It’s been quite a few weeks for Bradley Wiggins. Last month, he won Olympic gold in the team pursuit to become Britain’s most decorated Olympian ever yet in the past week-or-so, he’s been brought down to earth with a right bump. As part of the ‘Fancy Bears’ hack, Wiggins’ medical data was leaked, along with numerous other high-profile athletes. There were surprisingly few contentious pieces of information put into the public domain but what has really put the cat amongst the pigeons was that it was revealed that Wiggins had been granted therapeutic use exemptions (TUEs) for the corticosteroid, triamcinolone, before major races. This is a powerful steroid that many say is performance-enhancing. TUEs allow athletes to use banned substances if they have genuine medical need but suspicion has been raised around Wiggins because of the timing of his use of the drug- immediately before major races.
The Fancy Bears hack has brought up questions about specific athletes but more significantly, it has brought up wider questions about the use of TUEs and athletes’ medical records. It is generally acknowledged that TUEs can be abused but there are also many legitimate TUEs granted.
Olympic gold medallist, Callum Skinner, was also a victim of the Fancy Bears hack and his reaction to having some of his medical data as well as his TUEs leaked was to release his medical records in an attempt to prove that his asthma was genuine and his TUEs were legitimate. Dave Brailsford, the general manager of Team Sky, has revealed that he is looking into whether his team should release all their riders TUEs as a matter of course in an attempt to make things more transparent.
Brailsford’s is an interesting strategy. Certainly, sport is suffering from a perceived lack of transparency at the moment and any degree of secrecy, together with the current level of public suspicion, is a toxic combination. There have been suggestions that if athletes want to prevent rumours starting regarding what substances they are taking, they should go down the Team Sky route and release everything. Release their TUEs, release their medical records and so everything will become less opaque and the public’s trust will begin to rebuild.
Jonathan Vaughters, the former professional cyclist and current manager of the Cannondale cycling team, believes that the answer is to make publishing TUEs compulsory which would, in turn, make athletes think twice before they took any substance. This would, unquestionably, be an invasion of an athletes’ privacy but Vaughters believes that being a professional athlete is a privilege rather than a right and if you don’t want to release your records then fine, don’t become an elite athlete.
To a degree, this argument is legitimate. Athletes are well paid to do a job that many people would give their right arm to do and so some concessions are necessary. Currently, athletes must name where they will be for an hour a day, 365 days a year. This is an invasion of privacy but almost all athletes comply without complaint because it’s acknowledged that this is a sacrifice that must be made if clean sport is the goal.
Releasing TUEs and medical records is, though, a significant step further than the invasion of privacy required by drug-testing. Athletes are, to a degree, public property and their employment is also, to a degree, reliant on public trust. But they are also people. Is it fair to expect every medical condition of each individual to be disclosed to the public? What if an athlete is transgender? What if a female athlete has had an abortion? Is it fair that the public should be told this on the basis that full transparency is the only solution? I really don’t think so.
The concern, though, is what is the answer? I refuse to believe that every part of an athlete’s life is fair game in the pursuit of clean, trustworthy sport. The problem with any degree of privacy, though, is that whenever anything is then leaked, it can look very suspicious, as in Wiggins’ TUE case. There is no suggestion that Wiggins has broken any rules; TUEs are, by definition a tool that prevents athletes from breaking rules. But Wiggins has a cloud over him now that will forever taint his legacy. Will he ever completely recover from this slur? It’s unlikely. Mud sticks and unfortunately for Wiggins, his TUE revelation has come at the very worst time for him, when public trust in elite athletes is at an all-time low.
The sad thing is that there’s no easy answer to this problem; athletes will always get ill and will always have pre-existing medical conditions so they will always need to take medicines or substances. Would it help if nothing was done in secret? Maybe. But the negatives of having an athletes’ medical record on the table for all to see, far outweigh the positives. Which means that another solution must be found before the trust in elite sport is rebuilt.
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