Re: Sky
- Firstly, the purpose of the trip. Whatever the substance was, the team clearly cared more about the substance and its secrecy than they did about Cope, hanging him out to dry as a convenient patsy asking him to lie to customs.
- The very fact that they used an employee of the publicly-funded British Cycling enterprise as a mule for the privately-funded commercial enterprise Team Sky is a significant problem of governance that had been raised right from the beginning. I've been commenting on it on the forum since back in 2010 and I'm far from alone - including official documents raising the issue of the blurred lines between the nationally-based public organ and the international commercial team.
- Then to add to this you have the additional problem that we are talking a coach of the women's team not coaching the women but instead their resources being driven towards the men's team, including Cope admitting to spending a month motorpacing Wiggins in training sessions. This is not his job, and the fact that the women were organizing their own training camps and paying their own expenses to travel to the World Championships while Cope was ferrying packets to and fro for Team Sky is a significant issue in its own right.
- The incredibly inelegant attempt to pin the package on Emma Pooley which would have been pretty questionable had Cope stuck around in France for a while rather than just dropping the package off and returning again. As it was, it was a pretty disgusting attempt to disguise the misuse of Cope and deflect blame away from the potentially guilty parties by implicating an innocent bystander, who also happens to be one of those who has been most wronged by the point above about the women being hung out to dry by BC. The fact that such a transparent lie made it to the press before any fact checking could be done (literally, disproving it takes under 30 seconds using a results aggregator like CQ ranking) also shows the contempt in which they held the intelligence of the press and the general public.
- Cope had no idea what women's races even existed and admitted to running this courier service on a number of other occasions (the number of which he has revised downwards as the story has continued).
- Brailsford trying to sell Lawton a "more positive" story and buy him off with merchandise and bike rides. Enough said.
- The team purchased fiumicil abroad on a number of occasions, so why would they have needed this particular batch of it so urgently that it had to be a "drop everything and deliver today" situation to carry it halfway across Europe? Even if the substance WAS triamcinolone, why did they then lie to the enquiry and say it was fiumicil? Is the concern about the supposed midnight limit so severe that it merits lying to a parliamentary enquiry through your teeth?
Once you move past the package, however, there are a number of procedural problems that have been raised from the subsequent enquiry statements.
- Brailsford claimed never to have heard of the substances in question when first asked about them. Now he claims to have been injected with it. I don't know about you, but if I have a problem which requires something being injected into me, I want to know what it is and why it's being administered. I may not be familiar with the substance's name, but I want to know what it does. And I'll know what the substance is afterward.
- Freeman supposedly didn't back up his medical records for three whole years, if the Sky story is to be considered correct. If this is the case, then there is a case of gross negligence which demonstrates an absolutely fundamental lack of proper governance. How in god's name has this not been picked up in an audit? Or if it has, how has Freeman not been disciplined for it? In my profession, if stuff is not improperly stored and there's a data protection breach, it's a big deal. And you have to assume - and indeed it has been confirmed by people on the forum who work in the profession - that in the medical profession it's an even bigger deal because it includes a lot more sensitive personal data. Three entire years of not backing up your files should be grounds for firing long before it gets to that point.
- If Freeman did back up his medical records, where have the backup copies gone?
- Who was keeping watch over Freeman, who did the auditing, who was responsible for governance that allowed such a dreadful error to occur as medical records for an entire three year period (minimum) going missing? Because if they've allowed this to occur due to improper governance or insufficient checking of the records, they have not exercised appropriate control over the staff, so would be guilty either of negligence or of being complicit in deceit and they need to go too.
- If Freeman has been massively over-ordering pharmaceutical products, then what happens to the surplus?
- If as has been stated to the enquiry these products have been purchased for BC and thereby passed on to Team Sky, BC effectively act as wholesaler of controlled substances. This is tightly regulated, and BC would therefore need to have very strictly monitored records to make sure that this is all done above board. Is this in place?
- If BC are wholesaling these products to Team Sky, it raises a very valid possibility that, indirectly, British taxpayer money is going to providing controlled substances not just to riders for British Cycling, but foreign riders from the commercial Team Sky, i.e. not under BC jurisdiction. If so, this is a further potential legal issue - again like with USPS one of the main issues is the public nature of one of the organs in the arrangement which raises more questions about the morality of the operation because public money is involved.
Frankly, to believe this is a nothing incident blown up into something big is to miss the point. To not be implicated in some serious wrongdoing (and some of the potential, and even likely, wrongdoing as listed above is very, very serious indeed) and for it all to be innocent mistakes and misunderstanding, you must credit Team Sky with very little intelligence and business acumen at all, because you'd basically be saying that they've bumbled their way, Keystone Kops-like, through pro cycling, giving pro speeches about the level of professionalism they're bringing to the sport whilst relying entirely on blind luck, throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks, not overseeing their staff and exposing themselves to all manner of errors and omissions issues, just relying on a combination of hope and beginner's luck that they'll succeed. That they've managed to order wrong documents, fail to audit people for three years (and then, once the laptop has been stolen, fail to take action against the culprit of the failed compliance processes for a further three years) and demonstrate silent movie slapstick levels of incompetence, and yet run the most successful operation in the sport. Brailsford couldn't have got to where he is being such a bumbling buffoon that he didn't know any of this, and was able to so successfully control the message but couldn't keep any control whatsoever over his staff over such a period of time. It's either stupid or disingenuous to believe that they could be that incompetent and yet that successful in that manner, and that's why even if the actual incident that has triggered this investigation may be minor, the fallout from it IS a big deal and damn well should be. Personally, I believe you're smarter than that.
