Inside Team Sky

by Walsh, David

  That’s the life. With the team, parallel to the team. For the team.

  Mario has a son. Christian is three years old.

  How does he feel about the possibility of Christian going into cycling?

  ‘Yes. I can suggest him into this sport,’ he says. ‘But, he likes the food a lot, the only problem! A grandmother always say, they say the boy looks really skinny but he’s, already . . .’

  As big as Richie Porte?

  ‘No, I don’t want to say, I don’t want to say this, Richie’s really professional guy. No, I mean he’s a really good Italian, he likes eating well, you know?’

  He also has a wife, Tiziana. He travelled the world meeting women and ended up marrying the girl he went to primary school with and he couldn’t be happier. Sometimes she nudges him and asks if they might move. Somewhere more exciting, somewhere a little nearer the team’s new base in Nice.

  The Côte d’Azur has much to recommend it but it’s not for Mario. ‘If you found a place where you drink amazing coffee espresso in the morning, sixty cent [as it is Pietragalla], then we move there.’

  He is satisfied with what he’s made of his life.

  ‘Because when I go to sleep, I sleep on seven pillows. Like in Italy, they say when you have nothing wrong in your life, they say that you sleep on the seven pillows. Like, “Aahhh no problem.” I haven’t done anything wrong, nothing can talk bad about me.’

  I’ve come to know Mario. I understand why Dave Brailsford wanted him in the team three years before he got the team on the road. Mario’s important, a keeper of high standards and good morale. He can be like this because he was nurtured by a good man. Canio Pafundi.

  Seven days into the Tour, I ask Mario to take me with him on the 200km journey to the next hotel, that I want him to tell me about Canio. And to tell me what happened when he came to that fork in the road that offered him a choice: this way one year as a lion; that way twenty years as a rabbit?

  We are alone, the road disappearing beneath our wheels, the distance that separates us diminishing with each mile.

  ‘Mario,’ I say, ‘you speak well of your father?’

  ‘The car was the best place for us to speak. In the car together we would speak about important things.’

  He recalls telling Canio about Tiziana when he knew she was the girl for him. He’d known her from their days in the village primary school at Pietragalla. Then he’d left for Turin at fifteen, travelled round the world with cycling teams, met the most beautiful women, there was a Swedish woman, an Australian, good times, but not what he wanted.

  ‘You know you go all the world looking for something, you feel you have it but you don’t know where you put it. Then you see you’ve left it in the most obvious place. The women I met, they helped me, but it’s only when I arrive back where I start that I find it. Tiziana is a fantastic, amazing girl.’

  He told all this to Canio, who spoke solemnly to him.

  ‘Mario, you can play your game with whoever you want but if you play the games with this girl, from our village, where we all know our story, it is different. The distance between you and Sweden or Australia is great, the difference between you and the other side of the street is nothing. Whatever happens between you and Tiziana will affect your parents and your brothers and her parents, and all our families.’

  Mario never listened to anyone else as he did to Canio because his advice was never wrong and his support was unwavering. ‘When I was a little boy, he told me I had two parents, I would never have any more. I had two brothers, never any more. If you don’t like each other, you will still be brothers.

  ‘He grew us up. He never touch any of us with his hand, he always try to teach us. All three of us, no one ever smoked, no one drank, no one got in trouble with the police, no one ever did anything very wrong.’

  Mario became a professional bike rider in 1999, the year of Lance Armstrong’s first Tour de France victory and a time when most riders wouldn’t go to the start without EPO coursing through their veins. But Mario decided against eating that mushroom and turning into Super Mario.

  ‘Ah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But, you know that I think, my private opinion, it’s not private, it’s just a legal one. Maybe at the height of it the UCI, they chose a haematocrit limit of fifty. It was like you can steal, but you can steal just five thousand euro. But your mum and dad they say since you was young, you are not allowed to steal anything. Anything! A lollipop . . . you are not allowed to steal. If I say I have stolen the lollipop, my dad say, “Yes, but it doesn’t matter, you have stolen.” Yeah but it was just a Haribo. “Doesn’t matter, you have stolen.”

