Inside Team Sky

by Walsh, David

  The case would be a considerable embarrassment for Team Sky and for Brailsford, but more critically it would come at a time when cycling stood at a crossroads. The sport needed to reform itself in all sorts of ways. If Team Sky could gather the respect and admiration to match their success, they would be big players in determining the future of cycling. If Team Sky kept shooting themselves in the foot, that future might not happen at all. So Team Sky had come to Tuscany with two things in mind. The World Championships was one, of course. But also more media massaging.

  In January 2013 in Mallorca the team had entertained a large swathe of the British media. The key element of the trip as far as Sky were concerned was a three-hour media presentation on what the team were about. The first question asked was by Dave Brailsford himself as he began the PowerPoint presentation.

  ‘How are you going to succeed in winning admiration, if people can’t be sure you are clean?’

  That established the theme for the next 179 minutes. How would Team Sky become the most admired sports team in the world? One imagined that the first thing they needed to do was stop talking about becoming the most admired sports team in the world, but there is something almost endearing about the manner in which Brailsford wears his ambition on his sleeve. ‘Call me naïve, but . . .’ he says occasionally, and there have been plenty of times when he has been.

  So the PowerPoint presentation aimed to hose down that chorus of overheated former pros who pronounce on everything from their media talking shops without actually being familiar with the scientific approach the sport has now taken. This was a particular bugbear of Tim Kerrison’s. Sky talked of the philosophy of marginal gains and how it worked. Click, next slide. Their faith and investment in sports science. Click. The benefits of state-of-the-art equipment. Click. Coaches that know the human body as much as they do the sport. Click. The injustice of the growing tendency to establish guilt by performance. