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Inside Team Sky

Page 27

by Walsh, David


  Through the eyes of his fellow riders in those two races, this was a 27-year-old who had come from nowhere to emphatically beat them in the mountains. They weren’t just disappointed. Some were disgusted. How could this ‘unknown’ rider from a lower-tier Pro Continental team beat guys from elite WorldTour teams? L’Equipe’s reporter at these early season races inhaled the scepticism.

  ‘Are we in the presence of a champion or a chimera? Tiernan-Locke can only be one or the other in order to win five races in a row [two stages and overall at Tour Méditerranéen, second stage and overall at Tour du Haut Var]? He’s part of a team from the third division, a category where the riders don’t have to submit to biological monitoring, via the blood passport programme of the Union Cycliste Internationale.

  ‘What do his peers think? With the microphone on, not much. But with the tape recorder turned off, they express some deep doubts.’

  L’Equipe wasn’t the only refuge for those wishing to unload their suspicion. It could also be found on social media outlets. The rider himself was aware of what was being said. ‘I’ve heard the rumours, and the suspicion,’ he said in that March 2012 interview with Cyclingnews. ‘I’ve heard it all. I don’t know what to say other than I’ll do whatever it takes to show people, so I’ll be doing weekly, or bi-weekly, blood tests. Like I said, whatever it takes.

  ‘I can’t let things like that get to me. There were comments made but I think a lot of it is sour grapes but it still does piss me off.’

  He went on to say that if he was guilty of anything it was that he had in the past engaged in the same rumour-mongering that he was now a victim of. ‘In the past, I’ve been guilty of that. Laughing at performances when I don’t know what’s fact or not but when it happens to you . . . It will make me look at other riders differently in the future and if I’ve learnt something it’s that I wouldn’t be as critical as other people.’

  Finally, he reiterated his intention of undergoing voluntary blood-testing. ‘Whether they’re weekly or bi-weekly, I don’t know yet. I just want to remove any doubt.’

  General manager of the Endura team Brian Smith confirmed that when Tiernan-Locke’s performances were questioned, the rider volunteered for blood tests. ‘I am one hundred per cent certain he is clean,’ said Smith. ‘He was the one pushing me last year to get him on the biological passport when he heard there were rumours after he won a couple of big races.’

  Of course, the UCI could not change their rules to accommodate Tiernan-Locke. He wasn’t in the top league and so could not be part of the bio-passport scheme. But this wouldn’t remain the case for long. WorldTour teams Garmin and Sky wanted him.

  Wishing to have a closer look, Sky invited Tiernan-Locke to a training camp in Tenerife in early April. Before that, he had been down to Girona for blood and physiological testing with Team Garmin. Any rider being seriously considered by Garmin has to undergo blood and physiological testing before a deal can be done. Ideally the rider shows up the morning after he’s ridden well in a race, so his prospective employers can see his blood values when on top form.

  On 26 March Tiernan-Locke turned up at Garmin’s European headquarters in Girona where he had a blood test, did an hour’s intensive effort on a stationary bike and then had another blood test. The first blood test gives some basic values, the physical effort offers a reading of the rider’s physiological capacity and the second blood test gives a value that will be skewed by dehydration.

  If blood values rise sharply when dehydrated, it may be because the rider has taken saline solution to dilute their blood concentrations for the first test.

  Tiernan-Locke’s blood results from that day’s testing were normal. His performance on the bike suggested good but not outstanding physiological capacity. A solid B-grade but not the A needed to win races on the WorldTour. The rider explained he felt run down and Garmin weren’t put off. They wanted him back for a second round of testing and preferably when he was riding well and not run down.

  A week later Tiernan-Locke went to Tenerife with Team Sky. They knew he’d been to Garmin for testing and that the American team was still interested in him. That meant there was nothing irregular about his test results. Both Brailsford and Rod Ellingworth knew Rapha’s DS John Herety and Julien Winn who had worked with Tiernan-Locke at Endura. From conversations with both, they harboured no doubts about the rider’s ethics.

