Inside Team Sky

by Walsh, David

  Afterwards Brailsford was thrilled with Froome’s tactical nous. A lot of time and energy at Team Sky has gone into teaching Chris Froome to be patient and discerning about his use of energy.

  ‘When he was attacked on the flat, he had the wherewithal to go with Valverde; when Quintana went on the climb, he had the wherewithal to go with him; he knew he couldn’t let those guys go. Then when Dan Martin and Fuglsang went, he knew to sit there with the other guys.’

  In the end Dan Martin won the stage, clear from Fuglsang. The final 30km had been largely downhill and the leading pair got home 20 seconds in front of the bunch. That Froome was in the bunch was enough to keep him in yellow.

  Not a great day for Team Sky though; Brailsford had a lot to think about.

  ‘It was one of those days that was challenging, and the hammer blow if you like, the thing that made the day a lot worse was Kiryienka missing that cut-off time. The Pyrenees were a game of two halves, you’ve come out in the first half, absolutely screaming and you’ve taken a two-nil lead. Then in the second half you’re a different team and you’ve taken a mauling, you go down to nine men and you’ve still won the match two-nil. It felt like we just scraped through three-two, but the reality is it’s still two-nil. It felt like we had lost, but we came out of the match having won. With Richie, it was the element of surprise. I don’t think any of us saw that [time loss] coming.’

  Post-race? The match might have been won but there were many casualties, and Brailsford had a job on his hands.

  ‘We tend to leave them on their own, emotions are running high, you want to take information in calmly, react rationally, but that’s a very difficult thing to do just after you’ve competed. I think that’s something we’ve taken off the track in British cycling, we let them do their warm-down, we leave them to it. Our urge as a management team is to want to talk about it, most people cope with stressful situations by talking about it. But in reality it’s not the greatest thing to do from a rider’s perspective, we tend to leave it.’

  And what about Kiryienka? To have seen Geraint Thomas suffer an early injury in the Tour was unfortunate. To lose a second engine through being one minute outside of the cut might seem a little careless. One of those casualties which can occur in the fog of war.

  ‘If you are the last car, and you have to go forward, what you say to one of the other teams is, “Just keep on the lads for me.” Back towards the end of the race on a mountain day, you are not racing. You’re all just trying to survive. So if your guy gets a puncture, he will be given a wheel by one of the other teams. From what I gather, Kiryienka was dropped when he was really struggling, and he came back again, and then I think Matt Goss might have been dropped and the Orica-GreenEDGE car was looking after him. And Kiryienka dropped out behind, then he was gone, and nobody knew. There was no malice.’

  Brailsford recognises that Kiryienka, being such a proud man, would never have said, ‘Look, I’m really struggling here.’

  ‘I think with hindsight, he should have said something because our guys would have dropped back and got him home within the time limit. On the other hand if somebody is literally walking the bike up a hill, there’s no point in losing other riders.’

  What did he find when he spoke with Kiryienka that evening?

  ‘You have to recognise how devastated he is, because he’s a proud guy. You could tell that he felt he let people down and in that situation you’ve got to reassure someone. He didn’t do anything wrong, and he certainly didn’t do it deliberately. Get yourself home and get yourself right, there are moments where you can push people and moments where what the person needs is one hundred per cent support. No matter what, you’ve got to put your arm around someone and say “Look, it’s going to be okay.”’

  That was one of those moments.

  The Tour is going into a rest day. Brailsford can leave his team to eat and think tonight but there are too many signs that Team Sky aren’t functioning as they did last summer. Tomorrow will be about calming things down and putting together a rational review of the situation.

  Team Sky do still have the yellow jersey. Things could be worse. They certainly are for Thibaut Pinot, the speed-fearing French racer. Today he lost another 25 minutes when he came in with the gruppetto and was in tears soon after the finish.

