Inside Team Sky

by Walsh, David

  Farrell was quite direct. First and foremost from a doctor’s point of view was concern for the health of the athlete. One reason why the athlete would be told to scrap the idea. And secondly?

  ‘This is cheating, okay. And then the question was would you bring this to senior management’s attention? And I said, absolutely. Of course I would. You have to respect . . . there’s laws governing medical confidentiality, and I’m bound by those, but at the end of the day if somebody is doing something that is potentially endangering their own lives, then you have an obligation to intervene there. So there are times that you need to breach that. If they’re a danger to themselves or others.’

  Doping didn’t crowd his thoughts though. He had his views and was relieved that his new employers genuinely seemed to share them. They did what it said on the tin.

  He saw himself though as getting into a medical job, not a policing job. He wanted to work as a healthcare professional in a professional sports environment. The job was described to him as involving covering a lot of races and race days, but not big races.

  ‘It was kind of made, not clear, but, implied that – don’t think you’re gonna be covering the Tour de France. Don’t think you’re gonna be on Grand Tours any time soon.’

  He was still interested. He still wanted to get in the door.

  What was on the other side of the door changed quickly. He did the Tour de Romandie. The Giro, the Tour de Suisse. Then went to Manchester for a catch-up with Rod Ellingworth, Tim Kerrison and Carsten Jeppesen.

  At the end of that day of talking and debriefing they asked him if he would be available for the Tour de France, starting just two weekends later. He gulped. He’d done the Giro d’Italia. This would be his second Grand Tour in three months. The Tour de France!

  It was sometime around then that they explained to him that Geert Leinders would no longer be working with the team. Farrell had heard the rumours running around but wasn’t sure how seriously Team Sky were taking them. He wasn’t at the level to make a judgement. He’d spent a week with Leinders in Romandie and found him personable on the human level.

  ‘If you had asked me I would have said I’d be very surprised if they weren’t taking this very seriously, but I wasn’t privy to exactly what their position was.’

  And so Leinders was gone and more painful bloodletting would follow later in the year as Team Sky discovered that their zero tolerance policy was a stick with which their detractors could beat them. They had perhaps been a little naïve in trusting job candidates to answer a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ when asked at interview if they had ever been involved in doping.

  Farrell hadn’t been anything more than a spectator during the doping era. Pro cycling represented a new beginning for him. And in his own quiet way he represented part of a new beginning for cycling. What team operating a doping programme would turn over the medical duties on the Tour de France to a bright young idealist who had been just over six weeks in the job?

  He sees the extent to which Team Sky have gone, not just in terms of the painful sundering of relationships, but in educating their athletes, in batch testing any nutritional products a rider might express an interest in. Chris Froome for instance expressed an interest in fish oils. Nigel Mitchell, who looks after this area for the team, wrote to the manufacturer concerned looking for details. When no reply was forthcoming, no nutritional information received, it was decided that Froome had best abandon his interest in the supplements altogether.

  These stories, these attitudes reassure and enthuse Alan Farrell. In the course of a long conversation he welcomes questions on the issue of doping and repeats his employer’s offer of complete transparency so long as the rules of medical confidentiality aren’t breached.

  As we talk he says things which would surprise the cynics and which surprise me. A frequent source of scepticism in chat rooms and tweets is the issue of TUEs or Therapeutic Use Exemptions. These are exemptions granted to a team to administer a listed drug for a genuine medical reason and not for performance enhancement. There is a perception that TUEs are thrown about like confetti. In his fifteen months with Team Sky, they have applied for two TUEs. One earlier this year, in season but out of competition, to treat a respiratory problem, the other to treat a medical condition before the rider went for a surgical procedure. The rider specifically needed a medication which was on the prohibited list. The operation was at the end of the season and he didn’t compete for another three or four months.

  Other issues?

  ‘Having Festina as a sponsor of the Tour de France is not good for the image of the sport. I’m sorry I’ll probably get in trouble for saying that, but, I don’t care . . . I think there are doctors still involved in this sport that would have been involved with teams in the dark days. Sponsors should be more insistent with that not being the case. Now this isn’t going to go down well with my medical colleagues on the world tour, but I just don’t think it gives the right image. And sponsors need to show more power on that front, should put pressure on people running teams to follow the lead of other teams, like ourselves.’

  ‘People are accusing us of not being transparent, but, we really are trying to be transparent. It’s not just the anti-doping, it’s everything surrounding that, so it’s about the education and changing the culture, it’s about things like the first international federation to introduce a no-needle policy into the sport. Massive, massive change. It got that culture of an athlete requiring an injection of anything, out of the sport. So successful was that that a lot of other sports are taking that policy on now as well. The summer Olympic Games 2012 in London was the first no-needle games – so if anyone required a needle or injection of any description, they had to bring that to the attention of the medical authorities in charge of the London games.’

  He is aware too of cynicism surrounding the biological passport and isn’t naïve enough to believe that any testing system will ever produce a 100 per cent deterrent in a world where cheating can mean survival or riches. But within a changing culture he sees the passport as a useful tool.

