Originally Posted by Inspiration:
“The interview tomorrow feels odd. Andrew Marr of all people? He's hardly a sports expert or doping expert.
David Walsh is writing an article in the ST:
"The more I've looked at the Wiggins' TUEs, the murkier they seem. I've tried to explain in tomorrow's ST how it happened."”
The ST article says little new. It makes it clear Sky have pulled down the shutters and slammed the door shut on David Walsh. He is an outsider looking in, not the 'access all areas' embedded journalist of a couple of years ago. Sky are not denying they crossed a line. It is inconsistent with their zero tolerance purge of a couple of years back.
Wiggins says in the Marr interview:
Quote:
“This was to cure a medical condition. This wasn’t about trying to find a way to gain an unfair advantage, this was about putting myself back on a level playing field in order to compete at the highest level,”
He appears to admit there was an advantage - just not, in his view, intentional. The fact it was kept secret though shows there was something to hide.
It is important to note this was a one-off injection. The abuse in previous generations used a wide-ranging, systematic approach:
Quote:
“A recent story illustrates the point. In spring 1998 Laurent Dufaux had just won the Tour of Romandie by a street. He was absolutely flying, using cortisone, a fact which didn't escape his team mate and fellow-Swiss Alex Zülle, who had arrived at the team in the off-season. Less than a week before the Tour of Italy, for which he was the favourite, Alex, who was the Festina leader on the race, came and asked for the same course of treatment.
"All you need to power you is your class. It will be more than enough for the prologue”
Alex was strong enough anyway, the more so because he'd been using a treatment based on growth hormone to prepare him before he moved on to corticosteroids. When you are tuning up a Formula One car, you deal with the tyres, the engine, and the aerodynamics one by one. Every parameter has to be just perfect. It's the same with a cyclist. You can work out after every stage of a race what state the rider is in depending on his blood-test readings and the graph traced by the heart-rate monitor which he wears during the race. You can foresee breakdown or improvement.
The Spanish soigneur who looked after Zülle's preparation just carried on regardless. He thought that he could apply to Alex a method which had worked on another rider. So he injected massive doses of corticosteroids, which destroyed the balance which had been so finely calculated. Where the hormones had been building up the muscle, the cortico' just devoured them. The result was disastrous: after being by far the strongest in the first ten days, Alex simply fell to bits.”
From Willy Voet's book 'Breaking the Chain'