There was yet another dimension to the debate, as Tejay Van Garderen bemoaned the lack of chivalry shown by some towards misfortune befalling the wearer of the yellow jersey. ‘The gentlemanly thing to do,’ the American said, ‘would be to stop and wait and regroup. You saw a lot of that in the past but these days people just seem to want to take advantage of it.’
The polemic continued, but it was a half-hearted debate. The Tour bubble had already burst. The brutal truths of the real world had intruded. The party was over. That realisation had been written all over Prudhomme’s weary face. And from that mournful morning in Bourg-Saint-Andéol, all the way to a stiflingly humid evening on the Champs-Élysées, nobody was really in the mood for a celebration.
It’s the end of a long summer. Not for the first time, I’m hanging around the Team Sky bus hoping to speak to Dave Brailsford. This time the location is Gandia, Spain, as the 2016 Vuelta a España comes to an end. It’s a hot September afternoon, team buses and cars parked haphazardly on the finish line, by the beach resort’s small port, an hour or so south of Valencia.
I spot Brailsford. He’s sitting on a bench on the quayside, sunglasses on, deep in a phone conversation, hand cupped, oddly, Mourinho-like, over his mouth. I scan the scene for camera crews, but there are none. Does he think someone is lip-reading?
We’d been meaning to talk since late July when he’d mailed me regarding a tweet I’d put out about Team Sky’s budget, their catenaccio riding style and the Tour’s musings over rider numbers in each team, all of which had been hot topics when Froome had won his third Tour. I maintain a respectful distance, waiting for him to finish the call. Next time I look, he’s gone. Somehow, through the parked cars, the crowds milling around the team, I miss him. A few minutes later, the bus doors hiss closed and it moves off.
The next day, at the start of the Vuelta’s pivotal time trial, I am hanging around once more by the bus. I try to speak to him again. We exchange texts. Something’s come up, he says, and he can’t talk.
It’s the same the next day in Benidorm, although this time there is another sighting, among the crowds at the start village. He is on another lengthy phone call, hand cupped over mouthpiece, shades on, body language a million miles from the bonhomie of Holborn. Eventually, he deigns to speak. ‘Better be quick,’ he says brusquely. I throw him some quickfire standard questions. Is a Tour–Vuelta double more possible for Froome than a Giro–Tour double? Did travelling to Rio impact on Froome’s Vuelta? Blah-blah cycling speak, but enough for a story.
Two days later, the leak, fuelled by Russian hackery, of Bradley Wiggins’ highly questionable TUE history becomes a tale of unexplained couriers and mystery Jiffy bags, and sparks a lengthy saga of fresh suspicion against Team Sky. This time, however, Brailsford’s justifications are muddled and contradictory. He gets his facts wrong. He falters badly when trying to explain why a package was flown to Wiggins. He says he doesn’t know what was in it. Froome, meanwhile, distances himself from his team boss.
The questions, spearheaded by Matt Lawton at the Daily Mail and Daniel Benson at cyclingnews.com, won’t go away. Even David Walsh, happy to vouch for Brailsford and Team Sky in the past, turns on him and calls for his resignation.
There is obfuscation, fumbled communications and contradictory accounts, but this time there is no talk of pseudo-scientists. Wiggins stumbles anxiously through an interview on The Andrew Marr Show, mumbling about a ‘level playing field’, but later reverts to type, abusing the press in one of his final press conferences after racing in Ghent. The media are all stirring it, Bradley says, targeting the Daily Mail and describing journalists as ‘cunts’. It’s classic Wiggins, childlike and petulant until the end. And it doesn’t address the issue.
Still, some depict his bravado as ‘Brad being Brad’, a man of the people setting the record straight, slagging off the malicious, malevolent Mail. But I just see entitlement and arrogance as a substitute for telling the truth.
What was in the bag, Brad? What was in the bag?
It’s a question that won’t go away and that Wiggins, his retirement looming, won’t answer. Now even a Parliamentary select committee wants to know. Meanwhile, the shadows lengthen and Team Sky and Brailsford twist on the end of a rope.