  ‘That was the principle they put on me. They say you have a surname and you have family, our little village are so proud about you. They tell me I can live one year like lion? Or twenty years like rabbit? It’s just a choice. I have lived twenty years like a rabbit but I have stolen nothing.

  ‘In 2010, Team Sky want everyone in the team to sign this paper, saying you have nothing to do with banned substance, that you never helped anybody to do something. I say, “Why not, this is no problem for me.” And then last year, in October, they say you must sign this paper again. Nothing to do with doping. Easy for me, I sign.

  ‘And I realise, three years after he passed over, my father has given me the best thing.’

  And so Mario continues to realise that the values Canio and his mother imbued in him were the right ones. The decision to quit racing rather than dope has meant that, over a decade later and three years after Canio’s death, Mario can sign up to Sky’s zero-tolerance policy with a clean conscience. If he had lived one year like a lion, Mario would not be lead carer for Team Sky right now. The decision to live twenty years like a rabbit proves itself once again.

  Canio Pafundi was a carpenter, ‘ . . . like Giuseppe,’ says Mario. Towards the end he developed an allergy to wood dust and then got sick. It almost broke his son’s heart. When it seemed sure that Canio wouldn’t pull through, Mario told him he would be lost.

  ‘When I see he is going to pass over, I said to him, “How can I do this, you need to still teach me. Without you, I don’t know anything. Every time you’ve given me a nice advice. Every time I did the wrong thing, you tell me, “Okay, you did this mistake, but you now try to sort it out. We can find the solution.””

  ‘And you know what he tell me? He said, “I always thinking it’s much better for a child to lose a parent than for the parents to lose their children.” He passed over two days later and this was the last advice he gave me, to help me through this difficult moment. Some of my friends and family have lost a child, and I say, “Fuck, I am lucky.”

  ‘After he passed over, everybody talks about him and I learn it was not because he was my dad but because he was the right person.’

  After Christian was born, Tiziana said something Mario has never forgotten. ‘If this little boy loves you half as much as you loved your father, you will be a very lucky man.’

  And Mario knows, he would be.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  ‘Now the general who wins a battle makes many calculations in his temple ere the battle is fought. The general who loses a battle makes but few calculations beforehand. Thus do many calculations lead to victory, and few calculations to defeat.’

  Sun Tzu, The Art of War

  I’m taking the back stairs in the team hotel one night and I meet the leader of the Tour de France hiking the same route. I suspect he does this sort of thing a lot. David Brailsford sometimes describes himself as a loner but he is an outgoing, gregarious loner. Chris Froome is more in the traditional mould. The dizziness and giddiness which come with the Tour circus don’t appeal to him.

  He is a serious man with a good sense of humour. A card-carrying Brit with an African heart. A leader who always says please and thank you. Even when he texts his friend Gary Blem for an alteration to his bike, he makes it sound as though Gary will be donating a kidney which might save Chris’s life.

  Cycling, t
hough, awakens the general public once a year when the Tour starts and people are torn between the sunflowers of rural France and the strawberries and cream of Wimbledon. It takes a long time for a quiet man to impress himself on the minds of the greater public. Even longer when the acrid smoke of the drug wars still distorts our way of seeing everything to do with the sport.

  If you are wised up and street savvy and reckon that you won’t get fooled again then there are certain givens about Chris Froome. Be honest, you hold them dear.

  You know, for instance, that he once had to be towed over the top of a mountain in Italy. And not when driving his car. Enough said. And last week he was riding kiddies’ bikes around Kenya and singing the ‘Up With People’ theme song as he went. Now he has the maillot jaune. What’s that all about?

  While we are talking, let’s just point out that Froome’s cadence is an abomination to all right-thinking people and will hasten the apocalypse. And his bilharzia (so we’re told but you’re not buying it) is his sooo convenient response to Lance’s missing testicle.

