Dr Richard Freeman, left, aids Bradley Wiggins just after he crashed out of the 2011 Tour de France.
The medic at the centre of the Team Sky jiffy bag controversy, Dr Richard Freeman, has pulled out of an eagerly awaited parliamentary hearing in the UK tomorrow.
Dr Freeman has contacted the culture, media and sport select committee today to inform them he is ill and too unwell to appear before them tomorrow, Wednesday.
He was due to be asked about the delivery of a jiffy bag to Team Sky on the final stage of the Critérium du Dauphiné race in France in 2011.
Team Sky principal Dave Brailsford late last year told the committee that the bag contained a decongestant available over the counter – Fluimucil.
And former British Cycling technical director Shane Sutton told the committee on the same day that the decongestant was to be used in a nebuliser by Bradley Wiggins.
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No written records were available to confirm the team’s account; that the product had been taken from stores in Manchester and brought to France by British Cycling coach Simon Cope because he was travelling there anyway.
Brailsford told the committee that Dr Freeman had informed him there was a decongestant in the bag and that he was basing his evidence solely on what Dr Freeman had told him.
It meant the doctor was to set to be a crucial witness whose evidence was awaited with great interest.
However, he emailed the committee’s chairman Damian Collins MP to inform him he would not to be able to attend the hearing because he was ill.
It appears the committee may now give him the option of submitting written evidence and to possibly call him before it for questions at a later date.
The hearing had already been postponed for a week when UK Anti-Doping chief executive Nicole Sapstead requested the extension
No needles UCI policy
Damian Collins MP, the acting chairman of the Commons’ committee examining the issues at the centre of the case, said it seemed clear there was no paper trail Team Sky or British Cycling could provide to support the contention the bag contained Fluimucil.
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He pointed out all that was available by way of evidence was the word of Dr Freeman, to whom the bag was delivered for administering to Wiggins.
“There’s no evidence to back that up,” said Collins of the lack of any paper trail.
“The question that poses is how can you know you’re operating at the standards you expect of your team and the ethics of policing the use of drugs that you want them to be if you’ve got no evidence of what the doctors are administering to cyclists.
“The whole story doesn’t look good and it’s a story that has evolved over several months now.
“The team doctor should keep medical records of the drugs he’s administering to cyclists in and out of competition and I can only imagine those documents, if they do exist – and they should exist – have not been shared with UK anti-doping authorities. And if they were this could clear up this one way or another.”
Since the last Commons’ committee hearings, it has emerged that Chris Froome –the current leader of Team Sky – had received injections of Fluimucil for recovery purposes before he joined the team.
That occurred around 2008, long before injections for recovery purposes were banned by the UCI, and when Froome was with Barloworld.
By the time the medicine was delivered to Team Sky, in June 2011, the kind of injections Froome had received in 2008 had just been banned under the UCI’s ‘no needles’ policy, though the actual substance Fluimucil is not banned and never has been.
And now MP Collins wants more information about Team Sky’s and British Cycling’s general use of Fluimucil.
In October the Daily Mail put queries to Team Sky about a ‘jiffy bag’ delivered to the team in France on the final day of the 2011 Criterium du Dauphine, which Bradley Wiggins won overall.
Team Sky decided to refer the matter to British Cycling so that UK Anti Doping could examine it.
However, it was not until the Commons’ hearing late last year that Brailsford offered an explanation for what was in the bag.
He said it was Fluimucil; a substance he said was used in a nebuliser to break up mucus.
Brailsford conceded he was supplying the information about the contents of the bag only on the basis of what Dr Freeman had told him.
He was unable to furnish any written record to support his evidence and said he was not aware of the product being delivered at the time in question in 2011.
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