Inside Team Sky

by Walsh, David

  Because of his sports science background and his refusal to be involved in doping when working with the notorious Festina team in the 1990s, Vayer has credibility on the subject of doping. So much so that some see him as a Breton Caesar, sitting in the tribune and delivering a thumbs up or a thumbs down to what he sees. A coach and teacher in physical education, Vayer writes for Le Monde during the Tour and his take on the race is generally interesting and hard-hitting.

  Just before the Tour he’d published a magazine, Not Normal, which examined the performances of twenty-one of the most successful modern riders – a range running approximately from Greg LeMond to Cadel Evans, with a large slice of Lance in between. Having examined the performances Vayer then ranked them in an index of suspicion.

  He came up with three categories of performance, the names of which are redolent of the old-school codes which the peloton would put on surprising performances.

  Suspicious – A ride showing a power output of 410 watts at threshold.

  Miraculous – A ride with a power output above 430 watts.

  Mutant – A ride with a power output above 450 watts.

  (He standardises the performances of riders against an ‘average’ rider weight of 70kg to allow him to compare the performances of heavier and lighter riders in the same way.)

  After Froome’s climb on Ax 3 Domaines, Antoine pronounced a power output of 446 watts according to his calculations. (Scaled to a 70kg rider; the equivalent of 6.4 w/kg for Froome.)

  Miraculous.

  After Ventoux, the situation looked like Vayer standing in a small room and berating Froome for being a cheat. Antoine says, though, that all he is doing is letting people decide for themselves.

  So on the Tuesday of this week, Vayer emailed Brailsford and asked to meet him. A totally off-the-record, no-journalists-present meeting. He hoped Brailsford would be able to give him the information that could, perhaps, allow Vayer to believe in Froome.

  Antoine Vayer and I go back to the 1999 Tour and a clandestine meeting in the Gobelen bar of those journalists who weren’t buying the romance of a cancer survivor winning the Tour de France clean. Back then he coached Christophe Bassons, cycling’s Mr Clean, and condemned in unambiguous terms the culture of doping that was destroying the sport.

  He was what cycling needed then: a breath of clean air.

  Now, I’m not so sure. Froome’s power at Ax 3 Domaines was deemed beyond suspicious but, in wanting to meet Brailsford and Kerrison, it seemed he was open to being persuaded that the Team Sky leader was clean. It seemed to me there was a disconnect between the post Ax 3 Domaines conclusion and the possibility of being persuaded that it wasn’t miraculous at all.

  Brailsford is inclined to meet him because he knows that Vayer’s figures on power output in the Tour de France are the basis for others’ calculations. Kerrison, too, because whatever his reservations, he recognises the attempt to factor in many of the variables makes Vayer’s model better than most people’s. These calculations are this year’s craze.

  Brailsford believes totally and passionately that Froome is clean. He wants to help Vayer to understand this. He asks Kerrison if he would come along to the meeting with Vayer as he believes it would be helpful to have his sports scientist along – a man who understands completely the significance and the limitations of measuring power output.

  Kerrison says he would like to go along because he disputes the idea of drawing a line and saying, ‘Beyond this is not possible without doping’ as a starting point. ‘In ten years’ time people would look at that line and laugh because things will have moved on so much,’ he says. Both Brailsford and Kerrison have yet to see a model which would satisfy them as being acceptably accurate. This frustrates them.

  Brailsford asks me if I know Antoine.

  I say I do. Antoine and I are friends and I add that his anti-doping stance while working for Festina was seriously admirable. He and two of his sons, Titoine and Benjamin, have come and stayed at our home in England.

  ‘Is his mind made up about this?’

  ‘Hmmm,’ I say, ‘that’s something you will have to discover for yourself.’

  All in good time.

  It is the morning after Froome has won the stage up Ventoux and the air hangs thick with accusation as Brailsford sits down to Froome’s right at the head of the press conference. Froome has a bidon of Gatorade which he sips from occasionally. Brailsford looks slightly bemused.

