Blazin' Saddles: TUE stench still clinging to Bradley Wiggins and Team Sky

It's almost a fortnight since the Fancy Bears leaks revealed the WADA medical files of certain elite athletes – and Team Sky still have a lot to answer for despite Bradley Wiggins' latest defence.

[STORY: Medical records for Sir Bradley Wiggins and Chris Froome leaked by hackers]

Initially it seemed more Tame Koalas than Fancy Bears: a slow drip-feed of sportsmen and women who had legally received treatment for ailments by using otherwise banned drugs.

For many it was the mild annoyance of having these confidentialities made public – akin to you or me having the details of every visit to our GP broadcast to all and sundry (including that time you got that thing inexplicably stuck in that equally inexplicable place). Gary Larson's Far Side cartoon of a man leaving a rest room as an alarm flashes up with 'Didn't Wash Hands' sprung to mind.

Even when Chris Froome's details were leaked we hardly learned anything that we didn't already knew: namely, that the triple Tour de France champion had received two Therapeutic Use Exemptions in his career (both for courses of the steroid prednisolone to treat asthma).

[STORY: Froome has 'no issue' with certificates leak in WADA hack]

But there's something about Sir Bradley Wiggins's released files that has lingered more than the foul stench Peter Sagan no doubt left behind in that camper van following his impromptu visit during July's Tour de France. And despite Wiggo's most recent attempts to clear the air, it still stinks.

[STORY: Wiggins: 'No unfair advantage' from banned steroid]

To recap, it emerged that Britain's first Tour winner – man of the people Wiggins – received three corticosteroid injections before the 2011 and 2012 Tours and the 2013 Giro d'Italia. The same Wiggins who insisted in his autobiography, My Time, that he had never received any injections during his life other than vaccines.

All three of Wiggo's TUEs were granted by the UCI's then scientific advisor Mario Zorzoli – the same doctor who was briefly suspended in January 2015 before being cleared any of wrongdoing after former pro Michael Rasmussen made claims against him during the investigation into former Rabobank doctor Geert Leinders (himself controversially hired – and fired – by Sky after stints on the team as a consultant in 2011 and 2012).

Curious and curiouser. No surprise, then, that Sky went off-grid, Sir David Brailsford disappeared, Wiggins went AWOL, and the newspapers and Twitter, quite understandably, went into overdrive.

And you know what, now the dust has settled it still doesn't look good for Team Sky – whose whiter than white veneer is about the same colour as their kit right now.

Dutch rider Tom Dumoulin – beaten by Wiggins in the 2014 time trial world championships – says the whole situation "stinks"; a "stupefied" Romain Bardet has called on a total ban on corticosteroids – both in and out of competition; a specialist French doctor has told L'Equipe of his surprise that a World Tour team could "take corticoids so casually"; even former UCI President Pat McQuaid has spoken about the abuse of corticoids while branding Team Sky's famous anti-doping stance "hypocritical" in the light of the revelations.

Of course, we must stress that there is no suggestion that any of the athletes named in the Fancy Bears leaks are involved in any wrongdoing.

Indeed, that's exactly what both Wiggins and Sky reminded us when they finally broke their deafening silence last week.

No rules were broken, they said; all TUEs were granted by the relevant authorities, everything was done within the existing guidelines and systems chez WADA. Brailsford even denied knowledge of the performance-enhancing qualities held by cortisone – which seemed to over-egg what was already an extremely eggy pudding.

Still, Brad and Dave insist they have done no wrong. And for his part, Zorzoli broke his own silence to say that Wiggins and other riders' TUE applications were all approved in good faith and in line with the WADA code.

Talking to the BBC's political commentator Andrew Marr – the equivalent of, say, Donald Trump being quizzed on foreign policy by Jeremy Kyle, and (let's be honest) the biggest TV cop out since Lance Armstrong opted to make his infamous confession to Oprah Winfrey rather than Jerry Springer – Wiggins defended himself and his team's actions to the hilt.

Speaking perilously close to a vase of lilies – scented flowers renowned for their sneeze-inducing pollen – Wiggins reiterated to Marr that he was a "lifelong sufferer of asthma".

That's all well and good, but come on. Treating asthma with triamcinolone acetonide is like having an enema in response to a nasty boil on your bottom. Triamcinolone is a proven PED which is rarely used in normal medical procedure – a drug whose clear benefits the former pro and confessed doper Joerg Jaksche admitted to seeking out by deliberately exaggerating claims of illness.

