It strikes me as odd that some of the best endurance athletes in the world all seem to have spent their childhood working in the coal industry during the 1800s. How else can we explain why so many of them appear to have asthma?

Grand Tours (TdF, La Vuelta and the Giro) involve sustained periods of spinning ones legs at high revolutions at (literally) alpine height. This is a fact. The air at relative height contains less oxygen. This is also a fact. Phew! Two facts in one blog. I need to sit down. Asthma is a condition of the airways of the lungs, manageable by way of an inhaler, symptoms of which include “chest tightness and shortness of breath”. Another fact! Fuck. I’ve got a nosebleed. Just squeeze out one…more…fact…prominent sports people (Brad Wiggins, Simon Yates, Paula Radcliffe, Chris Froome et al.) have all faced scrutiny for the use of TUEs (Therapeutic Use Exemptions) linked to asthma.

***15 mins of breathing into a paper-bag later (where’s my inhaler when I need it?)***

What gives??

It seems blatantly counter-intuitive that WORLD CLASS (in this instance I use the ‘Fellicionado Scale of Class’ – WORLD being the top 5% of athletes, down to the bottom 5% of athletes known as COUCH) require inhalers ad infinitum for a breathing condition?!? THE BEST ENDURANCE ATHLETES….IN THE WORLD?!??

What have I missed?!?

**I’m not pointing fingers here (though on the surface, and without adequate reflection, you may think that as a knee-jerk response to the first few lines). I simply and genuinely do not understand. I want this post to get people thinking. Not to find people guilty or slander them necessarily. Just to start a narrative and, ultimately, to come away from it clearer than I am right now.**

Let’s rewind a bit. Surely there’s a reason for this. Are WORLD CLASS athletes more susceptible to these kind of conditions on account of their exposure to the higher demands of training? It’s a real thing. Honest. It’s known as EIA (Exercise Induced Asthma), which differs from the more common allergy-induced form suffered by 8-10% of the nation. EIA is brought on by rapid breathing through exertion, particularly in cold air. Sounds legit. Maybe these cyclists should think about going to warm weather training camps over the colder, winter months?

Oh.

They already do.

Chris Froome has had his EIA since childhood. He must have had a shit childhood if he was being beasted up the Alpe d’Huez switchbacks, sucking on thin, cold alpine air instead of dicking about in a park drinking White Lightning with his mates. Then again he’s worth a mint and living it up in Monaco or wherever. Fair one.

As we keep getting told there’s nothing wrong with the use of inhalers etc etc for those who have applied for and received a TUE, legally anyway. Morally though? Well, I think it’s pretty frickin’ wrong, but that’s just my gut feeling. It’s a controversial topic. Some think “innocent until proven guilty, he’s broken no rules so leave him be”, others chuck piss at him. Toh-may-toe, toe-mah-to. The old ‘excuse’ touted by such heroes of the doping world, David Millar, Floyd Landis, Thomas Dekker and so on, is that they were ‘being professional’, the implication being that because everyone else was doing it they had to too. How else were they going to keep up, literally and figuratively, and keep their jobs? Pretty sure I’ve heard a similar line of logic elsewhere from followers of a certain Austrian vegetarian…….

I can sympathise with their view for sure. I definitely do not agree with it but how can I sit here, with no experience of the world they are/were in, and pass judgement. These guys made mistakes, lied, and paid for it. They are still morally reprehensible. They still made the decision to cheat.

The arch villain of all, at least in the cycling fraternity, is Lance (Ph)Armstrong. He was a prize c*nt, yet people still defend him. Why? He set out to ruin the lives and careers of anyone who tried to lift the veil. He was an evil, vindictive bastard. How is what he did remotely defensible?

Lance. If you’re reading this. You’re a piece of shit.

Could that be the reason, though, that people like Brad, Mo, Paula and others are still revered and pandered to? Are they too big to fall? Evidence of Lancey-boy suggests otherwise; that they’ll get their dues in the end. Until then though? Enough mud has been thrown but none of it has stuck. People are nostalgic for success. Does it need to come from the other athletes themselves, as it did in cycling? Laura Muir recently made fairly damning insinuations about a certain Ethiopian athlete and her association with a fairly controversial coach who also has links to big Mo….

Mo denied ever even knowing Jama Aden, despite numerous, separate photographs of the two together at training camps in Ethiopia. Why deny that? Nigel Farage pulled a similar one to that mate, and we ain’t that stupid to fall for it again. Oh wait. We are. If you’re truly innocent you’d not hide anything as trivial as that surely??!

This was all around the same time as his surely undeniable association with ‘big’ Alberto Salazar. He ain’t exactly whiter-than-white huh?!

Again, what does that mean? In the world of elite level athletics I’d find it perhaps odd if those at the top didn’t have links with each other. To use football as an analogy, Chelsea’s Eden Hazard plays in the same league as a club managed by Sean Dyche, but he sure as shit won’t be signing for Burnley any time soon.

Ok, not the best.

So what is it I’m trying to say? I’m conscious that this is, like most of my other posts, fairly rambling and inconclusive. I’ll try to address one of those accusations. You’ll just have to put up with my ataxic, rambling musings for a bit longer I’m afraid.

There is no smoke without fire yet it doesn’t sit right with me to start slinging mud (or chucking piss for that matter) without concrete evidence. I don’t have any conclusive proof and I would love to keep living in this unsettling narrative that tells me ‘the Brits are clean, the Russians aren’t’ in some sort of weird relapse of the Cold War propaganda machines of he 60s, 70s and 80s. It’s simply not as clear cut as that. To my layman’s brain, if the ‘Russians’ are doping and we aren’t, why do we still beat them?? Are we really that naive as a public to think that we aren’t doing it ourselves? Gone are the days of British ‘fairplay’, if indeed they ever existed in the real world outside of our romantic ministrations.

At least in cycling it’s easy to see who was doping and who wasn’t. Take ol’Pharmstrong duelling it out with Jan Ullrich on Alpe d’Huez with his infamous ‘look’ before launching, and holding, an all-out sprint effort about 6km from the line. Uphill. For 30mins. “Impossible” said some commentators. Well, they were right.

What the minority are doing (and I do still believe that it is a firm minority) is tainting the entire game. A few peoples mis-directed delusions are ruining it for all else. The burden of proof is now firmly on the accused. It did used to be the other way round. Honest. You see it a lot in rock-climbing. If there’s no footage of the first ascent then it may as well have never happened. Our word just is not good enough anymore. How worrying is that for our wider culture and society??

Once we get used to, and accept the excuse of, the argument that it’s not ‘morally’ wrong then our mindset of what is allowed shifts further down a notch. The next excuse builds on the previous one and the notch slips down again. And again. And again. It’s the tip of the iceberg. The sharp end of the stick. The drop in the ocean.

*Chucking piss at Chris is not cool. Despite what he may, or may not, have done. If you chuck it as Lance, I might pretend to not have seen anything…….because I’m a hypocrite.