Inside Team Sky

by Walsh, David

  Dave Brailsford is not often wrong, but on this assumption he was. Nothing had faded away. His antagonism towards Paul Kimmage’s edgy but not particularly disrespectful question at the pre-race press conference showed his chimp had made the journey to Corsica. It is remarkable a man so bright can so easily lose his ability to be rational and do what is best for the team.

  As the Tour unfolds there will be press conferences far more hostile than that opening salvo on the cruise ferry. And Brailsford knows he will have to do better.

  By now Brailsford is sitting on the low shelf that runs across the back of the camper van, SKY 18. He senses he’s made a bad start to his media performance at the Tour and though he barely shows the disappointment, it is there.

  Rod Ellingworth, the team’s performance manager, comes to where we’re talking. Affable, enthusiastic, an outstanding planner. He has been for a walk and arrives with beads of sweat. Most mornings Brailsford and Kerrison, and general facilitator Dario Cioni will rise around six and be out on their bikes before seven. A former bike rider, Ellingworth has previously said he wouldn’t be comfortable disappearing at that time in the morning, preferring instead to hang about, breakfasting with the carers and mechanics, available to anyone with a problem he can help solve.

  Empathy comes easily to him and underpins his role within the team. A lot of the staff find it easy to relate to him, and him to them, and as well as his people skills he is a master planner. Quickly picking up on the fact that Brailsford isn’t his usual self, Ellingworth makes a little small talk and soon carries on to the hotel.

  Chris Haynes walks from the hotel, as quietly and as unobtrusively as he does most things in life. He is softy spoken, polite, gentle even, and you wonder how he was ever persuaded to head up Team Sky’s media operation. His day job is in London with the ultra-successful Sky Sports television channels, where he is head of media and, though he consulted with and offered guidance to Team Sky, it was never more than an adjunct to his primary role.

  Bradley Wiggins and a moment of breathtaking madness changed that. After the finish of the eighth stage of the 2012 Tour, Wiggins was asked in a press conference what he had to say to critics on Twitter who publicly accused him of doping. Perhaps the journalist asking the question didn’t realise it, but this was one question guaranteed to evoke a vitriolic response from Wiggins.

  Two months before he’d won the Tour de Romandie but soon after, while recovering with his family, he’d gone on Twitter and was sickened by what he read. A lot of people, mostly under the cover of their anonymous Twitter names, accused him of doping. For all the cool, Wiggins needs to be respected, even loved, and he couldn’t just dismiss those accusing him as people who didn’t know what they were talking about.

  Instead he looked at himself as others were looking at him: dominant cyclist who wins time trials and occasional sprints, who stays with the best climbers in the mountains, yeah, he could see why there were suspicions. He thought it would be better if he didn’t win his next race, the Dauphiné Libéré, as another victory would only make things worse. He worried what winning the Tour de France would do to his reputation. He told his wife Cath that he didn’t want to win the Tour.

  Shane Sutton, the mate and Team GB coach who wasn’t afraid to stand up to him, told Wiggins to ignore the accusers. He said he wasn’t able to do that. Tim Kerrison told him to accept that he was going to get this kind of criticism. He stopped checking Twitter, tried to put it out of his mind, but it lay there, in a quiet corner, waiting to be roused.

  So the question comes at him like a grenade. He catches, pulls the pin, and flings it back into the crowd.

  ‘I say they’re just fucking wankers. I cannot be doing with people like that. It justifies their own bone-idleness because they can’t ever imagine applying themselves to doing anything in their lives. It’s easy for them to sit under a pseudonym on Twitter and write that sort of shit, rather than get off their arses in their own lives and apply themselves and work hard at something and achieve something. And that’s ultimately it. Cunts.’

  To get ‘fucking’, ‘wankers’, ‘shit’, ‘arses’ and ‘cunts’ in one answer must be a record, possibly even more rare than winning Paris–Nice, Tour de Romandie, Dauphiné Libéré, Tour de France, and an Olympic gold medal in the same season, as Wiggins did. You could rightly argue about how he expressed his frustration, but if he was clean, as he insisted he was, then it was easy to understand what drove him to say exactly what was on his mind, and in exactly the way he wanted to say it.

