‘It looked impressive,’ Brailsford says with understatement. ‘Everybody got very excited about that. It couldn’t have gone any better. It was textbook. As he was coming up, I was thinking about where I wanted to be, to see him cross the line. So I stood on this wall, thinking, “Brilliant – people will always remember this. This is an extraordinary performance.”
‘I was thinking, “He deserves this”, and I was also allowing myself to get lost in the moment and getting quite emotional about it all. I was remembering all the work he’d done to get there, thinking about all the positive things. The thought that people would question it genuinely didn’t enter my mind.’
As Froome climbed through that last horrendous bend to the Ventoux’s summit, to seal the stage win, Brailsford, watching from beyond the finish line, was exuberant, punching the air and jumping for joy. Within moments, though, he was turning the same thin air blue, as, in the wake of Froome’s solo win, the media huddled around him and the doping questions began.
‘Yeah, I can remember that,’ he says.
‘Chris crossed the line and then . . .’ – in the calm of the Rosewood’s lounge, Brailsford slams his fist into the palm of his hand for emphasis – ‘. . . bang!’
When I first started covering cycling, stage races like the Tour, the Giro and the Vuelta were heavily populated by long, flat stages, designed to generate opportunities for the sprinters and rouleurs to shine, not to mention the ‘pack-fill’ who dominated in the peloton. The division of opportunities was clear: there would be a series of flat, or at worst, rolling stages, in which the team leaders were expected to keep their powder dry, sit in the bunch, avoid trouble and await the mountains and time trials.
But the Grand Tours of European cycling are not like that any more. Four or five days of sprinting have been deemed dull, uneventful, bad for TV ratings. At the same time, the rise of riders as accomplished as Peter Sagan, who can climb, time-trial competently and sprint, has hit the big-name sprinters – the Cavendishes and Greipels – of the peloton hard.
It hasn’t gone unnoticed by those ‘pure’ sprinters that even ‘flat’ stages are no longer flat and that their opportunities are few and far between. For riders like Cavendish, it has ended the days of multiple stage wins in the Giro or the Tour. ‘I’m sick of red spots – so, so sick of them,’ Cavendish said in July 2015, referring to the red spots signifying categorised climbs on the route du Tour.
Asked, on stage seven of the 2015 Tour, when he expected the next sprint finish, Cavendish’s German rival, André Greipel, scratched his head as he contemplated a further two weeks of climbs. Eventually, the German responded. ‘I think the Champs-Élysées will be a sprint for sure,’ he said. Nor is Cavendish keen on the Vuelta a España, describing the number of mountain stages in the race as ‘stupid’.
‘No one wants to go to the Vuelta any more unless they crashed out of the Tour de France,’ he said. Based on his hissy fit at the top of the Giant last time the Tour tackled it, he doesn’t like the Ventoux much either. But then, like Jean-Louis Pages, you’d probably realised that.
As the routes of three-week stage races become more and more demanding, the modern stick-thin peloton has become crammed with excellent climbers, all engineered towards high performance on increasingly explosive courses. That is why leaving it to those climactic kilometres across the moonscape has become leaving it too late on Mont Ventoux. Performance analysts will tell you that by the time you pass Chalet Reynard, the wind is too unpredictable, the gradient too slight and the time gaps that much harder to achieve.
Far better, then, to attack in the still heat of the forest, where a high, grinding pace on the long, straight, airless ramps will exhaust the front group and force so many riders into submission. Chris Froome detailed that change in thinking in his book The Climb, ghostwritten by David Walsh.
I had spoken to Contador about Ventoux. I said to him: ‘It’s going to be a big day for us in the Tour.’
He nodded and had a little think. ‘Yeah, yeah, it’s a tough climb, but in the final [section] it’s always headwind and it’s difficult to make a selection.’
That conversation lodged in my brain until I was two-thirds of the way up Ventoux. Richie Porte had done the work and had laid it all out. I could launch myself now to the top of Ventoux.
. . . Contador hadn’t expected anything here.
