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Tiernan-Locke’s (referred to as T-L herein) major breakthrough came in 2012 where he won the Tour of Britain and the Tour Mediterranean. It is fair to say that the Plymouth-born rider was quickly establishing himself as one of the pace-setters at the forefront of the British Cycling revolution. However, T-L’s fledging career was thrown into disarray when, on 29th September 2013, he was forced to withdraw from the Road World Championships because of a potential discrepancy with his biological passport. The ensuing investigation found T-L guilty and on 17th July 2014, Team Sky terminated his contract in light of a two year doping sentence handed out by UCI.
It is this reportage’s opinion that the decision to outcast T-L from the sport of cycling is at best misguided and at worst, unlawful. The case for the defence is as follows:
2012 Evidence:
As a new and expensive safeguard, biological passports are not yet mainstream across the board for professional cycling. In 2012, T-L was racing for UCI third tier team Endura who were not subject to mandatory biological passport compiling. Regardless of whether T-L’s strong showing in 2012 prompted more drug tests or not, it is our view that the purpose of the biological passport would have been warped and only sufficed to provide a snapshot of readings for that year rather than a meaningful set of statistics for the 2013 readings to be compared against. Indeed, the only reason that there were any 2012 readings at all was because T-L volunteered to be tested under the scheme.
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