Inside Team Sky

by Walsh, David

  ‘At first when I saw the way Tim was working I was pretty sceptical. Then as soon as I’d figured it out I was like wow! Why doesn’t everybody do it like this?’

  Kerrison hoovers up cycling data with an addict’s voracity. Numbers are his bricks and from the bricks he can build models. The models tell him how to determine what it takes to be the best in the world.

  He casts a cold eye on this year’s craze, the hula-hoop which is home-brewed power stats.

  He sees people happily making big assumptions while watching a rider perform and then throwing the assumptions into the mix as a power-to-weight quantity is determined. The result is a set of rules which supposedly determine the physiological limits of an athlete. Any athlete going past those limits is red flagged. These home-brewed stats are much like their liquor counterparts: rough, inconsistent, and coming with a distinct risk of blindness.

  Contaminated evidence.

  If you live on a diet of numbers it is interesting to watch but not definitive. His own range of data occupies that no-man’s land between Team Sky’s desire for transparency and Team Sky’s need for a competitive edge. As a scientist he doesn’t discourage the use of data to make for more informed viewing of the sport but he is saddened by the notion of guilt by association. Saddened but somewhat used to it.

  Let him go boys, there ain’t no flies on this one. Case dismissed.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  ‘You cannot teach a man anything; you can only help him discover it in himself.’

  Galileo

  Saturday, 6 July

  Kaboom!

  Chris Froome blew up the Tour de France today and almost got lynched for it. On the short final climb of Ax 3 Domaines he ascended in what we were told was the third fastest time ever. He might as well have had a cannula in his wrist attached to a giant IV drip marked ‘EPO’.

  Suddenly, this Saturday evening, it is raining conclusions. People are shaking their heads in sadness. Some are wagging their fingers in anger. To me it is all meaningless. Now, I’ve never worn the leader’s jersey in the race for a Field Medal in mathematics, but I do know this: today is only the fifth time that the Tour has used Ax 3 as a climb. It is also the earliest ever appearance which the climb has had in the race.

  Today’s stage was the eighth and the riders are fresh (in 2001 Ax 3 was on the twelfth stage, on the thirteenth stage in 2003 and was fourteenth stage fodder in both 2005 and 2012). The length of the stage was different each time. Straight off the bat this is a flimsy and unreliable shred of evidence for anybody to be drawing any conclusions from.

  Inevitably times set in the doping era will someday be surpassed by clean riders. A well-supported and talented rider doing that on a climb that lasts a little less than 24 minutes is not going to convince anybody that the Tour has gone needle crazy again.

  So you would think.

  It took until just the third question of the press conference before somebody confessed to having had a US Postal flashback. Froome was asked to assure everybody that what they had seen was bona fide.

  Herein lies part of the disconnect between the riders and the media. When I spoke to Froome about the questions, he was of the view that most media believed in his team because there was no concrete reason not to. In reality it is more likely that journalists won’t believe in a team because there is little concrete reason to. These competing starting points inevitably cause problems. Froome thought that the questions came from a need, especially post-Lance, for journalists to be seen to be asking questions about doping. But without real suspicion based upon real evidence, the inevitable doping questions lack rigour and mainly serve to just irk those within Team Sky more than anything else. It’s not exactly Pulitzer material.

  I remember during the Armstrong years doing an interview in the course of which I said that no one part of the evidence I had amassed amounted to a smoking gun. The evidence was substantial: a suppressed positive, eyewitness testimony of Lance listing what drugs he had done, the tales of Emma O’Reilly, the confession Betsy Andreu heard, Stephen Swart’s inside story about Lance pre-cancer, the Ferrari/Conconi chain etc. etc. What I meant in that interview was that, taken together, this evidence amounted to a serious case to answer for, but I didn’t consider any one piece of evidence alone to be proof of Lance’s guilt.

  That seemed reasonable to me and still does. Tonight it seems that the damage done by the Lance era has led us to an environment where one short performance can be taken as conclusive evidence of guilt.

  I am uncomfortable with that.