Miguel Indurain had understood that too, even back in 1994, as he led the front group in pursuit of the distantly toiling Eros Poli. The Spaniard’s attack came in almost the same spot – seven kilometres from the summit and just before Chalet Reynard – as Froome’s now-infamous acceleration 19 years later. But in 1994, Indurain’s turn of speed merely splintered his group; in 2013, Froome’s acceleration detonated it.
If Froome’s hamster legs, both provocative and comical at the same time – ‘comme un Mobylette,’ they snorted on French TV — raised the spectre of doping, both motorised and pharmaceutical, yet again, they proved fatal to his rivals. All the dancing in the world couldn’t save Alberto this time.
The morning after Froome’s spectacular stage win, Dave Brailsford pulled on his Team Sky kit, climbed onto his Pinarello and set off from his hotel in Orange to ride the Ventoux. ‘I’ve ridden it a lot with Team Sky,’ Brailsford said. ‘Whenever we’re close we’ll go up it, even if it’s a recce. So I’ve ridden it a lot lately, quite often on one of our rest days in and around that area.
‘If we’re close, Tim Kerrison and I will always get up and go. I ride my bike a lot with Tim. We’re pretty keen.’
That morning Brailsford and coach Kerrison met Alastair Campbell at the top. ‘He was coming up from the other side – I think he set off first,’ Brailsford says.
Brailsford and Campbell, long-standing friends, mulled over the previous afternoon’s victory and what it might mean.
Earlier that morning, Brailsford and Froome, already paying a high price for his victory on the Ventoux, had faced the press. ‘I can understand the questions,’ said Froome, who found himself besieged as soon as he emerged from his room, ‘but I’m also one of those people who have been let down, who’s believed in people who’ve turned out to be cheats and liars, but I can assure you, I’m not.’
A little later, as the hotel dining room filled with media, Team Sky’s beleaguered press officer, Chris Haynes, got the ball rolling in a short and tense press conference. As they defended themselves, not really against specific itemised accusations of doping but more against a general atmosphere of scepticism, both Brailsford and Froome looked aggrieved.
‘I know what I’ve done to get here and I’m extremely proud of what I’ve done,’ Froome said. ‘To compare me with Lance . . . Lance cheated, I’m not cheating. End of story.’
But Brailsford’s weariness and frustration finally took over. ‘You’re all asking the same question,’ he said. ‘I’m getting asked the same question by a hundred people, so why don’t you collectively – you’re all in the same job – get yourselves together, have a meeting, get yourselves organised and you tell me what we could do so that you don’t have to ask that question . . .’
This proved too much for Froome, who stifled a laugh. Brailsford was off and running, though. ‘I know what we do but I haven’t got a magic wand,’ he says. ‘It’s a rest day, it’s ten o’clock in the morning and I’m trying to defend somebody who’s done nothing wrong.’
But the old ways of thinking had become ingrained. Froome’s display of dominance had come on the Ventoux of all places, the mountain most associated with cycling’s perpetual struggle to exorcise its demons. When the race reached Gap, 48 hours later, the French media were in attack mode. What had started in the Pyrenees as aggressive questioning – ‘Look me in the eyes and tell me you’re clean,’ French TV presenter Gérard Holtz had said to Froome after his stage win at Ax 3 Domaines – had, in the aftermath of the Ventoux, become an inquest.
So in Gap, Brailsford appeared on the live post-race chat programme, while H
oltz – who had never batted an eyelid at outrageous performances before or during the Armstrong years – again played at chief inquisitor. This was, to paraphrase one description of Geoffrey Howe’s attacks on Margaret Thatcher, like being savaged by a dead sheep, albeit a highly coiffed one.
Introducing Brailsford sardonically, with a knowing smile on his lips, as ‘Monsieur Tolérance Zéro’, Holtz mocked Froome’s prowess on Ventoux. Froome, he smirked, had ridden ‘Comme un Mobylette . . .’ Like a scooter. That phrase again.
‘We’re all fans of cycling,’ Holtz says, ‘but when we see Chris Froome climb the Ventoux like he’s on a scooter, we all ask questions. When we see Chris accelerate like that, we all ask questions. Do you understand why people say, “That’s not possible?”
