Team Ineos (Formerly the Sky thread)

[samhocking]

My points are related more to any investigation into Wiggins TUEs not being therapeutic in terms of him requiring evidence if it ever came to that either for himself to prove innocence or to disprove theories the package was Triamcinolone and he received an injection. He has access to all the information and ENT reports if he wants to do both once UKAD allow him to speak and release documents.

The history of his first Triamcinilone injection really begins in 2008 and earlier and as the years go by his doctors from before Garmin, within Garmin and then Sky move him to more powerful Corticosteroid allergy treatments that follow the British Society for Allergy and Clinical Immunology advice pretty much to the letter. So assuming the documents back up what is claimed the TUE itself can be justified not only legally, but ethically too because that is in line with those setting the treatment guidance at least in UK at the time.

>3 years before 2011 (so at least from 2007) Maximal treatment using Flixotide inhaler + Ventolin, Clarityn, Avamys & Opticrom
2007 -Cofidis - Flixotide inhaler + Ventolin, Clarityn, Avamys & Opticrom (assume Salbutomol too?)
2008 - Team High Road Salbutomol TUE + allowance for 250ng of Fluticosone Corticosteroid nasal spray per day also + Antihistamines etc from above list
2009 - Garmin–Slipstream Salbutomol TUE + More powerful inhaled Budesonide Corticosteroid TUE replaces last years Fluticosone Corticosteroid + Antihistamines etc from above list
2010 - Team Sky TUE no longer required for Salbutomol or inhaled Budesonide Corticosteroid under WADA, so why there are no 2010 TUEs + Antihistamines etc from above list. Treatment at sky same as at Garmin previous year it seems.
2011 - Team Sky Triamcinolone TUE replaces Budesonide & Flixotide after Endoscopy despite maximal therapy of Budesonide & Flixotide etc. Assume still taking Salbutomol within WADA limits.
2012 - Team Sky As 2011 with additional ENT documents
2013 - Team Sky As 2012 with additional ENT documents

So he went from oral antihistamines at Cofidis to Corticosteroid nasal sprays at High Road, to more powerful Corticosteroid inhalers at Garmin to injected IM Corticosteroid after a year at Sky which is the treatment progression British Society for Allergy and Clinical Immunology advised. i.e. you can't go straight into an injection, you have to exhaust all oral treatments first to maximal therapy first according to their guidance and this is what the ENT confirms has been done.

My overriding argument is for Wiggins to want to apply illegally for an IM Triamcinilone injection in 2011 and for CAS to be satisfied it was, the history and supporting medical evidence already exists or not at WADA and passes back through doctors and consultants while riding at Garmin, High Road & Cofidis. Sky might have looked at his medical history at Garmin, High Road & Cofidis and noticed the Corticosteroid theme throughout his road career so far and then decided there was enough history that with a fake endoscopy and fabricated maximal treatment in 2010 his first year at Sky, it would allow an injection in 2011 TUE. The claims so far are not that the TUE was illegally applied for and/or illegally granted using false documents. The history of treatment looking at Wiggins several TUE notes seems to build the history of long-term allergy treatment an expert witness such as a Dr from British Society for Allergy and Clinical Immunology might be called on by CAS should any of this ever go to CAS.

 

[Eyeballs Out]

Re: Re:

Kenalog injections for allergies will not turn you into a Tour de France champion.

Why in the world would we assume he was only cheating the one way he was caught? That defies logic.

The true meaning of #marginalgains

 

[Gung Ho Gun]

Re: Re:

Kenalog injections for allergies will not turn you into a Tour de France champion.

Why in the world would we assume he was only cheating the one way he was caught? That defies logic.

It is logical if you assume perfect testing. If he was cheating some other way as well, he would've been caught for that too. It defies prior knowledge and common sense more than logic imo.

 

[red_flanders]

Re: Re:

Kenalog injections for allergies will not turn you into a Tour de France champion.

Why in the world would we assume he was only cheating the one way he was caught? That defies logic.

It is logical if you assume perfect testing. If he was cheating some other way as well, he would've been caught for that too. It defies prior knowledge and common sense more than logic imo.

