by Walsh, David
Then he asked Oli what his role was, his job in the team?
‘Okay, performance coordinator.’
‘Ah, so you carry medicine?’
‘No, no medicine.’
It went on like that for a while. Then to Rod.
‘Performance manager.’
‘Oh, so you carry the medicine, no?’
‘No. No medicine.’
‘Okay, out of the car.’
They get out. No hustle and bustle. Things still cool.
‘Okay, empty your pockets.’
Oli had nothing in his pockets, he had placed it all in the central compartment of the car. Rod got his phone and his wallet out, but as he did so, laying them on the bonnet, Oli noticed one of the other policemen had opened the back door and was going through his bag.
Oli couldn’t see what was going on: ‘Sorry, you can’t do that. You can’t go in my bag without me watching you going in my bag.’
‘Yes, we can.’
‘So what happens if you put something in there or, you know? I go to jail for two years and the whole team folds, it’s ridiculous.’
‘No, no, we can go where we want.’
‘Okay, well, let me see.’
So Oli started to walk round the car and told the policeman that now he could look where he liked.
‘Okay!’
At this point, another policeman went around to the other side of the car and they found the cooler, the mini little cool box of sandwiches. The policemen got excited at this, and Oli and Rod could hear them going ‘Oi oi oi oi.’ Surely the perfect equipment for storing blood used in mobile transfusions?
The mini cool box was tucked in behind one of the front seats.
‘It was a Vittel bag, and then inside it there was a small hard cool box which the team use for VIP sandwiches because we don’t have much space, so it’s kind of a mini cool box, about 25cm by 25cm by 30cm or something.’ The cool box turned out to be empty, because there were no VIPs that day. And it all would have been a bit comical if it hadn’t been so serious. The police weren’t seeing any funny side.
‘Okay, well where are the drugs?’
‘Sorry, we don’t have any drugs. Well, not “sorry”, but we don’t have any drugs. Why would we have drugs?’
‘You are cycling, cycling you carry blood, you know?’
‘No, we don’t. Maybe that was the old cycling.’
‘No, it’s still today cycling.’
The conversation was going nowhere. Oli looked to wrap it up.
‘Okay, well, maybe you’ve come with a preconceived agenda unfortunately, so please, let’s search. You can search us every day, you’ll never find anything that’s, you know . . .’
One of the policemen opens the boot and Oli has his main bag in there, his big travel bag. Oli had just seen his girlfriend for a day, because he’d had three days of the race with no VIPs, and driven up north, a 900km drive, to Paris and then to Tours. And he’d stayed a night in Tours with his Spanish girlfriend Lucila and, anyway . . . long story.
The policeman started to go through Oli’s bag.
This was taking too long and Oli was watching Rod, to see if he was getting itchy. And there’s a funny side to it but there are people passing now, blowing their car horns and taking photographs. The BMC team drove past and waved triumphantly.
It’s comical . . . but . . . it’s just not funny . . . this doesn’t look great. Team Sky have an image . . . people always jump to conclusions.
Rod is sitting on the fence – literally, not figuratively – and one of the policemen is going through Oli’s bag and, ta da! He pulls out a jar of French jam!
He holds the jam up in the air and looks at it.
Clouseau has triumphed.
‘What is this?’
‘It’s jam, mate.’
Oli laughs.
The policeman doesn’t.
Then the policeman pulls out another jar. Major bust.
‘What is this?’
‘Jam. Toast. You know toast, mate?’
So then he pulls out another. Huge. Again he asks, ‘What is this?’
‘It’s jam, mate. For toast.’
And Rod had sort of had enough by now . . .
‘Oli, what the fuck are you doing with loads of jam?’
‘Rod, just don’t ask. It’s a long story.’
And then the policeman starts to pull out bottles of shampoo.
Rod’s jaw is hanging a little loose now.
‘Oli? What the fuck are you doing with a bag full of jam and shampoo?’