  Speaking candidly to L’Equipe afterwards, the tachophobe said: ‘When I saw that I was not able to stay on the wheel of a rider like Mark Cavendish on the descent off a mountain pass, I asked myself, “What am I doing on the Tour?” I received the clear response that I have nothing to do here.

  ‘This is a very sad situation for me, I’m the person who is most disappointed about it . . . I don’t know if I will be able to get over this trauma. During yesterday’s stage my only objective was to survive. I don’t know if I will recover, but that’s life and that’s cycling.’

  Pinot’s difficulties go back to a crash he suffered when he was younger, which has resulted in him being extremely tentative on descents. Imagine if he gets his head right. The time improvements. The things which will be written. Death by the firing squad of social media. Commentators armed with anecdotes each expressed in 140 characters or fewer.

  Monday, 8 July

  Often on a Grand Tour Dave Brailsford arrives home fitter than when he left. He likes to get up early and hit the roads on his bike for about two hours.

  This Monday morning though he has a management task. Not something that would get studied in an MBA class. Not a case-study from a text book. Eight riders whose heads are all over the place. One leads the Tour, the other seven aren’t sure where they are. The ninth is going home. This Monday morning Dave Brailsford doesn’t go for his usual ride. He waits. Morning rides are Brailsford’s little slice of sanity during the race. Today he’s brought the whole cake to share out.

  When the team go out on their bikes to loosen the limbs and clear the minds, he slips into Lycra and goes with them. Wordless. He has seen his team virtually in disarray but this morning that same team are comfortable with his presence. He just hangs there.

  One by one the riders drop back to him and speak. These are men who spend their working lives in the saddle and talking frankly while riding comes easier to them than while sitting down across a desk. So one by one they drop back and open up, and by the time the ride has ended Brailsford has gathered together the pieces of the jigsaw.

  What do you think about the other guys, he asks them, is everybody contributing do you think? Are you contributing as much as you can? What should change?

  He asks his questions, receives his answers, and one by one the riders seem glad to have spoken. Brailsford has managed to get a feel for where they are at, any personal angst. He has isolated those few issues which he thinks need to be addressed.

  They get back to the hotel. Dave Brailsford begins putting the jigsaw together.

  Tuesday, 9 July

  Morning. Eight riders and Dave Brailsford on the Death Star bus. He speaks. They listen.

  Brailsford leads the team into an open discussion. A classic Stop, Start, Continue.

  What are we going to stop doing?

  What are we going to start doing?

  What are we going to continue to do?

  A typical Brailsford solution. He is not the boss man here. He is the solutions guy. He outlines the state they are in. It’s all okay.

  ‘If you bring any group of individuals together these things happen. We have been together for two weeks. We went into Corsica under pressure.’

  He knows the boys can’t get away from each other and after two weeks’ imprisonment little things become big things. Splinters under the skin. He said this. He did that. The way one guy picks up his fork starts pissing another guy off. It’s irrational but human. He will try to reset the bar.

  They know they had a bad day to Calvi. They know they had a worse day on Sunday. They know where everybody is at.

  Now, here on the bus, this is the time to have the discussion. Not in priv
ate, guys saying what’s on their minds in front of everybody. This is Brailsford on his terrain de prédilection.

  He looks to Edvald, his talented young Norwegian. Edvald has the feeling that the team hadn’t cared if he got the yellow jersey or not at the time trial in Nice back at Stage Four. Yellow was so close that Edvald was already picking out his matching cleats but he gave it up for the team. He wasn’t resentful because that’s not Edvald, but he had carried that disappointment with him like a lead weight.

  ‘Edvald is disappointed he didn’t get the jersey. He feels that you guys felt no disappointment for him. He isn’t sure if you guys even want him sprinting. How do you feel about Edvald sprinting? Let’s have some honest opinion.’

  Honest opinion. Of course it comes from Pete Kennaugh, the oldest tyro in town.

  Always when Kennaugh speaks they are reminded that the young rider from the Isle of Man carries the same chippiness that his fellow islander Mark Cavendish once brought to this team.

