Inside Team Sky

by Walsh, David

  Often in the car we spoke about doping and at one point he pondered his own career. He wasn’t making a fuss about it but he hadn’t doped and, like everyone else rowing a boat against the blokes with outboard engines, he didn’t get very far. ‘I was the same era, more or less, as guys like George Hincapie, Bobby Julich and even David Millar.

  ‘They were good riders, but I felt I trained as hard as they did, I wanted it as much as they did, but they went on to have great careers. I thought about it a lot, why they went so far and why I went nowhere. What I believed is that they were much smarter than me. They trained better, they were cleverer in races and I felt I just wasn’t bright enough.’

  Rod was filled with doubt over his own intelligence for years. To meet Rod now, who has traditional intelligence to rival his emotional intelligence, this is almost unthinkable. But until the true cause for his competitors getting so much more out of their training and races came to light, his self-confidence was shaken.

  Cycling’s ultimate short-cut is pharmaceutical. When others took that route fifteen years ago, it hurt Ellingworth. Now, just one Team Sky rider taking that short-cut and getting caught could destroy the team and leave people like Ellingworth wondering what they wanted to do with the rest of their lives. You know Rod’s answers on the subject, but you want to torture him anyway because on a Tour with so many ghosts and bad memories you can never have enough reassurance.

  ‘It would be absolutely gut-wrenching, wouldn’t it, you know?’ he says. ‘That’s always the fear, isn’t it? Oh we’ve had a few conversations about somebody doing something on their own, and it coming out and it’s just, just everything you do or have done it’s just . . . ah . . . it’d just be . . .’

  Chris Froome once said that he couldn’t be left in a room with a teammate who had cheated. Assault charges would follow. He left the rest to your imagination. Rod is more specific. A baseball bat, if you were wondering.

  Meanwhile, it’s summer and it’s France and the former Witham Wheeler has miles to go and promises to keep. When it all ends he has more work to get into, but holidays beckon.

  The Isle of Wight. Hitting it at 9am of a morning, taking in a small music festival that will be going on down there. Himself and Jane and their little Robin, Rob Hayles and his wife and their two kids, and a few more friends. A few days of camping and chilling.

  You’d never see a fat cat under canvas.

  How is it going, Rod? Good, thank you.

  They really tried with the post-Tour party this year.

  And by Team Sky’s standards, it was deemed a notable success. ‘Definitely, the best we’ve ever had,’ said Rod Ellingworth.

  An upstairs bar in the team hotel was taken over and drinks and very fancy canapés and chocolates were served. I’d been a reluctant participant as the party seemed an occasion best left to those who were genuinely part of the team. But in the end, the Slovenian soigneurs Marko Dzalo and David Rozman thrust a bottle of beer into my hand and ensured a late night became a very late one.

  Rozman told me again about how highly he regarded Froome and that it wasn’t just because he was a damn good cyclist. In Froome he saw a fine human being. We had spoken one day on the Tour and I’d asked Rozman if he believed Team Sky was clean and if he did, what convinced him.

  ‘A small thing,’ he said. ‘I have worked with cycling teams before this one and I would walk into a room and two riders would just stop talking. That happened many times. In this team, that has never happened. There aren’t conversations going on that people need to stop just because you’ve walked into the room.’

  Gary Blem was looking forward to getting back to South Africa and seeing his family. He reminded me one more time about what defines and distinguishes Mark Cavendish. They were working together at the Tour de France for the first time and Cav had just finished second in a bunch sprint.

  ‘Well done,’ said Gary, acknowledging a decent effort.

  ‘Gary,’ said Cavendish with the kind of post-race passion that is exclusively his, ‘don’t ever, ever, congratulate me on finishing second.’

  You live and you learn.

