Racing Hard

by William Fotheringham

  There are obvious similarities between the pair, however. Both used track cycling to hone their speed and bike handling – Hoban has compared Cavendish to Patrick Sercu, a track specialist who took the Tour’s green jersey in 1974. And Hoban was the last rider to win a Tour finish on a velodrome, in 1975, at the age of 35, when he zipped down the banking at Bordeaux to outsprint a bevy of youngsters. Cavendish would have been at home there as well.

  Both men complain that they are better known in Europe [than in Britain], but only Hoban is correct. Cavendish’s frank autobiography, Boy Racer, rightly made headlines and he has many more years ahead of him in which his profile will rise. In his autobiography, published soon after he retired in 1980, Hoban was bitter that his achievements went largely unnoticed: “It would be nice not [to be] pushed into oblivion as if it didn’t count. No one knows who the hell Barry Hoban was.” Right now, it’s hard to see Cavendish suffering the same fate.

  There has been another key player in recent Tours: Alberto Contador. Whatever one feels about his ethics few can deny his influence. This piece was written before he took his third win in the Tour, and many months before that third win was taken away from him.

  The gunslinger firing at a place in the pantheon

  27 June 2010

  For the past two decades the Tour de France has belonged to the USA and Spain. The Americans have followed their national stereotype to the letter: global stars such as Greg LeMond and Lance Armstrong, both of whom managed the greatest comebacks in the sport’s history and took salary levels to stratospheric heights, accompanied by, in Armstrong’s case at least, whirlwinds of controversy – bigger arguments, juicier doping allegations, and meatier lawsuits.

  The Spanish, on the other hand, have gone to the other extreme. If Armstrong is the equivalent of a jet fighter – very fast, cracking the sound barrier as he goes, shaking those around him out of their slumbers, and leaving an unmissable slipstream – the Spanish resemble those black triangular things made largely of carbon fibre that zip about under the radar. They are stealth cyclists, remaining largely unnoticed before and after the racing is done.

  Miguel Indurain was the first Spanish stealth champion, dominating the Tour from 1991 to 1995, five Julys in which the most dramatic event was the annual ritual of watching him receive his birthday cake. As Indurain was about to win his first Tour, a Spanish journalist came up with the phrase that was to sum up Big Mig: so impenetrable was the great man, said the writer, that the woman in his life would never know the man she had married. Oscar Pereiro and Carlos “the silent assassin” Sastre, respectively 2006 and 2008 winners, were so obscure that no one even went to the trouble of dreaming up such a line about them.

  This year, Spain’s fourth stealth cycling champion, Alberto Contador, is expected to win his third Tour in four starts, if the form he has shown this year holds. Three Tour victories would be key, as that marks the point at which a Tour winner joins a small, elite club: only eight riders in the race’s history have managed three victories or more. Equally strong in the time-trials and the mountains, Contador is the perfect all-rounder, and has won every major Tour he has entered since 2007, taking the Giro d’Italia and Vuelta a España in 2008, when he did not start in France. Only four other cyclists have won all three Grand Tours during their careers. It is a remarkable record for a rider still only 27.

  Yet he has remained in the shadows, emerging to take the plaudits before returning to live the life of a normal man in Pinto, an anonymous dormitory town in the Madrid hinterland. No tax exile in Monte Carlo for him. As far as indulgences go, Contador’s are decidedly modest: a Porsche he bought after his Giro win, a BMW that was his personal reward after last year’s defeat of Armstrong, a Weimar dog called “Tour” bought after his first win in the French race. Birds are one of his hobbies, but he has given up his aviary of 20 canaries.

  “Off the bike he is a simple, humble guy, but on the bike … There are two different faces to Alberto: one in the saddle, the other in front of the press,” said his directeur sportif, the Italian Giuseppe Martinelli, who ironically enough was Marco Pantani’s manager in the 1990s. The same was said of Indurain, time after time. Contador’s one concession to the charisma-seekers is the victory salute: he mimes a shooting gesture like a child playing cowboys and Indians, which has led to him being nicknamed pistolero or gunslinger.