  Not all the questions concern doping. It just seems like that. A lot of the questions are framed with that nervy intro journalists use when asking a question but not wanting to get offside. ‘What do you say to those who ask you . . .?’

  Brailsford and Froome are patient and strong on the issues. Froome asserts yet again that he is not cheating. There isn’t much more he can say. ‘I can only be open and say to people, I know within myself that I’ve trained extremely hard to get here. All the results I get I know are my own results . . . Outside of that, I can’t talk about that; I can’t talk about that other stuff. I know what I’ve done to get here and I’m extremely proud of what I’ve done.’

  Somebody tosses up a comparison with Lance Armstrong and Froome raises his shotgun and fires. ‘Lance won those races but that aside, to compare me with Lance . . . I mean Lance cheated, I’m not cheating. End of story.’

  Brailsford, as ever, has been having a walk and a think outside the box. He asks reporters to tell him what it would take to convince them, an acknowledgement that what has been tried so far hasn’t worked. He asks them if they might not sit down collectively and discuss what would be a satisfactory outcome.

  ‘You’re asking me, how can I prove to you that we are not doping? You’re all asking the same questions. We wrack our brains every day.’

  Brailsford stresses his reluctance in a competitive environment to release his team’s power stats willy-nilly, but suggests that perhaps monitoring riders using the conventions of the biological passport process would be feasible.

  ‘We’ve been thinking about the biological passport and how that works with an appointed panel of experts . . . If you extrapolate that thinking forward I think we’d be quite happy, we’d actually encourage maybe the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) to appoint an expert and they could have everything that we’ve got. They could come and live with us, they could have all of our information, see all of our data, have access to every single training file we’ve got. We could then compare the training files to the blood data, to weight . . . All of that type of information they could capture on a consistent basis.

  ‘And it seems to me WADA are a good body to sit and analyse all that data. And they then could tell the world, and you, whether they think this is credible or not.’

  It seemed to me at the time, and still seems to me, that:

  Say you’ve decided that Brailsford is the evil godfather of a sophisticated doping programme. A doping programme going down in an era still reeling from the carnage of Lance Armstrong’s bio-physical racketeering. If you are the mastermind of this scam, which would surely end cycling forever, well, this is a pretty big thing to offer. He has a sceptical journalist living with the team at the moment. A scientist from WADA is a step further.

  Then he displays a charming lack of understanding of the way the media operates.

  ‘Rather than asking us all the time to come up with some creative way to prove that we’re innocent, why couldn’t you . . . get yourselves together . . . and you tell me, what would prove it for you, what could we do? . . . Get your heads together and come to me and say, “Well this is what we think we would like in order to prove to us beyond reasonable doubt that you are not doping.”

  ‘Bottom line is, it’s a rest day, it’s ten o’ clock in the morning and I’m trying to defend somebody who’s doing nothing wrong. I’m quite happy to do it, and I’m more than happy to try to convince you guys that we’re not doing anything wrong, but I need a little bit of help, I think, in coming up with a way about how the hell w
e do it.’

  Some hope.

  Froome, by his own standards of chill and cool, has become a little agitated as the press conference has worn on. His last words have an edge to them. Still, he manages to keep a hold of his tongue.

  ‘I just think it’s quite sad that we’re sitting here the day after the biggest victory of my life yesterday, quite a historic win, talking about doping. And quite frankly, I mean, my teammates and I, we’ve slept on volcanoes to get ready for this, we’ve been away from home for months, training together, just working our arses off to get here, and here I am, basically being accused of being a cheat and a liar and . . . that’s not cool.’

  A year ago on the Tour, Bradley Wiggins snapped and then railed against the faceless peloton of tweeters and bloggers. By comparison, Froome’s quiet hurt and frustration and Brailsford’s cerebral response to the intractable problem of proof seem quite eloquent. There is a recognition that a sport which has suckered and short-changed its customers for so many decades has no right to instant redemption. There is hurt there also, however.

