Inside Team Sky

by Walsh, David

  Team Sky are in thrall to the new-fangled. All those PowerPoint presentations and business jargon buzzwords and new ways of measuring everything. Did Coppi use PowerPoint? He did not.

  Team Sky are slaves to analysis. Riding at a certain tempo for a certain amount of time instead of flaring briefly and dying? Just not old school. Team Sky would need an architectural blueprint and several environmental impact surveys before tilting at a windmill. Analysis? Schmanalysis!

  Team Sky are keepers of bad company. Sky. The Murdochs. Not the Sopranos, but for a lot of people they might as well be.

  Team Sky are headhunters. The recruitment of so many good riders in a short space of time. So unfair. All money, isn’t it?

  Team Sky and their bloody detail. The sheer tyranny of it. Team Sky don’t move to the music of chance. Ever. They bring their own mattresses everywhere in case they get allergies. Never trust a man who carries his own mattress around with him.

  Team Sky carry echoes. They train in Tenerife where Armstrong and the boys used to train. Bradley Wiggins had a house in Girona where Armstrong and the boys . . . Two plus two equals?

  Team Sky aren’t cycling people.

  Team Sky test positive for smug.

  Team Sky stand for piety. Team Sky speak of their zero tolerance policy as if they invented the idea of being against doping. So when a chance arises to beat Team Sky with their own crosier, a lot of people like to step in and take a swing.

  Which brings us back to Geert Leinders. Dr Geert Leinders.

  Team Sky employed Dr Geert Leinders. Therefore, Team Sky are a force for evil.

  Whenever a Team Sky person is asked about Leinders, they will draw a sharp intake of breath before responding. They don’t resent the question, they are just tired of dealing with it. They never say the words but deep in their soul they must want to ask if you will be questioning all the other teams about their doctors and staff too.

  The questions have to be asked but they have a point. Katusha, the Russian team, for instance have a doctor [Andre Mikhailov] who was arrested in France in 1998 with a van full of EPO. He said he was making an emergency run to a hospital in Russia. He got a suspended prison sentence. They have a sprint coach [Erik Zabel] who admitted some years ago that he took EPO for a week in 1996 but it didn’t suit him. And they have an interesting boss in Viatcheslav Ekimov, who was a lieutenant of Lance Armstrong’s on six of his seven Tour wins. Ekimov claims not only to have done nothing, but to have seen nothing untoward in those years. How did the Russian’s seeing eye dog keep up with him?

  Earlier this year Katusha got their World Tour licence back through the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) after the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI) had withdrawn it citing several reasons, the principal of which was financial. The team’s travel budget was colossal. When the reasoned decision for restoring the licence was published by CAS, it emerged that on top of the two positives in 2009, another in 2011 and another in 2012, Katusha had employed seven riders with doping convictions and had registered twelve ‘whereabouts mistakes’ for random dope tests since 2009.

  (Incidentally, after the 2013 Tour, Zabel would be named as among the positives in those samples retested from the 1998 Tour, news which required him to issue an updated edition of his original tearful confession. Ekimov, with heavy heart, suspended him from work.)

  We journalists want to talk about Geert Leinders, however. Always.

  Tweeters, bloggers and haters want to talk about Geert Leinders. Always.

  The theory borrows heavily from The Manchurian Candidate. Brailsford, having spent a good proportion of his professional lifetime building up British cycling and then establishing Sky Pro Cycling, decides to secretly dismantle it all and to destroy the reputations and lives of those who work with him by bringing in a master of the dark arts. He hires a doping doctor.

  Either that or, as he claims, he screwed up.

  Worse. When he is caught he doesn’t keep hold of his doping czar by claiming to have had a Damascene conversion to the way of truth and reconciliation as practised by, among others, Jonathan Vaughters at Garmin. Brailsford could have said that it is important that we understand, forgive and move on. He could have said that those who have sinned in the past can be part of the future. Instead he reiterated the zero tolerance policy and the only moving on that was done was by several contaminated staff members.

