British sport lucky to have UK Anti-Doping says Alliance chief executive

The US Anti-Doping Agency (USDA) has released a 1,000-page report which devastatingly highlights alleged systematic drug taking by Lance Armstrong and the United States Postal Service professional cycling team during the late 1990s and early 2000s.

The report’s evidence is some of the most comprehensive in the history of the USDA and describes ‘the most sophisticated professional and successful doping programme that sport has ever seen’.

Dave Brailsford, British Cycling performance director and Team Sky professional cycling boss said:

"You can see how the sport got lost in itself and got more and more extreme because it seemed to be systematic and everybody seemed to be doing it at the time - it completely and utterly lost its way and I think it lost its moral compass.

"Everybody has recalibrated and several teams like ourselves are hell-bent on doing it the right way and doing it clean".

Tim Lamb, chief executive of the Sport and Recreation Alliance said:

“It’s clear that cycling was beset by widespread drug-taking in this period. Results must be scratched from the records and a period of introspection should be observed for the sport to learn every lesson it can from this shocking episode. But we can draw positives from this exposure – and sport has an opportunity to show just how far it has come.

“UK governing bodies operate wide-ranging anti-doping education programmes which aim to foster the true values that sport represents – values such as fair play and transparency, as well as educating athletes about the risks of doping.

"What’s important now is that athletes continue to take part in these programmes. We’re also lucky enough to have one of the world’s leading anti-doping organisations in UK Anti-Doping.

“UKAD is at the forefront of anti-doping policies and detection. Its intelligence-based approach to doping is already proving successful and its close relationship to governing bodies means that the regime we have in the UK makes it very difficult for athletes to get away with doping.

“There’s absolutely zero room for complacency but attitudes in UK sporting organisations to doping have long been hardened against doping. It’s when you allow a culture to grow that doping becomes more widespread and everyone involved in sport has a responsibility to ensure that that never happens in this country”.

If you would like to more on the Sport and Recreation Alliance’s views on doping please contact James Stibbs.