Former British Cycling technical director Shane Sutton insists he is not sexist and denies ever telling rider Jess Varnish to “go and have a baby” after she was dropped from the team.
Sutton resigned in April following Varnish’s claims that he had made inappropriate remarks about her weight.
On Friday last week, British Cycling said an internal investigation had upheld Varnish’s allegations, effectively ending any chance that Sutton would return to the organization.
However, Sutton claims he has been the victim of “untruths.”
“It would be just nice to understand how they came to this decision,” Sutton, a key component in Britain’s rise to become a cycling superpower, said in an interview with Sky Sports.
Varnish was dropped from the program in March after a disappointing performance from the British women’s sprint team at the London track cycling world championships.
Asked whether he told her to go and have a baby or that her backside was too large for the event, straight-talking Australian Sutton said he told her she needed to “lose some timber.”
“I will continue to repeat what I’ve said from day one, that conversation has never taken place,” he said.
“The weight conversation did take place. If Jess can produce where the conversation took place, who was there at the time — and I believe that it was only me — so I’m trying to understand how they’ve arrived at that decision given it’s her word against mine. It never happened in the way it was described,” Sutton said.
“I can visualize the conversation quite vividly. The coaches and dietitians had sat Jess down and said you really need to lose some weight. Jess was confused, because she thought the coaches had told her to get bigger, get more power,” he said.
“She asked me for my personal opinion and I said: ‘Do you want the director’s opinion or the personal opinion?’ My exact words were: ‘We are trying to qualify for the Games in team sprint and you need to lose some timber,’” he added.
An independent review into British Cycling is ongoing after other riders, including Olympic champions Victoria Pendleton and Nicole Cooke, claimed there was a culture of sexism and bullying in the organization while Sutton was in charge.
He has also been accused of calling Paracyclists “wobblies.”
Sutton continues to deny the claims.
“I sympathized with [Varnish] losing her place on the team, but we were about performance and Jess hadn’t done that in quite some time. This is nothing to do with sexism,” he said.
“I like to tell the truth, maybe to my detriment sometimes, and the truth is I’m not a sexist and that is the only thing that has really hurt me in all of this,” he added.
Sutton joined British Cycling in 2002, and together with Dave Brailsford masterminded stunning medal returns at the 2008 and 2012 Olympic Games, at which Britain won eight golds each.
Revelations of positive doping tests for nearly two dozen Chinese swimmers that went unpunished sparked an intense flurry of accusations and legal threats between the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the head of the US drug-fighting organization, who has long been one of WADA’s fiercest critics. WADA on Saturday said it was turning to legal counsel to address a statement released by US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) CEO Travis Tygart, who said WADA and anti-doping authorities in China swept positive tests “under the carpet by failing to fairly and evenly follow the global rules that apply to everyone else in the world.” The
Taiwanese judoka Yang Yung-wei on Saturday won silver in the men’s under-60kg category at the Asian Judo Championships in Hong Kong. Nicknamed the “judo heartthrob” in Taiwan, the Olympic silver-medalist missed out on his first Asian Championships gold when he lost to Japanese judoka Taiki Nakamura in the finals. Yang defeated three opponents on Saturday to reach the final after receiving a bye through the round of 32. He first topped Laotian Soukphaxay Sithisane in the round of 16 with two seoi nage (over-the-shoulder throws), then ousted Indian Vijay Kumar Yadav in the quarter-finals with his signature ude hishigi sankaku gatame (triangular armlock). He
RALLY: It was only the second time the Taiwanese has partnered with Kudermetova, and the match seemed tight until they won seven points in a row to take the last set 10-2 Taiwan’s Chan Hao-ching and Russia’s Veronika Kudermetova on Sunday won the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix women’s doubles final in Stuttgart, Germany. The pair defeated Norway’s Ulrikke Eikeri and Estonia’s Ingrid Neel 4-6, 6-3, 10-2 in a tightly contested match at the WTA 500 tournament. Chan and Kudermetova fell 4-6 in the first set after having their serve broken three times, although they played increasingly well. They fought back in the second set and managed to break their opponents’ serve in the eighth game to triumph 6-3. In the tiebreaker, Chan and Kudermetova took a 3-0 lead before their opponents clawed back two points, but
Taiwanese gymnast Lee Chih-kai failed to secure an Olympic berth in the pommel horse following a second-place finish at the last qualifier in Doha on Friday, a performance that Lee and his coach called “unconvincing.” The Tokyo Olympics silver medalist finished runner-up in the final after scoring 6.6 for degree of difficulty and 8.800 for execution for a combined score of 15.400. That was just 0.100 short of Jordan’s Ahmad Abu Al Soud, who had qualified for the event in Paris before the Apparatus World Cup series in Qatar’s capital. After missing the final rounds in the first two of four qualifier