  His partner Michelle Cound takes no prisoners on Twitter. She wears the lycra shorts in that house. And anyway, Chris Froome rides for a team whose motorised transportation choices alone announce them as the axis of evil. Everybody knows that the team Chris Froome rides for has a golden syringe which they unsheathe every sunset, like Excalibur. The golden syringe is for Froome’s use only. Not nice.

  It’s a movie script, this story they are selling. Tarzan does the Tour. You’re not having any of it.

  It may transpire in years to come that some of these things which you believe to be true are actually true. I don’t think they will, but it would be derelict today for any journalist not to ask questions. Yet to close the mind off to the possibility that this is an interesting man, a man with a great story and an outlier in his sport – that would be to let Lance Armstrong win twice. That would be to let Lance’s toxic cynicism enter your skin and your system like the waterborne parasite that you say Chris so conveniently suffers from. You once loved this sport and when Lance turned out to be a phoney it hurt. So now you feel safer believing in nothing than believing anything. So Lance wins again.

  In the house of Team Sky they expect you to look around. They want you to believe. Well, so did Lance, you say. He wanted us to believe. Team Sky expect you to ask questions. Smart, intelligent questions. Well, actually, Lance didn’t want that. Team Sky simmer with frustration that all the good things they do weigh as nothing on the scales of perception compared to the mistakes they make. Lance didn’t own a set of scales. Not for that purpose anyway.

  So here he is, Chris Froome on Stage Thirteen of the Tour de France today wearing the yellow jersey. He is 3 minutes and 25 seconds ahead of Alejandro Valverde in the General Classification as the riders mill about the start in Tours. Behind Valverde lie Bauke Mollema, Alberto Contador and Roman Kreuziger. All in pounce position.

  Today’s stage isn’t billed as a game changer, but when we look back on it we can see that perhaps it has been. For the old Chris Froome this might have been the day to give it all away. When he hit Europe first he had a talent which he didn’t know how to handle and a love of racing which wasn’t matched by any deep understanding of how to race.

  In the end Mark Cavendish will win today’s stage, a 173km pull to Saint-Amand-Montrond, and it will be the twenty-fifth stage win of his career. The Manx sprinter will use the tactics of a cuckoo riding off in a break with Alberto Contador’s Saxo-Tinkoff team before sprinting home. Cavendish, for all that his heart is forever beating luminously on his sleeve, has that street savvy, especially when there’s a timing bridge at the end of the street.

  Team Sky will have their own problems today. Down to seven riders now and one with a crack in his pelvis. Of the others, one is Froome and five are here to support Froome, but their willingness to do so isn’t always matched by their ability or their energy. Still, the crisis has prompted Dave Brailsford to issue another of his business maxims. The fewer resources you have, he says, the more resourceful you get. Dave should work in the newspaper business.

  What is left in the Team Sky gang might well be wrung out of them by the time they reach the end of the neutral zone in Tours today – 14.5km to be ridden before racing proper begins.

  That’s a long preamble. Time to think.

  How did Chris Froome get here? Sift through his life story and calculate the odds on each passage leading to the next passage, ending up in Tours this morning wrapped in yellow. Impossible.

  In the shorter term though, he started training to be in this place last winter when he was at home in Africa. Six-hour stints every day. He’d head out, sometimes to the Lowveld, and ride hard for six hours at altitude. Over those lush mountain passes and peaks he’d picture the road he would be taking this summer. And he would push on. It’s the constant theme of the journey that has got him to this place this morning. Chris Froome keeps on, keeping on.

  On those African rides he was tended to by Stefan Legavre, a masseur who has worked with the Springboks but who has a love of cycling and turned his hands easily to the art of the soigneur. Otherwise they were lone ventures, this matchstick man on his sleek Italian Pinarello, sailing past the odd worker toiling over the handlebars of the ubiquitous black mamba bikes of Africa.

  Those sessions were typical of Froome and of Team Sky. When few in professional cycling are working, Team Sky are clocked in and the SRM details gathered on riders’ every training run are being downloaded and whizzing down the wires to Tim Kerrison.