By now the police had figured out that the body language of Oli and Rod wasn’t that of major drug traffickers. They lost heart with the searching. Instead they left Oli by the side of the road, blushingly trying to explain to Rod about the nice French deli which sold certain flavours of jam that you can only get in continental Europe. Oli tells me later that Lucila’s embarrassment about the story is still all-encompassing: ‘If there’s any kind of dinner or something with the team then she’ll say, “Oh, I can’t come, I can never show my face in the team again when the team was stopped because of all my jams!”’
The shampoo remains a mystery . . .
You wonder if it might have struck Oli that he could have been carrying blood and drugs unknowingly.
‘That’s the beauty of the team we work in, I’m pretty sure, and I’d hope, pretty sure all the teams, all the guys working in cycling, don’t ever have to worry about that, you know. From what I’ve read in Willy Voet’s book and other books, and obviously . . . that’s a different era. The only disappointing thing was the way that the police started off so aggressive and they already had the idea that we were carrying it, unless that was what their tactic was.’
But, the story was funny and the vigilance was reassuring to Cookson and Ellingworth.
‘Well, that’s what we like, we’re glad we were stopped, you know, it’s not like . . . well for me, and you can stop me, er, every day, and the whole team, that’s what we want, really. Although we also want them to do it to other teams, and, just because we’re winning doesn’t mean you shouldn’t stop other teams, you know?’
If that sounds a little too good to be true, sometimes it is okay. It reflects Team Sky’s understanding of the world they live in and the challenges their sport faces. In a lifetime of covering drugs-in-sport stories there are few things more discouraging than encountering athletes and teams who have a hostility to the entire business of being tested, nothing uglier than competitors who respond in ugly fashion to good people’s attempts to keep sport clean and trustworthy. It isn’t easy to stand with a stranger and pee into a bottle but everybody’s life is easier if athletes understand why it has to be done.
In La Baule the police came at Team Sky car with a little too much aggression for sure, but that is the world that these men live in and it is, to use another buzzword of the post-Lance era, the legacy which has to be dealt with.
For a long time to come, cycling will be working hard to make a telling breakaway from its legacy. The Faustian deal with the dark side was a rolling contract in every way. Many cyclists are gone but their pee is not forgotten. Their urine and their blood remain sitting refrigerated in labs waiting for technology to catch up. Cycling’s cold cases.
In the Mercure Majestic in La Baule I am sitting with Brailsford and Ellingworth and I drop a little reminder that cycling’s murky past just keeps giving and giving. New technology has given the French the chance to alter history. The results of the retrospective testing on the 1998 Tour de France by the French anti-doping laboratory AFLD are due out three days after the Tour ends. According to reports, there will be forty-four positives from that race. Given that the protocols were such that stage winner, race leader and two riders at random were selected for doping control, that means that half of the 1998 samples were found to be positive.
We wonder what might come out in this latest wash of 1998 linen. Thinking aloud, I ask if Chris Boardman won the pro
logue in ’98, meaning he would have been tested. Ellingworth and Brailsford say no, they don’t think he did, and anyway, he wouldn’t be in any danger of testing positive. I say that more than one French rider has claimed that Boardman used EPO at a certain point in his career and, specifically, that Philippe Gaumont, who has since died, wrote in his book that Boardman had doped.
Nobody at the table believes that Chris Boardman’s reputation is in danger. Rod Ellingworth immediately starts flicking and swiping on his iPhone screen and brings up the 1998 Tour de France; from there he goes to the prologue and there it was, Boardman the winner by four seconds. The result he brings up gave the top ten in the prologue, the riders Boardman had beaten by four or more seconds. Unlike him, most of them were later implicated in doping.
Brailsford and Ellingworth both shrug. It doesn’t change their instinct or their opinion. They don’t expect to see Chris Boardman’s name connected to any of the forty-four positive samples. They will be proved right of course, but it must have crossed everybody’s mind what damage even a British positive from the dim and distant past could do to Team Sky in 2013.
