Skyfall #2: Injections at Windermere, drugs in the fridge, and lies about coming clean

By the time Team Sky won the 2012 Tour de France and Team GB won most cycling medals at London 2012, British cycling was being run by men with doping secrets

It was in Autumn 2012 that I first had serious misgivings about the manner in which Team GB and Team Sky had come to dominate global cycling at Olympic level and in Grand Tour cycling.

In the first part of this series, published yesterday, I detailed how an interview with Tyler Hamilton in October 2012 led me to believe that there were multiple members of Team Sky who had hidden doping pasts.

Team Sky’s efforts to be the cleanest team in cycling were futile because the most egregious former dopers were also serial liars.

Those same former dopers mostly also had long-standing and close connections to the hierarchy of Team Sky, and British Cycling, dating back to the start of the Noughties.

A personal opinion: it was folly for Team Sky, and Dave Brailsford, to declare themselves as a clean team with no staff who had doping pasts. It was too easy to prove that was nonsense, and then in turn to say they were liars, and hiding stuff. That, in turn, chipped away at any faith they were doing things the right way.

The grown-up approach would have been to acknowledge that many people in road cycling had used or encountered drugs in the recent past, but stress it wasn’t happening now. What transpired was a muddle of lies and half-truths and suspicion.

The key people who were running British Cycling - and Team Sky - by 2012 had been connected for a long time. Dave Brailsford, later Sir Dave and now Sir Dave of Manchester United, was the main man in a key management team who were thick as thieves.

They knew each other’s secrets. And there were a lot of secrets, both professional and personal. Secrets about their working lives and their sporting lives and their private lives, and their affairs and their refuelling habits and their doping lives. They worked on the basis of a code of omertà.

They still do.

Today I’m going to share specific doping allegations about one key figure in this story, those allegations put to me by three independent sources in October 2012; and I’ll also share the key figure’s responses.

On Friday I’ll move onto another series of allegations that bring in a wider group of his former cyclist team-mates who came to populate the upper echelons of British cycling in the glory years from 2008 onwards.

On Monday I’ll share details of positive drugs tests within British cycling in more recent times, and how they were effectively swept under the carpet because, by then, British Cycling and Team Sky were viewed as beyond reproach, not least by UKAD, the UK anti-doping agency that was supposed to be policing them, but didn’t.

And I’ll also take you inside a Parliamentary investigation into doping in sport, which concluded by hanging Bradley Wiggins out to dry without telling the public that a key witness who gave secret evidence against him was himself a serial doper and liar with an axe to grind. 

Oh, and the MP who chaired that investigation asked me to gather testimony and affidavits about the serial doper, promising he would include that evidence in his final report. Multiple people, including some with hugely traumatic stories, submitted their stories. And then the MP didn’t publish what they sent.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. And I haven’t even got to Dr Richard Freeman’s tribunal yet.

As revealed yesterday, there was one key figure in British cycling by 2012 who was particularly influential but also particularly problematic. 

When I had been tipped off about him in October that year, what he told me in a conversation made me more certain than ever that there was a dark heart to the story of British cycling glory in 2012. He was, demonstrably, a liar. 

He was one of Dave Brailsford’s key lieutenants, and a media darling because he was so accessible and quotable. And yet he had a secret doping past, as both a rider and a coach, that raised massive questions about his role at Team GB and Team Sky that, frankly, nobody wanted to address.  

What follows is the first tranche of evidence that he was a cheat, and his initial - bizarre - response to the allegations against him.