  Had Garmin manager Jonathan Vaughters been aware of the scepticism surrounding Tiernan-Locke after the Tour Méditerranéen he wouldn’t have given it that much credence. He had been through this with Ramunas Navardauskas, the young Lithuanian whom Garmin wanted to sign in 2010. He had won so many U23 races in France that many of those he was beating, and others, muttered under their breath that they were sure he had to be doping. Even riders within his own team told Vaughters not to touch Navardauskas. Such is the fear and loathing in cycling post Lance.

  Garmin’s boss didn’t go along with the consensus, so he did what he always does. He let the rider know he would be interested in having him on the team but a final decision would be made only after the team ran some blood and physiological testing. His blood values were entirely normal, and his physiological testing suggested he was an extremely talented bike rider.

  Following the initial test results, Garmin waited for Navardauskas to perform well in a race and then arranged for him to travel immediately to Girona. The day is well planned. The rider is picked up at the airport and does the first blood test before he is taken to breakfast. While digesting his meal, the rider finds out what the contract might look like should everything run smoothly. Then, the power test.

  At all times, there’s someone from Garmin in his company and straight after the power test comes the second blood test. Results from the two blood tests are set against each other. Again, the results showed very normal blood values and extraordinary power output. Vaughters satisfied himself, as much as any team boss could, that Ramunas Navardauskas was both highly talented and clean. He signed him.

  Vaughters wanted to get Tiernan-Locke back for a second round of testing, preferably on the day after he’d finished a race in which he’d performed well. They tried but always something cropped up. Tiernan-Locke kept winning, though, adding the midsummer Tour of Alsace to his early-season victories in the south of France. He remained on Garmin’s radar.

  If there’s one thing worse for Team Sky than getting into a bidding war with Garmin, it is losing that war. Especially if the rider happens to be British. Team Sky detect a piety in Vaughters which gets under their collective skin. It is odd because both teams are among the white knights trying to rescue the sport, but they are natural rivals in their respective approaches. Vaughters passionately disagrees with Sky’s policy of not allowing anyone with a doping past to work in their team.

  Being Vaughters, being the affable J V, he couldn’t stop himself leaking a little Schadenfreude at Sky’s turmoil when Sean Yates, Steven de Jongh and Bobby Julich had to leave the team at the end of 2012. If Vaughters had applied his intellect to devising the best way to get under Brailsford’s skin, he wouldn’t have come up with anything more effective than the prodding at the misfortune of his rivals.

  So Brailsford didn’t want Tiernan-Locke joining Garmin, while Vaughters would not have beaten himself up with guilt about pinching a rider from Sky’s domestic pastures. Andrew McQuaid, son of the former UCI president Pat and agent to many riders, did what everyone in his job does by playing one off against the other.

  Then Tiernan-Locke, still riding with Endura, won the end-of-season Tour of Britain. Jackpot! He was a trophy signing now. Team Sky just had to have him. They offered a two-year contract on the kind of money that Tiernan-Locke wouldn’t have dreamt of three years before. Garmin stayed interested but in the end, they couldn’t compete. Like a Royal Canadian Mounted Policeman, Brailsford got his man.

  Without wishing to sound arrogant, Team Sky would have thought, ‘If he can win four stage-race victories with Endura, how many
is he going to claim with us?’ There was no telling how good Tiernan-Locke might become.

  It never worked out.

  He was often sick, couldn’t seem to handle the training load and didn’t ride to the level expected. From the twenty-seven riders on Sky’s roster in 2013, his performances were the most disappointing. He blamed it on the training, which he considered too intense and made him feel run down and low on energy. Sky, and especially Kerrison, listen to what riders say and it is common for them to lighten the training load for those struggling to cope.

  Before the end of the season Tiernan-Locke spoke with Shane Stokes for an interview that appeared on the Velonation website and accepted some responsibility for what had been a terrible season. ‘I guess some of what happened this year is my fault, in terms of not being more communicative with my coaches,’ he said.

  A month later, it was members of the UCI medical panel who were after his communication.

  That Saturday telephone interview with Brailsford was difficult.

