Well done G - and Chris

A remarkable win for Geraint Thomas in the Tour de France which finished last Sunday. G, as he is known to his friends and teammates (er, c'mon chaps, Geraint isn't the hardest Welsh name to pronounce*) had a stellar career in track racing. However, it looked like he would always be the bridesmaid in the big road races, especially le Tour. He had been Team Sky's star performer in their first Tour way back in 2010, but once Chris Froome usurped Bradley Wiggins as team leader, Thomas seemed destined to support others. He also had bad luck with crashes, some leading to significant injuries including a fractured pelvis (which didn't stop him completing the 2013 Tour) and a broken collarbone. When a crash didn't intervene he had occassionally blown up and lost huge chunks of time on a stage. Which made the last few stages of the Tour nerve racking and, for the first time ever for me, compulsive viewing. Before then Thomas had performed heroically to win two consecutive stages in the middle of the Tour. The second of those wins, stepping on the gas and using his track cycling experience to find the best line to the finish after the monumental climb up Alpe d'Huez in stage 12 has been listed by roadcyclinguk.com as one of the best stage wins ever by a Brit. Thomas always looked comfortable once he had the yellow jersey and he made the later stages uneventful, not only ensuring his rivals could not make gains against him but finishing strongly several times to extend his margin.

It's remarkable that, no Brit ever having won the Tour ever before Sir Bradley Wiggins in 2012, three different Brits have now won it in seven years. We've almost monopolised the event, with only one non-British rider, the Italian Vincenzo Nibali, intruding into that sequence in the year Chris Froome crashed multiple times and was forced to retire with fractures to his left wrist and right hand.

Equally remarkable is the fact that Thomas, now one of the world's most outstanding sportsmen, with two Olympic golds and three World Championship golds, went to the same Cardiff school as Sam Warburton, the most successful ever captain of the British Lions rugby team - leading them to a series win in South Africa and draw in New Zealand - and Gareth Bale, three time winner of the Champions League with Real Madrid and a member of the Welsh team that got to the semis in the 2016 Euros. They were obviously doing something right at that school.

But there were some other things we learned from the Tour. We saw for ourselves that Geraint Thomas is a likeable, boy next door kind of character. But we also saw that Chris Froome, who clearly bridled at having to support Bradley Wiggins when it was pretty clear who was the stronger cyclist in 2012, is also a pretty good geezer, at least when it's Thomas and not Wiggins in front of him. Froome was perfectly happy to do whatever he could to support Thomas once it was clear the Welshman had the better chance of winning.

Froome was allowed to compete after what seemed at first to be a sudden and strange decision by the doping authorities not to proceed with the case against him for his adverse analytical finding during last year's Vuelta. Now I've always believed Chris Froome to be genuine though, like many, I began to have doubts over the athsma inhaler/salbutamol drugs test issue. Doubts that were fuelled when David Walsh, the Sunday Times chief sports correspondent who played the leading role in Lance Armstrong's downfall, lost confidence in Froome over the issue. Walsh knows Froome well and is more than expert in both cycling and drugs in sport so who was I to feel I was better placed to assess Froome's innocence?

In the Sunday Times on 8 July Walsh said that his first conversation with Froome after his adverse analytical finding was difficult. Froome said he had used his inhaler in the normal way, well within what was permissable and he couldn't explain how his level had got to 2,000ng/ml, well over the 1200ng threshold. Walsh thought it was hard to believe Froome would have cheated with Salbutamol (I understand no-one thinks salbutamol via athsma inhaler is performance enhancing anyway) but how could his level have gone from 100ng one day to 2000ng the next? Anti-doping is based on strict liability - the competitors are responsible for what is in their bodies, however it got there. Froome had to prove he hadn't done anything wrong. Walsh noted that, against the reality of the test, that was always going to be difficult. Walsh clearly thought it couldn't be done and he told Froome that he thought he should have withdrawn himself from competition while his case was being heard. But incredibly it now turns out that, throughout the period of the investigation, the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) was sitting on research that proved athletes using salbutamol in a multi-stage cycle race had a high probability of exceeding the threshold while staying within the number of permissable puffs from their inhaler. WADA had commissioned a Danish research group and they used 20 subjects who took eight puffs for five consecutive days, their salbutamol levels being measured at the end of each day. Seven of the 20 participants recorded levels over the 1200ng threshold although they had stayed within permitted doses. One subject recorded a level of 3,000ng, 50% higher than Froome's. Not surprisingly, Walsh says WADA's law on salbutamol is seriously flawed and will soon be changed. This is why they decided to drop the case against Froome.