Certainly perfect or even adequate testing does not exist. Therefore...

 

[Benotti69]

Re: Re:

Kenalog injections for allergies will not turn you into a Tour de France champion.

Why in the world would we assume he was only cheating the one way he was caught? That defies logic.

It is logical if you assume perfect testing. If he was cheating some other way as well, he would've been caught for that too. It defies prior knowledge and common sense more than logic imo.

Testing, now there is a great sporting joke, perhaps the greatest!!!

 

[Zypherov]

Re: Re:

Kenalog injections for allergies will not turn you into a Tour de France champion.

Why in the world would we assume he was only cheating the one way he was caught? That defies logic.

Caught doing what? He got TUE'S to use this medication. That's not cheating. I myself got several steroid injections for hay fever. They are now no longer available. They did not make me feel any different. In other words they don't enhance one's performance. Although they do help with the symptoms. You guys are going way, way over the top about a few injections of Kenalog which the guy obviously needed for a medical condition. That's the point I was trying to make. I am not assuming anything whatsoever. He has never tested positive. And I don't want to hear the neither did Marion Jones story either. How is it constructive to continually assert that Wiggins and Sky were doped to the gills when there is absolutely no evidence for that scenario whatsoever. And, yes that includes empirical evidence also. It's my belief that he won the Tour clean. That is my opinion. You're entitled to yours.

 

[Craigee]

Re: Re:

Kenalog injections for allergies will not turn you into a Tour de France champion.

Why in the world would we assume he was only cheating the one way he was caught? That defies logic.

Caught doing what? He got TUE'S to use this medication. That's not cheating. I myself got several steroid injections for hay fever. They are now no longer available. They did not make me feel any different. In other words they don't enhance one's performance. Although they do help with the symptoms. You guys are going way, way over the top about a few injections of Kenalog which the guy obviously needed for a medical condition. That's the point I was trying to make. I am not assuming anything whatsoever. He has never tested positive. And I don't want to hear the neither did Marion Jones story either. How is it constructive to continually assert that Wiggins and Sky were doped to the gills when there is absolutely no evidence for that scenario whatsoever. And, yes that includes empirical evidence also. It's my belief that he won the Tour clean. That is my opinion. You're entitled to yours.

You're dreaming mate. And that's my opinion.

 

[The Hegelian]

Re: Re:

Kenalog injections for allergies will not turn you into a Tour de France champion.

Why in the world would we assume he was only cheating the one way he was caught? That defies logic.

Caught doing what? He got TUE'S to use this medication. That's not cheating. I myself got several steroid injections for hay fever. They are now no longer available. They did not make me feel any different. In other words they don't enhance one's performance. Although they do help with the symptoms. You guys are going way, way over the top about a few injections of Kenalog which the guy obviously needed for a medical condition. That's the point I was trying to make. I am not assuming anything whatsoever. He has never tested positive. And I don't want to hear the neither did Marion Jones story either. How is it constructive to continually assert that Wiggins and Sky were doped to the gills when there is absolutely no evidence for that scenario whatsoever. And, yes that includes empirical evidence also. It's my belief that he won the Tour clean. That is my opinion. You're entitled to yours.

Can you please answer me these questions:

1. Have corticosteroids been consistently abused in the pro peloton or not?
2. Why did the MPCC have an explicit policy of corticosteriod usage = rider misses the race?
3. Why did Sky refuse to join the MPCC (despite being the self-proclaimed leader of clean cycling)?

Have a good think about them and then answer them individually as honestly as you can.

1,2,3.

Then let's see where we're at.

 

[Saint Unix]

Cortisone creams for saddle sores will not turn you into a Tour de France champion.

Caught doing what? He got TUE's to use this medication. That's not cheating. I myself have used cortisone creams for saddle sores. They are now no longer available. They did not make me feel any different. In other words they don't enhance one's performance. Although they do help with the symptoms. You guys are going way, way over the top about a bit of cortisone which the guy obviously needed for a medical condition. That's the point I was trying to make. I am not assuming anything whatsoever. He has never tested positive. And I don't want to hear the neither did Marion Jones story either. How is it constructive to continually assert that Armstrong and USPS were doped to the gills when there is absolutely no evidence for that scenario whatsoever. And, yes that includes empirical evidence also. It's my belief that he won the Tour clean. That is my opinion. You're entitled to yours.

