. According to Brailsford, revolutionary training methods in particular were supposed to ensure success:”In the past, there was mainly doping, so drivers didn’t have to train. Our drivers train properly. That’s actually all.”

Through “marginal gains”, the advantage of small technical refinements, something new should be built up. The core objective was to be the first ever British Tour de France winner.

We want to make Team Sky the undisputed best cycling team in the world – one that is considered one of the best in the world of sport,”was Brailsford’s demand. And what the Sky team did, they achieved. In the following years, it became an outstanding power on the rounds and dominated above all the Tour de France at will. From 2013 to 2017 Froome won the round trip four times.

It was a dominance like in the best times of Lance Armstrong’s US Postal Teams. Sky’s team of helpers was superior to everyone in the mountains and neutralized almost every enemy attack due to their qualitative and quantitative superiority.

But: From the very beginning, there were doubters who considered such a superiority to be impossible without performance-enhancing means. The steep ascent of Froome was also surprising for many observers, as he had never been a particularly good round-trip driver before his time at Sky. Brailsford reacted to the constant reproaches mostly annoyed:”Instead of constantly asking us to prove our innocence, you can give us a few ideas.”

Sky himself proclaimed a strict anti-doping policy for himself. With zero tolerance and incomparable consistency one wanted to face the issue. However, the Dutch doctor Geert Leinders – who has been proven to be involved in doping practices – was obliged to release him shortly afterwards under pressure from the public.

In 2016, the myth of the untouchable Team Sky began to seriously crumble. Russian hackers discovered at the time that both Wiggins and Froome received several medical exemptions from the UCI for the use of prohibited substances.

These prescriptions seemed to be more than suspicious, especially in the case of wiggins, since it was the drug triamcinolone. Among other things, the actual allergy spray causes a sudden weight loss. Appropriately, Wiggins received the administration three times directly before the start of a three-week tour – a great advantage at numerous mountain stages where every lost gram counts.

However, Wiggins was not aware of any guilt. He perceived the accusations as an overreaction:”Some parts of the accusations are exaggerated and personalized. It doesn’t take much more to make a fuss about the things that have happened before. I understand that.”

But it got even fatter: Shortly after, details about a package for Wiggins became known. A member of the team is said to have taken the ominous cargo from Manchester to La Toussuire, where the team was just now, before the 2011 tour. The contents of the package were not recorded anywhere. So the question that arose was: Why does someone personally travel over 1,500 kilometres to deliver a parcel?

The reaction of the team was anything but credible. The package contained the cough expectorant Fluimucil – a drug that would have been purchased locally in France for eight euros from any pharmacy. Neither Wiggins nor Brailsford were able to provide a plausible explanation for this, but rather both became entangled in contradictory statements.

And all this was not enough, a positive doping test was announced by Froome at the Vuelta 2017, which he had won sovereignly. The drug Salbutamol was allegedly found to combat asthma, but was above the limit.

However, a final verdict has not yet been reached, and the intention to commit fraud has not yet been proven. An unlucky thing for Tour boss Christian Prudhomme:”This is crazy. We want an answer. That there’s someone on the starting list who might be told later that he shouldn’t have been there. This is a farce.”

However, all of these were only indications, a clear and unequivocal violation of the rules could not be proven to the team until then. However, investigations into the inconsistencies were quickly launched, both by the UKAD and a British House of Commons committee of inquiry.

While UKAD concluded its investigations without any result, the parliamentary committees reached a clear conclusion:”In contrast to Brailsford’s statement to the committee, we believe that Team Sky used drugs within the WADA rules not only for medical treatment, but to improve driver performance”.

For the first time there is an official statement confirming Sky’s doping. The result does not have direct consequences, however, because no official rules of the World Anti-Doping Agency have been violated. Nevertheless, the report sends out a signal, especially because Sky had always declared the highest moral standards to himself, as Froome once said:”We must not only comply with the rules, but also act as role models. Morally and ethically.”

The image of being a cleanman is no longer there, even if the parties involved defend themselves. Wiggins speaks of a “witch hunt” and “hell on earth”. Things could get worse. At the moment, there is even speculation about the dissolution of the racing team and now the UCI’s Anti-Doping Commission wants to investigate the case in more detail. If the latter would find a violation of the rules, the team could also lose its Tour title.

Then the Sky team would find a similar end to Armstrong’s US Postal: from the myth of an invincible super troop to a synonym for evil in sport.