For three hours in the Thatcher room in Portcullis House the air had all the ease of a dentist’s surgery as the committee for culture, media and sport slowly prised, like recalcitrant teeth, a series of facts from Sir Dave Brailsford, Shane Sutton and the British Cycling chairman, Bob Howden, about the most infamous Jiffy bag in cycling, an envelope delivered to Dr Richard Freeman at the Critérium du Dauphiné in 2011 that has come to symbolise Team Sky and British Cycling’s lack of transparency.
The governing body and its offshoot professional team live by process; the session was one of aggregation, not of marginal gains, of little nuggets of information which might have seemed more credible if presented in a timely style 10 weeks earlier. It had its lighter moments, mostly inspired by the SNP MP John Nicolson, who questioned with the air of a man who could turn ordering a pint of heavy in his local in East Dumbartonshire into a piece of street theatre, but mostly it was a litany of process that was far from light.
Related: Mystery package contained Fluimucil, Brailsford tells select committee
Related: Coughing up the facts on Fluimucil, Team Sky’s Jiffy bag decongestant
Continue reading...