A few words switched and we have quotes that sum up the bots on this forum from five to ten years ago.

 

[70kmph]

What happen to the 60 missing Kenacort injections... just take a wild guess

 

[red_flanders]

Re: Re:

Kenalog injections for allergies will not turn you into a Tour de France champion.

Why in the world would we assume he was only cheating the one way he was caught? That defies logic.

Caught doing what? He got TUE'S to use this medication. That's not cheating. I myself got several steroid injections for hay fever. They are now no longer available. They did not make me feel any different. In other words they don't enhance one's performance. Although they do help with the symptoms. You guys are going way, way over the top about a few injections of Kenalog which the guy obviously needed for a medical condition. That's the point I was trying to make. I am not assuming anything whatsoever. He has never tested positive. And I don't want to hear the neither did Marion Jones story either. How is it constructive to continually assert that Wiggins and Sky were doped to the gills when there is absolutely no evidence for that scenario whatsoever. And, yes that includes empirical evidence also. It's my belief that he won the Tour clean. That is my opinion. You're entitled to yours.

We have a different view of the situation. To say there is "no evidence" is patently absurd. There is a mountain evidence and quite a bit of proof that they were using TUE's as a cover for extensive steroid use. You can believe that the one thing they got caught doing (which they always said they were NEVER doing) is the only thing, but it's IMO laughable. I won't re-iterate the years-long case about Sky and their lies, absurd performances and flat out use of drugs. If you don't accept those facts there's nothing to discuss.

 

[Dan2016]

Re: Re:

Kenalog injections for allergies will not turn you into a Tour de France champion.

Why in the world would we assume he was only cheating the one way he was caught? That defies logic.

Caught doing what? He got TUE'S to use this medication. That's not cheating. I myself got several steroid injections for hay fever. They are now no longer available. They did not make me feel any different. In other words they don't enhance one's performance. Although they do help with the symptoms. You guys are going way, way over the top about a few injections of Kenalog which the guy obviously needed for a medical condition. That's the point I was trying to make. I am not assuming anything whatsoever. He has never tested positive. And I don't want to hear the neither did Marion Jones story either. How is it constructive to continually assert that Wiggins and Sky were doped to the gills when there is absolutely no evidence for that scenario whatsoever. And, yes that includes empirical evidence also. It's my belief that he won the Tour clean. That is my opinion. You're entitled to yours.

We have a different view of the situation. To say there is "no evidence" is patently absurd. There is a mountain evidence and quite a bit of proof that they were using TUE's as a cover for extensive steroid use. You can believe that the one thing they got caught doing (which they always said they were NEVER doing) is the only thing, but it's IMO laughable. I won't re-iterate the years-long case about Sky and their lies, absurd performances and flat out use of drugs. If you don't accept those facts there's nothing to discuss.

But but but...the hard facts are on the side of the defense innit - there are zero positive tests.
The (very strong) circumstantial evidence is on the side of the prosecution, which is the majority of the Clinic (meself included).

The Hegelian has already set some questions for the defense. I'll add:

1. How do you explain Froome looking like a bike alien? (just kidding just kidding)
2. How do you explain the truly bizarre chain of events around the wee magic bag of jiffy?
3. How do you explain Gollum's flappy hands? (please answer this one)

#sillyquestionsandwich

 

[Libertine Seguros]

Re: Re:

I am not assuming anything whatsoever. He has never tested positive. And I don't want to hear the neither did Marion Jones story either.

I hope you can be seen mounting similarly impassioned defences of Juan José Cobo and Chris Horner.

 

[hrotha]

Just because you have heard the Marion Jones story many times it doesn't mean you can just push it aside and pretend it didn't happen. Most dopers don't test positive. Most people who test positive still test negative 99% of the time.

