LONDON, Feb 15, 2011 – British cycling’s Team Sky may relax their
“zero tolerance” doping policy as they seek to hire staff capable of improving
the outfit’s performance, it was reported Tuesday.

Team Sky general manager Dave Brailsford told The Guardian that the policy
may be softened because of the difficulties in finding support staff who had
not been tainted by the drugs scourge.

“There’s no place for drugs in the sport and we like to think that, with a
few other teams, we’re at the forefront of trying to promote clean cycling.
That philosophy will always stay,” Brailsford said.

“However, when you’re trying to lift performance and you look at the
staffing side, if you want experience of professional cycling you have to go
back a long way to find people over 40 who haven’t been tainted in some way by
many of cycling’s past problems.”

Brailsford conceded that Team Sky had last year held talks with Neil
Stephens about a possible role with the team. Stephens was part of the Festina
team who were kicked out of the scandal-hit 1998 Tour de France.

Australian Stephens was the only Festina rider not to be sanctioned in the
scandal, claiming he presumed his team-mates had been injecting themselves
with vitamins. However Stephens was later dragged into the Operation Puerto
scandal in 2006, serving as sporting director of the implicated Liberty
Seguros team.

Brailsford said that while there were no plans for Sky to hire Stephens,
Sky would not necessarily shy away from controversial figures in future, even
if the “zero tolerance” policy would remain in place for riders.

“We’ll probably stick to our policies at the moment. I don’t see us signing
somebody who has come back after a doping ban,” Brailsford said.

“But maybe somebody who is a 45-year-old sports director, who has held his
hand up and said this is what I did in the past, and has since worked for
clean teams for a long period of time and has vast experience that would
benefit the team — that’s a decision which is a bit more difficult to decide.

“It’s on the margins.”

Team Sky will tackle this year’s Tour de France hoping that Bradley
Wiggins, who achieved a stunning fourth place finish in 2009, finds the going
easier than the 2010 edition when the Londoner finished 24th overall.

A number of ex-riders who have been involved in or admitted to doping
currently work in the professional peloton.

Saxo Bank-Sungard is run by former Tour de France winner Bjarne Riis of
Denmark, who in 2007 confessed he had used performance-enhancing substances
during his career.

In 2007 sprint legend Erik Zabel, a six-time winner of the Tour de France
green jersey, and fellow German Rolf Aldag admitted to using the banned blood
booster EPO (erythropoietin) at the end of the 1990s.

Zabel has worked as a consultant with the HTC-Highroad team, where Aldag is
one of the team’s sports directors.