• Triple Tour de France winner hedges his bets on Jiffy bag question • ‘I’ve always been very focused in my stance on doping, on riding clean’

Chris Froome was unwilling or unable to give a firm endorsement of Sir Dave Brailsford despite being repeatedly invited to back the beleaguered Team Sky principal during a 25-minute press conference on Friday.

Brailsford has been under pressure since the revelation in October that Team Sky had taken delivery of a Jiffy bag containing a medical substance at the Critérium du Dauphiné in 2011, an episode now at the centre of an inquiry by UK Anti-Doping into Team Sky and British Cycling. Before a committee of MPs looking into doping in December, Brailsford admitted that he had been “too hasty” in giving an explanation which was shown to be unfounded, and that he had “handled this situation very badly”.

Froome, when asked if Brailsford retained sufficient credibility to defend his Sky riders when tough questions about power outputs, cadences and training methods are asked at the Tour de France, replied: “That’s not for me to say.” When the question was put a second time, he answered: “You’d have to ask [Brailsford] that. I don’t know how he is going to respond.”

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The triple Tour de France winner, who will start his season at the Cadel Evans Great Ocean Road Race in Australia on 26 January, also confirmed – when pressed to do so – his revelation of two years ago that he had received completely legal injections of Fluimucil, the substance that Brailsford has stated was in the infamous Jiffy bag. The substance was at one time in use among teams as a legal way of aiding recovery by injection, before the UCI’s adoption of a ban on injections in 2011.

Asked what he knew of Fluimucil, Froome replied: “Not a lot, to be honest. It’s something I’ve used in a nebuliser before.” Later, asked directly if he had indeed been given Fluimucil by injection, as stated in an interview in June 2014, Froome said: “That was part of the recovery protocol [at the Barloworld team] before ‘no needles’ came in. Fluimucil was one of the things.”

The Olympic bronze medallist was also asked if he personally still had faith in Brailsford. He replied: “Dave himself has put his hand up and said he has made mistakes. I think if you look at what Dave has actually done, the team he has put together, I think we’ve got a great group of guys with values in the right place.”

He also said he had seen little of his team principal since the autumn apart from training camps.

Froome added: “I’d like to think when I get up there and say: ‘Believe in what I’m doing,’ when I stood on the podium in Paris and said: ‘These are yellow jerseys that are going to stand the test of time,’ that I’m not going to do anything to dishonour these yellow jerseys, that I actually meant what I said and I’m asking people to believe in that.

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“My values haven’t changed. I’ve always been very focused in terms of my stance on doping, my stance on riding clean, showing people that it is possible to win the Tour de France clean, to win multiple Tour de Frances clean. That’s what I’m going to continue to do going forward.”

He added that he remained comfortable that his principles were in harmony with those of his team, and accepted that, for now at least, he is the face of cycling so the pressure will fall on him to respond. “For me personally, it’s just going to have to be the test of time,” he said. “What I’ve promised people: we’re going to have to wait 10 years and show it there.”

Asked if he believed Brailsford’s assertion that the Jiffy bag did indeed contain Fluimucil, for which documentation has yet to be provided, Froome hedged his bets: “I don’t know any different. We’ve all been told what was in the package. Obviously the Ukad investigation is ongoing and we’ll probably have more answers when they come to the end of that. I only know as much as everyone else. I haven’t been involved in the Ukad investigation.”

Team Sky and Brailsford have also been hit by the leaking of therapeutic use exemption certificates (TUE) which showed that Sir Bradley Wiggins was given injections of the powerful corticosteroid triamcinolone before the 2011 and 2012 Tours de France and the 2013 Giro d’Italia. The injections were within the rules as the correct documentation was obtained, due to the substance being required to treat Wiggins’s pollen allergies.

He also reiterated that he believes questions are still to be answered: “A lot of people have asked questions … we have yet to get a lot of those answers but I don’t see why that should flow into the 2017 Tour.”

He added that he was unwilling to speculate whether he should have been informed that Wiggins had received an injection in 2012, and whether it might have had an effect on the outcome of that year’s Tour in which he finished second. “I’m not even going to waste energy thinking about that. It’s not helpful for me to go back and revisit certain events five years ago.”

Helpful or not, such a re-examination of history is currently under way and, while Froome is not directly involved, he appears to be looking on uneasily from the sidelines.

Froome also said he rejected a TUE to treat a medical condition during the last week of his 2015 Tour win. “It did not sit well morally with me,” he said. It was previously known that Froome had twice been granted TUEs in 2013 and 2014.