‘It’s normal to have to answer those questions after everything that happened last winter,’ Holtz said, referring to Armstrong’s confession. ‘Last winter we really heard about the depth of the problem. We have a responsibility to try to improve that situation.’
Brailsford responded calmly in French. ‘I understand, but I’ve seen him do exactly that, very specific, twice a week, in training. I’ve seen him do it often.’
Then he added: ‘Honestly, when I saw more detail of his performance afterwards, I believed that he could have climbed Ventoux faster.’
In hindsight, his final comment may not have helped defuse the tension.
So here’s the thing – my thing – about Team Sky. It has a lot to do with context and with my own experience of covering cycling. Both are relevant: otherwise it may seem as if, to use Brailsford’s own words, I’ve ‘got it in’ for them.
We are absolutely right to expect the highest levels of probity from Team Sky; I expect less, for example, of Team Astana. That is not because of some notion of British ‘fair play’, or because Team Sky is British, but because since its inception Team Sky has set itself high standards of accountability, transparency and ethical conduct. They have insisted that we expect this of them.
‘No doping will ever take place,’ Team Sky pledged. ‘Zero tolerance.’ This was set out as a guarantee, a guarantee that, in the environment they inhabited, I believe was impossible to maintain. I don’t see why Team Sky shouldn’t have been expected to adhere to those standards, three, five, ten years down the line.
If you guaranteed that level of propriety, post-Generation EPO, post-Lance, if you presented yourself as the ‘cleanest of the clean’, then you had better follow through. If not, then you deserved what you got. Most, wearied by all that had gone before, from Pantani to Puerto, Festina to Armstrong, welcomed Team Sky’s high-minded positioning; in fact, I’d go as far as to say that they craved it. Team Sky was forgiven the earnest pretentiousness – the mood lighting in the team bus, the thin blue line, the daytime and evening dress codes – because people wanted to believe in what they were saying.
For most of the 1980s and the 1990s, there were only a handful of English-speaking riders in European cycling. At the Tour, there’d be a couple of Australians, a handful of oddball Americans and a token maverick Brit – a Millar (or two), a Yates or a Boardman. When I first started writing about cycling it was hard work getting editors interested in taking stories about foreign stars named Miguel, Gianni, Johan or Toni – no matter what they had won (or how cartoonish a portrait I drew). Then came Lance and his Hollywood success story. In 1999, all that mattered was that an English-speaking cancer survivor had won the Tour de France. His story drew chief sportswriters like bees around honey. Any misgivings were trampled underfoot by the stampede to his door.
Back then, I still believed the mantra that doping was ‘dangerous’ – that a man who’d had cancer would not dare dope because of the risks to his health. I didn’t yet fully understand just how skilfully and effectively doping could be manipulated, with the right doctor and the right budget, even for a former cancer sufferer. That July, I argued with Pierre Ballester, of L’Équipe, who insisted Armstrong was doping and was angered by my naivety. And the real significance of Christophe Bassons’ mid-race breakdown after Armstrong’s bullying, the omnipotence of the omertà, eluded me. In hindsight perhaps I knew but refused to acknowledge it.
There is no doubt that the journalists who covered the Armstrong era, and also the many subsequent scandals, have a more jaundiced perspective. They are more sceptical of remarkable performance. That is because many of them erred on the side of caution and sat on the fence, losing credibility through their unwillingness to embrace the suspicion that swirled around the American for so long.
It was a harsh lesson: the fine cord of mutual respect between reporter and athlete that had long been a characteristic of sports-writing, and, forged on the long days on the road, that was particularly evident in cycling, was abruptly cut. I can still hear Raphaël Géminiani telling me, all those years ago, as I jogged towards a Portaloo in Vaujany, that ‘cyclisme est une grand famille!’ Maybe, given all the time spent thrown together, it once was, but it’s now become a highly dysfunctional one.
By the time the Cofidis scandal swallowed up David Millar’s career in the spring of 2004, I was no longer naive. We talked regularly, and as his immersion in the scandal deepened, I understood Millar was caught up in the same vortex and was lying to me, well before his arrest and subsequent confession. In the aftermath of his admission, David and I worked together on his first book, Racing Through the Dark. It was a cathartic experience for him. He devoted himself to the project, feverishly generating thousands of words, and pouring his creative energies into it.
