Then there’s all the other stuff – the media pressing around the bus, in your face, doubting their own interpretations, desperate not to be fooled again, dredging up innuendo and rumour but also unsure what to write . . . this is uncharted territory, I say. Nobody said it was easy . . .
He nods. ‘. . . and it’s a separate challenge, really. When it comes to that separate challenge, the thing that we started to engage more with was whether we should release the data and, if we do, what would happen then.
‘There are two ways of approaching it. You either gather the facts, do it properly – look at the facts and on the balance of what you have, the balance of probability, you form an opinion. That’s one way.
‘The second way is that you decide on your opinion, then you gather the facts and then you make sure that the facts are interpreted in a way that reinforces your opinion.
‘I’m all for the first approach,’ he says, ‘but not for the second. There are too many people taking the second approach and lacking scientific rigour, looking for evidence that will back an opinion.’
The pseudo-scientists, you mean?
‘Yes – they don’t test the rigour of the evidence first; they don’t make sure it stands up. They can’t see through those separate distinctions.’
But isn’t dealing with that, however infuriating and frustrating it may be, however misinformed or cynical, the key element in the team’s brief – isn’t that the transparency and accountability part of Team Sky’s original mission? Isn’t that the cornerstone?
‘Everybody’s interested in comparing – there’s nothing wrong with that. We’re interested, too, but do it with the right information – do it in a rigorous way. Draw your conclusions afterwards, not before.’
Surprisingly, he does think that it is possible to compare current and past performances on the Ventoux. ‘I think you can, but only if it’s rigorous. Let’s really look at the conditions, what was going on in the peloton at the time, what was the temperature at the time, what was the length of the stage – let’s go to town on it all – then you can have an informed opinion about it.
‘But really, ultimately, unless you have everybody fresh, riding from the bottom to the top, on the same day, then you can’t draw any real conclusions. I get that comparisons are fun, but it has to be done in the context where there’s no margin for error.’
The abuse, the scepticism, the mockery and questioning – surely that takes its toll?
‘My job is to be robust and resilient enough to take that on board and to try to protect the team from it. It doesn’t take a genius to see that if you want to pull a load of people together, to motivate them, you find a common enemy.
‘All the stuff that comes at us just galvanises everybody. In many respects it makes my job easier. Everybody’s pumped up because they feel under attack. It’s a siege mentality – you can start to use language which is quite emotive. That really worked for us in 2015, when Chris was getting such a hard time. I was thinking, of that very emotionally charged situation, “How can you use this to try to get a better performance?” ’
In the end, for better or worse, he admits that Team Sky unleashed their inner chimps.
‘We decided to close ranks and say: “Fuck ’em all – we’re going to win this race, we’re going to pull together.” Everyone was up for that.’
Even, says Brailsford, the most affable team personnel, such as coach Rod Ellingworth. ‘When you’ve got someone like Rod, a very personable, popular, likeable guy, saying, “I’m not taking this shit,” that’s a big behavioural change. When they saw that, it galvanised everybody and brought the group together.
‘So you can use it for your own benefit, although I wouldn’t say it was optimal. You’d prefer to be in a situation, at some point in the future, where people see a performance and go: “Wow, that’s amazing – well done.” ’
He returns to his baseline, to where we started. ‘We want to make the unbelievable believable,’ he reiterates.
There’s a resigned smile. ‘It feels a long way off, though.’
An hour ahead of the peloton racing in the 2016 Paris–Nice, I sit waiting at Chalet Reynard, listening to race radio. Here, in the lee of the mountain, with the peloton approaching from the north, the reception isn’t so good, but I can just about hear the time checks.
‘Huit minutes pour les échappées,’ after just over 20 kilometres, the radio says . . . Then, ‘Dix minutes pour les échappées,’ this time after 30 kilometres. I can’t catch any of the names in the breakaway apart from the immediately recognisable ‘Boooom’ of Lars Boom.
There is hazy sunshine at Chalet Reynard, but the temperature is struggling. The deep snow banks of the previous week have almost melted away. It’s almost spring, but not quite. A pair of Brits at the café – one wearing kit from Edgware Road Club and the other Rapha CC’s melancholic all-black – drink coffee and swap stories. They have followed the race from the frozen, icy hills of the Beaujolais, down to the watery spring sunshine of the Ventoux.
Inside the café, the log fire is burning and the rotisserie turning. Yet despite a queue of hungry fans at 11.50, the kitchen remains firmly closed. ‘A midi!’ insists the owner tetchily as, one by one, punters ask if they can eat. ‘Nooooon . . . pas avant midi!’
Far below, as the break’s lead grows to 11 minutes, the chase is on, as Team Sky and Tinkoff Saxo move to the front of the peloton. The loss of the Mont Brouilly finish 48 hours earlier, due to snow, has robbed race favourites Alberto Contador, Geraint Thomas and Richie Porte of a key rendezvous. Instead, Michael Matthews – the Australian equivalent to Peter Sagan, able to climb and sprint – rides on in yellow.
The breakaway leaves Bédoin behind and, as the climb begins, André Greipel is one of the first to crack. He is distanced even before St Estève, on the slope leading through the hamlet of St Colombe. In the peloton other sprinters soon follow suit and, by St Estève, Tyler Farrar, Tom Boonen and Marcel Kittel are losing contact. Unexpectedly, Andrew Talansky, the volatile hope of American cycling, is also among them.
But this is the Ventoux: a ruthless indicator of who’s been naughty and who’s been good during the winter break, even as early as March. Some of those left behind will make up for lost time: after the freezing descent from Chalet Reynard to Sault, there are still 120 kilometres to race, across country to the finish in Salon-de-Provence. So the crowd stands around, stamping their feet to keep warm, biding their time, cheering the occasional race vehicle that comes past, eavesdropping on race radio.
The breakaways eventually appear, wrapped up against the cold, but breathing hard. The climb has done its job, reducing them down to a handful. Boom is long gone and the peloton is now closing fast. The Movistar team lead the field past, but they remain bunched together, Contador, Thomas and Porte in their midst, riding at brisk training pace. This is nothing compared to the intensity expected in July, when the race returns for the Tour de France.
The stars roll past, followed by the long line of team cars. The convoy turns right, accelerates and disappears back into the forest and then turns towards the valley again, descending towards Sault and the Plateau d’Albion.
Race radio crackles again. Greipel has abandoned.
On 14 July 2016, the Tour de France returned to Mont Ventoux.
To the sound of a distant dustcart, beeping, banging and rattling its way through the sunrise, I woke up next to Richie Porte. The Australian was in the neighbouring room in my hotel, Le Clos de l’Aube Rouge, in an anonymous suburb of Montpellier. We’d crossed paths on the gloomy corridor the night before, acknowledging each other with a cursory nod. After the wind-blown stage from Carcassonne to Montpellier, BMC Racing team’s leader was turning in for an early night, just as I was heading out in search of a late dinner.
As we passed each other, there was a flicker of recognition in his eyes, based perhaps on some vague memory of his hackles rising in response to a question about his improved performances after hi
s 2013 victory in Paris–Nice. But maybe not: maybe it was my imagination. Perhaps by now any rider who’d won a race in Team Sky colours had become so accustomed to that line of questioning, the constant innuendo, that it was quickly forgotten, water off a duck’s back.
By the next morning, he probably thought I was stalking him. We exited our rooms at almost the same moment, me appearing in the corridor as he locked his own door, both grunting in recognition once more and me then following him – at a respectful distance, mind – down the same gloomy passage, through the lobby and to the hotel’s breakfast room.
Richie is an odd fish. It’s hard to shake the idea that, with his talents, a more forceful character would have achieved greater results. But he struggles to impress, his voice a flat monotone and his demeanour often one of boredom. He always appears a little distracted. But he must love cycling because on his 29th birthday he rode 400 kilometres around Tasmania in a single day, with fellow pro Cameron Wurf, sustaining himself with Coke, iced coffee and cheese and Vegemite rolls.
I’ve seen him really animated just the once, hurling abuse at former team-mate and training partner Froome as they crossed a finish line during the 2016 Critérium du Dauphiné, moments after Team Sky’s leader and his team-mates had blocked Porte’s path and cost him a top-three finish in the Alpine race. I didn’t catch all of what was said, as a breeze blew across the mountains and the crowd, such as it was, cheered the riders home, but as the pair free-wheeled past us, I was pretty sure I heard Porte bellow a stream of obscenities. We jogged after him, anticipating a Cavendish-style meltdown of helmet-hurling and microphone-mashing. But no: ten minutes later, Richie had calmed down, got off the bus and assured us that everything between him and Chris was just fine.
Back in Montpellier, I walked through the lobby towards the breakfast room. Two or three armed gendarmes, in bullet-proof vests, their right hands on their holsters, hung around edgily in the reception area. Post-Charlie Hebdo, post-Bataclan, this was the Tour’s new normal and a sight I was becoming increasingly used to as the race wore on. France’s most-loved sporting event was on terror alert. A police car parked outside, adjacent to the BMC Racing team bus, monitored the hotel entrance.
I sat down to breakfast a few tables from BMC’s management, where Jim Ochowicz – with almost two weeks of the Tour still to come – was talking through plans for the team’s end-of-race party in Paris. Porte, the first of his riders to appear, paused to say good morning before strolling on to the private annexe where he and his team-mates ate undisturbed.
Today, Ventoux day, was a big moment for Porte, a potential moving day. He had lost vital time on the second stage of the race, stalled by a puncture on the climb to the finish in Cherbourg. On that occasion, he hadn’t calmed down before speaking to the press and his fragile self-belief was all too visible. ‘It was a disaster but what can you do?’ he blurted, before venting about sustaining his hopes, not of overall victory, but for a stage win. Since then, BMC had been working to rebuild his morale. Now they would find out how effective their reboot had been.
It was a big day for me as well. For the first time in over a decade, I’d opted to take up a place on the press motorbike offered up to the media. Years ago, when the riders washed their own kit each evening and slept in musty dormitories, and Dr Dumas rode pillion, many journalists covered major races, such as the Tour, from motorbikes. This was long before the Tour became a motorshow, long before race car parks were crammed with branded-up Octavias, Scenics, Méganes and even the occasional Maserati Ghibli.
The great pontificators of cycling journalism once rode pillion, like Dumas, stopping at a mid-stage buffet and nodding off against their driver’s back on long, hot stages through the flatlands, donning mackintosh and flat cap for storm-wracked stages through the Alps and Pyrenees. They spent hours chin-stroking their way through 600 words and a bottle of Brouilly or Morgon, sometimes even at the same dining table as the riders. They read their copy down the line, from a phone box or a hotel lobby. They didn’t have to do podcasts, webchats, live radio, blogs, tweets, or Instagram sunsets (hashtag cliché). They certainly didn’t write about doping.
Now, following an initiative from the Tour’s service presse, they can do that again – the pillion passenger part, that is, not the chin-stroking. Taking a seat on the motorbike was a chance to get closer to the peloton, to experience the weather, the bumps and gradients in the road, the wind in my face. After years spent driving to the pressroom and finding a place in a crammed sports hall or gymnasium, as close to a plasma screen as possible, I wanted to experience that again. Luckily, nobody else wanted to take the remaining available pillion seat on the stage from Montpellier to the Ventoux.
I cadged a lift to the start with the fresh-faced team from Danish newspaper BT, covering only their second Tour. We headed into town, parallel to the race route, me encouraging them to drive the wrong way down tram tracks as we struggled through the road closures to the start. ‘Don’t worry, it’s the Tour – there won’t be any trams today,’ I said airily as a tram appeared around a corner and rolled alarmingly quickly towards us.
Already, the wind that had marked the previous afternoon’s racing and decapitated the eagerly awaited finish on the Giant was blowing hard. A viciously gusting Mistral sent spirals of dust spinning into the blue sky at the start village in Montpellier’s Champ de Mars gardens.
