Tour de France leader Chris Froome this afternoon admitted that he is considering undergoing independent physical testing in a bid to prove he is racing clean.
News agencies broke the story reporting as much on Wednesday morning, but details of any potential tests and the person or persons undertaking them are unknown, and Team Sky staff today declined to comment further.
However, 30-year-old Froome said such tests may take place in the coming months.
“Obviously my focus is on the race, but I’m certainly open-minded to potentially doing some physiological testing at some point after the Tour,” he said.
“There would be some interesting things to come out of it, as a team we might even learn something from it, but at the moment I’m just focused on the race.”
However, as Froome was defending the maillot jaune in the Pyrenees, another video claiming to detail his power output during a race surfaced online.
Labelled on social media with the heading #SkyLeaks, the footage onto which the figures were interspersed was from stage 16 of last year’s Vuelta a España.
Froome launched one notable attack on the stage to Lagos de Somiedo, but was beaten to the line by eventual race winner Alberto Contador. The 19-minute video has already been viewed nearly 20,000 times on YouTube; the first clip that detailed Froome’s performance on Mont Ventoux in the 2013 Tour has since been deleted from the popular video site.
Team principal Dave Brailsford claimed that the team’s legal advisors were investigating the data breach, and Froome said the videos will not tempt him into releasing his data publicly.
“I’m certainly not planning to start realising data to the public,” he said. “I can see the effects of the supposedly leaked file, it doesn’t prove one thing or another, it’s pointless.”
Brailsford declined to be interviewed by English-speaking media after Thursday’s 11th stage in Cauterets, but gave an interview to the France 2 television station.
“We have given all our data to UK Anti-Doping,” he said. “But as we do with the biological passport data, why not have a power passport and give that all to the experts?”
Froome was later defended by his teammate Geraint Thomas, who said: “It’s sad [that Froome is placed under such scrutiny] but that’s the situation of the sport.
“You can kind of see why, I guess, but if you ride well you’re accused of that. In tennis or football, if you produce a really good performance, nobody questions that.
“I’m not saying they’re doing anything wrong, but it’s sad that if you ride a bike well, people say you’re cheating.”
Chris Froome’s 2015 Tour de France bike