  Rewind from the Tour for a moment. It is March. Altitude training in Tenerife. Here, up at over 2,000m, the Hotel Parador often sits above the clouds but it is never free of ghosts. A couple of weeks ago it was announced that Geert Leinders is to face a criminal investigation in Belgium. That is enough to ensure that the story will have legs all the way into the summer.

  The Parador is located in the Teide National Park in Tenerife, where the volcanic landscape takes your breath away, replacing it with the cleanest mountain air. Here professional cycling teams have been coming to train for almost two decades. The best and the most notorious all came here.

  ‘US Postal,’ the man at reception says, ‘for five years they came. First as Postal, then as Discovery. I have my photograph taken with Lance Armstrong. Would you like to see?’

  ‘Did Dr Ferrari stay here too?’

  ‘Oh yes, he come always with his family.’

  There were suspicions about US Postal’s training camps in Tenerife. Why did they go there? How often did the testers show up? Armstrong and his key teammates came, trained, and returned to conquer. Their doping guru came too. After they’d gone Teide’s pure air had the lingering whiff of toxicity.

  On this crisp March morning though, it is eight riders from Team Sky who head off on a five and a half hour ride. The team has come to this training camp in Tenerife without a doctor. They like to strip things down when they’re in Teide.

  Seven times Sky have returned to this island, their faith in the high-altitude location expressed most keenly by their head of performance, the Australian Tim Kerrison, a key representative of all that Brailsford has got right in bringing in new talent from other sports.

  ‘There’s a time for giving the riders all the support and a time for focusing them on the things that matter,’ says Kerrison, which is why Sky always come here without a doctor. ‘Up here we try to eliminate all the distractions.’

  To anyone who has spent more than ten minutes with the team, the importance of Kerrison’s contribution is clear. He has been Dave Brailsford’s key appointment and what has been achieved has much to do with Kerrison’s coaching and mentoring of the riders.

  Kerrison arrived in 2010 from a background in Australian swimming and rowing. He watched the Team Sky operation for months on end. He studied cycling and its practices and traditions. He crunched numbers. Finally, he told them the three things which would keep Team Sky from the success they had promised themselves.

  Heat. Mountains. Altitude.

  These three things may seem a little obvious but the team had morphed from the world of track. What makes a great track team doesn’t make a great road team. Kerrison went further. He came back with a training schedule and an overall philosophy which would work.

  Team Sky were thinking way outside the box now in cycling terms. Coaches to work with individual riders. No more racing your way into fitness. No more assuming that a cyclist can’t do ‘efforts’ in December, that he should start in January. They started training earlier than anybody else. They incorporated power and speed work into their sessions from the start. They had long training camps and from the first race of the season they gave 100 per cent.

  And Kerrison brought them to Tenerife, to this absurd landscape, where above a certain altitude the very concept of flatness ceases to exist. One road with its scorched surface runs like a ribbon over the volcano. You toil uphill or hurtle downhill. Six-hour sessions; 4000m worth of climbing.

  Heat? Mountains? Altitude? Bring them on.

  So Kerrison is in the business of excellence and sometimes he is in the business of ghostbusti
ng. He knows the furtive practices of the men who cycled these roads in the era of Lance & co. He knows the risk he takes with his own reputation in the sport.

  I want to get a picture of the environment which Geert Leinders slipped into. I have some straightforward questions, I say to Kerrison. They just need a yes or a no. He nods.

  ‘Have you ever been involved in doping, either in Australia or in the UK?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Have you ever witnessed doping either in swimming or cycling?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Have you ever seen anything in any programme you were part of that made you suspicious?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘If you came across anything suspicious in Team Sky, would you immediately tell Dave Brailsford?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Would you leave Team Sky if you felt any form of doping was tolerated?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Ask any Team Sky staffer and they will give the same answers. With conviction. So why the traces of toxicity? Why Leinders?

