Tiernan-Locke says British team ‘freely offered’ Tramadol at 2012 World Championships
In an interview with BBC Sport, Jonathan Tiernan-Locke has claimed that unnamed individuals working with the British team offered riders the controversial medication Tramadol at the 2012 Worlds.
“There was a time I rode the World Championships and we were offered a painkiller called Tramadol,” he told the BBC. “I wasn’t in any pain so I didn’t need to take it, and that was offered freely around. And then we are seeing later on that they are calling for it to be banned and it should be on the WADA list and whatnot. It just didn’t sit well with me at the time. I thought, ‘I’m not in any pain, why would I want a painkiller?’”
The use of grey area substances made headlines last month when a leak by Russian hackers showed that 2012 Tour de France winner Bradley Wiggins received injections of the powerful corticosteroid Triamcinolone acetonide prior to the 2011 and 2012 Tours, as well as the 2013 Giro d’Italia.
“It definitely looks odd,” he said regarding the practise. “I don’t want to insinuate anything, but the timing doesn’t look great. You assume if you had a need for such a thing it would be consistent throughout his career, that you’d use it year in year out, so from that point of view it looks suspicious.”
