Inside Team Sky

by Walsh, David

  In Tenerife Mat Hayman, the thirty-four-year-old Australian rider, took a call from a cycling journalist who wanted to know about his memories of working with Leinders at Rabobank. Hayman said he would prefer not to comment, an answer that didn’t please Brailsford.

  ‘It was a legitimate question and Mat should have addressed it.’

  Sitting on a couch in the lobby of Hotel Parabor, I asked Hayman how he looked upon his ten years at Rabobank.

  ‘From the beginning, I let it be known I wouldn’t dope and no one tried to push me. I didn’t want to go to bed worrying about testing positive. I suffered because of that, never got to ride in the Tour de France, and settled for the life of a domestique. I felt it was unfair and there were lots of performances I was suspicious about, from riders in other teams and riders in my own team.’

  And Geert Leinders?

  ‘I have no proof, I didn’t see any doping, but I felt there were riders in the team who used doping and I was sure some members of staff were helping them.’

  ‘I spoke to a lot of guys from Rabobank, both on and off the record,’ says Mark Miserus. ‘They pointed the finger at each other but no one mentioned Hayman in connection with doping.’

  Brailsford accepts that Sky’s recruitment processes weren’t sufficiently rigorous. ‘We asked questions about Geert, no one raised an alarm and we didn’t see the need to grill people. As the person responsible for bringing him in, I thought maybe I should resign. I got it wrong and if the board had wanted me to step down, I would have.’

  In the post-Armstrong era many saw echoes of Armstrong everywhere. Leinders was depicted as the new Ferrari. Online cynics began referring to Team Sky as UK Postal. Leinders never covered a Tour de France for Team Sky but his ghost haunted the 2012 Tour and even though he had been dismissed in October 2012, he would still be a feature of press conferences at the 2013 Tour.

  Brailsford points out anytime he is asked that there is no evidence, no hint that Leinders was ever even slightly unethical in his time with Sky. He was a good doctor, an excellent one. He understood the job and, in an environment where riders are being pushed to their limits day after day, Leinders was an invaluable asset as a medical practitioner.

  And yet, he concedes with a sigh, it was a mistake. Not to have asked more. Not to have dealt emphatically with the issue sooner.

  After Leinders’s departure, Team Sky reverted to its policy of employing doctors who haven’t previously worked in cycling and the new head doctor is Alan Farrell, recruited from a practice in Dublin.

  On the Tour I will ask Farrell about the Leinders appointment and for such a genial man he will be quite blunt.

  ‘Erm, when all you have to go on is rumour, and not facts, it’s difficult that one. I’m glad I wasn’t in that position. I think, I think, given the undeniable history surrounding the sport and the influence that doctors with questionable ethics had had on the sport, I think that hiring somebody from that era would surely have come with a couple of question marks . . .’

  And if the team could turn the clock back would they ask more searching questions, do you think?

  ‘Or even not involving themselves with anyone from that era. But, in fairness, as soon as it materialised, his association with doping and the Rabobank team, what more could they do other than expel him? Once the decision was made that I was going to the Tour, Geert was no more really after that.’

  Geert Leinders was no more. Not in body. But his ghost still haunts them. Back on Tenerife where Michele Ferrari used to calibrate Lance, Geert Leinders is another spook from the past. Team Sky press on, trying to exorcise him, trying to find their space in the brave new world. Sometimes they wonder if cycling is interested in a brave new world at all.

  They have been to this island eight times now on training stints. Every time they fill out the forms telling the authorities which riders will be where and for how long. Tenerife is a two-hour flight from Spain and the hotel is a fifty-minute drive through spectacular landscape. Only once in those eight times has a random drug-testing team made the journey to see them and test them.

  ‘Now that,’ says Tim Kerrison, ‘is truly disappointing.’

  CHAPTER SIX

  ‘Damn everything but the circus! . . . damn everything that is grim, dull, motionless, unrisking, inward turning, damn everything that won’t get into the circle, that won’t enjoy. That won’t throw its heart into the tension, surprise, fear and delight of the circus, the round world, the full existence . . .’

  E. E. Cummings, ‘Damn Everything But the Circus!’

  Some things send a peloton of shivers racing down a man’s spine. In the team car Alan Farrell could hear the voices of the Team Sky riders ahead of him, familiar voices crackling on the radio.

  ‘Awesome, G!’ they were shouting. ‘Awesome!’ It was Stage Three, the last day in Corsica, and Geraint Thomas had just hauled himself and his famous cracked pelvis out of the grave to briefly join his team at the top of the field and roar them on. They were responding to his extraordinary courage.

  Alan Farrell allowed himself a grin. When you run away with the circus, when you elope with the love of your life, these are the moments you cherish.

  For the first three days of the Tour, Team Sky’s race headquarters and its media centre have been on a boat, the Mega Smeralda, a ferry anchored in the dusty old port of Bastia. To get from the finish to the press centre, we journalists jumped on one boat. Then we get to work on another boat. It may have been Smerelda but it wasn’t mega. The Corsicans never tire of pointing out that Christopher Columbus came from the town of Calvi where the third and final Corsican stage finished and Napoleon came from Ajaccio. Had either man seen the Tour’s difficulties in extricating that bus from under the timing bridge at the finish line on Stage One, they might have gone out into the world a little more timorously.

  For Team Sky the chaos and carnage of that first day of racing on the island are still being audited. Alan Farrell, the team doctor, is on his second Tour and the sight of Geraint Thomas lying on the hot asphalt beside the kerb unable to get up, having somersaulted over his own handlebars, was novel but worrying. Ian Stannard had been brought down too and Froome had squeaked past, narrowly avoiding the chaos.

  Thomas, or G as he is affectionately known, was the principal casualty though. Very little stops G Thomas. Eight years ago his handlebar impacted with his torso so violently that he had to have his spleen removed. After a few weeks of morphine-masked pain he was up and about, gleefully showing his scar to innocent bystanders and claiming that he had been bitten by a shark.

  A regular X-ray on the day of the crash failed to show the small fissure in the rider’s pelvis. Thomas must have suspected he was suffering from a little more than bruising the next day, however, when having been lifted onto his bike he set off on the second stage, an undulating 156km slog to Ajaccio. The first 10km of the race were punctuated by roundabouts and the process of slowing into them, and accelerating out, produced an exquisite pain the like of which he had never experienced before. He couldn’t generate any power in his left leg and was seriously worried that despite his bravery he would finish outside the time limit and everything would have been in vain.

  By the time an MRI scan showed the full damage to his pelvis he had ridden the second stage and could see no reason to let the team down by not riding on. He submitted to a regime of pre-race coffees, ibuprofen and paracetamol, as well as three sessions of physio and some acupuncture daily with Dan Guillemette, the team’s head physio and a former elite amateur cyclist himself. Other than that he was devouring Jo Nesbo thrillers to keep his head occupied and to stop himself thinking about his mother’s encouraging words – that he should get some sense and quit the race.

  On Monday morning at Ajaccio the onlookers were wincing empathetically as G tried twice to get his leg over the saddle. In the end he was hoisted into place again.

  Stage Three went fine for Team Sky, yet the moment on everybody’s lips at dinner that n
ight was the same one that sent shivers down the spines of those in the team car. G, bloody G Thomas, materialised on the shoulder of his colleagues, shouting at them to lift it. What a bloody war!

  Nobody was sorry to leave Corsica behind but for G Thomas the road ahead is as treacherous as the road behind. Today, Tuesday, in Nice brings a 25km team time trial. Geraint Thomas has been told that, as much as his teammates love him, they won’t be waiting for him. They can’t be waiting for him. When he gets dropped early as he inevitably will, he is alone with just his pain for company.

  C’est la guerre, mon amie, c’est la guerre.

  Nice, France. The Promenade des Anglais.

  Team Sky is another country. They do things differently here. With the three Corsican stages out of the way the race organisers arranged to fly the riders to Nice for Stage Four. Everybody else was to make the long schlep via ferry. People who have worked the Tour for a long time see nothing unusual here. The Tour is the Tour. As the miles go by, as the days pass and as the stages mount up, everybody gets more fatigued and more jaded until a caravan of wall-eyed zombies rolls into Paris. The Tour is the Tour. There is no need to see it any other way.

  David Brailsford can’t accept that. He himself often sleeps through portions of race stages in the afternoon so that he will be fresh and at his best when he swings back to work later. Days are long, beginning with a cycle with other staff at 6.30 in the morning. There is little for Brailsford to do when the riders are on the road and he trusts his staff entirely. He recharges daily and stays fit and sharp. As such, the decision to fly riders to Nice but to send those whom the riders depend on by boat made no sense to Brailsford. He investigated the cost of a private plane, found it to be good value, and flew the fourteen staff who didn’t have to drive the vans and cars onto the ferry straight to Nice. Little wonder that the view which other teams hold of Team Sky is jaundiced by some jealousy.

  For Alan Farrell his days during a race are long and hectic. He doesn’t have the luxury of running in the mornings or taking a spin on the bike with his colleagues. Availability he sees as being a key part of his job. He is available in the team hotel first thing in the morning. He goes to the race in the bus so he can continue to be available. He is in the race car during the race, available for any calamity the stage might bring. Coming up to a stage finish there is a deviation for the support cars, so when he gets dropped off he has to get himself to the finish to be at anti-doping with any of his riders chosen for testing. To be there he has to get through the crowds and the security. He doesn’t have to be there but he likes to be. Availability.

  Today’s team trial means a short day on the road. For the riders the effort is short and intense. For the team around them the day allows time to catch up on all the other things which make Team Sky tick.

  When life slows down for Alan Farrell he will probably appreciate the strangeness of these days. For now the young doctor is immersed in this world. When Thomas cracked his pelvis and rode on Farrell wasn’t much fazed by it, or unduly surprised. The heroics were wonderful and Farrell knows that the more Thomas works on the bike, the more pain he cycles through, the better he will feel. Everybody has their reasons for running away with this circus. The sense that anything can happen during a working day on a Grand Tour is one of the attractions.

  Farrell had been working in pro cycling for just six weeks when he found himself acting as Sky’s full-time doctor on the 2012 Tour de France. The first major issue he had at the Tour was when Kanstantsin Siutsou [Kosta, to the team] broke his leg on the third stage. One of those moments. You’re not in Kansas anymore, Dorothy.

  Farrell learned quickly that this job was different from any he was used to before. He was an Irish doctor. Here he had a rider from Belarus who was living in Italy, riding his first Tour de France for a team based in the UK. When Kosta broke his leg Alan Farrell was up all night trying to organise a flight to get the rider to the UK to have an operation. At the last minute he realised that being a Belarusian, Kosta didn’t have a visa for the UK. He would be turned away. Alan Farrell switched his attentions to Paris, found what he was looking for and resolved to improve his linguistic capabilities.

  Today’s team trial isn’t an annual feature of the race. Last year for instance it didn’t figure at all but when the team trial is included it makes for a fine spectacle. Teams operate what they call a rotating pace line with the members of the team, taking it in turns to lead the group. This is called taking a pull. Thus the cyclists share the responsibility of punching a hole through the wind. That’s the theory. The challenge is discipline. You want the group to maintain a steady pace rather than have each rider who goes to the front upping the ante until the team gets strung out and the system breaks down.

  In this context G Thomas is expected to be dead wood today. Yesterday in Corsica was wonderful but winning is about pragmatism, and finishing close to the top of the pile in Nice will send Team Sky towards the Pyrenees in pretty good shape.

  When he finished his medical studies at Trinity College, Dublin, back in 2001, Farrell taught anatomy for a year in the University. He served an internship in a Dublin hospital and then did a year and a half of anaesthetics before heading off to travel for six months. He returned to Ireland and settled into life as a General Practitioner for four years. His last job in Ireland was working in an urgent care centre, best described as a halfway house between an A&E department and a GP surgery, where he dealt with people with acute injuries. By then he had fallen in love with cycling, but nothing suggested to him that he would someday be watching Geraint Thomas be helped onto his bike to head off with a cracked pelvis.

  Farrell had given up his own athletic pursuits when he was in his twenties. Middle age wasn’t exactly crowding him when he decided to get back out and do a bit of running, but he felt the need for exercise and for competition.

  He joined a triathlon club in Mullingar in the Irish midlands and that got him back into running again. He was a novice swimmer and that was hard work, but the bike? The bike just sang a siren song to him.

  As soon as he started cycling properly he was out of the triathlon business and pledging himself to the bike. He bought himself a Trek 1000, the bikes used in the Discovery Team, bought it at Trevor Martins, a bike shop in Longford. Trevor had raced at a decent level and the connection and the 6000 euro Alan paid for the bike fuelled his interest. He still has the bike, preferring it to the Pinarello he got from Sky.

  Soon he was addicted. He went from feeling slightly comical wearing a cycling helmet to staying up into the small hours devouring YouTube footage of old races.

  By 2009 he could no longer conduct the affair by long distance. He went to the Tour de France, three of them driving from Ireland. They met with some other lunatics – three from the UK and two from Australia – when they were in the Pyrenees and they joined forces cycling around after the Tour like a supporting trip. In Longford where Farrell comes from you could stand on two phone books and see for ever, so the mountain terrain was very new from a cycling point of view. Now he was racing his new friends up mountains and finding that he had the legs for it and that he certainly had the competitiveness for it.

  For six weeks they were based in Barèges, a village in the high Pyrenees just to the west of the Col du Tourmalet. It was 2009, Lance Armstrong’s comeback but the beginning of the end of cycling’s lowest period. Farrell sat on top of the Tourmalet as the race passed over the summit. Thinking. Thinking.

  The addiction bit him hard and wouldn’t let go.

  Still. Nobody predicted what would happen in the spring of 2012. Late one night in Dublin, with his girlfriend Rhona away in Boston on a trip to see her sister, Farrell was enjoying a quiet evening in, watching the television and sipping a glass of wine. Still thinking, thinking, thinking. He would like to work in professional sport, he thought to himself. What sport would that be? Cycling. What team would he like to work for? Well, language was going be an issue. He had just the standard Irish pe
rson’s linguistic skills – fluent English and Gaelic. And game to try anything else.

  So. Cycling. A doctor. English speaking. Sky were the newest team on the block and the obvious choice. So he literally Googled ‘Team Sky Cycling Doctor’ and the first thing that came up was the British Medical Journal and an advertisement for a job with Team Sky with the closing date two weeks later. His jaw fell open as if its hinges had been removed. He had actually Googled his specific dream job. Eureka. The phone rang. Rhona, from Boston. He told her what had just happened. She heard him say it and some voice inside her told her that he was going to get the job.

  He wasn’t so sanguine.

  ‘I applied, not expecting a reply. I got news of the interview in an email on a Saturday night. I was running a race, a ten k, in Carrick on Shannon the next day. It was a particularly hilly ten k. I smashed forty minutes, I broke it. I was on an absolute high. I was thinking I’m not going to get this.’

  Still. It was a high just to be getting interviewed.

  Two weeks later on 14 March he went for the interview in Manchester. He wore his good suit and his competitor’s face. He was offered the job that day. He was leaving Manchester when his phone rang and they asked him to come back into the velodrome. Tim Kerrison and Dr Steve Peters were there.

  ‘Look, do you fancy this?’

  He did.

  The interview had been freighted with small reminders of what the world of cycling was going through and clear messages as to what Team Sky saw their response and their responsibility being. One scenario put to candidates was to tell the interview panel (Kerrison, Peters and Dr Richard Freeman) how they would deal with a young athlete coming in and saying, ‘Look, I want to try this . . . uhm “method”.’

  What would the doctor do in that situation? Bring it to management? What would the response be to the athlete?