Chris Froome was cleared of doping one day after being banned from the Tour de France. What is going on?

Chris Froome is cycling’s latest bête noire.

The four-time Tour de France winner was found to have tested positive for double the levels of the asthma medication salbutamol permitted by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) last December. Yet, he was set to compete for a fifth yellow jersey when the Tour begins on July 7. Cycling’s governing body — the Union Cycliste Internationale, or UCI — did not suspend him, and had instead been waiting for its own investigation to conclude before meting out punishment.

But on Sunday, six days before the Tour’s Grand Départ, race organizers took matters into their own hands and blocked Froome from competing. The Tour is run by an independent French organization — Amaury Sport Organisation, or ASO — that was evidently frustrated by how long UCI’s investigation was taking.

THEN on Monday, UCI dropped a bomb shell, releasing a statement saying that it has concluded its investigation, and that Froome is clear of charges.

The UCI has considered all the relevant evidence in detail (in consultation with its own experts and experts from WADA). On 28 June 2018, WADA informed the UCI that it would accept, based on the specific facts of the case, that Mr Froome’s sample results do not constitute an AAF. In light of WADA’s unparalleled access to information and authorship of the salbutamol regime, the UCI has decided, based on WADA’s position, to close the proceedings against Mr Froome.

Now for the next week, the sport of cycling will be a circus.

This is a mess for cycling — for Froome, for UCI, and for the Tour de France. The Tour has not announced that Froome will be allowed to race yet. While we wait, let’s go over how we got here.

Froome’s offense occurred during the final three days of the Vuelta a España last September, which means it was almost 10 months to the start of the Tour without a resolution in the doping investigation being conducted by UCI.

There was hope that a ruling would be handed down in a timely manner. Froome insisted that he wanted the investigation finished before the start of the Tour, and UCI’s president, David Lappartient, said shortly after news broke of the positive test that Froome should be suspended.

Even precedent suggested we should have known something much sooner. Riders Alessandro Petacchi and Diego Ulissi earned one-year and nine-month suspensions in the past for similar offenses. Ulissi tested positive for excess salbutamol in May, 2014, and was punished in January, 2015, seven months later.

Yet while all parties involved no doubt would have preferred a quick decision, none was likely to cede ground, particularly Froome and the battalion of lawyers at his and Team Sky’s command. Notably, Team Sky dragged its feet providing an explanation for why so much asthma medication ended up in Froome’s system, and has mounted a defense saying that the results may have been the result of a “kidney malfunction,” and later questioned the method in which the test was conducted.

Prior to Monday’s news, the investigation was expected to go beyond the end of the Tour.

UCI can suspend athletes provisionally, but it didn’t suspend Froome right away because the substance he took is classified as a “specified” substance. UCI follows WADA’s guidelines, which make a distinction for substances that may have entered “an athlete’s body inadvertently, and therefore allow a tribunal more flexibility when making a sanctioning decision.”

In layman’s terms, a “specified” substance is anything that an athlete could conceivably take too much of while treating a prior condition — like, say, asthma — or accidentally ingest. That’s opposed to a “non-specified” substance, which WADA says would only conceivably be found in an athlete’s body if he or she is doping. (Again, this is layman’s terms).

Taking salbutamol is not necessarily a sign that someone is doping. There’s a reason why WADA allows a threshold of 1,000 ng/ml of the substance. It assists in oxygen transfer, and Team Sky said in a statement that Froome had been suffering from “acute asthma symptoms” during the final week of the Vuelta.

Truthfully or not, Froome could say he was taking a specified substance because needed it, thus requiring UCI to investigate.

Team Sky was never likely to suspend Froome. Before the news of Froome’s positive test, the team had to weather an investigation by UK Anti-Doping into Bradley Wiggins, another British former Tour de France winner. Accusations have trailed Sky for years, and they have pushed back against detractors at every opportunity. Throwing Froome under the bus would have invited even more digging into the team’s unaired laundry.

Last March, sources told The Guardian that the organization that ASO would refuse to let Froome race if the investigation hadn’t been concluded by Stage 1. ASO, it should be noted, operates independently of UCI, and holds a lot power in cycling because it oversees what is by far the sport’s most popular and biggest money-making event.

Tour race director Christian Prudhomme then went on the record in June and said that it would honor UCI’s timeline and let Froome race.

It seemed like ASO was trying to avoid the massive public relations effort that would have had to be conducted in its wake. Why they reversed course just a few weeks later is anyone’s guess. Maybe it just wanted to build up some drama before the race?

The decision was understandable, however. The organization already has a lot of asterisks in its record books from dopers past. It doesn’t need any more.

Now that UCI has cleared Froome, it’s up to ASO to decide whether it would like Froome to compete in its race. Ostensibly, it should allow Froome back in, given that the reason it gave when it banned him was that it was frustrated by the length of the investigation.

However, the timing of UCI’s announcement so close to ASO’s, and the fact that the investigation was supposed go beyond the Tour, certainly reeks a lot like a counter move.

And ASO doesn’t have to let Froome back in. The Tour de France justified denying Froome’s application for the 2018 Tour by invoking article 29.1 of its rules. The article states:

“ASO expressly reserves the right to refuse participation in - or to exclude from - the event , a team or any of its members whose presence would be such as to damage the image or reputation of ASO or the event.”

It doesn’t help that UCI’s statement is so low on details. You can read the full statement here. Though it’s encouraging that WADA was involved in the decision process, note that it doesn’t state exactly what happened Froome when tested for twice the allowed limit of a substance, or why that result is invalid now.

Froome raced and won the Giro d’Italia last May, and was relatively accepted by Italian spectators who have long come to grips with their own nation’s long history of dopers. The French, on the other hand, have a reputation for reacting harshly towards anyone even remotely attached to doping.

In 2015, for example, Froome was spat on and doused with urine on the way to his second yellow jersey, long before there was any concrete evidence suggesting he might be a doper (beyond, you know, simply being good at his sport). France’s reaction this year had the potential to be vicious.

Perhaps not unrelated, France has not had a Tour winner since Bernard Hinault in 1985, and Hinault himself has called on other riders to strike if Froome raced, and insisted that Froome should not be considered among the greats.

As far as anyone knows, Froome is not Lance Armstrong. It takes a truly special person to be that good and cunning and ruthless, and the world will be better off if we never have another. But the comparisons have been easy to make, and the race has been burned before.

That context matters. The Tour de France is an entirely different beast, because of its sheer history and size, and the country in which it takes place.