  Froome jokes that his two brothers are both accountants and it was his fear of falling into that sort of life which sent him into pro cycling. In fact what he discovered is that there is something inside him which refuses to quit or die.

  ‘I think a big part of it is a, it’s almost a ruthless . . . determination, desire.’

  Stubbornness?

  ‘Stubborn. Yeah, I mean, I’ve found with my training, I’ve been very, very particular with my training, and I know it’s something that all my coaches sort of remind me of is that, when I set a workout or I set a ride I’ll, say, ninety-nine per cent of the time, do exactly what’s been set out. It would be very rare that I get halfway through an effort and I say, “Ah I don’t feel like doing it any more,” or anything. Even if I felt rubbish I’d turn myself inside out to do whatever I’d set out to do.’

  So he goes out every day during that time of the year that many in the peloton consider to be holiday time and he leaves the soul of himself on the dark roads of South Africa. He never lets up on himself. And the day he chooses for a quieter, shorter training he makes sure to eat less that day.

  Froome spent a lot of time in the career neutral zone. Or so it seems at a cursory glance. We have never seen anybody arrive in the peloton with quite his back story so we aren’t too sure what to measure it against. Perhaps he should have been an accountant like his brothers. The guy who turns out to be rather entertaining when you get talking to him at the office party, but who says nothing for the rest of the year. Just another guy who keeps his dreams locked in a dusty box in the corner of his head.

  There is an early escape today, once racing starts. There always is on these types of stage. Five or six guys making off like desperados. Or so they imagine. From outside the race they look like plankton getting on with their day before the whale is roused. Still, one of the breakaways is Luis Angel Maté. A different kind of dreamer. It is fair to say that Maté has never seen a break he didn’t like the look of. So he tucks in his hair braid and rides off with such optimism every day, like one of those persistent escapees in World War II films who always end up back in the cooler but still dreaming. You would have to like him. And why shouldn’t Maté dream big? He’s twenty-nine and never going to win the Tour but one day the peloton won’t quite catch the break and he’ll get a stage win.

  Maté has five companions today. I wonder what exactly they talk about as they ride – great breakaways that nearly paid o
ff, maybe this will be the day when the big bosses say, ‘Let those guys have it,’ or are their hearts heavy with fatalism? Maybe one breakaway in twenty will pay out big. Directeurs sportifs of smaller teams say if you’re not in then you can’t win. Pragmatists say if you’re not in, you can’t lose. The dreamers go with each escape. And when they look at the man in yellow today, why not?

  Still, whatever they talk about they must suspect that this is another day for the sprinters. Yesterday, Mark Cavendish had urine thrown at him by a spectator. His old friend Chris Froome tweeted that such behaviour left a bad taste in the mouth. Especially Mark’s mouth. Cavendish has just a single stage win to his name so far on this Tour, which has seen him involved in far more drama than he would have planned for. Marcel Kittel is the new sprinter on the block; even Cavendish has called him ‘the next big thing’.

  But not so fast. Cav may not be at his best in this Tour, but he will get himself right and reclaim everything. He’s Mark Cavendish, serial winner, and not ready to leave the stage.

  Wow. The peloton itself is riding with a Cavendish-like attitude today. The breakaway group gets caught with over 90km to ride and the serious pace is a rebuke for their temerity. The main tyrants when it comes to punishing through pace today are Cav’s Omega Pharma-Quick Step who are really whipping things along, hoping their man will deliver at Saint-Amand-Montrond. At this speed everybody is happy to follow the wheel in front.

  Froome’s stubbornness and the sense of self-sufficiency he carries make him different. He recalls that from the time he was a young kid his upbringing was unique. ‘I was allowed to make my own decisions, I wasn’t sort of kept in a house and told, “Okay, these are the rules, don’t go outside, don’t speak to strangers,” or anything like that. That sort of typical English upbringing, or a European upbringing would entail.