  Just as alarming as the outbreak of statistics is the death by anecdote routine gaining popularity. To pull this off, you just need to quote one Ax 3 figure and then drop in a line about how this performance has come from a guy who was disqualified for taking a tow on a mountain in Italy not so long ago.

  This is the obligatory reference to the 2010 Giro, which Froome raced in following a bout of sickness (it was a habit of his in his early times as a pro to keep his mouth shut about feeling unwell). Anyway, on Stage Eight his knee gave him trouble and by Stage Nineteen, trailing the stage leader by 35 minutes going up Mortirolo, he was in agony.

  There was a feed zone at the top of Mortirolo, and Froome decided to abandon the race and jump in the team car when he reached it. He grabbed the back of a police motorbike, got a pull to the top, stepped off his bike and duly quit.

  A commissar saw him hanging off the bike and, thinking that Froome was stealing an advantage and was still in the race, the commissar reported him. He was fined and disqualified, somehow, having already quit.

  Ergo? Froome could never climb. And as an aside, if you were going to take an illegal tow would you really choose a police motorbike?

  I like to tell another motorbike story which Froome told me. It goes back to the 2007 Giro delle Reggioni in Italy, an Under-23 race. This was where Rod Ellingworth first spotted Froome. Ellingworth is no mug. Froome wasn’t long out of Africa (two weeks at the UCI World Cycling Centre in Aigle) and admits sheepishly that he didn’t know back then that downhill riding is done 90 per cent on the front brake. He crashed four times on the first stage. Next day was a mountain finish.

  ‘I’d trained really hard to get ready for it. I actually trained at altitude in Lesotho, which is an “island” entirely inside SA with very high mountains, and in J’burg where I was staying at the time. I got over to the Reggioni and this second stage was the mountain-top finish. I was surprised how I rode away from the bunch; going up the last climb, I was with a Russian and a Slovenian, Grega Bole, who is still on the circuit. We dropped the Russian, I think in the last kilometre.

  ‘Grega was on my wheel and he begged me to slow down. He said he would give me the stage, “Just don’t drop me, don’t drop me.”

  ‘I said: “Okay, okay, not a problem.”

  ‘We got to the last hairpin and they pulled the front vehicles away, the front motorbikes veered off. I was following the vehicles and blindly I followed them into the deviation when they veered off ! That was one hundred metres before the finish line and the Slovenian went the right way and won the stage. I had to do a bit of a U-turn there and got second on that day.’

  He got second place despite his chain going metres from the line.

  A few days later they had another mountain-top finish in Montepulciano in southern Tuscany. This time Froome waited for nobody. He went early and then put in a sudden burst of acceleration on the final 1.5km to the finish line. Something familiar about that.

  ‘I just went on my own, went from the last five kilometres, up through cobbled streets, it was beautiful, my first win in Europe. I was blown away.’

  Guys like Rui Costa, Bauke Mollema, Ben Swift and Ian Stannard were behind him, gasping.

  Ergo? Ergo, nothing actually. They are mere shards drawn from a career of thousands of races. A Reggioni yarn doesn’t trump a police motorbike tale or vice versa. It just doesn’t work that way. Meanwhile, just because we want to urge people not to leap
to conclusions by isolating performances, we shouldn’t fail to acknowledge when those performances are exceptional. Froome has been trained and paid to be exceptional and today he was.

  The stage was the moment on the Tour for Team Sky to lay its cards on the table. This is what we’ve got and we believe it’s good enough. Froome was the ace they were holding back and the question, endlessly debated, was ‘when to play it?’ Twelve months before, Sky controlled the Tour by playing safe, covering every attack in the mountains and gaining enough in the time trials to win.

  But Froome is not Wiggins. He’s good against the clock but not as good as the Londoner. In the mountains he’s different and better. Can’t just sit there when the road rises, he wants to attack. See what the others have got. He’d spoken so positively, not to say aggressively, about the stage to Ax 3 that Brailsford and Kerrison became pacifiers.

  ‘Chris, we know you’re going to attack on that climb but, mate, better not go too soon.’