  ‘We are a racing team,’ says Kennaugh, ‘of course we are going to sprint. If Chris is safe and he says, “Okay, go for it,” then of course Edvald must go for it.’

  This is okay by Brailsford, who believes if Boasson Hagen gets the chance to win stages he will then have the morale to go and empty himself in the mountains for Froome. The same for Richie Porte. Richie bombed in the second day in the Pyrenees on Sunday. Brilliant the first day. Crushed the second day.

  There is an individual time trial coming up. Richie’s shot at a top ten finish is gone. Should he take it easy in the time trial or go out and give it everything?

  The old school would have said, ‘No. Richie, you are here to conserve your energy.’ Porte would have said, ‘But the TT is my thing. I need that for me.’ The old school wouldn’t have been interested, but Brailsford is not old school.

  So he asks and Porte says that he would like to do the time trial flat out. That would give him the morale to give it everything in the mountains. He rooms with Chris Froome and they are close. He won’t be letting anybody down.

  Brailsford knows Rod Ellingworth feels that Porte should conserve his energy and Rod knows when to keep his counsel to himself.

  Brailsford says, ‘You should go for it, Richie.’

  Porte’s teammates want him to prove to the world that the guy who suffered this body blow could go out and show the world that he is one of the top time-triallists.

  He adds that the team needs Richie and Froomey and Pete in top shape when they arrive at the bottom of Mont Ventoux. The team has targeted Ventoux from a long way out, they have always held it as crucial in their march to Tour de France victory.

  Ian Stannard is assigned a new job. From today he will chaperone Froome from 30km out to the finish. ‘Ian, you will be our guy for taking him there.’

  This simplifies Stannard’s job. Gives him a new status in the team. He perks up.

  Through this first week of the Tour, David López and Kosta Siutsou, who were expected to be two of the team’s strong climbers, have not been riding well enough to contribute significantly. There were whispers from other riders that indicated dissatisfaction and, after Froome was left on his own for most of the ride to Bagnères-de-Bigorre, things worsened.

  So Brailsford addresses the issue right here before the start of Stage Ten in Saint-Gildas-des-Bois:

  ‘David,’ says Brailsford, looking straight at López, ‘you are at eighty per cent, right?’

  López quietly nods his agreement.

  ‘Nobody can blame you for that. It happens to everyone, but David what we need is one hundred per cent of your eighty per cent. You do that and everyone on this bus will be happy.’

  Brailsford is taking reality and reshaping it for his riders. What López had been doing through the first week was to measure out his effort each day to ensure that he got to the finish without blowing up. Respectable on a personal level but not much good for the team.

  Brailsford looks to the other riders and reiterated.

  ‘David and every other rider in this team needs a little success in the race, and we’ve got to make sure they have that.’

  It wasn’t just López, but Siutsou as well. Brailsford outlines his new plan for the two under-performing riders.

  Instead of expecting them to work for Froome at the end of the more difficult stages, they will now try to control the first 150km of the flatter stages. After the customary breaks of riders low on General Classification clear, López and Siutsou will make sure it gets no more serious than a five-minute gap. For two thirds of the race they will give it everything and then pass the baton.

  Brailsford turns to the rest of the team. He tells them that he understands their disappointment that certain riders are not at their best, but that those riders are going to need to feel a little bit of love and appreciation in the days to follow. When they do their job, and when they do it well, they will need the others to notice their contribution.

  This is a reversal of the usual roles for López and Siutsou but in the coming days it will work. This morning both are pleased to be given jobs they know they can do. They feel drawn back into the fold. As their morale improves, so too will their performance level.

  Brailsford will meet his riders before each morning’s stage on the Tour, but in the three weeks of racing no other meeting will be like this. No other meeting will impact the team as this one is going to.

  In the space of a few minutes he has relaunched them psychologically and he has scrapped and redrawn the best-laid plans that he brought to France.