But more seriously this shows that WADA behaved in a fundamentally dishonest manner, concealing highly relevant evidence while insisting that Froome prove his innocence. Froome's team submitted 1500 pages of evidence about how his levels of salbutamol had varied enormously even though his use of the inhaler remained constant. During the first two weeks of the Vuelta, there were times when Froome's sample was totally clear, literally zero ng but on one occasion it was 300ng. On the day before he recorded the 2000 result that caused the problem his level was 12ng. Froome says his use of the inhaler was precisely the same on those two days. Understandably, given cycling's doping history, many people felt Frrome must have done something wrong to produce a sample so far beyond WADA's 1200 limit. But as Walsh notes WADA, without admitting as much knew there was a significant chance this was a false positive as its salbutamol threshold was predominantly based on research conducted on athletes in one day competition. Salbutamol excretion in mutli-day events such as cycling tours had never been studied.

This is why Walsh was critical of the anti-doping authorities for putting Froome in a position where he would inevitably get abuse and probably threats of physical violence as the Tour got under way. "I cannot blame those who voice their disapproval because, knowing more about the man than they do, I doubted him. That was a judgement call I regret" said Walsh.

That's bad enough but I think it's actually much worse than that. David Lappartient, the head of the world cycling governing body UCI, caused a stir on the eve of the Tour de France when he told the BBC that Team Sky’s wealth had helped them fight the salbutamol case, their rich resources enabling them to hire an army of lawyers and experts**. The inference was that riders in the same position in the past had essentially been priced out of justice.

So WADA were sitting on unpublished info showing what Froome was saying was probably true. And yet Sky gets accused by the head of the UCI of using its wealth to clear Froome. If you ask me it stinks. No wonder Sky boss Sir Dave Brailsford got into a slanging match with Lappartient via the media as the Tour progressed with Brailsford saying Lappartient had failed to grasp the responsibilities of his role and accusing him of having a "local French mayor kind of mentality"**. (Lappartient had once been the mayor of Sarzeau in Brittany). Lappartient replied that Brailsford "does not understand much about cycling" (er, hello, 18 Olympic and 59 World Championship golds across different disciplines in 10 years as Performance Director of British cycling even without the 6 Sky Tour de France and other road race wins? That's a remarkable claim, monsieur). As the Tour swung towards the critical stages in the Pyrenees Brailsford suggested that the disgraceful behaviour of some fans that his team, particularly but not just Froome, have had to tolerate was a "French cultural thing" saying:

“I don’t think spitting has a place in professional sport personally, or in everyday life, but it seems to be the thing that’s done here. But we’re not going to let it distract us. It’s interesting, we just raced in Italy and if this is all about Chris and his case, well his case was open during the Tour of Italy and they were fantastic, the Italians. The Spanish, fantastic. It just seems to be a French thing. A French cultural thing really, that’s it."

While this was an interesting thing for Brailsford to say at that point in the race remarkably Lappartient, to whom the words had not been addressed, responded and, while he advised Brailsford to tone down his rhetoric, he also said

"he can't say it's down to mentality of the French. It's down to the mentality of fans everywhere. He has to understand that the Tour is the biggest race in the world, so there's more pressure, more media, and the decision for Froome to come to the Tour also focused on this."

Lappartient also suggested it wasn't necessarily French fans spitting as the fans passports weren't checked at the roadside. Er, so let me understand this Monsieur. They spit at Team Sky in France but not Spain or Italy. I'd wager the largest contingent of non-French fans at the Tour these days are Brits. So just who do you think is doing the spitting? Brailsford then backed down and said he didn't believe that spitting was a French cultural thing, but he was agitated about what had been happening to his team.

I find several things about this spat interesting. One is that Brailsford, the most successful team director in modern cycling history if not ever, has not met or spoken directly to the head of his sport's world governing body. But he's obviously got his man down to a "t": could you imagine the boss of the FA responding directly to a Jose Mourinho rant in the way Lappartient did?  Sure, the FA can slap a "disrepute" charge on a Mourinho, but even so....

