TUEs your poison
TUEs (Therapeutic Use Exemptions). TUEs we are told are required by athletes to
treat a medical condition. But this may also enable them to legally use and
benefit from drugs which they may otherwise be banned from using. Which raises the question, is this ethical?
That is the question.
And we have the Fancy Bears leak to thank for this, for exposing the
medical records of many athletes across the world.
Fancy Bears, it is thought, hacked this information online on
behalf of the Russians smarting from being accused of operating a state run doping system which
led to various of their athletes being banned from the Olympic Games when hey, why
let dopers from other countries off the hook. Fair enough.
Caught up in the poisonous fall out of these revelations is
the most famous British Olympian of all time, our very own top bikie, the
charismatic Sir Bradley Wiggins who, when riding for Team Sky, had a TUE when
he became the first Brit to win the Tour de France on 2012. Also in 2011 and
2013.
It must be said that Wiggins and Team Sky insist they have acted within
the rules in applying for TUEs.
TUEs! This
arrangement has been agreed to by all the agencies concerned – the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and
the international sports governing bodies. It was
decided it can be only fair to allow medical treatment for athletes with allergies and/or ailments, such as asthma.
But now everyone is
asking, well it may be legal but is it moral if, by taking certain drugs
legally, athletes are unfairly, perhaps knowingly, enhancing their performance?
No we are not, cry the athletes.
But are they in a position to judge?
Is a by-product of a TUE also a means of extending the
marginal gains achieved through diet and nutrients and equipment and clothing and
so allowing the athlete into forbidden territory?
Are the athletes themselves so completely wrapped up in
their own world of training and racing that they can no longer see why TUEs are
being considered wrong – morally.
Wiggo has been put on the spot.
He looked ill at ease when featured in a pre-recorded
interview for Sunday’s Andrew Marr show. But Wiggo got off lightly, it was
felt, because Marr failed to press him over his explanation for the three TUEs
he was permitted in 2011, 2012 and 2013 which allowed him to take the powerful and
banned corticosteroid, triamcinolone.
Those TUEs were to “cure a medical condition” Wiggins
explained. “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.”
Owen Gibson in The Guardian the next day (September 26)
delved more deeply into the enigma.
Wiggins, in explaining his need for TUEs to Marr, said he had really struggled with
respiratory problems in the run-up to the 2012 Tour.
But, as Gibson pointed out in his article, he’d said nothing
about that in his autobiography. Wiggins had been in the form of his life, only
been ill once or twice with minor colds; he’d barely lost a day’s training.
On the other hand, I am thinking, by the time he came to
write his autobiography, had the issue of those respiratory problems paled into
insignificance in his own mind, when he came to look back at what he had
achieved that year?
And three weeks on the Tour can feel like an age, in a good
way, mind. But those three weeks seem
like a lot longer than three weeks at home, with each day divided up
into all those compartments, breakfast, getting to the start, warming up, the
stage itself – hours of riding – then the warming down, the podium, the press
calls, driving to the hotel, massage,
meal, set up for the tomorrow, bed. Three weeks of that.
One day on Le Tour is a week doing anything else.
Not making excuses for him, mind. But when you look back,
it’s always the good things you remember.
You gloss over the bad bits.
Wiggo may also simply have left that episode out because it
spoilt the story. A film maker may do that. If they are trying to portray a
superman you don’t include bits which show he’s human, like the rest of us.
That had been fantastic season, remember? Wiggins had
practiced for taking the yellow jersey in the Tour by winning three prestigious
stage races that season: Paris – Nice, the Tour of Romandie, and the Criterium
du Dauphine. No Tour winner had previously won all three in the same year.
Then after Le Tour, he wins the Olympic time trial title.
Sod mentioning the breathing issues. Doesn’t fit the
picture.
But then there is the contradiction about needles, they
don’t fit the picture either. When he
said in that autobiography he wouldn’t take needles that was a reference to
needles for doping, he explained. Not to be confused with needles used to
inject 40mg of the banned drug triamcinolone - allowed him under a TUE on the
way to his 2012 Tour de France victory.
And so the story rolls on.
The following day’s papers carried interviews with Team Sky
boss Sir David Brailsford who robustly defended Wiggins and said that Team Sky did nothing wrong over TUEs.
On the question of whether an injection of a powerful
corticosteroid provided Wiggins with performance enhancing benefits that helped
him to the 2012 Tour de France victory, Brailsford said, that “the question was
more about whether it mitigated the illness that he presented for. I just don’t
think it’s possible to answer that.”
So doubt remains. In
which case, maybe TUEs should be cast into Room 101.
I must admit I was quite taken aback when I first learned
some years ago now, that a great many athletes from different sports are
registered as asthmatics, including cyclists and a great many cross country
skiers. Because I thought, how does anyone compete when they have asthma?
My memory is of a teenager who had asthma and how his
condition prevented him taking part in schools sports. He struggled if he ran
for a bus.
So I have difficulty squaring that vision of a weakened
young man with top athletes who also claim to have asthma, yet who can compete
at international level, in the world’s toughest events.
Does asthma affect people in varying degrees? I suppose it
must.
What did athletes so affected do before there were TUEs?
I don’t know. Give up; get dropped, probably, when they had
a bad turn.
But now they can get a TUE, and take medicines for their
condition and so keep on running and riding at the front of the race.
The question being asked is, what is the dosage allowed
them? And is that dosage performance enhancing?
The answer is always no.
Will the public buy this? Who knows?
If they don’t, will it mean that the fabulous Gold Rush by
British cyclists is to become tainted by the revelations about the legal but
morally questionable use of medicinal aids taken by Britain’s most famous
Olympian Sir Bradley Wiggins? Is the story of the century about to unravel?
It is two decades since British Cycling raised itself from
the ashes of its near bankrupt former self to become the UK’s most successful
Olympic sport in history. They ushered in a new age, gave us hope after the
disgraceful and shocking drug-fuelled career of Lance Armstrong’s seven Tour de
France victories (1999- 2005).
The sport of cycling in the UK transformed itself and British riders became world beaters on the
track and, with Team Sky, made history winning Le Tour while all the time
proclaiming themselves to be clean.
