A lot of sound and fury at the MPTS/ Freeman hearings, but not much light. To try and step back a bit from that: what was actually happening inside Team Sky in 2011?
The team is a year old and its first year has been hard on the ego. It hasn't met the expectations it set for itself. In Moore's
Sky's the Limit, we see 2010 ending with Brailsford saying he'll have to consider some of the expectations he himself set, such as ZTP, and offering ambiguity on where the ethical line he wouldn't cross actually is. In Wiggins's
My Time, we see Lombardia ending with him down in his cups, half-cut in a half-finished hotel, having walked out of the team lodgings.
What responses do we see?
- We see Wiggins getting a bollocking and told to either man up or step down
- We see two doctors, Leinders and Bartolucci, being brought in toward the end of 2010
- We see one doctor, Hulse, being let go
- We see an IV récup programme agreed for the Giro but the no needles policy scuppering it
- We see the TUE system being gamed for Wiggins, with regard to his Triamcinolone
- We see a box of Testogel sachets arriving in Manchester
- We see a BC staffer sent to courier a Jiffy bag
- We see more pressure added to the boiler with Wiggins's performance at the Tour
- We see Froome facing into having to find a new team for 2012, or take a pay cut, only to pull a rabbit out of the hat at the Vuelta
What else do we
know was happening, specifically within that narrow time frame, the end of the 2010 Tour through to the end of the 2011 season?