  The recommendation for Leinders to join Team Sky had come from Steven de Jongh1, a directeur sportif with the team who had worked with Leinders while both were at the Dutch team Rabobank.

  That Leinders had come to Manchester at all was indicative of a change of policy at Sky as, when the team was founded a year before, it had committed to employing doctors who had not previously worked in professional cycling. Brailsford wanted to create a team above suspicion and with a clear code of ethics, but a disappointing first season was followed by a review.

  Brailsford and those around him point to the context in which the Leinders appointment was made. The death of one of the team’s more beloved carers, Txema González, during the Vuelta doesn’t justify the mistake, but when they analyse where their heads were at the time they understand the anatomy of their mistake a little more clearly.

  Right from the start of the 2010 Vuelta, the riders were feeling poorly. A virus had spread through their ranks, weakening them and causing upset stomachs. Txema González, the friendly Basque soigneur was suffering worse than anybody and had to be hospitalised. The team struggled on, losing Ben Swift, John-Lee Augustyn and Juan Antonio Flecha to abandonments as a result of the virus.

  It was a nightmare period. The team which had headed into the season with so many idealistic notions and policies about supplements and nutrition etc., found its riders ailing and crying out for medication. The heat was oppressive, the racing was hard, the bulletins about Txema González’s declining condition upset and frightened everybody. Riders are twitchy thoroughbreds and many were used to different regimes. The team felt impending pressure on its policy of no intravenous drips and no needles. The new team found itself making calls and decisions it had never anticipated having to make.

  On the Friday of the Tour’s first week, on the day of the seventh stage, Txema died in a hospital in Seville. It transpired that he had contracted a bacterial infection which entered the bloodstream and developed into sepsis. The toxins had damaged his organs and his body went into septic shock. It was a different illness from that which the riders had been suffering but there was a difficult period of confusion which was reflected in the official statement of the Vuelta itself.

  ‘The Spanish masseur Txema González has died in a hospital in Seville, where he was transported from virtually the start of the Tour of Spain, as a result of a viral illness from which he could not recover . . . Team Sky have suffered since the beginning of the race from a viral illness that has affected not only its riders, but also one of the members of the backroom staff . . . from the beginning it was discovered that Txema was worst affected.’

  Brailsford said later that, ‘When someone dies on your team, you feel you’re putting riders at risk . . . for all we knew the riders could have had the same thing... We sat down and realised that as a group of people we did not know enough about looking after people in extreme heat, with extreme fatigue. We were making calls like “No, on you go, mate.”’

  The outcome of the team’s review of the Vuelta raised a question mark over whether the policy, of having new doctors from outside of cycling dealing with the extremes that professional cycling offers, could be sustained. Brailsford found it difficult to locate and recruit medics from the real world who had the experience and knowledge of the demands placed on riders while riding Grand Tours. It was agreed that the team’s medical outfit had not been focused enough and that, contrary to the team’s charter, they now needed doctors with experience in bike racing. So the policy was changed. There would still be no IVs, no needles and a severe discouragement of supplements but these things would be dealt with by an experienced cycling doctor.

  Thus, Geert Leinders came to Manchester with good references and recommendations and at just the right time.

  Leinders was interviewed first by the team’s medical chief, Dr Steve Peters, and then by team doctor Richard Freeman, before Peters again spoke to Leinders and two other applicants.

  Dr Steve Peters is a typical Brailsford appointment. A forensic psychiatrist by profession, his CV includes a stint working at Rampton High Security Hospital (at a time when Soham murderer Ian Huntley was there). He has made the journey from working with mental illness to working with elite athletes and has brought the same degree of success to both arenas. He is a fascinating, deeply thoughtful man and, one suspects, an accomplished judge of character.

  ‘We needed a doctor with experience and the guy I met [Leinders] appeared very ethical, very professional and very compassionate,’ says Peters. ‘He was also very knowledgeable about cycling, training, the different races. This wasn’t an appointment made lightly. Dave [Brailsford] and I had spoken a lot about how we could get tarnished by our involvement in pro road racing and how that would diminish everything we achieved with the track team. It was a massive fear.’

  Peters doesn’t claim to have an encyclopaedic knowledge of sports. When he moves into a new discipline he asks questions constantly until he understands the nuts and bolts. As such his experience and expertise at the time of the interview were in track racing and its world. On that October day in 2010, Steve Peters knew little about professional road cycling.

  He didn’t approach the interview as an interrogation. It was one professional interviewing another. He didn’t know about Rabobank, the cycling team Leinders had been with from 1996 to 2009, and he didn’t ask Leinders what he knew about the team’s Michael Rasmussen being withdrawn while leading the Tour de France on suspicion of doping. Neither did he ask what breach of ‘internal rules’ had led to Thomas Dekker being kicked off the team.

  ‘I could have grilled him and grilled him but when someone assures you that he has not been involved in doping, that doesn’t seem appropriate,’ says Peters.

  After Peters’s interview, Leinders was then interviewed by Richard Freeman, another doctor, who quizzed the Belgian on his medical skills and was impressed. Peters and Freeman recommended Leinders be hired and Brailsford offered a contract that meant he could be asked to work for up to eighty days in 2011. He worked sixty-seven days for Team Sky that year, starting with the Tour of Oman and covering some one-day races in Belgium, the Giro d’Italia and the Vuelta.

  He was liked by the riders for his ability and admired by the management for his professionalism. If he treated a rider for an injury he would follow up with phone calls and advice after the race. If the truth and reconciliation movement within cycling was looking for a poster boy, Leinders might have been it. Sky found him in tune with their policies and keen to make a contribution.

  Peters insists that Leinders was scrupulously ethical in his time with Sky. ‘We agreed as a team that if a rider, suffering from asthma, got into trouble with pollen we would pull him out of the race rather than apply for a therapeutic use exemption on his behalf.

  ‘Once, one of our riders was in this situation and the doctor got in touch with me and asked if we could get an exemption because the guy was in a bad way but was very keen
to finish the race.

  ‘Using my discretion, I said “Okay.”

  ‘It was Geert who rang me afterwards to tell me I was wrong.

  ‘“We’ve got to have consistency,” he said.’

  Leinders had worked forty-four of his eighty-day contract in 2012. Leinders was present for a couple of days in Majorca at a team training camp, then spent a week on Paris-Nice, worked six one-day races in Belgium before working the Tour de Romandie and the Critérium du Dauphiné.

  Then in April Theo de Rooij, former directeur sportif at Rabobank, did an interview with journalist Mark Miserus for the Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant. De Rooij said there had been a doping programme at Rabobank and that Leinders had been part of it. Brailsford asked for an explanation and Leinders claimed de Rooij’s words had been misinterpreted and insisted that he, Leinders, had not been part of any doping programme.

  In his modest and obsessively uncluttered office in Manchester, Brailsford thought deeply about the problem. He judged finally that to keep Leinders on while this allegation was being investigated would damage the reputation of the team. Brailsford has a fondness for coinages which sum up situations. This was a reputational risk.

  Leinders’s contract was paid up for 2012 and he was told the team would not use him again. Since then, Leinders has given interviews to Miserus and another Dutch journalist, Maarten Scholten, from Handelsblad. To both he said his role with Sky was ‘minimised’, meaning he had worked purely as a doctor. With Rabobank, he was involved in the conditioning and preparation of the riders and, it is alleged by Rasmussen, Dekker and Danny Nelissen, in doping. The fall-out continues for Team Sky.

  Just last week when Richie Porte won the Paris–Nice his greatest challenge came in the press conference afterwards. Half the questions concerned doping. The Australian, riding for the English team was even asked to pass judgement on the state of Dutch cycling vis-à-vis Rabobank.

  The team have noticed that when they go badly the questions subside. There is a danger therein which they need to address. Failure bringing the reward of a little peace is a dangerous concept.