  Froome told them he’d waited the whole year for this stage and he knew if he felt good he’d just want to rip the race apart. And, dutifully, they reminded him that this was only the first of six mountain stages.

  When it came to the nitty-gritty of where and how the race would pan out, they saw Vasil Kiryienka making the tempo on the Col de Pailhères, then Kennaugh would take over, lead over the top, make the descent and keep going for as long as he could. On the climb to Ax 3, Porte would take control and burn off many of those in the leading group. Then on a really steep section 4km from the summit, 5km from the finish, Froome would launch his attack. They expected him to take the yellow jersey on this day because they knew he’d set his heart on it.

  And he’s a pretty stubborn guy.

  This was going to be a big hit. Some guys wouldn’t be getting up off the canvas.

  The first 120km of flatness was unremarkable. A four-man break was indulged with a lead that stretched to 9 minutes at one point. The action on this stage comes at the end though. By the time the race hit the hors categorie Col de Pailhères (bigger than its neighbour Ax 3), the breakaway boys could feel breath on their necks. The lead had been eroded away and was down to around 60 seconds by the time the leaders had reached the Col de Pailhères. From Sky’s point of view, perfect.

  There were some solo bids from here on, but it was young Nairo Quintana who made the attack that counted. He broke away on the Pailhères, so far from the finish it was clear his Movistar team were sacrificing his chances for team leader Alejandro Valverde.

  Sky had to chase Quintana, spend a lot of energy in the process and they would then be vulnerable on the final climb. It was a shocking miscalculation by Movistar because Quintana was much stronger than Valverde and, before the Tour would end, he would show he was easily the second best rider in the race. Not bad for a man being used by his own team as cannon fodder.

  In Team Sky they fret a little that this long stage race is too much too young for Kennaugh. I don’t think anybody dares say that to the face of the Isle of Man rider. He’s saucy and tough and does a brilliant ride to the top of Pailhères. On the descent he gives life to the expression ‘poetry in motion’ and Froome is comfortable taking his teammate’s lines into every corner.

  Quintana had a minute at the top of Pailhères. Thirty seconds after the descent.

  As a postscript, Kennaugh rode at lunatic pace into the final 7.8km climb to Ax 3 Domaines. He was astonishing, almost comical to watch in his fury. He paid the price, dropping away with 6km left, but his work was done.

  As planned, that left Richie Porte to pace his friend and roommate Froome. Porte grew up riding the Sideling, a famous climb in Tasmania, and he looked comfortable here at the other end of the world as the two Sky boys reeled Quintana in.

  Just the finish left to execute. Froome, relatively fresh, took a look around and surveyed the state of his competitors before striking off on his own for a win which hurt all his rivals. Quintana and Contador lost 1'40", and he put more than four minutes of hopelessness into Cadel Evans. He reached the top 50 seconds before teammate Porte and, when the jerseys were re-allocated, he had yellow.

  Froome was the story of the day, but Kennaugh’s toughness on the descent of Pailhères is highlighted by another tale to which little attention is being paid.

  The Pyrenees should have been the making of one Thibaut Pinot, France’s great climbing hope. He finished tenth on his Tour de France debut last year. Unfortunately, for a great climber, Pinot finds there is one thing he can’t do. Come down again.

  ‘Some people are afraid of spiders or snakes. I’m afraid of speed. It’s a phobia.’

  On Pailhères today when Pinot was separated from the yellow jersey group on the way down he lost six minutes.

  Poor boy. Imagine the horrors to come.

  Sunday, 7 July

  The horrors came.

  Mainly for Dave Brailsford.

  On the other hand, if Team Sky wanted to send out a message about the ethical nature of their work they could hardly have done better than today. Chris Froome had breakfast with his team and then scarcely saw them again until they reconvened for dinner twelve hours later. ‘Hey, guys, what’ve you been doing today?’

  Guys like Porte, Kennaugh and Vasil Kiryienka, who all did shifts at the coalface yesterday, might have been forgiven more moderate performances today, but no one at Team Sky could have been persuaded it was possible for their team to collapse quite as it did.