Later that evening I am sitting in the bar talking about doping stuff with Alan Farrell. The subject of the past and the battle for the future is never far away. Team Sky fights on two fronts all the time. The battle to be cycling’s top team through constant reassessment of the targets and potential benefits of training. And to be demonstrably clean, insofar as that is even possible in a world where we say, ‘Well, let’s see in ten, fifteen years’ time just how clean you were in 2013.’
Farrell’s nightmare though is not a positive test. He doesn’t toss and turn worrying if a guy will decide that he wants to cheat intentionally.
‘Because if a guy does that he’ll be caught and he’ll suffer the consequences. And if that is, for example, blood doping and it can be proved that he did this intentionally, then as far as I’m concerned, out of the sport.’
Alan Farrell’s nightmare is not that guy.
‘It’s the guy who’s living with his friend from another team who gets some supplement over the internet, takes that and it contains a contaminant, and then us trying to explain that this was an accident. Because people will say, same old story, same as what people are saying about the Jamaican sprinters at the moment. Well, they’re entitled to their defence, and it may well turn out that it was the result of contamination. But it looks bad. And people have been using it as an excuse for years and years.’
So Sky provide their own supplements.
‘We’d be pretty severe on guys that we thought were taking anything that didn’t come from us, and we have . . . I mean Nigel [Mitchell] our nutritionist deals mainly with that side of things, but at least we know where our products are coming from and they’re subject to proper quality control.’
That sounds small but on a team of twenty-seven riders with different needs it is quite an undertaking in order to avoid the cynicism which would greet a claim of accidental contamination.
The waves of the past beat relentlessly against the present. All the cheats who have gone before play their part in eroding this great sport today, even if they are just central figures in the ongoing argument between a future for cycling which involves truth and reconciliation, and a future which involves zero tolerance. By opting to set the bar higher, Team Sky have left themselves open for a surprising amount of vitriol.
Yet here in La Baule, Brailsford persists with the blue-sky thinking which is the hallmark of the operation.
‘The doping stuff is a lot less intense than last year,’ he says, ‘Twitter is still relatively new. Loud voices and you couldn’t put a name to the voice and they were saying very hurtful things. You think people will think less of you and that is very difficult to take. Last year it was like, “We’re busting a butt to run a clean team and we’re getting slaughtered for it.” Last year it seemed full on, and I had never been exposed to that level of aggression. I couldn’t get my head around how unjust it was, and this time last year I felt just rotten.
‘I could take Leinders on the chin because I fucked up there. I watched the performance on the bus on Saturday, as Froomey broke away, and I loved that performance, and the second it ends and I’m getting out of the bus, I’m thinking, “I’m going to get some shit now.” And that’s what I got. The elation lasts for a second, then you get off the bus and someone says, “You’ve killed the Tour. You must be doping, you guys are definitely doping now.”’
If Brailsford composed a list of the most asked questions, they would be:
Number One. ‘What do you say to people who say your team is the modern version of US Postal?’
Number Two. ‘The similarities between Lance Armstrong and Christopher Froome are there for everyone to see, what have you got to say about that?’
Number Three. ‘How do you explain Christopher Froome’s performance? It doesn’t seem normal to us.’
Number Four. ‘Can you look us in the eye and tell us you are not cheating?’
Number Five. ‘Is it true you go to Tenerife because you can dope there and mask it?’
They’re not really the sort of questions that Woodward and Bernstein would have put to Nixon, Liddy or Hunt.
‘Can you look me in the eye, Mr President, and say you didn’t know anything about the break-in at the Democratic HQ at Watergate?’
‘Damn you and your journalistic brilliance. You have me bang to rights.’
On Saturday in the Pyrenees, the Team Sky boys had the perfect day. On Sunday they collapsed and Froome was on his own, without support, and the team lost one of its strong men, Vasil Kiryienka. The question that followed this turbulent day of racing was not one of Brailsford’s most common, and it was the most insulting yet.
