Ross Tucker, a leading anti-doping expert, said the decision to close the Froome case reveals inconsistencies about how justice is served in high-profile cases.
“What’s happened here is that they’ve obviously set this limit for Salbutamol. So most listeners would be aware that you’re allowed to have some Salbutamol in your system but not too much,” Tucker explained.
“There’s a line that they’ve drawn and it was 1000 nanograms per mole. And what that line betrays is that WADA was basically asked to defend that line and they couldn’t do it.”
“Burden was effectively put back on them to defend that the line was a legitimate and fair and robust way to exclude people or not based on anti-doping policy”.
“I don’t want to be over-dramatic but I think that there are other broader implications to this,” he said. “What this particular instance does is it highlights that even at the back end, there are problems with enforcing the sanctions from testing and that’s not unique to Salbutamol.
“I think this Froome decision today is a giant leap in the direction that anti-doping was already going which is the direction of no credibility. It’s a very damaging day for the concept of anti-doping.”