The stage had been scheduled to climax at Ventoux’s summit, but after the recent introduction of the extreme-weather protocol, ASO were wary of taking risks. Faced with 100-kilometre-an-hour winds, the Tour organisation had to consider the worst-case scenario – that the protocol was invoked mid-stage and the summit finish abandoned. So Prudhomme and his team opted to bring the finish line down the mountain to Chalet Reynard.
The decision was met with disappointment and derision from some. Prudhomme, however, insisted that there was no choice. ‘We can’t set up two finish lines. We’re not going to play poker by saying, “Let’s see tomorrow whether we put it higher or lower,” ’ he had explained the previous evening in Montpellier.
Prudhomme didn’t respond well to one journalist’s suggestion that cycling was getting soft. ‘I think it was the right decision, the decision of a responsible organiser, to protect both the riders and the public.’
Already in March 2016, ASO had cancelled a stage of Paris–Nice, invoking the new extreme-weather protocol (EWP) as sleet settled on the roads around Mont Brouilly. The introduction of the EWP had been accelerated by indecision at two recent Italian races, Milan–San Remo in 2013 and Tirreno–Adriatico in 2015. On both occasions, as heavy snow fell on the peloton, there had been heated debate over whether to continue racing. The parameters of the newly introduced EWP were developed to end the conficts between riders and race organisers. The EWP had been welcomed by some but also criticised by others.
As Team Sky’s Rod Ellingworth pointed out, the days of suffering through blizzards and freezing rain were probably over. So, in all probability, were the days of extraordinary exploits, such as Bernard Hinault’s victory in the snowbound 1980 Liège–Bastogne–Liège or Andy Hampsten’s attack, mid-blizzard, on the Gavia climb, during the 1988 Giro d’Italia.
‘Things move on,’ Ellingworth said. ‘We spend a lot of money on riders, and their health and safety is key to the team. So I don’t think there’s any team who would have wanted to carry on on Mont Brouilly.
‘If you did get riders injured badly in those conditions, you’d think, “Why didn’t they stop the race?”
‘So carrying on is a big risk. Everybody knows that and everybody knows that cancelling the race is a big deal too. I don’t think there’s an ideal solution.’
Not everyone was so sure. Allan Peiper, a survivor of the 1988 blizzard on the Gavia and now a sports director at BMC, was conflicted. ‘If I look back, I was proud to go over the Gavia that day,’ the Australian said, as we stood in warm sunshine in Nice, a few days after the Brouilly stage had been cancelled. ‘I
was last over the top of the Gavia, and I finished 39th on the stage and rode all the way to the finish. It was something to go through, a rite of passage. Maybe that’s lost now because of the growing professionalism of the sport.’
Did Peiper think that some riders needed to man up a bit?
‘I can think that, but I can’t say it. I come from a different generation.
‘I came to Europe and lived in an old butcher’s shop, stealing spinach from a stall at the side of the street, so how can I tell riders to toughen up? It’s like two different worlds.’
Peiper’s schooling as a professional was in Flanders, where the icy winters hardened him. ‘But global warming has changed things,’ he said. ‘I remember in the winter of 1985 to 1986. There were two weeks in Belgium when it was minus 15, and I trained nearly every day, around Geraardsbergen, where the roads were salted.
‘I was used to riding in those conditions but those days are gone: we don’t have that weather any more. We haven’t really had a wet Paris–Roubaix in 20 years, so the riders are not as used to those conditions.
‘You get the first hint of rain in Belgium and the riders are travelling to Spain to train. The mentality has changed.’
As a young rider, Peiper experienced bad weather on the Ventoux. ‘I defended the white jersey in Paris–Nice on the Ventoux in March 1985. It had been snowing then, too, and the snow was at least a metre thick on the side of the road.
‘We made it to Chalet Reynard where the finish was – Sean Kelly won and took the leader’s jersey. It wasn’t raining or snowing but it was freezing.
‘But I hate the Ventoux, just hate it. It’s a bastard of a climb. I’ve ridden it a couple of times in the past few years – in fact, a couple of years ago I got up in an hour and 32 minutes, which is pretty quick for my age.
‘But,’ Peiper said, ‘every time I go back I wonder, “What am I thinking . . .?!” ’
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