At this point, though, the problems with the story are so many that it has become irrelevant whether the infamous jiffy bag was actually something illegal or not. It really doesn't matter now even if it was fiumicil because the problems posed by the handling of the issue are so massive as to hugely incriminate Brailsford, Sky and BC anyway.JRanton said:
- Firstly, the purpose of the trip. Whatever the substance was, the team clearly cared more about the substance and its secrecy than they did about Cope, hanging him out to dry as a convenient patsy asking him to lie to customs.
- The very fact that they used an employee of the publicly-funded British Cycling enterprise as a mule for the privately-funded commercial enterprise Team Sky is a significant problem of governance that had been raised right from the beginning. I've been commenting on it on the forum since back in 2010 and I'm far from alone - including official documents raising the issue of the blurred lines between the nationally-based public organ and the international commercial team.
- Then to add to this you have the additional problem that we are talking a coach of the women's team not coaching the women but instead their resources being driven towards the men's team, including Cope admitting to spending a month motorpacing Wiggins in training sessions. This is not his job, and the fact that the women were organizing their own training camps and paying their own expenses to travel to the World Championships while Cope was ferrying packets to and fro for Team Sky is a significant issue in its own right.
- The incredibly inelegant attempt to pin the package on Emma Pooley which would have been pretty questionable had Cope stuck around in France for a while rather than just dropping the package off and returning again. As it was, it was a pretty disgusting attempt to disguise the misuse of Cope and deflect blame away from the potentially guilty parties by implicating an innocent bystander, who also happens to be one of those who has been most wronged by the point above about the women being hung out to dry by BC. The fact that such a transparent lie made it to the press before any fact checking could be done (literally, disproving it takes under 30 seconds using a results aggregator like CQ ranking) also shows the contempt in which they held the intelligence of the press and the general public.
- Cope had no idea what women's races even existed and admitted to running this courier service on a number of other occasions (the number of which he has revised downwards as the story has continued).
- Brailsford trying to sell Lawton a "more positive" story and buy him off with merchandise and bike rides. Enough said.
- The team purchased fiumicil abroad on a number of occasions, so why would they have needed this particular batch of it so urgently that it had to be a "drop everything and deliver today" situation to carry it halfway across Europe? Even if the substance WAS triamcinolone, why did they then lie to the enquiry and say it was fiumicil? Is the concern about the supposed midnight limit so severe that it merits lying to a parliamentary enquiry through your teeth?
Once you move past the package, however, there are a number of procedural problems that have been raised from the subsequent enquiry statements.
- Brailsford claimed never to have heard of the substances in question when first asked about them. Now he claims to have been injected with it. I don't know about you, but if I have a problem which requires something being injected into me, I want to know what it is and why it's being administered. I may not be familiar with the substance's name, but I want to know what it does. And I'll know what the substance is afterward.
- Freeman supposedly didn't back up his medical records for three whole years, if the Sky story is to be considered correct. If this is the case, then there is a case of gross negligence which demonstrates an absolutely fundamental lack of proper governance. How in god's name has this not been picked up in an audit? Or if it has, how has Freeman not been disciplined for it? In my profession, if stuff is not improperly stored and there's a data protection breach, it's a big deal. And you have to assume - and indeed it has been confirmed by people on the forum who work in the profession - that in the medical profession it's an even bigger deal because it includes a lot more sensitive personal data. Three entire years of not backing up your files should be grounds for firing long before it gets to that point.
- If Freeman did back up his medical records, where have the backup copies gone?
- Who was keeping watch over Freeman, who did the auditing, who was responsible for governance that allowed such a dreadful error to occur as medical records for an entire three year period (minimum) going missing? Because if they've allowed this to occur due to improper governance or insufficient checking of the records, they have not exercised appropriate control over the staff, so would be guilty either of negligence or of being complicit in deceit and they need to go too.
- If Freeman has been massively over-ordering pharmaceutical products, then what happens to the surplus?
- If as has been stated to the enquiry these products have been purchased for BC and thereby passed on to Team Sky, BC effectively act as wholesaler of controlled substances. This is tightly regulated, and BC would therefore need to have very strictly monitored records to make sure that this is all done above board. Is this in place?
- If BC are wholesaling these products to Team Sky, it raises a very valid possibility that, indirectly, British taxpayer money is going to providing controlled substances not just to riders for British Cycling, but foreign riders from the commercial Team Sky, i.e. not under BC jurisdiction. If so, this is a further potential legal issue - again like with USPS one of the main issues is the public nature of one of the organs in the arrangement which raises more questions about the morality of the operation because public money is involved.
Frankly, to believe this is a nothing incident blown up into something big is to miss the point. To not be implicated in some serious wrongdoing (and some of the potential, and even likely, wrongdoing as listed above is very, very serious indeed) and for it all to be innocent mistakes and misunderstanding, you must credit Team Sky with very little intelligence and business acumen at all, because you'd basically be saying that they've bumbled their way, Keystone Kops-like, through pro cycling, giving pro speeches about the level of professionalism they're bringing to the sport whilst relying entirely on blind luck, throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks, not overseeing their staff and exposing themselves to all manner of errors and omissions issues, just relying on a combination of hope and beginner's luck that they'll succeed. That they've managed to order wrong documents, fail to audit people for three years (and then, once the laptop has been stolen, fail to take action against the culprit of the failed compliance processes for a further three years) and demonstrate silent movie slapstick levels of incompetence, and yet run the most successful operation in the sport. Brailsford couldn't have got to where he is being such a bumbling buffoon that he didn't know any of this, and was able to so successfully control the message but couldn't keep any control whatsoever over his staff over such a period of time. It's either stupid or disingenuous to believe that they could be that incompetent and yet that successful in that manner, and that's why even if the actual incident that has triggered this investigation may be minor, the fallout from it IS a big deal and damn well should be. Personally, I believe you're smarter than that.
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