  CHAPTER NINE

  ‘“The rule is, jam to-morrow and jam yesterday – but never jam to-day.”

  “It must come sometimes to ‘jam to-day’,” Alice objected.

  “No, it can’t,” said the Queen. “It’s jam every other day: to-day isn’t any other day, you know.”‘

  Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There

  Sometimes the Tour de France is as much a planes, trains and automobiles experience as it is a bike race. Compared to the old days when different imperatives informed the selection of the route the Tour took, this year’s route was three stages in Corsica, a ferry back to the mainland, a few days in the Pyrenees and then a jump up to Brittany. In 2014 the Tour will linger amid the Francophiles of Yorkshire for two days before heading south and then evacuating to mainland Europe.

  The hopping, skipping and jumping between stages is a logistical difficulty but it often brings sharp reminders of the new ways in which the Tour interfaces with the real world outside. When you spend hours on end baking in a press tent, the talk of doping becomes so constant that the subject almost becomes abstract. People know because they know. Only rubes, dupes and suckers don’t know or deny knowing. You forget that outside it is France, and these days in France doping is no longer a game.

  Lest we forget when the French got serious on doping, introducing biological passports for sportspeople resident in their country before any other sports associations did the same, they also handed the bulk of the responsibility for enforcing their policies to the police. Lance Armstrong moved from the south of France to Girona in Spain like Jumpin’ Jack Flash. Doping was no longer an administrative issue, it was a big legal problem. A gas, gas, gas it ain’t.

  On the first rest day of the Tour, the candidates for the UCI presidency circulate their messages. One such is Pat McQuaid, the controversial incumbent. The other is Brian Cookson of Great Britain. Cookson has the rare distinction of being a sliver of common ground between the fallen Lance and me.

  At the time he announced his candidacy for UCI presidency, I tweeted that all cycling fans should unite and support Brian Cookson in his attempt to end McQuaid’s reign. Armstrong was impressed and retweeted my advice to his 3.9 million followers. Three point nine mill . . . all comes to he who waits!

  Brian Cookson’s son Oli works for Team Sky as a performance assistant. You will never hear anybody tell you that he got the job because of his su
rname. It doesn’t work that way at Sky and, by the way, Cookson junior is an impressive young man.

  On the day in question, Oli picked up Rod Ellingworth from the airport at Nantes, after Rod had been home to help his wife Jane look after their little girl Robyn who was unwell. They drove towards La Baule and the Hotel Majestic not far from the centre of town where the team were billeted.

  Oli was driving the Jaguar XJR, the long wheel-base VIP car. Tremendously flash. It’s the top of the range and Team Sky use the car for ferrying VIPs.

  Eight of the Tour teams are in La Baule on this main strip facing the sea and as Oli drives along he comes to a roundabout with a police check. He presumes the police are diverting the traffic. Nothing out of the ordinary. He continues with this presumption until the police pull the Jag over onto the verge just by the roundabout.

  So, a check of some sort. There are three or four of them. Bit heavy, but here goes.

  He winds down the window. Naturally the policeman speaks in French. Oli can understand him but isn’t confident enough to converse. Rod can speak French but, when asked if they can, the pair of them shake their heads, no. It’s easier that way. Nothing lost in translation.

  The local constabulary aren’t planning on beating around the bush or admiring Oli’s wheels.

  Are you carrying medicine?

  Are you carrying blood?

  The question is not asked in a neutral tone. More like a policeman asking a guy with long hair and a ratty kaftan not to waste any more time and to just hand over the hash. So straight off it was ‘show us the medicine’.

  ‘Oh, we don’t have any,’ said Oli.

  He could tell he was disappointing the police.

  ‘I’ve found a lot with French police that, maybe it’s just their way of being, but it seems like sort of aggressive to start and then once they talk to you then it’s fine and relaxed, but, it was just, you know, not the best way to start these things.’

  They spoke for a couple of minutes through the open window. One policeman spoke English and repeatedly he asked where the drugs were, the medicine.