Portraits of Britain’s most distinguished parliamentarians run the length of the wood-panelled first floor corridor in Portcullis House, Westminster. Thatcher, Douglas-Home, Major, Blair and Cameron stare loftily down from the walls. Outside, a December morning fog is wafting over the grey Thames. Dutifully, as packs of tourists gather for selfies on Westminster Bridge, the fog lifts and Big Ben’s clock face sharpens a little.
In the corridor outside the Thatcher Room, where the Department for Culture, Media and Sport is convening the latest select committee investigating doping in sport, a knot of sports journalists is gathering. They are keen to follow the evidence of British Cycling president Bob Howden, former Team GB coach Shane Sutton and, finally, the driving force behind the British cycling revolution, knight of the realm, David Brailsford.
At around 11.15, Bob Howden takes his seat before the committee and is the first to give evidence. He is quickly out of his depth. He is told by one select committee member that the Wiggins story is ‘a disaster for you and British Cycling’. MP after MP mocks Howden’s inability to detail the contents of packages flown around Europe by British Cycling staff. ‘I’m getting worried about our customs now!’ Andrew Bingham snorts.
John Nicolson MP nods in the direction of the watching media, seated behind Howden. ‘There are journalists behind you, laughing,’ he points out. Committee member Nigel Huddleston voices what everyone is thinking. ‘Are you up to this?’ he says. ‘If I was a corporate sponsor I’d be very concerned.’
The second act is Shane Sutton, for so long Brailsford’s right-hand man, Wiggins’ mentor and coach, and now centre stage. The questions about Wiggins’ medical needs and that now-infamous Jiffy bag are put to him, one after another.
‘There’s a huge amount of autonomy given to the medical staff,’ committee chairman Damian Collins says to Sutton. ‘You’d expect the head coach to be party to those conversations . . .’ Sutton counters that he hadn’t asked what the treatment for Wiggins was. ‘I didn’t ask any questions. My job was outside that of the medical team.’
There are long pauses after some questions, as if he is biting his tongue, swallowing his anger. But it doesn’t help. His famously pugnacious temper shows itself in the end.
‘You, sitting there, being British,’ he tells the committee, ‘you should be embracing the success they’ve achieved. They’ve all done it clean.’
Shane pauses. ‘You’ve actually upset me there. I’m astounded that you would take that sort of tone with me. I’m upset you question the integrity of the team.’
Brailsford is the headline act. Dressed immaculately in a three-piece suit, crisp white shirt and cufflinks, he looks every part the calm captain of industry, unflappable, at ease. He settles into his chair and unbuttons his jacket.
I listen to Dave talking, as I’ve listened to him talk so many times before. I think of his journey, from the fan packing a van for Planet X, the driven business student, to his dream job at British Cycling, the gold medals won everywhere from LA, to Palma, to Athens, Beijing, and then the great homecoming to London 2012; of the moments he’d shamelessly jumped for joy on finish lines and, most of all, of Froome’s win that day overlooking the Simpson memorial, up on the Ventoux.
Soon we learn what Brailsford believes the package couriered to Wiggins contained – an over-the-counter decongestant readily available in France, although not in the UK. It quickly becomes clear that, according to Brailsford, Team Sky flew a banal over-the-counter drug, costing a few euros, out to France to be delivered by hand by a British Cycling employee – a trip that took four days to complete – when it was readily available near by.
He takes some more questions. I am struck by just how far he has come in his attitude towar
ds sports doctors. When Team Sky was created, Brailsford had identified his philosophy towards sports medicine as a significant break with the dubious practices of the past. ‘I want British doctors who haven’t worked in professional cycling before,’ he told the Guardian in June 2009. ‘The problem is that people come into professional cycling and compromise. We can’t compromise.’
Now, he sat in Westminster detailing the structure of his medical team, their influence and their role in rider care. ‘The issuing of a TUE is driven by the team doctor,’ he says.
‘But do you push back on the decisions of your medical staff?’ Collins asks him.
Brailsford denies that his medical staff wield too much power and might need reining in. ‘We have created a very clear policy on culture and anti-doping,’ he says.