  He’d had a tough week in Italy. In the days before the Cookson/McQuaid presidential contest, there was gossip about Team Sky and whispered talk about suspect bio passports that went beyond Tiernan-Locke. From people in Cookson’s camp, he heard that people on the other side were saying Sky might not be as pure as the driven snow. Though assured that these deep ‘off the record’ mutterings were really attempts to hurt Cookson’s candidature, Brailsford still worried.

  And the letter to Tiernan-Locke wasn’t a rumour.

  The call from me was one he could have done without.

  I believed there was a good chance Tiernan-Locke would be able to explain why his end-of-year blood values in 2012 seemed unnaturally elevated in relation to his 2013 values. Could it be that he was over-trained and constantly run down in 2013 and this had led to unnaturally low blood values through his season with Sky? In other words, the low blood values of 2013 were mistakenly presumed to be his baseline values.

  The greater question, though, related to the very fact that there was such uncertainty haunting the team. Were Team Sky’s recruitment protocols sufficiently rigorous for a team with such high ethical standards? Especially after Leinders? Brailsford continually refused to answer questions related to Tiernan-Locke, but it became clear that he wasn’t aware of the controversial report in L’ Equipe after the Tour Méditerranéen victory. Fellow riders had all but openly accused Tiernan-Locke of cheating, but Team Sky hadn’t been plugged into the grapevine.

  ‘Dave, what did you think when you read that report in L’Equipe that virtually accused Jonathan of doping?’

  ‘I’m not sure we saw that.’

  ‘It appeared after his win in the Tour du Haut Var.’

  ‘Don’t know whether we talked about it, but we were confident about the information we had from John [Herety] and Julien [Winn].’

  Team Sky was also reassured by the fact that Garmin had tested him and were still trying to sign him. But if that testing by Garmin was deemed to be helpful, shouldn’t Sky have done its own testing on Tiernan-Locke when he trained with the team in Tenerife?

  It was hard to see what exactly Sky had learned from the mistake of Geert Leinders, what new measures had been implemented to better protect the interests of the team. This is not to say that Tiernan-Locke had been involved in anything untoward, but given Sky’s position on doping, for them to have not known about the accusations made in L’Equipe was very surprising.

  Two aspects of the story bothered Brailsford. The overriding concern was that this story should not have been leaked and be in the public domain. Disappointment at this outcome wasn’t lessened by the entire affair being a self-inflicted wound: the journalist that was going to undermine the UCI’s process and cast a slur on the team’s reputation was the one to whom Team Sky had opened its doors. Thanks, mate. But, of course, he couldn’t say this.

  The second was even harder to take. Tiernan-Locke’s story showed Sky still wasn’t getting its recruitment right. This wasn’t to say he had ever been involved in anything unethical but the background checks should have been more thorough. They needed to have investigated the L’Equipe accusations. As for Sky’s monitoring of riders’ bio passports, neither was that where it needed to be. How could the UCI’s medical panel have picked up an irregularity that the team had missed?

  Brailsford and key personnel such as Kerrison and the lead doctor, Alan Farrell, spoke about what they could do. They discussed the possibility of setting up a panel of experts, working for the team but independent of Brailsford and his management colleagues, to oversee recruitment and monitor riders’ bio passports. Chinks had been revealed in the team’s anti-doping armour and, having failed to properly protect itself after the Leinders episode, Brailsford was determined to sort this out once and for all.

  For example, it became clear from the Tiernan-Locke case that one of the dangers inherent in taking a rider from a Pro Continental team is that there is no available bio-passport data. Given this, wouldn’t it be sensible for the team to have a policy of doing their own tests on riders who come to them from a Pro Continental team? Saying it knew Garmin tested Tiernan-Locke and being reassured by its rival being satisfied with the results was to apply a standard that Sky would not tolerate in any other area of its existence.