  Back at BSkyB’s headquarters, the corporate bosses may have empathised with the sentiments but they wouldn’t have liked the expletives. Wiggins’s targets could have been Sky subscribers! Chris Haynes was on the next plane to France. Wiggins once said, ‘I’m not a well-trained corporate dream.’ That much was apparent when he made the air turn blue in the small Swiss town of Porrentruy.

  Haynes, though, is a paragon of reasonableness and it is difficult not to agree with most of what he says. Before he took his place in the front line at Team Sky there had been accusations of Team Sky trying to influence what was asked at press conferences. They’d ask journalists not to ask about such-and-such doping case because there was always the fear that Wiggins or Cavendish might react badly.

  That desire to control the agenda irritated journalists and offered another reason to any journalist inclined to dislike the team. Of which there were plenty.

  Haynes came with a more grown-up attitude, extolling the virtues of openness and encouraging the riders to see doping questions as inevitable and understandable. He reminded Wiggins that his knowledge of, and appreciation for, cycling’s history was something that would endear him to fans of the sport, especially to continental Europeans. By the end Wiggins was in his element speaking with reporters, eloquent and utterly engaging, maybe even almost a ‘well-trained corporate dream’.

  The improvement changed Haynes’s life, as he was seconded from BSkyB to Team Sky and he now divides his time between both. We ran together one morning during the Giro d’Italia, up a hill from our Italian hotel, round a few corners, then down a long straight road and past an unmanned border crossing and into Slovenia. Alas, we didn’t have the stamina to reach Marko Dzalo’s home town.

  That morning Chris spoke a lot about his son who was about to go to his first Tottenham Hotspur game without an adult and Chris was both excited and nervous about this rite of passage experience. A few days before he had been speaking about his family and told me that although the boy was from his partner’s previous relationship, he loved him as if he was his own son.

  ‘Chris,’ I said, ‘what you mean is that you love him as a son, no qualification.’

  A couple of days later we were talking again and he said there was something he wanted to say to me. ‘You know what you said to me the other day?’ I knew. ‘That meant a lot to me. Thank you.’

  Such sensibility hardly goes with the media manager’s job but Haynes isn’t your common-or-garden PR operator.

  And when he came out of the Golfe Hotel in Porto-Vecchio, it was good to see him. We chatted for a bit; he then had to take a call, but when he came back a few minutes later he was excited. ‘You know what’s just happened?’ he said. ‘A beautiful butterfly came fluttering by, landed just there, and rose again and flew on. The butterfly was yellow-coloured, totally yellow.’

  He saw it as an omen, this papillon jaune, a portent of good things to come.

  The butterfly, which drops into Corsica on its journey from North Africa, is called Clouded Yellow.

  CHAPTER TWO

  ‘The best executive is the one who has sense enough to pick good men to do what he wants done, and self-restraint enough to keep from meddling with them while they do it.’

  Theodore Roosevelt

  On the evening before the Tour begins, a staff meeting is called for nine o’clock on the team bus. This is the team’s fourth year and among the foot soldiers this gathering has taken on the status
of the pre-Tour call to arms. By 8.55 most of the staff are in their places, the nine available seats filled, everyone else standing or sitting in the aisle. Excitement hangs in the air, tinged with apprehension for they know what they will have to do over the four weeks and whatever happens, it won’t be easy.

  At the front of the bus a digital clock with illuminated red numbers moves silently from 8.53 through 8.54 to 8.55 but in a team where everything is timed, it starts to draw attention.

  ‘Who’s not here?’

  They search for the missing.

  ‘He’s gonna be late, gonna be in trouble,’ someone says. There is laughter at the thought of imminent embarrassment.

  Those who arrive in the nick of time are not jeered because they have cut it fine, but cheered because they are not actually late. At 8.59 everyone is present. Where’s the fun in that? It’s like we’re in the Colosseum and the emperor has given everyone the thumbs-up.

