Questions have been asked of morality and/or ethics in relation to Sky and Froome, in the context of modern pro-sport/entertainment, and as to what Sky’s standing now is after the past 12+ months of revelations. They have encouraged me to emerge from lurking, and give my take as follows (apologies in advance for the length – turns out I had a bit to say!):
With the tainting of Froome, Sky’s goose, as a clean and particularly ethical pro-cycling team, is well and truly cooked. When it comes to high level pro athletic sport (team sport has its own issues but is a little different), doping and official results, the final record and the amount of sanctioned positive tests are largely immaterial. What matters is the public perception, general consensus or demonstrable knowledge on a particular team or athlete. For example, both Indurain and Armstrong doped to win Le Tour. But Big Mig is still an official winner and Lance is not. Does that make Indurain any better (in a purely sporting sense) or any more a legitimate winner? Barely. Armstrong is a bigger public villain because of when and how he won, how he acted, and because he is a loud American with a much bigger worldwide profile than Mig, But in terms of what they achieved they are the same – both doped to win, and it is generally established and accepted that this is fact. But, and this is where sport as entertainment, theatre or a money-spinner comes in, it does not follow that because these two ‘stole’ Tour wins, someone else lost who should otherwise have won. Given the prevalence of doping during both their eras, it is simply impossible to identify a legitimate ‘clean’ winner of these races. All that can be said is people were entertained, money was made, and high-class athletes at least competed in some sense, albeit on a skewed, uneven playing field with at best some vague determination made of who was ‘best’.
The morality really only lies in two factors – the ‘tragedy’ of most modern pro athletic sport, in that almost all truly clean athletes are either spat out from the start or reduced to also-rans most of the time, leaving us with no true contest of ability; and the ‘how’ of wins and behaviour relative to the opposition. This, along with the factors outlined above, is where Armstrong fares badly compared to most others. The bullying, the arrogance, the collusion with the UCI, the cancer-survivor narrative, being the first to really ramp-up doping again post-Festina – all this immoral behaviour singled him out above and beyond his mere cheating, and magnified his eventual fall.
Which brings us back to Sky. That they dope in an era that is ‘cleaner’ (in so much as the blatant EPO/steroid/blood doping of the past is gone) but which really is almost certainly still riddled with widespread illegal/grey drug use, is by and by. That they did so whilst preaching a ‘new model’, transparency, zero tolerance and marginal gains, but instead delivering obfuscation, lies, arrogance, false science and superiority, heavy drug use, manipulation of the system, obvious willingness to at least push and twist the rules and grey areas right to the limit and often beyond their spirit/intent, almost certain out and out doping, cuddling up to the UCI, general taking of the public for fools, and UK Postal-style riding and operating, all so soon after the Armstrong era and a brief period of limited anti-doping progress in the late 2000s, is what sticks as particularly immoral and unpalatable. It’s one thing to come into a sport and just ‘play by the book’ like everyone else. That’s a shame but it can rarely be otherwise if one wishes to succeed in modern pro athletic sport. It’s quite another to come in acting as though you are different to and better than anyone else, when really you are just cheating like all the others, except that you have more money and resources to do it with. Sky aren’t immoral or unethical simply because they dope. It’s because they loudly and aggressively claimed otherwise and sold snake-oil to justify it, whilst probably actually doing more to cheat/game the system than anyone else, compounded by the fact that they did it in a sport still damaged from the last time a team basically did just that. And to top it off, they did it in a manner that was generally overly dominant and boring, apart from moments of mostly unintentional comedy from ridiculous performances, statements and brain snaps. So even as entertainment, they’re a fail (they do make a great, if fairly sad, story though).
These points are important for Sky’s current standing. Can it be said at present that the evidence is sufficient to say that they are established out and out dopers, at a team level? No. That would really be the final nail in the coffin of the Sky image/legacy. But because of how Sky have gone about things, it doesn’t need to be. The image/rep of Sky as the smarter, more ethical team, that won, often dominated, precisely because it did things smarter, differently, more ethically, is dead, and will never be resurrected. The past 12+ months has given us more than enough evidence of dodgy TUEs, lies, aggression, jiffy bags, cover-ups, shocking record-keeping, questionable and extensive drug use, ditching of their zero-tolerance policy, dodgy docs, ‘interesting’ relationships with BC and the UCI, and just generally unethical behaviour and revelations, to make it clear to any sensible and impartial person that the Sky narrative/image is a lie. How and to what extent they actually straightforward dope and break the rules almost doesn’t matter, except as a general curiosity. What matters is that the emperor no longer has any clothes, and it turns out that Sky is really just another pro-cycling team doing what it takes to win, with mostly the same tried and true methods we have seen for decades (the substances may change but the basic method is the same), and, again, achieving results generally simply because they have more money to get the required products and talent than anyone else (and getting incredibly lucky in finding out that Froome is a super-responder).