  As they get up to leave, their faces suggest that restraint and grace will bring them no respite. Outside, the TV crews are waiting at the Team Sky bus to continue the inquisition.

  Today is for resting. Tomorrow is for racing. Oddly, the racing brings more peace than the resting.

  Two days later, at breakfast at the Hotel Les Bartavellas in Embrun, I meet Dave Brailsford. He tells me about his television appearance on the France 2 post-race discussion in Gap. He was invited because Cedric Vasseur, a studio pundit for France 2 during the Tour, had said two days earlier that Froome’s feat on Ventoux was unachievable without drugs. That he didn’t believe it.

  Brailsford was seriously annoyed over what Vasseur had said, and in retaliation accepted the invitation to go on the show and speak about doping. He had hoped Vasseur would be present and gave serious thought to how he would respond to his challenger. As it turned out, Vasseur wasn’t there and, though Brailsford had done well on the show and received plenty of support from Jean-René Godart, a broadcaster who has covered Team GB on the track, and had argued convincingly that Sky were clean, he was disappointed not to get his moment with Vasseur.

  ‘I was going to pretend and say to him that I’d heard from different people in different teams that he had doped, but hadn’t admitted it. I’d also heard that his name would come out in the list of the forty-four positives from retrospective testing at the 1998 Tour de France.

  ‘I reckoned he would deny it, say he had never doped and he would not be named in the AFLD positives from ninety-eight. And that I had accused him without having any evidence. Then I was going to say, “So now you know what it’s like to be falsely accused, which is exactly what you have done to Chris Froome.” But sadly, he wasn’t there and I didn’t get my chance.’

  It’s a visceral response from a cerebral man. And pinpoints the deficiencies in the media approach to this issue.

  So. The Miracle of Mont Ventoux?

  I’m neither a great fan nor avid student of statistics. When we wrote together in the Lance era, my writing partner Pierre Ballester and I divided up the work as follows: he did the doctor, I did the massage therapist. So Pierre met haematologists and oncologists, wrangled the scientific stuff, and was both scrupulous and discerning about what he believed and what he used.

  Nevertheless a cottage industry has grown up in recent years, supplying the blogosphere with statistics which are supposed to ‘prove’ or ‘disprove’ whether a cyclist is guilty. I don’t believe the statisticians themselves set out to be conclusive, but their stats draw the rapt attention of scholars of the University of Wikipedia. If the exchanges between these crowd-sourced academics are any indication of the general comprehension of the stats, then it’s all a bit depressing.

  Lies. Damned lies. Statistics. You get rabid takers for each.

  When L’Equipe analysed eighteen climbs of Froome’s from the previous two years they discovered what, for me, was the most relevant statistic in the debate. What Froome did on Ventoux is what Froome does best. He has the ability not just to maintain tempo but to insert five-minute bursts of maximum power output.

  Why pay attention to just one statistic? Well, L’Equipe were comparing the performances of a single rider and isolating a small component of that rider’s performances on hills. The variables are not eliminated but they are minimised, and there is enough baseline data to make a general conclusion viable.

  Fred Grappe, who did the analysis, didn’t provide a ticker-tape parade proclaiming Froome’s conclusive innocence. That wasn’t his job and he hadn’t enough data for that. Grappe limited himself to a modest conclusion from the figures he was given.

  After Dave Brailsford’s attempt to think out loud about a solution during the rest-day press conference, it was a pity that WADA felt unable to help, but understandable as this is not their brief. Nor was it Brailsford’s fault that L’Equipe chose Grappe to do their analysis. Many were quick to point out that in 2001, ‘Grappe said the exact same thing about Armstrong.’