  The real emperor stands at the front of the bus. Forty-nine years of age, so neatly built his shaven head seems part of his DNA, clean-cut genetics. He smiles easily and is a natural communicator. People listen. His lucidity will carry him through this meeting. It was curious that in John Dower’s beautifully made documentary about Bradley Wiggins’ victory in the 2012 Tour, Brailsford claimed he didn’t really have friends and was by nature a loner.

  That’s not the person he seems to rank-and-file Team Sky staff, all of whom are comfortable in his company and most of whom like him. He takes out his iPhone and asks if he can take a group photo of everyone on the bus. There is something vaguely flattering when the boss asks to photograph the staff and, immediately, people are listening. They look towards him, the digitally reproduced shutter sound is heard among the grins.

  He then talks about the memories this photo might evoke in six months’ time and what each individual will think when he looks at it. ‘What you will want to say is that they were the best group of guys I ever worked with, as good as any team could have had. You also want to be able to say, “We were good together on that Tour, there wasn’t another thing we could have done.”’

  Brailsford then speaks of his role and their importance. ‘I am just the conductor of this orchestra, you are the guys who play the instruments and you were hand-picked for this job because you are the best at what you do.’ What he doesn’t say but everyone knows is that the road to this point could be paved with the bodies of those who were hired but just didn’t fit in.

  Team Sky isn’t for everyone and Brailsford believes it’s in all’s interests if the ill-fitting are politely offered the opportunity to continue their careers elsewhere. Turnover of staff was high in the first three years, but the boss is now much closer to the back-up team he wants.

  After identifying himself as the conductor of the orchestra, he then expresses one of the team’s core values. He deliberately picks a senior staff member, operations manager Carsten Jeppesen, to make the point. ‘If in our orchestra Carsten isn’t playing his violin properly it is my responsibility to come along and say, “Look, Carsten, we need to have a chat.”

  ‘What I mustn’t do is speak to Mario [Pafundi] and say, “You know what, Carsten’s fucking this up,” because then Mario might say, “Yeah, he’s always fucking things up,” and instead of my dealing with the problem we make it worse by talking to other people, who in turn talk to even more people.’

  So, in this team, bitching about colleagues will not be tolerated. Every suggestion is coated with a sense of what seems entirely reasonable. ‘We have come here without our wives, partners, children, and now for the next three weeks we have to make sure that we don’t allow our personal lives to affect our jobs.’

  During the course of the Tour different staff members will talk about how much harder they work in Team Sky than they have done in their previous teams and here, from the boss, is a warning about personal issues impinging upon their work with the team. Yet this isn’t as uncompromising as it seems, for when Rod Ellingworth’s little daughter gets sick in the first week, he is given the go-ahead to get himself home and take care of what matters.

  Brailsford wants everyone to know that he believes they have helped get the team into a position to win its second consecutive Tour. ‘We can look at what we’ve done and ask, “Could we have done more to this point?” I don’t think we could have. The team is in good shape, we have good results this year and the nine guys we have chosen are all fit and well. But now we want to have a really good three weeks.’

  He then gets into details that other teams mightn’t see as important. ‘Health is going to be a big issue. It is not a question of “if some of us get sick” but “when some of us get sick”. So we take every precaution to ensure we don’t help spread infection.

  ‘It is common practice in France to shake the hand of the person you are meeting. If you can, avoid shaking hands. Smile, whatever, but try to cut down on the hand-shaking. And make sure to use the alcohol disinfectant. Before you eat, before you get on the bus, use it. We had an issue in the Giro with three riders sick, including Christian [Knees] and Bradley who sat alongside each other on the bus.’

  He talks about security around the team. ‘We have to be really vigilant about this, especially in relation to riders’ food and drinks. If you see anybody, around the bus or any of our vehicles, who you’re not sure about, don’t let it pass. Ask him what he’s doing, mention it to Rod or me. One guy contaminating one drink is all it would take to give us a big problem, so you’ve got to stay alert to the danger.’

