Inside Team Sky

by Walsh, David

  Mario fits into this team because he gets it. The Pafundis are from a small town, Pietragalla, near Potenza, in the south of Italy. To give their son a better chance, his parents sent Mario to Turin to continue his education when he was fifteen. Mario missed home but learned to live with loneliness and after a time, he didn’t feel it anymore.

  Mario was especially close to his dad, Canio. They could talk about anything. Canio treated his son as if he were a man and so Mario tried to act like one. Once the boy spoke with his father about the loneliness he’d felt through the early months in Turin. Canio asked his boy to see this in another way. ‘You were sad,’ he said, ‘but can you imagine what it was like for parents to be separated from a son they loved?’

  Early in life Mario understood the world did not revolve around him.

  Gracie, Papa, gracie.

  It was almost as if Canio knew Mario would one day work for Team Sky.

  There are people who envy you, Mario, who think you have an exciting job?

  ‘I am glad you are seeing this,’ he says as he hauls massage tables along tight corridors, ‘that this is what it is like when you get to the hotel.’

  Rooms, beds, bottles, musettes aren’t prepared by accident and when you joke with Mario that actually his life is pretty unglamorous, he agrees.

  ‘Yes! Yes!’

  Mario brings people with him. No request from him seems excessive and when Sky’s army turns up at the hotel later in the day, they find enemy defences have been dismantled. Team Sky, staff at the hotels say, are a nice team but that’s mostly because their first impression has been created by Mario.

  He has been around riders long enough to know it’s different for them. Physical exhaustion can make ‘bonjour’ feel like an effort.

  Like thoroughbred athletes in every sport, they adhere to a non-negotiable schedule and move with such languid grace when not at work that you would hardly know they’re in the hotel. Each man serves as wingman to another, lest their thoughts be interrupted by a fan or, worse, a journalist. Some of them insulate themselves with headphones.

  For all but the dullest and most meaningless of stages, their heads will have been programmed full of information about terrain, distance, corners, inclines, ascents and descents. They are walking sat navs. They then race for four or five or six hours, are forced to hang around for thirty or forty minutes at the finish and by the time they get to the hotel, they’re ready for a lie-down.

  For them the hotel is a place to rest and eat and sleep and rest.

  Mario gives them their room numbers, so they bypass reception. Inside their rooms, their suitcase and water awaits them. Bedding is in place, sheets washed, pillow cases pristine and they’re at the back of the hotel, away from the noise. They know all this doesn’t happen by accident.

  One thing, Mario.

  Could you have been a contender? He was riding bikes in the south of Italy from the time he was eight years old. In Turin he got better. A pro contract was the dream. He got it, lived it for six months and then turned his back on it. He had six months as a pro and decided to do something else.

  So, could he have been a contender?

  ‘Yeah, yeah,’ he says with a grin that precedes humility. ‘Maybe not strong enough for do this job. The rider, you need to be a superman.’

  On the Tour he is beloved. Welcomed everywhere. You know Mario Pafundi? Most people know Mario. The young woman at reception who pretends not to have noticed him. Daryl Impey, the South African who now rides for the Orica-GreenEDGE team, says he can never forget him. They crossed paths at Barloworld four years ago.

  Seeing Daryl become the first African to wear le maillot jaune in this Tour brings Mario back to that time. Daryl was in the leader’s jersey for Stage Eight of the Presidential Tour of Turkey. Close to the finish line Theo Bos, the Dutch rider, appeared to grab Impey and fling him into the railing. Impey smashed three vertebrae and his mandible, and lost a tooth in the bargain.

  As the race moved on, Impey was left in a hospital at Antalya, a long way from home. Feeling for him, his team asked if he would like anybody to stay behind with him. Daryl asked if Mario could. The team booked a hotel for Mario and it was agreed he would stay for a week and see Daryl through the worst of it.

  At the hospital, they suggested Mario slept at the hotel during the day and spent the night in the hospital with his friend. Just call a taxi around midnight and it’ll take you to the hospital. He rang for the cab and when none came he walked the couple of kilometres to the hospital. He asked why taxis were so scarce.

