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Welcome back to Spin Cycle,
As Tadej Pogačar asserted himself at the Tour de France once again, the questions surrounding Ineos Grenadiers, Dave Brailsford and their head carer David Rozman continue to build.
Elsewhere, the theme of Tour de France fandom this year seems to be custom t-shirts, which we are very much into, while Sepp Kuss and Spin Cycle have never been more aligned.
Brailsford makes a break for it ...
If difficult questions remain unanswered, do they even exist? That was the plan from both Ineos Grenadiers and Dave Brailsford when they continued to refuse to comment on ARD's investigation into their longtime staffer's connection with a doping ring.
However, L'Équipe and the the Times then both picked up the story and named Head Carer David Rozman as the staffer who'd texted the jailed doctor Mark Schmidt at the centre of Operation Aderlass "do you still have any of the stuff that Milram used during the races? If so, can you bring it for the boys?” in June just ahead of their winning 2012 Tour campaign.
A rule of thumb is that when the big boys of media start asking questions (the same questions as everyone else had been), you better not fob them off as you do the others, as they are not to be trifled with. And so Ineos Grenadiers relented, after seven weeks of keeping shtum, and released a statement addressing the allegations.
"These allegations have not to date been presented to the team by any appropriate authority," the statement read, "however the team has made a formal request to the International Testing Agency (ITA) to request any information it considers relevant."
What this fails to address is the legitimate and fairly easy question to answer of: "What was the Milram stuff that Rozman was requesting from Schmidt?"
That statement that Ineos was slow to give was a beleaguered attempt to bat away the story from growing even more legs than it already has. But if we had to wager one way or the other, don't expect this story to go away anytime soon. Especially with a Tour de France press room full of journalists less than captivated by what looks to be another weeks-long coronation for Tadej Pogačar and therefore with a lot of time on their hands to dig around.
Spotted at the Tour 👀
Custom t-shirts seem to be all the rage this Tour de France, and the weirder the better.
First up is this pleasant man who we bumped into on the Toulouse metro sporting a t-shirt featuring a photo of himself and Tour director Christian Prudhomme at the Brussels Grand Départ in 2019.
Next up is this striking image of Jonas Vingegaard ...
Did we do a good job with this story?