  The team doesn’t shy away from expressions of self-belief. When he left the Garmin team to join Sky in 2009, Wiggins equated it to ‘leaving Wigan [then a lowly Premier League football team] and joining Manchester United’. Once, in the car, Ellingworth complained about the team’s arrogance in that first year, saying too much about what they would do before they had done anything.

  ‘Like what Brad said about Manchester United and Wigan. You can’t say that, although on that I do agree with Brad. We are Manchester United and they are Wigan.’

  Brailsford was a shade more subtle in his closing message. ‘If you all do your jobs, we have the best support team on this race and you guys will show that.’

  He had spoken for about twenty minutes and then asked Ellingworth to run through some organisational and logistical issues. Ellingworth reminds everyone that just because they’ve got Tour de France stickers on the cars doesn’t give anyone a licence to drive irresponsibly and the gendarmerie have told all the teams they won’t tolerate it. (Brailsford had earlier reminded staff that anyone who drinks and then drives a vehicle will be fired, a rule that is non-negotiable.)

  Lead mechanic Gary Blem asked Ellingworth to remind all drivers to fill their tanks at the end of the day so that those staff members who take care of the cars don’t have to refuel them early the next morning. There was also a request to hand in the keys at the end of the day so that Neil MacDonald, the Jaguar mechanic in charge of the cars, can keep them all together.

  Dave Brailsford then asked Tim Kerrison, head of performance support and the man most informed on the minutiae of the riders’ form, to talk about what he expected from the team over the following three weeks. Kerrison is quietly spoken and thoughtful, a man who’d never claim to have invented hot water when all he’d done was stumble across a geyser. Deadpan tone and natural understatement lend weight to everything he says. Overall, the team were in very good shape. He spoke about some of the riders about whom there were worries. David López, who had been sick in the Critérium du Dauphiné, was fully recovered now, and Vasil Kiryienka, who seemed tired in the Dauphiné, was now back at his best.

  Kerrison also spoke about how Pete Kennaugh had come through and was showing what the management always thought him capable of. He talked about the excellent form of Richie Porte and Chris Froome; he considered Porte was in the shape of his life and when he mentioned Froome he said Team Sky had by far the best rider in the race.

  Kerrison
delivers this verdict as if giving a weather report. Nicolas Portal, the young French directeur sportif, also spoke, as did Blem and Pafundi.

  Towards the end, Brailsford spoke about the media and how it was better if he dealt with most of the enquiries. This would happen mostly by the bus and, though there would be occasions when it might be necessary for Tim and Rod to offer their opinions on things, and while it was appropriate for the directeur sportif to handle questions related to that day’s race, most of the other stuff was best left to him.

  Brailsford made the point that when journalists didn’t get what they were looking for from him, they would go to Ellingworth or Kerrison trying to get what they actually wanted. Everyone needed to be aware of this and make sure there was as little leakage as possible. ‘While we want to be open and transparent and polite at all times, we also want to stay in control of this.’

  I’m sitting in the third seat on the left, listening and wondering if, unknown to myself, I am being controlled?

  The meeting peters out which seems disappointing as it had been almost inspiring when Brailsford was in full flow. I’d wondered what he might do for a final flourish. ‘I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips, Straining upon the start. The game’s afoot: Follow your spirit, and upon this charge Cry “God for Harry, England, and Saint George!”’ But this leader has come from the School of Dr Steve Peters and no need to rouse the chimps when a good night’s rest is what everyone needs.

  Seven months before, I’m sitting in the reception room at the Manchester velodrome waiting to meet Brailsford for the first time. Given what he has achieved with Team GB, it is strange that this is a first meeting, but my love for cycling had been destroyed by the Armstrong era and for six or seven years I’d given the sport a wide berth.

  Only a couple of weeks have passed since the Texan was kicked out of cycling, and the whiff of scandal still hangs in the air. Brailsford wants to talk about the stuff I’d written along the way. ‘What I can’t imagine is how you dealt with the sense of alienation from a lot of the guys you were working alongside at the Tour de France,’ he says. ‘Many of them must have hated what you were doing?’ That was, I say, the least of my problems.