  ‘People say that the biological passport hasn’t been that effective; well certainly some of the information we have regarding reticulocyte percentage [immature red blood cells, typically composing about one per cent of the red cells in the human body] and haemoglobin values, has been one hundred per cent effective. I would argue that an effective deterrent shouldn’t catch anybody. People say the passport hasn’t caught many people; it absolutely has changed the culture of the sport.

  ‘But obviously the collaboration with the police and a more forensic approach to the use of drugs and sport is another part of that . . .. Another tool in the toolbox. So you’ve got your anti-doping, you’ve got the education, you’ve got no-needle policy, you’ve got collaboration with the pharmaceutical industry, collaboration with the policing organisations, more interaction between the national anti-doping organisations – the international federations, the athletes’ entourage including coaches, doctors – more of an appetite to get drugs out of sport. And cycling is doing a good job of that. It’s got a bit to go, but it’s doing a good job. I definitely think there are a few other sports that really, really are in the Stone Age when it comes to this.’

  Still, he knows that his own sport has yet to fully deal with its past and cannot bury that past. A lot of talk on this Tour concerns the recent publication of Blood Brothers, a book written by two Dutch journalists. The book throws a little more light on what was going on through the first decade of the new millennium. It is the story of the Rabobank team and it is extraordinary. It is also a little chilling that one recalls Rabobank so often cited as an example of a team with good ethics.

  Head of the US anti-doping agency, Travis Tygart, described US Postal’s doping as the most sophisticated in the history of sport, but Rabobank’s wasn’t far behind, though manager Theo de Rooij denied that the team either suggested doping or paid for it. They had a recognised world authority in haematology, P
aul Hocker, supervising their transfusions at a clinic in Vienna. They washed the water from the red cells, added glycerol, froze the blood and re-infused it when it was needed. US Postal by comparison could only chill their bloods in a fridge. Being able to freeze the blood gave Rabobank total flexibility as to when they used it.

  As the UCI’s testing improved, Rabobank’s team bosses bought a Sysmex XE-2100, the same $100,000 machine the authorities were using to test riders’ blood. With that, Rabobank ensured that their riders didn’t test positive.

  The single most remarkable story in Blood Brothers concerns the Rabobank leader Michael Boogerd, who the authors say got a blood transfusion directly from his brother Rini the day before winning the Alpine race to La Plagne in the 2002 Tour de France. Boogerd denies this took place but the journalists claim to have two sources for the story.

  Blood Brothers makes difficult reading for anybody involved in Team Sky, as Geert Leinders is depicted in the book as a central figure in Rabobank’s doping programme. According to Michael Rasmussen, a rider who has now admitted his doping, it was Leinders who advised the riders to persuade a family member to donate their blood for transfusions.

  It was when these homologous transfusions became detectable that Rabobank’s riders turned to the clinic in Vienna and started transfusing their own blood.

  Leinders is no longer working in the sport and the Rabobank team has changed, evolving into the more credible Belkin team. Sky have no option but to learn from their own mistake.

  ‘This team,’ says Farrell, ‘it made very difficult decisions at our London meeting about its no-tolerance policy [parting ways with Steven de Jongh and Sean Yates. The American Bobby Julich had gone earlier] and even though I was sad to see some of the people that I’d worked with leave the team, I believe that they made the right decision. But that’s not to say that the staff on this team, we’re not machines, we’re not robots, you’ve seen us, we’re pretty normal people, you build up relationships with people that you’re working with, especially when you’re working on the road like this. So when I saw people like Bobby having to leave the team, and Steven de Jongh, that wasn’t something for us to celebrate, it was a sad day. But at the end of the day that’s the team’s policy, and I fully support that.’

  Alan Farrell represents some of the hard-earned wisdom which has come to Brailsford and Sky. He is the sort of clean break from the past which cycling needs. A man who doesn’t want his personal adventure contaminated.

  Out on the streets of Nice there is a story unfolding which explains why an Alan Farrell would choose to run away with the circus.

  Geraint Thomas, whom Alan Farrell says has more physical courage than anybody he has ever met, hasn’t been dropped by Team Sky right at the beginning of the time trial.

  Dave Brailsford had spelled it out the night before. It would be unreasonable in view of his injury, to expect that G Thomas would be part of that team time trial in terms of really being able to contribute. The team could live with that. G would be a dead man riding.

  G Thomas hasn’t been dropped though. And he hasn’t just stayed in touch. He has pushed the team on, taking his pulls at the front. He was there for 24 of the 25km, making his last contribution just at the return to the Promenade des Anglais at the end of the stage. He submitted another significant turn at the front, shouting at the boys and telling them to give every last ounce of gas they had. How could anybody not?

  Then, job done, he dropped back.

  The team finished third. Three seconds off first.

  It was an ideal result but those gathered at the end including Alan Farrell would have noticed a cloud of disappointment cross the face of one rider. A Team Sky win would have put Edvald Boasson Hagen, the team’s highest ranked rider, into the yellow jersey.

  The race though is about the team and its needs. Chris Froome, the team’s leader, had made up 6 seconds on Alberto Contador and 23 seconds on Cadel Evans, perceived in these early stages to be major rivals. Froome is seventh overall, now just 3 seconds behind Simon Gerrans, the Australian race leader who is commonly perceived to have a very short-term lease on the yellow jersey.