Both Rasmussen and convicted doper David Millar have both since elaborated on the performance-enhancing effects of triamcinolone. If Sky weren't aware that triamcinolone was a strong PED with a history of abuse in pro cycling then that is almost a big an oversight as, say, hiring a dubious Belgian doctor with a history of doping abuse.

Doesn't it seem odd that someone would, in 2011 and entering the peak of his career, treat a "lifelong" condition by using an injection of something he had never received before in his life – something that clearly worked so well that Wiggins then reused it ahead of his 2012 Tour victory and then again before his subsequent assault on the Giro 10 months later?

Indeed, Wiggins had used a regular inhaler to treat his asthma during the 2009 Tour (in which he finished fourth while riding for Garmin) and so somewhere along the line it must have been decided by his new team that this means of treatment wasn't sufficient.

(For their part, Garmin were against Wiggins using anything stronger than an inhaler – with the rider's former doctor, Prentice Steffen, admitting that the current situation "does not look right from a health or a sporting perspective".)

And don't get us started on the peculiar dates of these TUEs, which reek to high heaven. The 2012 TUE, for example, which was issued a week before the start of the biggest race of the season, the Tour.

So, yes, all things considered, it's not wrong to say that since the Fancy Bears leak shed light on the TUE-seeking antics of the pro peloton, the plot has thickened like a particularly rum variety of borscht. Unsurprisingly, there are no shortage of figures, like Jaksche, prepared to spit in the soup.

Jaksche has told Cyclingtips that it is a "weird situation" and has voiced his concern that Wiggins' TUE – like many others – could mask a "false medical justification". He has called for Sky to release all relevant documentation to prove that there was no other course of action for Wiggins than receive cortisone injections.

Because what it boils down to, says Cyclingtips, is that if the injections were not necessary, if these breathing difficulties could have been eliminated by less aggressive treatments – as opposed to treatments that coincidentally help you shed 5kg in a month – then Wiggins and Sky may have broken the rules; and not just the rules of ethics, morality and fair play.

Elsewhere, it has been speculated in L'Equipe that Sky's supposed abuse of the TUE system was exactly why the British team decided not to become part of the MPCC – the Movement for Credible Cycling group.

"There is no logic in injecting yourself with Kenacort [Triamcinolone acetonide] before the start of a Grand Tour," Dr Armand Megret, an expert for the MPCC, told the French sports daily this week. "It does not make sense that such a champion with such team with such an organised staff can take corticoids so casually."

For David Walsh, the Sunday Times journalist who helped uncover Lance Armstrong's web of deceit, Wiggins and Brailsford's casual explanations are not enough. Sky, he believes, would have not been so forgiving had the shoe been on the other foot – that of Froome's big rival, Nairo Quintana, for example.

Froome's biographer Walsh will feel particularly aggrieved with the situation – having recently been embedded with the team for a season following which he gave Sky a glowing reference and clean bill of health.

The Irish journalist was indeed led a merry dance when reporting Sky's insistence that they were not going to be using TUEs in competition and would steer clear of treatments involving cortisone. Poor Walsh – the reason why he himself has no doubt been rather subdued of late is because he's probably still busy clearing off his face some of the egg from Brailsford's over-egged pudding.

It is perhaps no surprise, then, that Wiggins re-emerged from the woodwork on Friday to further explain his situation after the Marr mediocrities last weekend.

Speaking to the Guardian, Wiggins opened up about his lifelong struggle with asthma and respiratory problems, once again stressing he had broken no anti-doping rules despite appreciating the unethical implications of his actions, while even suggesting that his injections were sometimes "a detriment to my performance".

The reason why Wiggins did not reveal more details about his condition in his autobiography was because he was "paranoid about making excuses" for not performing well. Wiggins also denied that Leinders had anything to do with the switching of his medication, nor was the Dutch doctor even aware of his allergies.

All this will buy Wiggins some time and put some minds at ease, but the vultures will continue to hover – around him, around Brailsford, around Team Sky, and the sport in general.

Froome is hardly out of the woods, either. Sure, he comes off as a choirboy in comparison to his former team-mate; in fact, Froome could even be viewed as a victim, given he would have been the principal benefactor of a wheezing Wiggins not being his best in 2012.

But if Froome's own major case was so urgent that he had to have it fast-tracked and signed off prior to the TUE committee then there's clearly an argument against him racing in the first place – let alone winning when ostensibly so sick. As Froome knows only too well himself, "the TUE system is open to abuse and this is something that the UCI and WADA needs to urgently address".