  Spanish stealth cyclists are a recent trend, some would say a historical aberration. On two wheels, Spain was once known for producing charismatic, quixotic figures such as Federico Bahamontes, a child of the civil war famed for two episodes, one in which he was (wrongly) claimed to have left the field behind on a climb, then stopped at the top for an ice cream, another in which he set about an opponent with a pump. Luis Ocaña was a tormented champion of the 1970s, who regularly attempted to defeat Eddy Merckx only to implode dramatically en route. Perico Delgado was an equally unpredictable character who lost the 1989 Tour by turning up late for the start of the prologue.

  Perhaps this sea change helps explain why Spain is no longer a major cycling nation, if its representation in the Tour is any measure. There is one fully Spanish team in the Tour, but it would be insulted at that description: Euskaltel is Basque, not Spanish. The Caisse d’Epargne squad is French-sponsored, but largely Spanish-managed. And that is it. Ironically, Spain has the strongest stage racer in the world, but no team for him to ride in. As a result, Contador will line up in the colours of Astana, financed by the Kazakh national development fund Samruk Kazyna, with largely Italian management and inevitably known as Team Borat.

  Contador began riding a handed-down bike from his elder brother Francisco at the age of 15. On their first ride together, on a little hill outside Pinto, he was faster than his brother, and that seems to have sparked his interest in cycling. From his earliest races he was given the nickname Pantani, because like Pantani he would always sprint for the King of the Mountains award in every event he rode. By the age of 20, he was a professional, under the tutelage of Manolo Saiz, who had a knack for discovering emerging stars until busted during the Operación Puerto blood doping scandal of 2006.

  One reason why Contador has remained relatively unsung is because each of his Grand Tour wins has been overshadowed by other events. His 2007 Tour victory, riding for the Discovery team, was a relative anti-climax as the race tried to get its collective head around a series of drug scandals. His 2008 Giro and Vuelta wins were emphatic – the more so as he rode the Giro at a week’s notice – but what mattered more was the fact that his team, Astana, were refused entry to the Tour due to involvement in the 2007 drug scandals (in which Contador had not been implicated). No Tour winner had ever had to suffer such humiliation.

  2009, of course, was the year of the reprise of cycling’s greatest comeback, with Armstrong in the starring role. Contador may have won, but the main strand in the plot was his relations with the Texan, who was then also riding for Astana and employed every psychological trick up his sleeve in an attempt to destabilise the younger man. Armstrong attacked Contador on a cross-wind stage early on, and then criticised him publicly for not following the team’s gameplan in the Pyrenees. Afterwards, Contador said there had been “a tendency to prioritise other people’s interests”. In other words, Astana were racing for Armstrong even though Contador was the strongest.

  It might have seemed astonishing that Contador was not destabilised, but in fact it is no surprise once his past was taken into account. In 2004, Contador crashed at the Tour of Asturias. It seemed an ordinary fall, but Contador noticed something: he had abrasions on the back of his hands, not the palms as would be expected. In other words, he had been unconscious when he fell. It was discovered that the fainting fit was linked to a cavernoma, an aneurism: he was offered the option of a risky operation to solve the problem, or remaining handicapped in the sense that he would not be allowed to ride his bike or drive.

  The operation left him with 100 stitches running from ear to ear, but it left him with someth
ing else, according to those close to him: maturity. “He has said this escape has helped him recognise what is important in life: every time he looks in a mirror he can see the scar, which is as if a doctor had opened his head to look at his brain,” says Jacinto Vidarte, the former journalist who handles press for Contador. “He looks older than his true age, because he matured quickly. It always surprises people: he seems far older and more experienced than they expect.”