  ‘It’s very dangerous at night,’ they said and asked how he’d got to the hospital.

  Mario said he’d walked.

  ‘Crazy man,’ they said, ‘you are a crazy man.’ Maybe.

  Still, he got the message. After that he spent twenty-four hours a day in Daryl’s room. He would sleep on the sofa. The doctors weren’t sure of the extent of Impey’s internal injuries and worried that he would suffer internal haemorrhaging.

  Mario waited night after night with Impey. Don’t give him food, the doctors said, don’t give him water. Nil by mouth. Impey was stuck on his back, immobile, unable to move a muscle. He would beg his friend.

  ‘Mario please, water! Mario please, some water.’

  It killed Mario to say no. He was allowed only to wet Daryl’s lips with a sponge. Mario saw how Daryl suffered, how he dealt with it and the experience brought them close. Tough though it was for Daryl, it was still a special time in their lives. ‘Always,’ says Mario, ‘when he always see me he says, “I never forget what you have done for me.”’

  Impey’s day in yellow pleased Mario. The best victories are wrung from adversity.

  But don’t misunderstand him. Mario’s sympathy is not for one rider, nor for one team but for all those who take on the challenge of racing a bike for a living. Anytime he sees a crash in the peloton it feels like one of his children has gone down.

  Everyone in Team Sky has their special tasks. When the team are on the move, which is most waking hours, they operate like worker ants, with fierce efficiency and the ability to move more than their body weight when needed.

  Everybody is a leader although, as Mario says, some are ‘leaders without the wallet’, referring to himself.

  And by the way, just because you ran away with the circus doesn’t mean that you get to see the circus. When the big top goes up, Mario goes to work.

  Every day starts the same. Movement. Out of a hotel and onto the road. Mario is always the first to leave. A one-man recce crew. He hits the road and stays in radio contact with everybody behind. How is the road? Any diversions? Any change of route for the truck or the bus?

  New hotel. First job is to charm the manager. Things to impress upon the manager. Good parking. Space for the mechanics to work. Quiet rooms away from the road. Bags of ice. Oh, and fill him in about the special mattress and beds with gels that will be arriving soon. And remind him that the team chef Søren Kristiansen will need access to the hotel kitchen for a while later. Mario calls this process ‘introducing our priority’.

  The beds arrive in the second movement of vehicles. Once a rider shows for breakfast back in last night’s hotel, his cleaning, his bedding and his suitcases are swept away. The stuff goes into the truck. Anything which will need to be replenished Mario keeps stocks of.

  Having arrived first and spread the charm, he begins setting up everything he can till the bedding arrives. It doesn’t dawn on him to have a quiet espresso and swan about in his Team Sky polo shirt for a while. No time for that.

  The truck arrives and bang. The bedding goes to the allotted rooms. Five rooms for the riders, four being shared and in the odd one, David López the Spaniard on his own. Froome and Porte are together, Stannard and Kennaugh, Thomas and Boasson Hagen, the two Belarusians until they lost one.

  Five or six massage tables get set up. If there is bed linen to be washed it gets done. The routine is a two-hour 90-degree wash every couple of days i
f you are thinking of beginning your own team. The riders have high metabolisms and sweat a lot at night, Mario says, so every second day the sheets get done. Sometimes if a rider has had a crash he’ll come in and lie down and take the pristine look off things.

  On his journeys through the lobby Mario will wonder what’s happening with the race. Maybe the boys are at the start area now. Dave Brailsford at the back of the black bus talking to a few journalists. The riders stretching their limbs, warming up feeling where the strength is, if it is there at all.

  Rest days mean ‘rest’ for the riders, not their valets. On the evening before the first, the riders fly from the south of France to Brittany, the support team make the 700-kilometre journey by road. It doesn’t matter if the next hotel is in Timbuktu or in the adjoining building, everything has to be right for the riders to sleep well and be out on their bikes doing their rest-day ride at ten in the morning. The long drive from the south leaves the carers and mechanics needing to do a lot of catching up.