Some people will still be bothered by the fact of Froome and Wiggins still being ‘official’ winners of the Tour and other races (for now at least), when perhaps they shouldn’t be. But to me, what does it really matter? What’s important is we now have a fairly him degree of certainty in knowing, rather than just suspecting, how they got there (in general if not in the specifics), and of how those wins are tainted just like most of the others. Giving the wins to the respective runners up doesn’t really achieve anything – in most cases they probably weren’t clean either, and even if they were they would get only limited enjoyment out of a retrospective win after the fact and in the history books. While more knowledge of what really went on at Sky, and what they took, would be interesting, in the theatre of pro-sport it’s enough for me to have validation of the suspicion that these races were just like most of the others, and that the general public perception of them is now that they were the same farce/show after all. The set-apart Sky legacy is finished. Froome and Wiggo are, broadly speaking, just like Contador – talented riders with impressive achievements but who doped to achieve them. The difference of course is that at least Contador was always a strong GT-rider, or at least has always given the appearance of being one, whereas the same can certainly not be said of the Sky duo. Which is perhaps suggestive of quite a different scale or type of ‘assistance’.
Froome was the last straw. Prior to December, at least with him they had their leading rider seemingly untarnished by all the other scandals and issues. The Salbutamol AAF establishes, if there was ever any doubt, that he is just as much involved in Sky’s PED use as anyone else. Their standard-bearer has fallen, and with him any sense at all that any significant part of Sky involved in stage racing is clean and above board, or that all the identified issues are purely historical. The claims and misdirection that “it’s just asthma treatment” or “he just took a little too much” just don’t wash. The amount he was over the threshold precludes this. In the context of Salbutamol being a known PED due to its weight loss (while retaining power), muscle-building and muscle-relaxing properties, combined with the obvious ability to exploit the threshold limitation for nefarious purposes, Sky’s now-known history of gaming the rules and grey areas, and Froome’s ability to keep beating other high quality riders whilst apparently ill and/or suffering from bad asthma symptoms requirement ‘treatment’, it is almost certain that he uses the product for performance-enhancing purposes, no doubt as part of some combination of drugs, blood transfusions etc. How and why Sky got their figures wrong remains a mystery, but that Froome regularly takes Salbutamol as a PED, and is therefore probably frequently close to the threshold, making it easier for him to trip up, is surely a factor in this.
Does Froome have asthma? I’d say it’s highly unlikely, if we’re talking about the ‘regular’ type one usually develops in childhood or, at latest, in adolescence. As has been said many times there’s no mention of it in either his or Walsh’s books, or any sign of it in his riding career prior to 2014. He may well have EIA though. The threshold for diagnosing this is ridiculously low, esp. considering how on the limit pro-athletes, and cyclists in particular, are. Probably he meets the criteria, as do many others. Is that the real justification for most of his seemingly frequently Salbutamol use though? Hardly. Is it a loophole that allows him to ‘legitimately’ take the product in quite significant quantities for performance-enhancing purposes, with minimum risk? Absolutely! (to be fair, he is probably far from alone in this) Do Sky extend that use to banned oral and injected forms? Probably.
So unless Froome can prove that the test was somehow inaccurate or compromised (rather than getting off on some fudged technicality), which is extremely unlikely given the amount in the samples, then this is a positive test and he is a proven doper, with it being reasonable to inference that this one positive is evidence, esp. placed alongside his history of unworldly results, performances and questionable stories like bilharzia, of long-term doping, rather than a one-off, just like Contador and so many others before him. We don’t know the full story (we so rarely do), but we know enough to know what’s going on and the general ‘how’ of Froome’s results. He’s still a good rider, and a super-responder, but he’s no different to what’s gone before when it comes to multiple GT champs. All that’s left is to maybe one day find out all the other details.
As a related question, it may be asked whether it is ‘more’ immoral or unethical to take more PEDs, or exploit the rules more heinously, than others, as Sky seem to do, or whether, to paraphrase Brailsford himself, a cheat is a cheat, and if you’re going to take illegal product ‘x’, then you’re really no better than someone who will take ‘x’ and ‘y’. Not sure where I sit with that.