 

[thehog]

Re:

Just because you have heard the Marion Jones story many times it doesn't mean you can just push it aside and pretend it didn't happen. Most dopers don't test positive. Most people who test positive still test negative 99% of the time.

The irony in the statement is that Maron Jones did test positive for EPO. For the B sample to be strangely negative.

 

[burning]

Re: Re:

I am not assuming anything whatsoever. He has never tested positive. And I don't want to hear the neither did Marion Jones story either.

I hope you can be seen mounting similarly impassioned defences of Juan José Cobo and Chris Horner.

 

[red_flanders]

Do we really have enough bandwidth on the internet to post photos of dopers who haven't tested positive?

 

[zlev11]

Re:

Do we really have enough bandwidth on the internet to post photos of dopers who haven't tested positive?

we have exactly this much bandwidth:

 

[Libertine Seguros]

Being serious though, Rabobank released mid-season data in 2009 on the tests they'd had, who had been tested and what for, to that point in the season.

Denis Menchov, you will note, has 24 tests there.

The team then updated at the end of the season.

As you will see, Menchov's total number of tests increased from 24 to 42, split perfectly between the number of blood and urine tests.

When the UCI surreptitiously updated their suspensions pdf on July 10, 2014, Menchov was included in it, banned for bio-passport violations several years prior and stripped of his result at the 2009 Tour de France. That's right - he kept the Giro d'Italia victory but had to have that 65th place at the Tour taken from him!

But clearly, those 42 tests didn't yield any positives.

And from what we've since learned, the biopassport is a long way from infallible and people like Kreuziger have successfully argued cases against it. You certainly have to go quite some way to even trip it in the first place, as Levi Leipheimer posting an off-score of 132,8 without being flagged shows. Wiggins' own off-scores have raised questions under further scrutiny in 2009.

So why are off-scores set so high? Ostensibly to off-set various environmental factors that can yield false positives, such as altitude. That's why people from places at high altitude have, in the past, carried certification allowing them higher hct% when they had the 50% rule, because their natural hematocrit value was higher than the norm. Damiano Cunego was one of the most famous of these, although Rob Hayles managed to trip the wire too, coming from the high altitude environs of Portsmouth (some notable quotes in there from Brailsford and Palfreeman, by the way). Palfreeman anyhow points out that hematocrit can fluctuate naturally by "up to 7%", but for an off-score like Levi's to be natural, that's going to be one hell of a fluctuation. Gewiss in 1994-1995 had an average fluctuation of double Palfreeman's figure - still some of them are inside the 133% off score, although admittedly not one stays below the 50%; one of the key reasons why that rules was implemented.

And now we also know that Sky have been using TUEs. TUEs are legal, but they can be misused or abused. Certainly the use of triamcinolone in this circumstance (which would be medically inadvisable given other conditions we are told Wiggins had/has) is within the letter of the law, but compared to the much more widely-prescribed but less powerful substances (including the very one - prednisolone - that had proven the difference between Chris Froome being too sick to race and Chris Froome dismantling the entire field at the Tour de Romandie, apparently) it was rather using a sledgehammer to crack a nut, if the performance-enhancing effects weren't being taken into account in the prescription, shall we say. Callum Skinner's angry reaction to his TUEs being disclosed has rather put Wiggins in a bind, too - Skinner's reaction is, regardless of whether he is or not, what you would want and hope for in a clean athlete. First, anger and frustration at this information coming out that makes him look questionable, followed by a voluntary release of information that justifies and proves that the condition for which the TUE was applied was legitimate. It then raises more questions about Wiggins, because he hasn't done this. It is a key part of the jigsaw, because when the TUEs were released, we discovered he was prescribed a substance, the use of which should have been precluded by a pre-existing condition we had previously been told about. If Wiggins can prove à la Skinner that the one condition is legitimate, it raises questions about the prescription of triamcinolone by a medical professional who should have known better given Wiggins' other pre-existing conditions; if Wiggins can't prove that the original condition is legitimate, then we have a very simple case of a team appearing to be either exaggerating or lying about medical conditions in order to procure TUEs, which is a doping offence.