  There are question marks over Contador’s ability to notch up a third Tour win. One involves the strength of his team: Astana was left virtually riderless when Armstrong moved on with all his mates, and has been rebuilt with a core of strong Italians and Spaniards, including Pereiro. It has never looked poor this year, but whether it will come apart in the crucible of the Tour is another question. There are also doubts about Contador’s capacity to get through one specific stage, the third, which includes several sections of the cobbles used in the Paris-Roubaix Classic. But if he is in with a shout when the Tour enters the Pyrenees in the final week, the Spanish stealth fighter will take some shooting down.

  Contador won the 2010 Tour after a tense duel with Andy Schleck, but was eventually disqualified after a lengthy dispute over a positive test for clenbuterol, which the Court for Arbitration in Sport ruled was probably due to a contaminated food supplement. He rode the 2011 race with the shadow of an impending suspension hanging over him, and was not present in 2012. He will return to the Tour in 2013.

  The other story of the 2010 Tour was the arrival of Team Sky, formed by Dave Brailsford on the back of British Cycling’s Olympic success – of which more later. With Bradley Wiggins in the leader’s role, their Tour debut was not a happy one.

  Lifting the lid on Sky’s icy precision

  18 July 2010

  Just inside the wide-open door of the Team Sky doctor’s hotel room sits the ice bath. It is not much to look at: a paddling pool with a pipe to bring in water at 10 degrees and another to pump it out. Something small and yellow is sitting in the water. It is not a climber who has caught jaundice. It is final confirmation that here is a team that covers every detail: it is a rubber duck. “You’ve seen all our secrets now,” jokes Dave Brailsford, the team principal.

  On which note, let us backtrack for a moment and make a more serious point. Team doctor. Hotel room door. Wide open. Doctor absent. “He’s very trusting,” says one staff member, but that’s only part of the point. There is nothing to stop me – or a WADA (World Anti-Doping Agency) patrol, or one of the French television crews who like to do this kind of thing – popping in and rootling around in search of incriminating performance-enhancing stuff.

  Open doors are not the norm in professional cycling. Trust has been a rare commodity since well before the Festina scandal of 1998, and if you believe only half the stories of the stuff that has gone on behind locked hotel room doors you can see why. But back in February 2009 when Sky’s sponsorship of a British-centred professional team was announced, Brailsford said he would have an open-doors policy: come and see what we do. The team doctor has clearly taken Brailsford at his word. So here we are.

  The doctor’s room is not empty for long. The sports scientist Matt Parker – the trainer who guided Britain’s pursuiters to a world record and a gold medal in Beijing – brings along the team’s Norwegian starlet, Edvald Boasson Hagen. Haagen-Dazs, as he is inevitably known, sits on the bed and Parker wraps his legs in two contraptions that resemble outsize moon boots.

  NormaTec space boots are used for treating circulatory conditions, putting pressure on the legs to pulse upwards; the team are using them to speed up recovery. The ice bath performs the same function – as used by rugby players – but has a more important role: with the temperatures on the Tour, 35 to 40 degrees by day, 20-plus at night, the riders take a quick dip before bed, to drop their core body temperature, so that they sleep without sweating.

  These are all part of a panoply of ways in which Sky are trying to improve their riders’ performance: recovery is key in the Tour and sleep is a vital part of that. To that end, Sky have brought their own mattresses, duvets and pillows on the race. They are all hypoallergenic, so that the riders do not wake up with the sniffles hotel beds often produce. They are new, so they contain less dust. And some of the pillows contain built-in iPod speakers so that as the riders go to sleep, they can listen to what they want without disturbing their room-mate, who may well be in a bed just inches away, dying for peace and quiet.

  “Eighty to 90 per cent of what we do is the same as other teams, but the aim here is to try harder to help the riders in areas such as nutrition, recovery, what goes in their bottles,” says the most senior directeur sportif, Sean Yates, a British icon as a cyclist and as a manager a veteran of major teams such as CSC and Lance Armstrong’s Astana. “They are going into everything.”

  Enhancing every area that can be controlled means two things: the riders’ performance should improve, over time, and they should have no reason to use doping as a psychological crutch. But it all takes more time and application. That morning, the team helper designated to move the bedding explained it takes him an hour on his own to get duvets, sheets and mattresses into vast bags, and load them into the big black van.