  He didn’t. He provided a general impression of the benefits of training smarter and came to an overly optimistic conclusion about Armstrong. I am sure it was an embarrassment for the man and it was certainly an irritation for those of us trying to investigate Armstrong, but there is no reason to think that, having been humiliated for reaching a broad and erroneous conclusion twelve years ago, Grappe was going to deliberately err in the same direction again.

  Grappe got caught in the crossfire anyway, and Brailsford’s attempt at transparency provided little protection. Talking to the Team Sky people before and during the race, they were more than a little alarmed that even the grasp of so-called ‘experts’ of the science of performance was years behind what teams were using. The calls for VO Max results were a case in point: ‘We have to have the VO Max results. Have to know them. What!? What do you mean VO Max testing is no longer done? Oh . . . Regardless, we must be the jury on all scientific data!’

  I thought that Ross Tucker of the Sports Scientists site, a man who I have met and respect, got it right when he spoke about what we were seeing this year, the new craze for science to feed extreme conclusions.

  ‘It doesn’t deserve outright dismissal and it doesn’t warrant embracing as conclusive proof of anything,’ Tucker said.

  He also recommends that we use our other senses if we feel the absolute necessity to come to conclusions. To me this is called journalism. You go into the background, test the transparency, test the substance of the people involved, find out what they do when we are not looking. When Bradley Wiggins speaks to me about doping in the context of letting his children down, when he speaks as the child of a man and doper who let him down, I hear somebody who has weighed the cost of cheating and found it excessive. That doesn’t end my curiosity but it informs my conclusions.

  Elsewhere, the blizzard of statistics just limits our visibility.

  The other day I was speaking to Tim Kerrison about the new data. He was pointing out that measuring power and measuring physiology just aren’t the same thing. Then he said:

  ‘So power is torque, which is basically force, but circular force. Torque multiplied by angular velocity – basically the speed at which the crank’s moving. So power is force times velocity if you’re talking about linear, or when you’re talking about circular it’s torque, which is the equivalent of force, times angular velocity. So the SRM measures the torque two hundred times a second. So at every point around the pedal stroke. But it only measures the angular velocity once every revolution. So there’s a magnet that basically measures cadence, and so assumes a constant velocity each revolution. But because on the oval rings you go from, say on a fifty-six oval ring, you go from the equivalent of a fifty-eight at the big point, and fifty-four at the smaller point. A big variation, and one of the whole ideas of the oval rings is that through that dead spot, you can get through that dead spot much quicker. So then your velocity’
s slower through one part of the revolution, and faster through the other part. And the mathematics of it is, if you were to measure it correctly, you’d measure the angular velocity at the same frequency that you’re measuring the torque. And multiply the two of them together. But the way it calculates it, which is absolutely fine for circular rings, because the angular velocity is much more constant, it just multiplies each of those torques by the average angular velocity for that revolution. So that’s where the error creeps in.’

  Funny, that’s exactly what I was about to say . . .

  I understand the appeal of the new approach. Statistics give the illusion of being as emphatic and decisive as a gun fired during a heated discussion in a pub. In this argument they are an illusion. Forgive me if this sounds too intuitive for those who speak in numbers, but no estimate of power output has ever made me as suspicious as Johan Bruyneel railing against blood tests in an interview before the 1999 Tour de France.

  I don’t fully grasp the maths but am willing to accept Brailsford’s charge of pseudo-science on the basis that the limitations of the data seem very obvious to me. As they used to teach accountants years ago: GIGO. Garbage in, garbage out.

  Garbage, I grasp.

  Take Ventoux, for instance. Different sites take their stats from different starting points. It is worth mentioning that these times themselves are taken from television coverage, not systematically and reliably harvested. Is that exactly where the climb starts? Was the stage winner at the front or the back of the peloton when they went past the start point?

  One source measures times from a distance of 21.5km out, quoting an average 7.5 per cent gradient. The stats here include performances on Ventoux from both the Critérium du Dauphiné and the Tour. By this measure, Froome’s climb of Mont Ventoux comes in twenty-third.