  In the aftermath of the Tiernan-Locke story running in the Sunday Times, Sky issued a statement that sought to distance the team from the issue its rider had to address. ‘Team Sky has been informed by Jonathan Tiernan-Locke that the UCI has notified him of a potential discrepancy in his biological passport data. He has withdrawn from racing whilst his response to the UCI is prepared then considered by the UCI. We have no doubts over his performance, behaviour or tests at Team Sky and understand any anomaly is in readings taken before he joined the team.

  ‘Team Sky has tried to respect what should be a confidential process, allowing the rider to explain in private, without prejudice, and the anti-doping authorities to do their valuable job. At this stage in the ongoing process we will not add any further detail.’

  Tiernan-Locke had twenty days to respond to the letter, but then sought and was granted an extension while he prepared his case to explain the anomaly.

  Before running with the story, I called him, and left a message on his voicemail asking him to call back. He did not respond.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  I do not try to dance better than anyone else. I only try to dance better than myself.

  Mikhail Baryshnikov

  EPILOGUE

  When the invitation came to travel with Team Sky in 2013 and experience the dips and swells of a season in a pro team, I was in two minds. If Team Sky was all that Dave Brailsford said it was, then the time spent with them would refresh the palate and flush the bad taste left by the Lance years. In truth, I was keen to fall in love with the sport again.

  On the other hand there was the fear of disappointment. Finding or even suspecting that Brailsford was running the cycling equivalent of a speakeasy presented no journalistic difficulties, but personally to see the sport screwing its people all over again would have been too much. After all that has gone before, cycling more than any other sport needs to offer some hope, some proof of integrity.

  I believe I found that. Everybody else can make up their own mind, but I believe that David Brailsford deserves a fair hearing first. I didn’t find an organisation which always lives up to the billing it provides for itself, but Team Sky try. The nascent team’s biggest achievements have been the Tours de France of 2012 and 2013. Yet those victories were bookended by the Leinders affair and by the Jonathan Tiernan-Locke business. For many, those bookends are all that can be seen.

  The Jonathan Tiernan-Locke business gave me a few shivers of déjà vu when it arose. These are not pleasant things to write about at any time, and especially not after a summer in the sun. Suddenly I found myself back in those dark places, old sources ringing and talking science instead of sport. Life is too short to be starting
a PhD in Haematology at age sixty.

  The news for Tiernan-Locke and Team Sky seems mixed at the time of writing at the beginning of November 2013. Sources confirm that the problem is a single test from late 2012, a few months before he officially became a Sky rider. The case, should it go forward, will hinge on the rider’s explanation for a very low percentage of reticulocytes in that test. Reticulocytes are immature red cells that circulate for a day in the body before developing into mature cells. They should comprise 0.5 percent to 1.5 percent of the total red cell population.

  Abnormally low reticulocyte numbers can be caused by various conditions, mostly to do with anaemia, but they can also be triggered by a problem with erythropoietin production, which in turn could have related to use of synthetic or recombinant EPO. An uncommonly low reticulocyte count is not easily accounted for and Tiernan-Locke’s fate will hinge on the credibility of his explanation.

  The young rider could well have a satisfactory explanation, but Team Sky still needs to absorb the lessons of how they left themselves exposed once again to the jeers and catcalls of their detractors. A refreshing aspect of life within Team Sky is the willingness to absorb those lessons. Over the space of a few months, I found that I could put to Dave Brailsford the harshest of accusations about the failures of his protocols, and if he thought it reasonable he would take it on the chin and explain how he intended to deal with it. If doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results suggests a sign of madness, Brailsford is eminently sane.

  After the 2013 season, for instance, Team Sky had to look at the annual issue of freshening up the team. In retrospect, most around the team would quietly admit that simply having Googled Jonathan Tiernan-Locke’s name would have revealed the suspicions (however fair or unfair) articulated about the rider in L’ Equipe. They certainly would have revealed the need for a more rigorous examination of the rider’s credentials than relying on the fact that Jonathan Vaughters’ Garmin team had tested him once and found things satisfactory, but with the caveat that they wanted him back for more tests. Regardless of the outcome of Tiernan-Locke’s eventual case (if any), the need for more improvement in the recruiting process is accepted.

 

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