  Consider the basis on which the team was picked: Porte, Kennaugh, Kiryienka, G Thomas, David López and Kosta Siutsou were selected because they should all be able to help Froome in the mountains. But, today, they didn’t have it. Just not there. There could be good reasons why two or three struggled, but all six?

  If Team Sky are cheating, it seems like they are doing it with just one rider. Everybody else in the team should ask for a little of whatever Chris Froome’s having.

  It was a gripping and engrossing stage in the Pyrenees that saw Kennaugh go down in an early crash, falling off his bike on the descent of the first climb, the Col de Portet-d’Aspet. ‘When he was down, we drove past him and didn’t even know he’d crashed. Luckily, Servais Knaven came in the second car and helped him,’ Brailsford said later. Kennaugh never really recovered.

  Porte, who looked so strong on Saturday as he helped Froome claim yellow, slipped badly off the pace and eventually finished long after the stage winner. Starting the day in second place in the General Classification, the Tasmanian lost time on the first climb and continued to lose more time until business closed with him 18 minutes behind, the team having finally told him to cool it and save his energy for what lay ahead. Kiryienka would have settled for that. Unfortunately he had tracked down a lot of early breaks and then run out of steam.

  Kiryienka is a tough Belarusian. You suspect that Belarusians aren’t available in any other model than tough. I haven’t got to know him. Nor will I. This is Kiryienka’s first year with the team and one glance at his lantern jaw suggests why he is here. He was hired to shovel coal into the furnace on hard days, and yet no rider in the team pedals with anything like Kiryienka’s classily elegant body position.

  He comes across as a serious and proud man. When he joined Team Sky they gave him a light-hearted questionnaire to fill out so that fans could get a flavour of him. Under ‘Interesting Facts’ he recorded, ‘I have no special talents.’ Asked about his interests away from cycling he says earnestly ‘I’d like to have a role in the development of my country. I am worried for the future of my children and my nation.’

  He’ll get to see those children a little sooner now, but it won’t be a happy flight home. The Belarusian exceeded the time limit by one minute and was forced to abandon the race. Kiryienka’s pride means that his loss is a serious blow. This evening at the Majestic hotel in La Baule, most of the talk is about him.

  ‘Kiry okay?’

  ‘Devastated. Feels he’s let people down.’

  No one sees him depart a
nd those who got to speak with him say that his eyes looked towards the ground. How could it happen? Why wasn’t the second team car behind Kiry? Encouraging him, coaxing him? In the end, he only missed the cut by a minute. Shame.

  While Team Sky struggled they had to watch Movistar doing a passable impression of themselves, pushing the tempo on the front of the bunch. They achieved the first leg of their master plan which was to get rid of Porte and isolate Froome, but things got tougher after that.

  Froome was part of a thirty-two-strong group which included most of the race favourites and, instead of bellyaching about his loneliness and isolation, the radio conversation with Nico Portal revolved around improvisational tactics. (It was a characteristically classy touch of Froome’s when questioned afterwards about how he felt being alone in the group to point out that in fact he wasn’t alone, he’d had Nico with him the whole way.)

  You deal with the problem by reducing it in size. So Froome doesn’t have thirty-one rivals in that lead group, he has just three. He needed to keep the cuffs on the Movistar pair Valverde and Nairo Quintana, and Alberto Contador of Saxo-Tinkoff.

  The Movistar boys maintained a strong presence at the front of Froome’s group but couldn’t shake off Froome in the valleys. Valverde tried to break clear on the flatter valley roads but Froome was on to him every time. Because he reacted decisively, Valverde got discouraged after the third or fourth attempt.

  One final throw of the dice. They would try to bust him on the day’s final mountain climb.

  Three times Quintana attacked. Three times Froome reeled him in.

  Contador should then have been able to profit from the energy the race leader spent on the Movistars, but the Spaniard in the Saxo colours just didn’t have it. The favourites reached the top of La Hourquette d’Ancizan together and though Garmin’s Dan Martin would escape with Jakob Fuglsang and beat him in a two-up sprint, that didn’t hurt Froome.