As for the results, that depends on how you view pro-sports/entertainment. If you’re one of the innocents who still believe it to be a true contest to establish who is the pure best on the day in any particular field, then doping to win is a terrible crime. In that context results and the ‘official record’ matter, and cheating to win is both stealing it from someone else, and corrupting the purity of the competition. If you’re a bit more realistic or cynical and you think it’s almost all tainted and uneven anyway, whether due to doping or money/resource imbalance, and it’s mostly impossible to have a truly even, fair and ‘natural’ contest, then you take pro-sport for what it is – great athletes competing within certain parameters to attain an arbitrary awarding of being ‘best’ at a particular time, and hopefully doing so in entertaining fashion (there is still wiggle room here though for differing perspectives, i.e. is it ‘worse’ if someone beats a field where only 20% are doping, as opposed to 80%?). Results don’t matter so much in that case – you may enjoy a particular favourite winning, and you may of course feel for the ethical athletes who never had a chance, but you accept that one cheating winner is usually not really denying the runners-up a more ‘deserved’ win, and you enjoy the sport either as pure entertainment, or in the knowledge that what you are seeing is a construct, which is interesting and engaging, but not ‘pure’ competition. Which ones you find entertaining and palatable then comes down to personal taste. So despite Sky and other blights on the sport, I still enjoy cycling for its sheer toughness, variety and frequent unpredictability. I just take the results, and what I am seeing, with a pinch of salt. Whereas I find that widespread doping has killed tennis for me as an interesting sport, because it has fundamentally altered the way the game is played, for the worst I feel, and created a massive divide between the top dopers and the rest. That the ITF has its head buried completely in the sand about all this only compounds the issue.
For the former true-believer class of fans, immorality is in the act of an individual/team doping in itself (character and actions still matter, but they are a separate issue rather than the primary one), and greatness is defined largely by results and being a clean winner. For the latter cynics, again, individual immorality lies primarily in behaviour, and precisely how one goes about doping/twisting the rules, rather than the act itself (doping is still immoral, but it’s reluctantly accepted as being ‘part of the game’), and greatness is defined by a somewhat imprecise combination of performance, panache, consistency, and some way of demonstrating an athlete’s high level of natural talent, where doping (if any) is only a small part of their reasons for success (this is the really contentious bit). For example, for the former Usain Bolt will be great only as long as his results are considered clean and ‘official’. Some may try and excuse away a positive test or other proof of cheating, but it will still come back to some form of ‘yeah, but he would usually have won anyway’ argument. It will still be dictated primarily by pure ability relative to others. But for the latter, Bolt can dope and still be considered great (as an athlete at least) if it is perceived that he is still a phenomenal talent who demonstrated his ability and character by performing at a phenomenally high level for a long period of time. The results still matter, but his consistency and resilience are what really mark him out as exceptional. He may not have really been the ‘best’ in a pure sense, and he would still be tainted, but he did enough to show he was up there. In this case he only loses his moral standing if he is deemed to be of poor character and behaviour, and his perceived exceptional ability if it turns out that he had access to more effective drugs than anyone else, was able to unfairly exploit the system/governing bodies more than others, or that doping was a really significant factor in his performance (again this is the really grey area). How the former will perceive and define Froome morally and in terms of his results and ability is pretty obvious. For the latter, it depends on how you rate his performances in context, whether you feel he has been particularly subversive in gaming the system, and how you judge his ‘natural’ ability against the level of benefit obtained artificially. But to just say that ‘it’s all immoral, so what does it matter?’, is a cop out. It’s far more nuanced than that.
So there it is. Sky – just another pro-cycling team, albeit one that is often more annoying, unethical and willing to exploit and quite probably break the rules than the others, and has the resources to make the most of this. This is what they are, and just as importantly, this is increasingly now how they are generally perceived. Just like US Postal, the immorality lies in their behaviour, rather than the doping itself (which is obviously ‘bad’ but only in the general sense of the unfortunate state of pro athletic sport, which isn’t Sky’s fault), and the unethical components are in their exploitation of the rules and system, and the possible dangers caused to the riders, esp. the more junior ones, associated with questionable drug use. They may still go on, and even continue to be successful, for some time, but in this current iteration at least it will be as a team that is seen as at best 'normal', and at worst as outright suspicious.
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram