Inside Team Sky

by Walsh, David

  I check the trash for syringes. I look at the riders’ arms and legs for puncture marks. I narrow my eyes when I see Søren Kristiansen, the chef, just to let him know I am on to him if he tries anything. I am on the alert for East German doctors. I would know a testosterone patch if I saw one. I ask Claudio Lucchini, the driver, if I can help him hoover the bus in the evening, so I can check for things hidden under the seats. I drift over and block the exit if a doping control chaperone comes into the room.

  Nothing so far.

  It might be better and more logical journalistically to sift through the available evidence first. Take what we can see and hold it up to the light. The things which Team Sky reckon make them go faster? Let’s see if they all add up. Many of those things come straight out of the head of Tim Kerrison, the team’s head of performance, who comes up with those marginal gains which so many denounced as madness at first. Let the investigation of Kerrison and his so-called ‘science’ commence.

  Mr Kerrison, you stand accused of masterminding the most complex doping programme of the modern sporting world.

  ‘Come, Watson, come! The game is afoot!’

  In the Sky hierarchy there are maybe five supreme beings whose roles I would crudely sum up as follows.

  Brailsford is unimpeachable as spiritual leader, Dalai Lama, guru, oracle, sage, swami, keeper of the fire, with a weakness to lapse into presumption on the question of others’ honesty.

  Fran Miller, head of business operations, is the conduit to the outside world, marketing, persuading, charming, correcting, chiding, far from a pushover.

  Carsten Jeppesen, head of technical operations, deals with the team’s partners like Pinarello or Rapha in getting the best equipment into the arena. Made for the world he moves in.

  Rod Ellingworth, performance manager, co-ordinates the sports directors and race coaches. Plans for tomorrow, next week, next season. As close to the soul of the team as one man can be.

  And Tim Kerrison, a quietly spoken, understated character who moves in the background but affects everything in the foreground. His influence is everywhere.

  The model under which Team Sky operates doesn’t mean that these five enjoy any more privilege or leeway than anybody else on the team. When there is work to be done, you do it. It is common during the Tour to see Kerrison and Jeppesen standing on the roadside, being accosted by cycling fanatics of all stripes, for a couple of hours waiting for the Sky riders to come past so they can hand them their musettes of gels and drinks.

  I like to watch Kerrison from a distance as he deals with the riders. Reconnaissance. He is that rarest of coaches, the man who can make you a better performer in half an hour. Riders would like him regardless of personality, because liking him and listening to him are the best thing they can do for their performance. Still, when he talks to riders in his quiet and reserved way he gives off liking and respect for them too, but never in such a way that a Chris Froome would imagine he was more special to Tim Kerrison than a David López or Pete Kennaugh.

  Glowing character references. Still, they won’t save you from the weight of cold hard evidence, you mark my words, Kerrison.

  Every rider is a person as well as a scientific project. A challenge of data, science and coaching, but also a human being needing to be understood. On my first training camp with the team, which was in Mallorca, I spent a lot of time shooting the breeze with Kerrison. We ran together, talked about sport and life and the team and the riders. Let’s see how he deals with good cop first.

  At different times he spoke to me of the importance of his chats with riders after training when they would explain how they felt while doing it. That feedback, he argued, can be as important as the numbers produced.

  It frustrated him that because he didn’t speak all the languages necessary to be conversant with every rider in the team, and because many of them had limited English, he couldn’t access the information he needed to set against the numbers.

  Kerrison despaired when he came into professional cycling and Google searches started linking him with doping. He talked with Dave Brailsford about it and though his boss told him not to let it worry him, it hurt Kerrison and caused him to wonder if he should be involved in the sport.

  His upset at his ethics being questioned was understandable. For a man who sees each of his charges as a separate project and different challenge, the notion of pumping a hatful of drugs into a rider and watching him go faster was profoundly insulting.

  There were things I would remember from that week in Mallorca. How Joe Dombrowski and Jonathan Tiernan-Locke hated being blood tested because of a fear of needles. Tiernan-Locke, the others were saying, used to turn green. Another memory is of the other young American Ian Boswell sidling up to me and introducing himself with an assurance that seemed very un-European.

  But the strongest memory was of the time spent with Kerrison and the absolute conviction I felt that whatever doping might still be happening in the sport, he would have no part in it. When Brailsford brought him into the team, it wasn’t because he was looking for the next Ferrari.

  So far so good, Tim, but we’re just getting started.

  Kerrison is an Aussie. He worked down under in both swimming and rowing before being lured to British Swimming in 2005. Kerrison is from Toowong in Brisbane and in 2002 Steve Kuzma and Michael McBryde from his home rowing club won the World Under-23 championships under Kerrison’s tutelage. How long since that had previously happened? Toowong, much Toowong.

  That isn’t the sort of joke one makes to Tim Kerrison. Well, actually, you could but you might have to pick your moment.

  Kerrison’s move into swimming performance at the Queensland Academy of Sport coincided with a time when the Australians were starting to worry about their inability to produce top-class female sprinters. In Athens in 2004, Queensland provided the answer when Jodie Henry of Brisbane took three golds. By the 2005 world championships there were sixteen Queenslanders on the Aussie swim team.

  Kerrison was underpaid and in demand. Another famed Aussie swim coach, Bill Sweetenham, was already in Britain and he lured Kerrison over – the latest transfer under the historical convicts for modern sports coaches exchange scheme, which saw a lot of Australia’s best coaching talent head to the UK.

  In Australia, Kerrison had constructed success on the back of his Interactive Race Analysis and Video System, which allowed coaches to analyse particular aspects of races as performed either by their own swimmer or by rivals. They could isolate increases or decreases in speed at certain intervals, instantly access the number of strokes taken, the distance travelled with each stroke, and so on. The system was launched with a library file of 2000 swims already loaded.

  When Kerrison came to Britain he developed a further advanced version of the system. The results were noticeable. His influence on performance and training gained a large part of the credit for Britain’s success in the pool in Beijing.

  During his years with the swimmers, Kerrison would meet regularly with a small group of coaches and sports scientists from a range of sports. Cycling was one of those sports. Dave Brailsford heard the word and was seduced by the message. He had his high performance director. Brailsford signed Kerrison just before he was snapped up by cricket and lost forever.

  Background checks look pretty solid.

  Kerrison is an earnest and likeable man. Not a lot of the loud Aussie stereotype survives in him. Put him back to back with Bradley Wiggins’s personal coach for 2012, Shane Sutton, and the two Aussies seem drawn from different species. Kerrison is guarded and doesn’t do bonhomie as a rule, but he would cheerily admit that when he came to Team Sky he knew little about cycling. He didn’t feel he needed to. He knew the human body. Everything else is just applications thereof. So Sky sent him out in a camper van. Usual Sky style. Even a camper can look ominous. They nicknamed it Black Betty. They told him to come back whenever he felt that he knew enough to make a difference. And by the way, no need to rush.

  The
result of his famous recce of the cycling world in 2010 was Brailsford’s announcement that Team Sky had, to that point, been worrying about the peas more than the steaks.

  Kerrison had watched and learned. Cyclists thought they were training hard. They weren’t.

  Famously, late in 2010, Brailsford and Wiggins had an altercation. Brailsford had travelled to Australia to the World Championships and had watched David Millar grind out a silver medal through gritted teeth and bloody-mindedness. It didn’t matter so much that Brailsford had gone to the edge by not inviting Millar into Team Sky when it seemed like he was an obvious signing. It mattered that Bradley Wiggins, highly paid and temperamental, was at home resting while Millar was medalling down under.

  Brailsford started the conversation with a phone call and continued it in person when he got home days later. Wiggins came to see the point. That is the easy bit. Leading the horse to water. Brailsford, though, was coming to realise that he had the man who could change all that, a man who was convinced that even elite athletes are only in the foothills of exploring the potential of the human body. A man who could get the horses to drink. Tim Kerrison.

  The culture of cycling bemused Tim Kerrison as he learned about it from within the bespoke confines of Black Betty. Riders clocked off at certain periods of the year then came back to train, riding hours on end in unsupervised bunches, gradually getting strength into their legs and stopping periodically for espressos. The same riders would use the early season races for more conditioning. The hope was that by the time the Grand Tours came about the races had worked as a whetstone for their bodies. The blade would be sharp. Hopefully.

  A lot of the time they peaked too early or too late. And a lot of the time they didn’t know what was keeping them from peak performance. Bradley Wiggins, for instance, couldn’t time his talent to be on tap when he wanted it. And he couldn’t ride above 1700m without experiencing difficulties.

  Training was often long but unfocused. When the season really got going the intervals between races were just a couple of recovery days, enough time only for getting ready for the next race. Riders might go through a whole season and scarcely ever train properly. Not doing any training meant not getting any coaching, which meant not improving technique.

  ‘So with quite a few of our riders we stripped the race programme down, so they were getting enough race days, but also enough blocks between race days to get some good training in. We tried to dispel this myth that you have to race to be ready to race.’

  Things changed. Riders’ schedules were carefully designed. They took warm-downs after stages. They took their long morning cycles – hours on end depending on bodily resources – before they had breakfast. Don’t worry, all this was monitored and a protein shake helps you go a long way. Coaches went out with riders and actually coached them. Guys who had been riding bikes from the time they could walk relearned how to ride their bikes.

  As well as trying to recreate the uneven rhythms of real races, the training sessions became harder. ‘There were days during our pre-season when I wanted to punch him in the face. But they’re the days that got me Paris–Nice,’ Richie Porte told me one evening before dinner.

  While at team training camps in Mallorca and later in Tenerife I noticed Kerrison insisting upon a reduced training day for any rider showing signs of fatigue or any hint that he might. And when they go well, he is pleased because he has grown to like them. What they seem to like is his even-handedness: he’s there for every rider, as interested in one as the next.

  After every ride a Team Sky rider performs he comes home, takes his SRM power gauge off his bike, downloads the day’s data and sends it straight to Tim Kerrison. The coaches who supervise the riders’ long rides know where the weaknesses are. They know where the improvements are to be found.

  So Bradley Wiggins found that he would go to Tenerife for two weeks and ride 32,000m of climb. He found that getting ready for the Tour de France involved him riding 100,000m of ascending asphalt. As well as everything else he did. Surviving in the mountains meant not handing back the advantages gained in the time trials.

  A few weeks before the Tour started, Chris Froome went to the wind tunnel at the University of Southampton on his new Pinarello Bolide time-trial bike to learn how to shave some more seconds off his time-trialling ability. Different rider, different challenges, different tactics.

  Most cyclists have experienced wind tunnels before. In Team Sky they want to go back often. The wind tunnel has become an instrument of such usefulness that they can see the point of building one just for themselves.

  In time-trialling, it is a natural law that if you get super low on your bike you are going to go faster. You’re going to get a more aerodynamic ride. Speed is largely about punching as small a hole as possible through the air. For a long time cyclists thought these things are set in stone. If you are a bad time-trialler, you are a bad time-trialler. It will say so on your grave.

  So, in Southampton, at first the riders would demur. The usual moans. I feel uncomfortable. I can’t get the power out with my hips angled like that, etc. So Sky educates to persuade. They let the rider take off in whatever way he feels comfortable and give them the figures and calculations in real time. Now they can see precisely what a repositioning of the hands, a tilt of the hips, a tucking-in of the elbows or a duck of the head can cost or gain over, say, 4km. Just lost a second. Another one. And another. So they adjust and they can see. Just gained a second. And the scales fall from their eyes.

  And suddenly it’s all coming from the rider. Two seconds could take years of training to shave off. But now with this new tilt of the hips and tucked-in elbows . . . they take ownership of it and off they go. Now instead of the physios dictating, ‘You have to learn to ride in this position,’ it comes from the riders: ‘Help me get the same power out riding like this.’

  The team embraced the wisdom of Kerrison’s theory of reverse periodisation. So instead of spending a large chunk of the early year building endurance and aerobic base, the rider focuses on introducing all the power and speed from the start. Gradually the duration of the sessions would increase, leaving Team Sky with their defining ability to ride long periods at high tempo.

  Anywhere that he could see a better way of doing things, Kerrison would do it. He is the embodiment of Robert Kennedy’s ideal of the man who asks not ‘why?’, but ‘why not?’

  Hate to say it, sarge, but he looks clean as a whistle.

  There is a story from the 2011 Tour which describes part of his genius. Having lost Bradley Wiggins to injury, the team were finishing out the Tour as best they could, learning their lessons. The seventeenth stage began in France and ended in Italy, running from Gap to Pinerolo. At 179km, mid-stage, the challenges began, with a series of climbs culminating in the category one Sestriere, then a long 45km descent before sweeping up the Côte de Pramartino, a category two climb.

  And then the finale, designed by race organisers keen to inject a little more thrill and spill into the race. The descent into the finish at Pinerolo was twisting, technical and steep, and described memorably by Andy Schleck as ‘fatally dangerous’. Collectively the peloton was nerved by the prospect. Sticking in the group meant danger. Going fast enough to get away meant danger.

  Kerrison had brought the Sky boys here before, though. They had done this three times in one day. Back to back. Kerrison hadn’t left it at that. He had filmed the descent. He showed it to them before they went to bed in Embrun the night before. He showed it to them on the team bus on the way to the stage. Every twist and turn was implanted in their brains.

  On the descent Edvald Boasson Hagen rode with glorious abandon and won the stage. Two riders, Thomas Voeckler and Jonathan Hivert, on the other hand, rode straight into a private driveway. Nobody died but everybody was forced to tread carefully. Everybody except those who knew what they were doing.

  Kerrison moved to Nice this spring. It’s just a thought, but France has the toughest anti-doping laws in the wo
rld. If Kerrison were the new dark overlord of doping, well, Nice wouldn’t be the place to fetch up. That stretch of Med from Nice to Monaco has become a home-from-home for the Team Sky lads, though.

  What the Manchester velodrome was for the track boys and girls, the Riviera is for the road warriors. Richie Porte is in Nice. Froome is up the road in Monaco. G Thomas, Ben Swift, Joe Dombrowski, Ian Boswell, Luke Rowe, Ian Stannard – they are all around. And Team Sky bought a house on the Promenade du Soleil for other riders to drop down to. So between training camps they don’t float unsupervised. They get daily face-to-face guidance and contact.

  Kerrison has come to appreciate the history and lore of cycling both for better and for worse. The climb in the Med from which Team Sky are building their own database is the Col de la Madone – the ride out from Menton to the Col and then down to Peille. It has been used for a long time, but most famously in recent times by Armstrong and Ferrari in the weeks leading up to a Tour.

  Aha! Gotcha. Cuff him, lads.

  The taint is inescapable and regrettable, but every working day of his life Kerrison feels Armstrong’s bony claws reaching out from the past and contaminating his present. Kerrison is a scientist though. Armstrong and Ferrari having been on the mountain does nothing to diminish the mountain or its fitness for purpose.

  Oh . . .

  ‘Everyone knows it was a test climb of Armstrong’s and Ferrari’s back in . . . the bad old days . . . So we have some reference data, but then that sort of reference data you never quite know in what condition they did it, and you hear lots of stories about times and time trials up there. [ . . .] It is the most conveniently located climb for us to use as a test climb, so we’ve started using that and we’ve started to build up a database of our own times up that climb.’

  The idea of coaches being present on a daily basis – watching, learning and cajoling – seems too obvious for it to ever have been new, but having Shane Sutton tag along with Bradley Wiggins, or Bobby Julich with Chris Froome, brought considerable benefit. Julich was initially old school in his view of Kerrison’s gospel.