Brailsford was asked if he had instructed his riders to perform badly on the Sunday in an effort to convince the public the team was not doping, if he’d told one of his riders to get eliminated. This question was posed by Nicolas Jay, an otherwise sane journalist working for the official television broadcaster, France 2.
Sky’s boss needed to speak sternly to his chimp before answering.
‘He starts it this way, “Dave, it is not me asking, but there’s a lot of people saying you asked your riders to drop back to make it look less suspicious.”
‘Then I was asked, “When you realised that Froomey was going to smash Tony Martin’s time in the time trial, did you ask him to back off?” And I’m like “I wish I was that clever,” I was sitting at the back of the bus having a kip at the time!’
Police and cheats. Testers and cheats. Media and cheats. I’m here so I don’t have to ask the same questions as my colleagues. An intelligent, original question at a press conference gives an intelligent, articulate answer to all your colleagues and competitors. The real work of looking at this sport and where it is at, is done elsewhere.
These weeks behind the scenes are a revelation.
And they have their funny moments too.
On the Saturday stage to Ax 3 Domaines, I watched the final 8km climb to the finish from the team bus parked at Ax-les-Thermes down in the valley. Brailsford was also there, the driver Claudio Lucchini, the physio Dan Guillemette and perhaps one or two others. We watched as Pete Kennaugh and Richie Porte prepared the way for Froome to attack.
Everyone on the bus knew how much this stage meant to Froome and that he would definitely go for it. He was supposed to wait for the murderous 10.5 per cent gradient that began 5km from the finish and stayed that steep for a kilometre. But Froome couldn’t wait and once he attacked, Brailsford’s reaction was the loudest. ‘Go on, Chris, go!’ and when the gap began to open, ‘Holy moly, look at that.’ He cheered him all the way to the summit and he seemed like a boy supporting his football team. At one point the TV coverage showed Porte riding strongly in second place. ‘And who said we didn’t have a team?’ he asked triumphantly.
Then, after a two or three seconds’ reflection, he remembered.
‘Actually, I fucking said it.’
CHAPTER TEN
‘Great, just great. You’re on an exciting adventure with Mario. Talk about unfair.’
Luigi, Paper Mario
Meet Mario Pafundi. The man who felt life offered him a choice. One year as a lion or twenty as a rabbit?
Before you meet Mario you know that you will like him. All the charm of an Italian matinée idol but none of the arrogance. And even his name has a lyricism to it that makes you want to repeat it again and again. Mario Pafundi. MARIO PAFUNDI! Eeeeeeeeeeet’s MARIO PA-FUNDI!
Mario is the oil on the wheel, the pacemaker in the heart, the guy Dave Brailsford met in 2006 and told, ‘If I start a professional cycling team, you will come and work for me.’ He is head soigneur or lead carer depending on whether or not you speak fluent Sky. As with all jobs in Team Sky though, demarcation is a dirty word. Mario does something of everything, says no to nothing.
Chances are it is hot outside, temperature in the high twenties, and when you meet him, inevitably it will be in a hotel lobby. You’re loitering. He’s hustling through. He spends more time in hotel lobbies than most concierges. Mario will be setting up the hotel for the arrival of the riders hours later. He may be hauling three physio tables along the corridor but he knows the score.
Everyone knows Team Sky likes to work on the outer boundaries of what’s physiologically possible and they will wax lyrical about the accumulation of marginal gains, but morale of the team is built on simpler values.
‘If you see somebody struggling with a heavy bag,’ says Brailsford, ‘if you’re not willing to go, “Hey, come on, I’ll give you a hand with that,” and you walk past them because you’re the doc or the physio, you’re in the wrong team. The physios have been more challenging in this regard.
‘“I’m a trained physio, I’m a professional, I’m not here to wash bottles.” Those guys should never have been part of a sports team. I mean someone saying, “I’m not here to do this.” Right, come on, mate. I wouldn’t work with them. They’d be gone. In a nanosecond. I used to tolerate it, but I now know it causes aggravation, it causes friction. You can’t build a team with people who want to be precious and individual about themselves.’