Yet a picture was emerging of a management structure that handed autonomy to medical staff, who blithely despatched products around Europe to be hand-delivered to their star riders. In the pre-doping-control era, the ‘treatment’ that so appalled Pierre Dumas had been left in the hands of soigneurs, or the riders themselves. That culture of self-medication, as Malléjac, Simpson and the earliest dabblings of Generation EPO demonstrated, had sometimes been disastrous.
As anti-doping established a presence, sports medicine did the same, enabling ethical competitors to stay within the rules, but allowing others, as we now know, to circumvent them. Meanwhile, the year-round demands to perform intensified, all of which enhanced the influence of sports doctors and brought them from the wings to centre stage. Michele Ferrari’s trajectory is, of course, the paradigm of this. A genius to some and a diabolical influence to others – and a man who Armstrong still says he loves. At the height of Armstrong’s success, however, Ferrari was probably the most influential man in cycling.
Nearly three hours after the select committee session had opened, Brailsford remained defiant. ‘There is no question of a cover-up,’ he says. ‘There was no intention to mislead in any shape or form.’ But the committee still wants to see a paper trail.
Brailsford might have thought the matter had been put to bed. But his answers had only provoked more questions. Now nothing could stem the tsunami of suspicion that was coming Team Sky’s way or the inevitability of further probing, both by the media and by Collins and his committee members.
At the heart of it all was Brailsford, all energy and ambition, whose supposed attention to marginal gains and microscopic detail suggested that he knew just how finely ground Froome liked his espresso, the thickness of paint on each of his riders’ frames, and the preferred weight of down in Geraint Thomas’s pillow. Yet nobody at Team Sky, it appeared, knew what was in Brad’s bag.
In the aftermath of Wiggins’ Tour win and London 2012, cycling in Britain had exploded in popularity. There was a vast reservoir of cash, some public, some private, buoying the collective that was British Cycling and Team Sky. But where one structure began and the other ended was never clear. Jiffy-gate revealed that the reservoir had morphed into a gravy train, characterised by British Cycling employees swanning around Europe working for Team Sky, swapping hats more often than Matt Damon in The Adjustment Bureau.
From the innovations in the Death Star, the altitude training in Tenerife, the marginal gains and the bespoke campervans, to the tacit suggestions that other teams were staffed by sporting simpletons and performance halfwits, Team Sky’s mantra was that success had been built on a highly publicised culture of ingenuity and innovation.
Now many were joining the growing armies of trolls and pseudo-scientists that had been on the march since Froome’s win on Ventoux, doubting Brailsford and his theory of marginal gains, wondering instead if they’d been fooled by the oldest trick in the book.
‘We might, in that indeterminate period they call mourning, be in a submarine, silent on the ocean’s bed, aware of the depth charges, now near and now far, buffeting us with recollections.’
The Year of Magical Thinking,
JOAN DIDION
The Light That Never Goes Out
On a grey November morning in the rural suburbs of Ghent, I walk up to the front door of Joanne Simpson’s house and ring the bell. As I wait, I glimpse the plasma screen in her lounge through her front window, relaying the 2016 election results from America and the unmistakably ruddy complexion of a wide-eyed Donald Trump.
Joanne flings open the door. She is in her mid-fifties, petite, cheery and bespectacled, with her father’s nose and immediate, ready smile. She looks fit, wiry and healthy. Perhaps that’s no surprise, given she rides well over 300 kilometres a week and says that, in good shape, her best average speed from Bédoin to the summit of the Ventoux is 17 kilometres an hour. That sounds pretty quick to me. Then she tells me that she once topped 100 kilometres an hour as she descended to Malaucène.
As her partner heads off to work, Joanne fires up the coffee machine. The house, in a quiet cul-de-sac, is modern, ordered and neat. On the wall, there are some small watercolour paintings of cyclists, and a couple of black-and-white photographs too. One in particular catches my eye, of her dad, in his kit, crouched on a patch of grass. It’s Tom being Tom, mugging for the snappers, picking a flower on the morning before he died.
Joanne built much of the kitchen and some other furniture herself. ‘I’m a technical designer and a furniture maker, like Daddy,’ she says. The workshop adjoining the kitchen houses a workstand, numerous tools and, on the wall, her dad’s old saddle and other memorabilia. ‘Most of what I have I treasure – the little things, his passport, the bike he won the Ronde with. You don’t give things like that away.’