  Not far away, Parker and another helper were filling the day’s 40 ice bags. These are women’s stockings filled with handfuls of ice (the hotels have to supply Tour teams with a designated amount; Sky, naturally, have their own back-up ice-maker); Yates hands them up from the team car to cool the riders down during the stage. Cooling being critical, the team have ice bowls on the bus for after the stage, when the riders wear silicone neck scarves, as used by the military.

  The morning briefing has been transformed, with the use of military terms (wingman, tailguard). “In a lot of team meetings there isn’t much clarity about what the roles are,” Bradley Wiggins says. “It needs to be very clear, so that I won’t be complaining to someone that he isn’t getting bottles when it isn’t his job. A lot of guys are shocked by how advanced it is, others have said their teams were just appalling for communication.”

  At the briefings, the riders seem to do as much of the talking as the management, with Wiggins and the Canadian Michael Barry in a lead role. “Most teams do what they do because they are run by ex-cyclists and that’s what they’ve always done,” Barry says. “Here, no one individual thinks he has an answer to anything. If issues arise, we get them off our chests. From day one, they opened up lines of communication, we were made aware our opinions mattered and that if we expressed them things might change.”

  Sitting alongside Yates on a very hot day on the Tour, you become aware of the “80 to 90 per cent” that Sky have not changed: the directeur sportif constantly handing up bottle after bottle, warning his riders of road conditions through the helmet radios, juggling supplies of ice and bottles. You note also that some of the riders – Steve Cummings, Boasson Hagen – have their own bottles, with different electrolyte mixes, because they sweat in a different way.

  Watching the group of 180 cyclists deal with 40-degree temperatures, a vicious dry headwind and climb after climb, a bigger point rams itself home: the Tour is light years away from the track racing that Brailsford and his team dominated in Beijing less than two years ago.

  The variables of terrain, weather, inter-team tactics and the agendas of the rest of the bunch have almost infinite variety. Comparing track and Tour is like setting martial arts against pure war. That military terminology is not misplaced.

  Among the bustle of the 13 Sky-badged vehicles and the 32 staff and riders, it is easy to forget that this is a project in its infancy. So much has been written and said about Brailsford’s new brainchild that two points have been overlooked: this is year one of a five-year project to win the Tour, and Wiggins and company in the Tour is just part of a larger picture for Sky and its partner, British Cycling.

  Team Sky at the Tour de France is just the tip of the Sky iceberg: down below are mass-participation rides, taki
ng cycling into schools, and putting 125 Sky employees into today’s Étape du Tour, the chance for amateurs to face the kind of challenge the pros must deal with. Sky have a director of cycling, Corin Dimopoulos, who has between seven and 70 employees working for him. In the nation’s bike shops, opinions have been divided about the project, but the Tour’s roadsides tell another story: on the evidence of a week driving, the route, the black, white and blue strip is more popular than any other pro-team jersey.

  What of the future? In terms of signings, speculation is naturally centred on the fact that Mark Cavendish has an opt-out in his contract at the end of the season. But on the bigger picture, race coach Rod Ellingworth, for one, notes that Sky are only at the base of a long learning curve: senior Tour teams can have up to 20 years behind them.

  “If you look at the majority of us on the Tour, apart from the riders, we haven’t done it before,” he says. “It is a big enough challenge for many teams, for us there’s the moulding-together process, Sean [Yates] has never been a lead directeur sportif at the Tour and that needs developing, we are trying out different techniques, trying to find out what works best, whether it’s equipment, bikes, clothing, trying to build a coaching model. In a business, the building period is 18 months from when you start, so that means two Tours. By the third, we should be bang on.”

  It’s rare that you have a pay-off as prescient as this quote: in year three Team Sky went on to win the Tour with Bradley Wiggins. That’s more credit to Ellingworth’s vision than my ability to foresee the future. There would be changes, however: Yates left Sky at the end of 2012; Cavendish came in for 2012 and left at the end of the season as well.