  If it’s a time trial, the day has a different texture to it. The riders will be waiting around for longer than they like. A few will race on full gas, others will take it easier, almost as an unofficial rest day. For Mario, it’s just another day. Sure, if Froome does a good time trial and gains on his rivals, that will lift the mood of the team. Mario says the true professional acknowledges neither victory nor defeat.

  ‘I don’t feel a difference between a big day and a little day, because I always do my work one hundred per cent. I try to put the rider in the best condition possible for them to think just about the race. If it’s a flat stage or a mountain stage, I don’t care. I don’t want to say I don’t care because I am really happy when the rider wins. But I am not disappointed when he loses, because I’m pretty sure I have done one hundred per cent.’

  Generally on the Tour, each day unfolds like a decent-sized novel. Lots of scenery and sub-plots early on. The narrative takes the characters to a place of jeopardy. On good days that place is a mountaintop and the story breaks men on the mountain. On bad days there are just breakaways which nobody heeds because the breakaways are just shoals of small fish. It takes more than that to bring out the sharks.

  By the sides of the roads the personality of the crowds change as the miles are left behind. Early in the day people are just out to see the race go by. The Tour is woven into the fabric of France and they like to come and wave, to see the gaily coloured jerseys and to talk about old times. It’s a good day when the Tour passes through your village or valley.

  But as the stage matures, the hard core take their places on the kerbs and grassy knolls. These are the students of cadence and chain rings, they know their history and get the tactics. Appreciation of the near emaciated band of men is heightened by fans’ understanding of how much pain it takes to keep churning the power out at this rate. For cycling is democratic. These roads and mountains will be empty tomorrow, just like they were yesterday, and anyone with the heart and the helmet can take up the gauntlet.

  The soigneur has a unique bond with the rider. Not always but mostly. It was with Emma O’Reilly that Lance Armstrong let his guard down and his mouth loose. How that came back to haunt him. Sometimes the soigneur can be just like a priest. Giver of counsel, taker of confession. Sometimes the massage takes place in silence.

  The soigneur can be the connection between the rider and the team. Sometimes, says Mario, he is left knowing things which just need to be kept private. Sometimes he hears stuff that he cannot keep private. He’ll need to talk to the boss. Sometimes the rider talks about family, about a wife or girlfriend, they talk about the kids they miss, the things they want to do when the race ends.

  This year Mario is working on two old friends. Kostas Siutsou who he has known since their Barloworld days, where he also met the other guy now in his care.

  ‘Allez le Pelvis! ’ he says. ‘Allez le Pelvis. You know? Geraint Thomas.’

  Old friends. Lots of old stories. Characters. He looks forward to that part of the day, listening, getting the inside stuff. That’s why he ran away with the circus. But he never forgets that however close he feels to those who come to lie on his massage table, he doesn’t work for one member of the team. Not for Team Le Pelvis. Not for Team Wiggins. Not for any rider. It is Team Sky who employ him.

  This lies at the heart of what is bothering Mario as the Tour snakes its way from Brittany towards Mont Ventoux and the Alps. Suddenly his mood isn’t as cheerful as it has been and on different evenings, he is seen having heart-to-heart conversations with Dave Brailsford in the hotel. He is concerned that David Rozman, the carer who has been looking after Chris Froome, is spending so much time with Froome that he struggles with his other chores.

  One of the Slovenians in the team, Rozman is good at his job and has worked closely with Froome for some time. Much earlier in the year, when Rozman’s partner delivered their child, Christian was going to be the name if it was a boy. But that changed in the moments after the birth when David understood he wanted to name the boy Chris after a guy he considered a great athlete and an even better person.

  Mario, though, feels Rozman has temporarily lost sight of who he works for. ‘When you are a father, there is one favourite child. You will not say this, but you cannot hide it. But you don’t need this to take away the stuff for the rest of the children. You need to give one hundred per cent for everybody and one hundred and one per cent for your favourite. Until now, we understand this.

