UKAD data highlights Chris Froome’s challenge to avoid a doping charge

One of Chris Froome’s most likely defences against a possible anti-doping charge does not appear to be supported by UK Anti-Doping data released to Press Association Sport via a Freedom of Information request.

The Team Sky star returned a urine sample with twice the allowed concentration of asthma drug Salbutamol – what is known as an adverse analytical finding (AAF) – during his winning ride at the Vuelta a Espana last September.

As Salbutamol is treated as a ‘specified substance’, it is only banned above a certain threshold and Froome has not yet been charged with an anti-doping rule violation.

This explains why the 32-year-old British rider has not been suspended and is scheduled to make his second appearance of the season at next week’s Tirreno-Adriatico, starting in Tuscany on Wednesday.

The concentration threshold for Salbutamol has been set by the World Anti-Doping Agency at 1,000 nanograms per millilitre. Froome’s contentious Vuelta sample was double this limit.

The threshold, however, is in the rules in order to keep athletes within a legal dosage range of 800 micrograms, or eight puffs on a typical inhaler, every 12 hours, and 1,600mcg within 24 hours.

Froome and his team strongly deny they broke the dosage limit and have suggested his AAF is a result of taking several puffs immediately before he was tested, at a time when he was dehydrated, fatigued and unwell – all factors that affect the excretion of drugs.

Speaking to reporters at Froome’s first race since news of his AAF broke, the Ruta del Sol two weeks ago, Team Sky principal Sir Dave Brailsford pointed out that the rules are about how much you put in, not what comes out, and stressed that Froome had not taken overused his inhaler.

“It has been proven that even if you take your puffer less than the amounts which you’re entitled to you can excrete more than the threshold in your urine,” Brailsford told Sky Sports News.

“It has been proven time and time again, it can happen.”

The former British Cycling performance director is correct that some studies have found that athletes who take the legal amount of puffs, particularly if they take a large quantity just before the test, will excrete more than 1,000 ng/ml – but UKAD’s statistics show this does not happen often.

Despite the high number of athletes with asthma, Salbutamol accounted for only three of the 109 AAFs UKAD processed in the three years between January 1, 2015, and December 31, 2017.

It has been suggested by sources close to Team Sky that AAFs are a relatively common occurrence and many of them never progress to anti-doping charges.

But the UKAD figures only partially support that view, as 77 of the 109 cases, or seven out of 10, did result in charges. And all three of the Salbutamol AAFs led to anti-doping rule violation cases.

The next stage in Froome’s case, however, is still unclear, with cycling’s world governing body, the UCI, telling PA Sport there is “no update”.

In the meantime, the four-time Tour de France champion is expected to continue his build-up to an assault on the Giro d’Italia-Tour double, an achievement that would demand a place among the sport’s greats.