  At the nightclub the riders were there with their partners and G Thomas was talking rugby. ‘Gatland was right to pick Jonathan Davies before Brian O’Driscoll for that final Lions test in Australia,’ he said, and then seemed disappointed that the Irishman in his company was agreeing with him. More than likely just happy G wasn’t reaching for that X-ray photo he’s convinced no one has seen yet! For almost three weeks, this has been a fountain for banter and you might almost forget that he’s shown unimaginable courage in not just finishing this Tour but making a significant contribution to the team. Whatever he earns in his career, he deserves.

  Then there’s Richie Porte who once examined himself and diagnosed ‘small man syndrome’. This condition isn’t always helped by alcohol and by the time Richie gets to me, he’s several to the wind. It’s like his index finger has fallen in love with my sternum. ‘You know when people spit at me on a climb and call me a doper, I think of all the journos who accuse me and I get so pissed. I’ve never done anything wrong. Why should I have to put up with that shit?’

  When that first wave of outrage crashes against the sand, Richie’s waters go still and conversation flows in a different direction. He’s amusing, engaging, fun to be around, and it’s not hard to work out why Froome would rather share a room with ‘small man syndrome’ than bunk alone.

  Celebrations are not Dave Brailsford’s tipple, for it is the process, not the result, that excites him. If you feel too good about the victory, you lessen your chances of repeating it. So, to get through this long night, he has more than a few drinks.

  Some dance to remember, some to forget.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  ‘He said the world was an inferno full of darkness and evil, and that there were only two ways of dealing with it. The first was easy and wrong: to accept it and become part of it. The second way was harder and right: you fight it, and recognise those who aren’t evil, and help them endure.’

  Scheherezade, Arabian Nights

  Months after the Tour de France, with the Wiggins–Froome cold war all but forgotten, the two stars made nice to each other at a press conference before the World Road Race Championships in Italy. That was just the public show of rapprochement. There was a more meaningful coming together on a Team GB training ride that, despite him being nowhere in sight, had a distinct ring of Brailsford about it.

  Back in July, Dave Brailsford decided to accompany the Sky riders out on a rest day training ride in an attempt to pick up the pieces of his team that had been strewn across the Pyrenees the day before. One by one, the riders dropped back to Brailsford for a more honest discussion of their feelings than they ever could have managed out of their saddles. Now, months on, a morning ride was again generating more than just sweat, hunger and leg ache, in the shape of much-needed communication. Only this time, instead of dropping back to get things off their own chests, the riders left the heavy-chested together at the front. One by one, the riders splintered from the eight-man group until only the two golden boys remained, no one to talk to but each other.

  ‘Now, guys you’ve got to talk,’ was the collective message to Froome and Wiggins from the group and, finally, talk they did. It was a step forward on the road to reconciliation, but no one was getting carried away. Such had been the enmity since the 2012 Tour that one harmonious week in Tuscany wasn’t going to blow away more than a year’s worth of accumulated mistrust. Still, some seeds were sprinkled on what had seemed to be barren ground that week.

  Froome will return to the 2014 Tour de France as defending champion and favourite. He will encounter tougher opposition than he did in 2013, not least because Vincenzo Nibali, the Sicilian, has targeted the 2014 race. However, Team Sky believe that they can be far stronger as a team than they were this year. But not without Wiggins.

  After the breakdown in relations in the second half of 2012, Team Sky t
hought the best way forward was to allow them to ride more or less separate programmes. Through the first seven months of 2013 they rode together only once, at the relatively low-profile Tour of Oman. Wiggins dutifully helped Froome to record his first victory of the year; Froome dutifully thanked him. Nothing changed.

  Thereafter, they went their separate ways. Froome raced the Tirreno–Adriatico, Critérium International, Tour de Romandie and Critérium du Dauphiné before tackling the Tour. Wiggins had won Romandie and the Dauphiné the year before, but this year he chose a different route and asked to ride the Giro d’Italia as well. He imagined riding well in the Giro and then showing up for the Tour de France five weeks later in good form.

  Injury, sickness and a loss of confidence on wet and dangerous descents destroyed his Giro and, back at home, he needed to rest his sore knee for five days before starting back. He felt he wouldn’t be able to get himself 100 per cent fit for the Tour. And that was that. The champion would not be defending his title. Though there was some sympathy for Wiggins, there was also relief within Team Sky because relations between the two leaders were still chilly.