  ‘But if you give one hundred and eighty-one per cent to one person and just nineteen to the rest of your children, that’s not right. If that happens, the rest of the carers need to cover for the eighty-one per cent you forgot, while you were giving so much to just one rider.

  ‘At the Giro d’Italia, you never see me come to dinner one and a half hours late because I was spending one and a half hours more with Wiggins. You never see me not carrying all the other suitcases because I’m taking just his suitcase from the room. You never see me walk straight to him when everybody else is around. You see, at the Giro I was in the same position as David Rozman.

  ‘When everybody else is around, I treat Brad same as everyone else. When we were just me and him, I give him five per cent more. I think if David Rozman speak with the rest of the carers and say, “Guys, I need your help because Chris is the strongest one and we need to support him more and how can we do this without damaging the other eight guys?” that would have been the right way.

  ‘But he spoke with the management and tried to cut out the other four guys [carers] and that wasn’t the right way. The carer must remember that his mistake might help the rider to lose the race but he cannot do anything to make him win it. When they win, it is by their performance, not ours.’

  Brailsford listens when Mario says something isn’t quite right. They’ve been together since the start and there is mutual trust. When Sky sent Mario his first contract, he called Brailsford and said, ‘The salary is wrong. What we agreed was in euros, but in the contract you’re paying me this amount in sterling. It’s too much.’

  ‘Mario,’ said his boss, ‘you deserve what we’re giving you.’

  When a stage finishes, the hierarchy of the peloton is never felt more keenly. There are media and podiums and doping control for some. For others a wait on the bus until it is time to move. With Froome leading the race and needing to do podium, press conference and anti-doping, he gets caught up in so much protocol that the bus cannot wait for him. A car will take him to the hotel half an hour or so after the bus.

  Team Sky handle all this stuff pretty much as they deal with all detail. They see what can be got out of it. It bothered head of performance Tim Kerrison that Froome had to do so much after the stage ended. So they timed him from the moment the race ended to the moment he got in the car waiting to take him to the team hotel. It came in at forty minutes.

  That showed Kerrison it was pointless for Froome to warm down when he got back. But Sky’s way is to find a solution and so
a warm-down bike was positioned right at the finish for Froome. And so the warm-down came before the podium, press conference and anti-doping. Sky was first to initiate warm-downs, a development so obvious that you wonder about the collective wisdom that went into a century of cycling before that.

  Mario likes the attention to detail. Water? Well, Mario would like it fresh and cold if he was riding these white hot roads, but too much ice on the drink is dangerous. There has to be sugar for energy and of course it shouldn’t be too warm either because some riders just like to pour it over their heads.

  The soigneurs make up two bottles. One is filled with a special drink made by British Cycling nutrition management. It is full of electrolytes and some carbohydrate, and given a neutral taste. This bottle is denoted by an ‘x’. Not too much isotonic reaction, says Mario, because that can be hard to digest and there is a risk of diarrhoea and, well, there are those sheets to maintain . . .

  The other is a bottle of water. But some riders have their own favourite drink as a mid-race treat. Some want protein shakes, and Mario lets them choose between strawberry, vanilla or banana. A key thing for Sky is their own drink, a special hydration tipple, which riders get as soon as they step onto the bus.

  The musettes handed out to riders at feed stations during the race have as much thought in them as food. Tart with jam or some baguette, and rice cakes which the team prepares in the hotel the day before they get used so that they can have a twelve-hour setting in the fridge.

  When a stage is climaxing you will always be able to find a man somewhere nearby making rice cakes for the next day. Detail, detail, detail. Give them a little flavour. Some soft cheese, agave, special nectar or honey. Maybe a little chocolate or chestnut jam. The feedback is good. The rice cakes get wrapped in special paper, not aluminium foil (the horror!), a softer wrapping so that riders don’t cut their lips trying to open them as they ride.