But after making that journey I knew it would be wrong to get ‘close’ to a rider ever again. As doping scandals proliferate across sport, it is imperative to be detached.
So I say stick to business and don’t blur the lines. Stick to business, because no matter how much you may be drawn to individuals, no matter how charismatic they may be, that’s what professional sport has become.
There is no point in Team Sky personnel ever railing against those who question them or pore over their performances. The team has made, and continues to make, strategic errors in terms of their medical and anti-doping policy, their core values of accountability and transparency and particularly in terms of their management of media relationships.
None of that proves that they have been doping. But they have to accept that there are now very significant reasons why people are uneasy. Only a part of that is the legacy of the Armstrong years: part of it is also down to their own decisions, their obfuscation and lack of clarity. Remove the history, pre-Team Sky, and there would still be doubts.
Take, for example, Bradley Wiggins’ golden six months of 2012, which spanned March to August and included multiple prestigious stage-race wins, Tour de France victory and an Olympic gold medal. This unprecedented success was achieved during a period when medical consultant Geert Leinders, now banned for life for doping offences earlier in his career, was a retained consultant with Team Sky.
I can’t think of another team that has ever, collectively, been under such scrutiny in any sport. But despite their public proclamations of openness and transparency, of their willingness to answer every question, that has not been the case, particularly in the hothouse environment of the Tour de France, where, it can be argued, a cool head is most needed. Every New Year, they meet with the media in a series of briefings, some informal, some more structured, and attempt to wipe clean the slate. This is a welcome initiative but every Tour de France still ends in bitterness and recrimination because of unflattering media coverage.
I would have liked to interview Chris Froome for this book, but, despite repeated attempts to arrange a conversation about his 2013 win on the Ventoux, it was not possible.
It appears that I have since been blacklisted by him, or at least by Michelle Froome, who manages his media contacts, because of stories I wrote in July 2015. In two pieces – one appearing in The Times (described by Kimmage at the time as the ‘official organ of Team Sky’), the other online for Me
n’s Health – I explored the rationale for the continuing trolling of Froome over his ride on Mont Ventoux in 2013. That had been fuelled by a video on YouTube displaying performance data from that day.
The performance data appearing onscreen alongside the footage was touted as conclusive evidence that his ride on the Ventoux in 2013 bore comparison with Armstrong’s in July 2000 – that his power outputs, his heart rate were, effectively, ‘mutant’. This naturally pressed the ‘cheat!’ button and generated a lot of white noise. A Twitter storm and oblique suggestions by Team Sky of the hacking, and others the leaking, of his performance analytics only fuelled the Froome-gate frenzy that had begun to build after he had won the first summit finish in the Pyrenees.
However, even now, I am not convinced that the video, while unnerving, conclusively ‘proved’ anything, beyond the watery nature of the UCI’s anti-doping policy, the tawdriness of Twitter trolling and the prevalence of the resulting faithlessness among so many who loved the Tour. Yes, Froome’s performance on the bastard Ventoux in 2013 was extraordinary, but did this video provide definitive, irrefutable proof that he had cheated?
And did Froome in 2013 really bear comparison with Armstrong in 2000? Did Merckx in 1970, for that matter, bear comparison with outstanding climbing performances in 1957?
What had happened in sports science and cycling technology in the intervening 13 years? And what, if anything, had changed on the Ventoux?
There were three key factors that favoured Froome against Armstrong: the road surface, the wind and the tactical situation. In 2000, the surface on the climb from Bédoin, particularly above Chalet Reynard, was a rougher aggregate, cracked, pitted and frost-damaged. That created a ‘heavy’ surface with greater rolling resistance. The road was resurfaced and much improved by 2013.
In 2000, the Mistral was blowing so hard, particularly at the summit and across the final kilometres of the climb, that the Tour organisation opted not to build their usual finish line banners and presentation podium. In contrast, when Froome won in 2013, there was barely any wind at the summit. I have ridden the climb on both surfaces and was at the summit of Ventoux on both of those days.
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