  During the Tour, there were many occasions when Wiggins’s absence was felt – most keenly at the team time trial in Nice when a narrow defeat would have been a convincing victory had Wiggins been there. That evening on the Promenade des Anglais, the lament around the Sky bus had a recurring theme: ‘We could have done with Brad today.’ Had he been on his best form, Wiggins would have been alongside Richie Porte in the mountains, helping to control things for Froome.

  Once a season begins, everything moves at a frantic pace and there isn’t much time for conciliation talks. Once the Tour de France starts, no one, certainly not Brailsford, would have been keen on having such talks during the race.

  In the immediate aftermath of Froome’s win in Paris, Wiggins didn’t publicly congratulate him and, given the frostiness, that wasn’t a surprise. Two weeks later he did, however, acknowledge that Froome had earned the right to lead the team into the 2014 Tour, which was his way of expressing admiration for Froome’s performance in winning the race.

  They are both stubborn, and Froome wasn’t going to read that comment and think everything could now be hunky dory between them. There was a problem, though, that neither seemed able or even inclined to address.

  They needed each other.

  Froome needs Wiggins in the team for the 2014 Tour because his inclusion will make the team stronger and give Froome a better chance of winning again. Wiggins needs Froome because a man on a Tour de France winner’s salary (£3-4 million) can justify his wages only if he actually rides the world’s greatest race. Furthermore, Wiggins’s targeting of the Giro didn’t work out due, in part, to bad weather but that is always more likely to occur in May than during the Tour in July.

  Team Sky also learned something about the Giro. After Wiggins departed, Rigoberto Urán was made leader and he rode an excellent race, won a mountain stage and climbed to second place overall in 2013. Few even noticed how well Urán and the team had done in Wiggins’s absence. The Giro was just the Giro and second was nowhere.

  That experience in Italy would have confirmed for Brailsford something he already sensed. If Wiggins was to do his job properly for the team in 2014, he must ride the Tour de France. And so the diplomatic mission began. Brailsford went to see Wiggins and they spoke about his relationship with Froome and how 2014 might pan out.

  Cycling has been Wiggins’s life and, in becoming Britain’s most decorated rider, he has been a highly dedicated athlete. In the past, however, the dedication was always for himself. That didn’t make it easy and because he would have been hurting himself, he didn’t take shortcuts. It was true he found it hard to forgive Froome for what he saw as betrayal at the 2012 Tour, but his difficulty in adapting to the role of team rider wasn’t solely down to that animosity.

  Wiggins wasn’t sure he could make all the sacrifices necessary to get himself to peak condition just to help someone else. A year of gruelling training rides day after day after day? Taking yourself to the brink of exhaustion come wind, rain or shine? All that to help somebody else fulfil their dreams while yours remain buckled in your pannier bags? It’s a tough ask for anybody, let alone a proud, stubborn, former champion of the Tour de France.

  But that still left Brailsford with the question of how the team could get value for the money they were paying Wiggins. Without the Tour de France, it would be impossible. Wiggins then went to Verbier in the French Alps to train at altitude and Brailsford made sure he was there. Given how much he is being paid, Wiggins should, perhaps, just do what he’s told. Brailsford’s bosses at News Corp would almost certainly subscribe to this view. But Brailsford has a keener understanding of how highly strung the best athletes can be and coercion wasn’t going to work with Wiggins. If forced to simply turn up at the Tour and ride for Froome, he might not find the motivation to prepare as thoroughly as he would need to.

  They spoke at length and tried to find a way forward.

  When it comes to problem-solving, Brailsford doesn’t get wound up by others taking a difficult or even unreasonable position. Instead, he reminds himself that the ultimate goal is not winning the argument, it’s winning the Tour de France. The focus is on doing everything to make that more likely to happen. Team Sky need Wiggins in the 2014 team riding for Froome, and doing so of his own volition.

