How Chris Froome can overturn his doping ban to race in the Tour de France
Chris Froome has been banned from riding the 2018 Tour de France because he tested positive for excess asthma medication. He’s not out of the race yet, though.
Chris Froome is cycling’s latest bête noire.
The four-time Tour de France winner was found to have tested positive for double the levels of the asthma medication salbutamol permitted by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) last December. Yet, he was set to compete for a fifth yellow jersey when the Tour begins on July 7. Cycling’s governing body — the Union Cycliste Internationale, or UCI — did not suspend him, and has instead been waiting for its own investigation to conclude before meting out punishment.
But on Sunday, six days before the Tour’s Grand Départ, race organizers took matters into their own hands and blocked Froome from competing. The Tour is run by an independent French organization — Amaury Sport Organisation, or ASO — that was evidently frustrated by how long UCI’s investigation was taking.
Now for the next week, the sport of cycling will be a circus.
Froome technically isn’t done yet. According to Le Monde, Froome and Team Sky will appeal the decision to the court of arbitration of the French Olympic Committee, which will consider the case on Tuesday and then decide his fate the next day. Beyond that, UCI could also hastily end its investigation, though an expedited conclusion seems unlikely.
Froome is one of the greatest cyclists of all time, having won the yellow at the Tour de France, the sport’s crown jewel, four of the last five years. He is, simply, the best Tour rider since Lance Armstrong.
That comparison is important. Froome and Team Sky are going to fight like hell over the coming days so that he can make the start. Whether they’ll be successful is impossible to tell. How we got to this point is, as is often the case in cycling, extremely messy.
Cycling’s governing body is carrying out an investigation, and taking a particularly long time.
Froome’s offense occurred during the final three days of the Vuelta a España last September, which means it will have been almost 10 months to the start of the Tour without a resolution in the doping investigation being conducted by UCI.
There was hope that a ruling would be handed down already. Froome insisted that he wanted the investigation finished before the start of the Tour, and UCI’s president, David Lappartient, said shortly after news broke of the positive test that Froome should be suspended.
Even precedent suggests we should know something by now. Former riders Alessandro Petacchi and Diego Ulissi earned one-year and nine-month suspensions in the past for similar offenses. Ulissi tested positive for excess salbutamol in May, 2014, and was punished in January, 2015, seven months later.
Yet while all parties involved no doubt would have preferred a quick decision, none was likely to cede ground, particularly Froome and the battalion of lawyers at his and Team Sky’s command. Notably, Team Sky dragged its feet providing an explanation for why so much asthma medication ended up in Froome’s system, and has mounted a defense saying that the results may have been the result of a “kidney malfunction,” and later questioned the method in which the test was conducted.
Prior to Sunday’s news, the investigation was expected to go beyond the end of the Tour.
Unlike the NFL, UCI couldn’t just provisionally suspend Froome before the investigation concluded in this instance.
UCI can suspend athletes provisionally, but it didn’t suspend Froome right away because the substance he took is classified as a “specified” substance. UCI follows WADA’s guidelines, which make a distinction for substances that may have entered “an athlete’s body inadvertently, and therefore allow a tribunal more flexibility when making a sanctioning decision.”
In layman’s terms, a “specified” substance is anything that an athlete could conceivably take too much of while treating a prior condition — like, say, asthma — or accidentally ingest. That’s opposed to a “non-specified” substance, which WADA says would only conceivably be found in an athlete’s body if he or she is doping. (Again, this is layman’s terms).
Taking salbutamol is not necessarily a sign that someone is doping. There’s a reason why WADA allows a threshold of 1,000 ng/ml of the substance. It assists in oxygen transfer, and Team Sky said in a statement that Froome had been suffering from “acute asthma symptoms” during the final week of the Vuelta.
Truthfully or not, Froome can say he was taking a specified substance because needed it, thus requiring UCI to investigate.
Team Sky could have also suspended Froome, but that was unlikely to happen.
Team Sky was never likely to suspend Froome. Before the news of Froome’s positive test, the team had to weather an investigation by UK Anti-Doping into Bradley Wiggins, another British former Tour de France winner. Accusations have trailed Sky for years, and they have pushed back against detractors at every opportunity. Throwing Froome under the bus would have invited even more digging into the team’s unaired laundry.
Tour organizers were not expected to suspend Froome ... until they did.
Last March, sources told The Guardian that the organization that ASO would refuse to let Froome race if the investigation hadn’t been concluded by Stage 1. ASO, it should be noted, operates independently of UCI, and holds a lot power in cycling because it oversees what is by far the sport’s most popular and biggest money-making event.
Tour race director Christian Prudhomme then went on the record in June and said that it would honor UCI’s timeline and let Froome race.
It seemed like ASO was trying to avoid the massive public relations effort that would have had to be conducted in its wake. Why they reversed course just a few weeks later is anyone’s guess. Maybe it just wanted to build up some drama before the race?
So yep, this next week is going to be a total circus.
Froome raced and won the Giro d’Italia last May, and was relatively accepted by Italian spectators who have long come to grips with their own nation’s long history of dopers. The French, on the other hand, have a reputation for reacting harshly towards anyone even remotely attached to doping.
In 2015, for example, Froome was spat on and doused with urine on the way to his second yellow jersey, long before there was any concrete evidence suggesting he might be a doper (beyond, you know, simply being good at his sport). France’s reaction this year had the potential to be vicious. Perhaps not unrelated, France has not had a Tour winner since Bernard Hinault in 1985, and Hinault himself had called on other riders to strike if Froome raced, and insisted that Froome should not be considered among the greats.
As far as anyone knows, Froome is not Lance Armstrong. It takes a truly special person to be that good and cunning and ruthless, and the world will be better off if we never have another. But the comparisons have been easy to make, and the race has been burned before.
That context matters. Froome may have raced in another grand tour while under investigation, but the Tour de France is an entirely different beast, because of its sheer history and size, and the country in which it takes place.