So if you take those factors all together:
- a rider can be tested 42 times without a positive, yet be known later on to have been doping
- because of the variables, the tolerance levels on the biological passport are extremely generous
- TUEs were being utilized to prescribe performance enhancing substances
- the substances prescribed and the conditions claimed by the athlete create dissonance that calls the legitimacy of the TUEs in to question.

So once more, where does this leave us? The best case scenario here is simply that Sky did not break any anti-doping rules. They played within the letters of the law. But that's not the ground-breaking, innovative approach they told us about at the outset, is it? What we've learnt over the course of many years is that very little of what Sky do is revolutionary. They just use the same approach as everybody else - sports science, pushing the boundaries of legality in both the medical and technological fields - and have been better at it, largely due to the resources available from one of the biggest budgets in the péloton (that they've then seemingly been able to supplement by pilfering staff and reappropriating funds and resources from British Cycling because of the overlap between the goals of each), and have also been better at selling this to the audience, via a combination of targeting the newer fans of the sport to whom the narrative can be more easily sold, keeping journalists complicit, and especially for the home audience, selling a patriotic line by wilfully conflating the national and trade teams. But that's not revolution, that's marketing. As Marc Madiot said all the way back in February 2010, "we put riders in wind tunnels too - we just don't put out a press release about it". Every team out there is doing everything its budget will allow to look for the improvements out there, not just Sky. And as Bjarne Riis' autobiography quote that Digger used in his blog post points out - Riis was known as a marginal gains guy, he just didn't repeat the mantra enough to give it a catchy PR name. Since retiring as an active competitor he's brought the same approach to management and has presided over victories in four GTs (1 Giro, 2 Tours - 1 by default - and 1 Vuelta) and 8 Monuments (1 MSR, 2 RVVs, 3 Roubaixs, 2 LBLs). He was also one of the most blatant and egregious dopers in the history of the sport. And he didn't test positive either.

 

[Saint Unix]

Phenomenal post as usual, LS.

 

[thehog]

Re:

Phenomenal post as usual, LS.

Fully agree.

 

[TeflonDub]

Re:

If Wiggins can prove à la Skinner that the one condition is legitimate, it raises questions about the prescription of triamcinolone by a medical professional who should have known better given Wiggins' other pre-existing conditions; if Wiggins can't prove that the original condition is legitimate, then we have a very simple case of a team appearing to be either exaggerating or lying about medical conditions in order to procure TUEs, which is a doping offence.

Excellent post ("the high altitude environs of Portsmouth" :lol: ). This bit I highlighted is really important, and one that Team Sky has been desperate to keep out of the conversation. The narrative they and Wiggins keep pushing is "we have done nothing wrong". They want everybody to believe that a TUE is a get-out-of-jail-free card. It isn't. The Jiffy Bag/Fluimicil conversation where the potential for taking something not covered by the single dose Triamcinolone injection TUE is the first bullet to dodge, but the circumstances around the granting of the TUE's and the contraindications of taking Fluimicil with asthma suggest the TUE's were anything but the last resort the process demands that they be.

 

[Robert5091]

Re: Sky

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/09/business/dealbook/fox-news-troubles-heighten-scrutiny-of-rupert-murdochs-planned-purchase.html
"... if Sky and News Corp. are effectively merged under the Murdoch umbrella, we can expect them to follow a similar editorial stance. How does that help media plurality in Britain?”

Is this why SDB is keeping stum?

 

[ontheroad]

Re: Sky

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2017/apr/13/ukad-team-sky-breached-no-needles-allegation?CMP=share_btn_tw

Now that we know that a Sky staff member has been in contact with the Select Committee, it begs the question what else have they been told and when exactly will this Select Committee publish their findings.

 

[thehog]

Re: Sky

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2017/apr/13/ukad-team-sky-breached-no-needles-allegation?CMP=share_btn_tw

Now that we know that a Sky staff member has been in contact with the Select Committee, it begs the question what else have they been told and when exactly will this Select Committee publish their findings.

Deep Throat at Sky!