There’s also a Pinarello bike, fixed to a turbo trainer. ‘I’ve always had a bike, a racing bike,’ she says, although Joanne only started riding seriously in her mid-thirties. ‘Now I ride three times a week, about 120-kilometre loops each time, not the really long distances. So over 300 kilometres a week, but that’s not extreme . . .’ However, in the Flemish Ardennes, where she does most of her riding, such a distance counts for a lot. ‘They’re all the roads from the Ronde Van Vlaanderen – the Tour of Flanders. The Muur, the Koppenberg and so on. So 120 kilometres or so in that area – that’s hard going’
Joanne is a survivor. She has survived the trauma and the numerous aftershocks, within her family, of losing her father so young, in such a dramatic way. She also survived a major head injury that left her in a coma after she fell from her bike. And there’s more: a week before flight MH17 was shot down over the Ukraine, Joanne flew that same route, from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur. ‘It seems like I have so many lives,’ she says.
Maybe you’ve got a guardian angel, I suggest. She smiles.
Joanne came off her bike when she tangled with some road furniture. ‘I hit my head. My helmet cracked in three places.’ Although now fully recovered, she has been left with some senses impaired. ‘The noise impulses and the visual impulses in my brain don’t go together. I can’t handle visual and audio impulses together. I can’t go to parties, I can’t go into town. I can’t work with machinery any more. I didn’t drive for a year but I can now. But on the motorway I feel nauseous sometimes. That’s why I wanted to meet here at home.’
Yet she is so fizzing with energy and enthusiasm, so expressive, that it’s hard to tell anything might be wrong. Only sometimes, when she briefly loses her thread, does the aftermath of her accident show. Now, she says that she finds her old self on the bike. ‘The accident damaged my life, but it hasn’t impaired my riding on the bike. Everything works fine on the bike, it’s really weird.
‘I feel liberated when I’m on the bike, it’s unbelievable. I can ride in the group and judge the wheels and the movement. But off the bike, my balance is gone.’
There’s a pause.
‘I should live on the bike,’ Joanne says, in a moment of supreme irony, given that her father died, high on the Giant, gripping resolutely onto his.
Joanne Simpson was born nine months after the 1962 Tour de France. ‘Nine months after the
criteriums – and all those parties . . .!’ she says with a Simpson glint in her eye. When her father died she was on holiday in Corsica with her mother. She was just four. The grieving was left to the adults. ‘Grandpa and Mum went off and two months later Mum picked us up, with Nana. By then, everything, the funeral and all that, was over and done with.’
Later, her mother recalled the blur of activity in the hours after her husband’s death on the Ventoux. ‘Everything was organised for me to get to Avignon,’ Helen explained in a Belgian TV documentary. ‘I didn’t know what to do – I was only 27 and I’d got two small children . . . I didn’t know if I wanted Tom to be buried in France or England. I had to make all these decisions, which was not easy.’
After Tom’s death, Helen Simpson grew close to her husband’s former team-mate, Barry Hoban, who had been one of his closest confidants in the British team riding the 1967 Tour. ‘We just became good friends,’ Helen Simpson said of her relationship with Hoban, ‘and eventually we got married, two years after Tom died.’
But Joanne admits she struggled to accept Hoban. ‘Mum was my mum, you know – we had a special bond, I think. And I used to wonder what would happen if Daddy came back home.
‘As a little kid, you’re very naive and don’t understand. Daddy had always been off racing so we were used to him being away. And in those days, kids weren’t told the truth, they weren’t told all the details.’
Joanne says that when she was a teenager, she was resentful of Hoban. ‘ “You’re not my father,” I’d say to him,’ she recalls.
‘I’ve apologised to him millions of times. But he’s the best father we could ever have had. It can’t have been easy for him, looking after two kids that weren’t his.’
As she grew up, shielded from the coverage of her father’s death on the Ventoux, Joanne remembers that she had ‘no idea what was going on’. ‘We never saw a newspaper, we never heard people talk about it. Not ever. It was all hush-hush. We never had a sense of the controversy around Daddy’s death, because nobody ever mentioned it.’
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