  At this stage of the Tour the team emphatically do not want to be defending the yellow jersey and wasting energy for a marginal advantage. Geraint Thomas has established the mood of the day. Poor Edvald Boasson Hagen’s personal ambitions or disappointments are of no interest for now.

  There are warm-downs and doping tests to be looked after. Today has been one of the days that Alan Farrell dreamed of when he ran away with the Tour.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  ‘Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.’

  Albert Einstein

  When the Tour leaves Nice, and after the drama of the team time trial, we have a few days of shadow boxing and photo opportunities as we meander to Marseille and on to Montpellier and then to Albi. Three days of drum roll before we get to the Pyrenees.

  Froome narrowly escapes a crash in the last kilometre to Marseille but otherwise there is a dearth of drama. He arrives in Albi lying seventh in the General Classification, 8 seconds behind. It’s been an eventful first week for Sky. Bad luck with Thomas’s crash, worrying performance into Calvi on the last day in Corsica, but that was then countered by the boost of the team time trial.

  By and large, judgement on the team is being reserved. Those who expect a re-enactment of their performance of 2012, gathering around their leader in a protective cluster, haven’t been paying attention.

  Fans and journalists collect around the bus in the morning, crowding around like Freddie Mercury has reanimated for one last reunion tour. And how do people try to comprehend this celebrity treatment? To explain it they talk about what they imagine lies beneath. And mustn’t what lies beneath be all lies? No? That’s the residual taste in our mouths from the Armstrong era. Shan’t get fooled again.

  They have to be micro dosing. They have to be taking something which isn’t even banned yet. They have to be. Doesn’t that drug AICAR make you thin? Aren’t they really thin? How else? Faulty syllogisms that wouldn’t pass in a philosophy undergraduate’s logic class. X was a doper. Yesterday Y was faster than X ever was. Therefore Y is a doper.

  My worry is this: from 1999 onwards it was easy to add up the questions that Lance Armstrong should have been answering but wouldn’t answer. A lot of people who got fooled and refuse to get fooled again didn’t want to know back then. A lot of those same people don’t want to know now when there are rational arguments for not pointing the finger at every exceptional performance.

  If we allow ourselves a culture of not believing anybody whose performance rises above the mediocre, we’re not avoiding getting fooled again. We are asking to be fooled again. If we believe nothing, if we take away the stigma of cheating by denouncing the entire peloton as cheats without asking the right questions, we leave nothing of value left to defend. The right of an honest athlete not to be accused just because he is an excellent athlete is worth defending.

  I go back to Bradley Wiggins speaking to me in a bar in Mallorca earlier this year. He is talking about his dad, a man who once smuggled amphetamines in Bradley’s nappy.

  ‘He left me when I was two years of age. That always stuck with me since I’ve had children, I can never allow what happened to me to happen to them. My kids must stay true to their mother and respect their parents and I want them to look up to me when they’re adults and go, “He was a great father,” and I never want them ever to say, “I don’t like me dad,” like I grew up saying.

  ‘It would crucify me if they did that.

  ‘How I conduct myself in my sport is the same. They can come into this bar [in Mallorca] in twenty years’ time and my yellow is hanging over there. They can walk in and say, “That’s my dad’s, he won the Tour de France,” and be proud of that. Not coming in and going, “He did win the Tour but he tested positive later,” and that means more to me than anything. I would rather no
t have won the Tour de France, not been knighted, and not got all the other stuff, just been a professional bike rider and not have any issues and go back to work in Tesco’s but still have my children be proud of who I was as a father.’

  When a man says something like that to you he shows you what is in his heart. Men can’t always live by what is in their heart but when you know it’s there; when you hear Wiggins articulate all this in his soulful way, it moves you. You have a responsibility to tread softly when you decide that he is very good and therefore very guilty. You have a responsibility to go and gather all the evidence before you frame a question. Even with Lance we had that responsibility. We need to remind ourselves of that more than anything now.

  Let me offer up a confession here.

  On the last Sunday of the 1999 Tour de France, I advised readers of the Sunday Times not to applaud Lance Armstrong as he rolled down the Champs-Elysées in the yellow jersey. Mistrust was based on his radical improvement, his bullying of the anti-doper Christophe Bassons, the US Postal cover-up of a positive test for cortisone and Armstrong’s refusal to engage in intelligent conversation on cycling’s doping culture.

  We called the story ‘Flawed Fairytale’.

  I didn’t actually feel great about that story. I was certain Armstrong had cheated but a gut conviction wasn’t evidence. But from the moment the 1999 Tour ended and there was time to delve I wanted to find the evidence that would convince others of what I knew. And I can’t recall this without a nod of appreciation to Sandro Donati, Stephen Swart, Betsy Andreu, Emma O’Reilly, Greg LeMond and many others.

  I’ve been with Team Sky for some time now on and off. Living with them and talking with them. I do my best. I keep my eyes peeled for a ‘Motoman’ character ferrying drugs through traffic. I check the car park for a camper van in which the health freak and bean sprout addict Chris Froome might perform blood transfusions on himself.