Back in the summer at the RIO Olympics how the BBC and others were outraged when all those nasty foreigners suggested that the amazing medal haul of Team GB on the cycling track might perhaps have something to do with our athletes being, er, driven by something different? It was okay for us to suggest that Chinese swimmers might be doing the same as they were just dirty foreigners. But the BBC knew that we Brits played it clean and this was just foreigners being bad losers. Fuck the lot of them, fucking foreigners either cheats or bad losers the lot of them.
As a long time Olympics cynic not least on the matter of drug cheating, I viewed the BBC coverage of this issue as lamentably lame and partial in a really very nasty jingoistic manner. But whipped up by the media the people all shouted: "How dare they insult national hero Sir Bradley Wiggins/". The media loved the cheery mod haircut. Politicians handed him gongs as they lined up to blow him off and gain reflected glory and everyone felt great.
Sir Brad is now a multi millionaire and we taxpayers get to subsidise UK Cycling even more. Panem et circenses.
But now the evidence that Sir Bradley's performance over many years was "assisted" looks overwhelming. Sections of the press are openly calling him a drugs cheat. Rod Liddle rips him a new one in today's Sunday Times. Almost no-one believes a word Sir Brad says, viewing him as a dirty man in a dirty sport.
Sir Brad meanwhile is earning millions as the TV face of car maker Skoda. The slogan on the commercials is "Driven by Something Different" which apparently refers to the car although most of us now think it applies to Sir Bradley as well.
How long, I wonder, before Skoda drops the shamed cyclist? And how long before someone calls for him to lose his knight hood as well? On the latter point I care not a fig. The honours system is so utterly corrupt that I am glad that Sir Brad and Sir Phil Green are part of it, to serve as a daily reminder of what sordid cesspit the gongs system has become.