British cycling: A doctor, drugs & a scandal
The Story
The Times
3.9 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 26 March 2021
⏱️ 40 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Last week the former Team GB and Team Sky doctor Richard Freeman was struck off the medical register after being found guilty of ordering a banned substance “knowing or believing” it was to dope a rider in 2011.
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Guest: Matt Lawton, Chief sports correspondent at The Times.
Host: Will Roe.
Much of the original journalism by The Sunday Times' Chief sports writer, David Walsh.
Clips used: Times Radio, TalkSPORT, BBC, Eurosport, OMN, Daily Mail, Olympic YouTube Channel, IBTimes UK, Cambridge University Darwin College lecture series and ARD.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, it's Manvine here. |
| 0:03.0 | Today's episode is about a scandal in British cycling |
| 0:07.0 | that my colleague at the Times, the Chief Sports correspondent Matt Lawton, |
| 0:11.0 | helped to uncover. |
| 0:13.0 | One of the producers from Stories of Our Times, Will Row, has been following the latest developments. |
| 0:24.0 | Last week, a British doctor was struck off the medical register. |
| 0:30.0 | Richard Freeman had worked with Team GB and Team Skies, |
| 0:33.0 | all conquering Olympic and Tour de France teams. |
| 0:36.0 | The decision leaves not just his career in Tatters, |
| 0:39.0 | but raises big questions around professional cycling in this country. |
| 0:45.0 | I think people are being deliberately evasive. |
| 0:47.0 | There's a lot of unanswered questions, but it has always been the way of cycling. |
| 0:51.0 | Has the sports eternal problem doping come back to haunt it yet again? |
| 1:00.0 | You're listening to Stories of Our Times from the Times and the Sunday Times, I'm Will Row. |
| 1:05.0 | Today, British cycling, a doctor, drugs and a scandal. |
| 1:16.0 | My name is Matt Lawton, I'm the Chief Sports correspondent at the Times. |
| 1:20.0 | I've been a journalist since 1993 and I've spent the last seven or eight years of my career |
| 1:26.0 | very much focused on corruption, investigations, doping across all sports. |
| 1:35.0 | As a teenager, Matt Lawton was a talented middle-distance runner. |
| 1:39.0 | Also, while still at school, he did a stint of work experience on the Croydon advertiser down in South London. |
| 1:47.0 | At 16, I arrived at this decision. |
| 1:49.0 | If I didn't make it as a runner and even if I had made it as a runner, |
... |
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