  Brailsford gets on well with Wiggins and usually when they talk, they can work things out. The appeal needed to be to Wiggins’s intelligence and his sense of fair play and, after Verbier, the Sky boss felt he was getting there. In his discussions with Wiggins, he would have pointed out that the money he’d not given Froome after the 2012 Tour needed to be paid in full. Without that happening, there would never be resolution.

  Verbier helped Wiggins get into good shape and he rode at the Tour of Britain to record his victory of the season. That was an important week, as Brailsford brought along Wiggins’s old sidekick and mentor Shane Sutton in the hope that the naturally funny Aussie could help the mood within the team. That played to Sutton’s strength, and his gentle and not-so-gentle banter got everyone laughing and Brailsford thought it one of the most enjoyable weeks of the season. More importantly, Brad was back in the fold.

  Brailsford then went to Monaco to discuss things with Froome. On the surface you might imagine this was the less complicated part of the jigsaw, because Froome is clear headed and fair minded. But he can also be obstinate and he wasn’t prepared to accept that everything was suddenly okay just because Wiggins was feeling better. Brailsford appealed to Froome’s calculating spirit. What’s the ambition? To win the Tour in 2014. Who would be leader? Chris Froome. Would Froome’s chances be helped by having Wiggins as willing équipier? Of course.

  Froome thought it wrong that he hadn’t had his cut from the 2012 prize money.

  The money was paid.

  The World Championship Road Race was down for the Sunday, but the main event was happening in the meeting rooms of an old Florence building in which Machiavelli once lived. Brian Cookson was taking on Pat McQuaid for the presidency of the UCI. Much had been made of Machiavelli’s distinction between politics and morality. The campaign had been vitriolic and stained with carelessly flung battery acid. Both men promised a new beginning for the UCI. In the end, Cookson convinced more people that he was the man to deliver that new beginning.

  Once upon a time . . .

  Whether a fresh start would be at all possible was a moot point. Cycling has many stakeholders and few are willing to loosen their grip in the name of progress.

  The Tour de France and several other races are run by the Amaury Sports Organisation (ASO) and they cut their own deals and make their own rules. The sport has several layers of professional activity and a calendar which is poorly designed and full of silly overlaps and bad planning. Team owners and team sponsors are constantly looking for a fairer shake of the proceeds and better rewards for their riders’ success. An
d the entire caravan travels under the cloud of doping. So when the cycling world gathered to find a World Champion and to elect a new president, it was always likely to come away with more questions than answers.

  For Team Sky, though, a third factor was intersecting with the election and the race in Tuscany that weekend. Between the vote and the race the word leaked out about the Jonathan Tiernan-Locke case.

  Jonathan Tiernan-Locke, a Team Sky rider, had been sent a letter by the UCI requesting an explanation for anomalous readings in his biological passport data. The readings under question were from a blood sample taken after Tiernan-Locke won the Tour of Britain in 2012, soon before signing for Team Sky. The nitty-gritty facts of the Tiernan-Locke business would be compelling in their own right, but in one key sense they didn’t matter at the time. This was Team Sky. This was the wrong sort of drama for a team which proclaims to be at the vanguard of cycling’s reform. He was given a period in which to make his response to the request, with a British Cycling official stating that no comment would be made until the case was resolved.

  There had been plenty of noise around Tiernan-Locke’s reputation before he joined the team and, when it emerged that Sky and Brailsford hadn’t properly explored reservations expressed seven months before, sympathy for Brailsford and company was muted. No one was saying Tiernan-Locke was guilty, but Sky should have spent more time working out why some of his rivals at the Tour Méditerranéen considered his performance suspicious.

  Geert Leinders had been a mistake, a costly one, but the cycling world expected the centurions at the gate would prevent such a thing happening again. One imagined Team Sky would now vet everybody like vice-presidential candidates in an American election. The timing was almost darkly comic. Here was Brailsford fighting a rearguard action just as cycling was talking about its new beginning.

  Once upon a time indeed . . .