On today’s rest day press conference, Team Sky principal David Brailsford appeared somewhat fed up with being questioned about the sincerity of his riders’ performance, especially his top rider, Tour de France yellow jersey Chris Froome.
Brailsford suggested that instead of asking the ever same questions, journalists should come with ideas on how Froome and the rest of Team Sky could prove their innocence. He offered an idea of his own – handing over all available data to the World Anti-Doping Agency for analysis.
“You’re all asking the same questions,” Brailsford said according to velonation.com. “We see each other in the morning in front of the bus and we see each other at night after the stage. Every day we get asked the same question. I can assure you we are thinking very hard about the optimal way of proving to you guys that we’re not doping.”
“Instead of saying, ‘Dave, how are you going to prove you’re not doping?’ – which isn’t the greatest question to ask – why not think collectively about the best methodology possible to prove beyond reasonable doubt that we and Chris aren’t doping?”
“I’m not sure I’ve got the answer to that. But if we think collectively maybe we could come up with an answer that said, actually, this would be a fantastic way of doing it. If we could contribute to that, we’d be quite happy to do it.”
Brailsford said he was happy to see the team plan come true on the Mont Ventoux, with Froome increasing his race lead: “We planned that performance for quite some time. Chris has been out to Ventoux to recce the climb, thought very carefully about how to ride it, how to ride as a team. And when you see that performance unfolding in front of you exactly as had been planned for some time, and Chris rode so fantastically at the end to win the stage, it was quite an emotional thing to watch.”
Brailsford sees the blood passport as a good tool, but said it needed to be expanded beyond being just blood values: “We’ve been thinking about the biological passport and how that works with an appointed panel of experts who get all the information, all the blood data from everybody, and analyse that. Of course the biological passport isn’t just a blood value; theoretically, the biological passport should be blood value, weight, power, it should be a whole picture of that individual, not just blood values.”
“Our idea is, we give all our information to WADA and they can have everything that we’ve got. They’ve got all our bloods anyway. They can have power data, weight, where we’re training, what we’re doing. Somebody sits there and pieces it all together and says yes or no. We’d be quite happy to do that.”
“What I would like is that the data they’re given is treated the same way as the bloods; so they get to see all the bloods but they don’t release it to the press, yet we trust their opinion. It seems to me WADA are a good body to sit and analyse all that data. They then could tell the world, and you, whether they think this is credible or not.”
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