Brailsford is of course controversial. Indeed he is tainted tainted by the Bradley Wiggins therapuetic use exemptions saga and the mysterious jiffy bag delivered to Team Sky during a race in 2011. Wiggins's TUEs , which enabled him to be injected with a powerful corticoteroid, no inhaler stuff here, were 100% legal but we can only wonder about whether they were opportunistic cheating - they just happened to be before Wiggins's biggest races 3 years in a row. However, Wiggins not unreasonably points out that the pollen season comes at the same time each year and, up till then he had been racing indoors. So legal but morally questionable. However, only Brailsford knows if he is really aware of what was in the infamous jiffy bag. The kangaroo court that is a House of Commons Select Committee made hay out of it, but it wouldn't surprise me if he genuinely didn't know. The Select Committee MPs seem to think someone like Brailsford, a banker or a Murdoch executive for example, knows every tiny thing that is happening everywhere in their operation every minute of the day and can remember it all seven years later. They feign disbelief if people say they can't remember or would never have actually known. Actually, I doubt they really think that, but it suits them to posture and go for soundbites to get themselves into the news. It's a system that I think should be overhauled urgently. How would any of them like to appear, without legal representation, in front of a panel of around a dozen hostile interlocutors, who make their own procedural rules and set about random points scoring rather than following lines of inquiry genuinely designed to elicit the truth?

Brailsford may be tainted and I had begun to doubt him and even to wonder about Froome. But at the moment for me the villains are the anti-doping and cycling authorities who would have left one of the world's most outstanding sportsmen of the last decade hung out to dry when they knew he was almost certainly innocent, or at least that his explanation made complete sense. If they had had their way Froome would have been stripped of his Vuelta win and wouldn't have been allowed to compete in the Giro or this year's Tour. And then Lappartient suggests that Froome had the advantage of wealthy backers. I'm not sure I can find the words to express, in polite language, how despicable I feel that behaviour was.

Fortunately, Froome now sits in the record books with cycling's equivalent of the "Tiger slam". He didn't win the Giro, Tour and Vuelta in the same year but he did win them back to back and held all three trophies simultaneously. This is a remarkable if not quite unprecedented feat: Eddy Merckx and Bernard Hinault are the only other riders ever to do it. (The cycling records are confusing for non experts as there is an unofficial "Triple Crown" involving winning the UCI World Road Race championship, the Tour de France and either the Italian Giro or Spanish Vuelta in one season, also only achieved by two riders: Merckx and Ireland's Stephen Roche). Anyways, it ain't been done in yonks and puts Froome in the highest echelon of road race cyclists. And he showed us, in coming third at the Tour, that he's not just out for himself. The authorities would cynically have denied not just Froome but all of us watching these outstanding achievements. I can only think they relented as it dawned on them that the truth would out and it would have catapulted international cycling into yet another crisis.

As you can tell I'm almost certain that Froome is genuine and, with some reservations, I'm also convinced that Sky were right to stick with Dave Brailsford.

Meanwhile there is speculation that Thomas might leave Sky to be a guaranteed team leader. But this year has shown it is very difficult, notwithstanding Froome's amazing achievement of winning three in a row, to lead more than one grand tour in a year. It's just too demanding. So why don't Sky have a chat with Thomas and Froome about the former leading in next year's Giro and Froome going for his 5th Tour? With the option that, if either rider falls away, the other goes for it.

I don't see why that wouldn't keep everyone happy.

And maybe I should go and pump my bike tyres up.....

* For example, what about Eifion, the name of our tiler on the house project. Pronounced "Avion" if you were wondering.
** http://www.cyclingnews.com/news/brailsford-the-quicker-lappartient-can-learn-his-responsibilities-the-better/
*** https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/cycling/44785605
**** http://www.cyclingnews.com/features/we-dont-ask-roadside-fans-to-show-us-their-passports-lappartient-tells-brailsford/
**** https://www.independent.co.uk/sport/cycling/tour-de-france-2018-team-sky-dave-brailsford-france-culture-abuse-spitting-punch-chris-froome-watch-a8459791.html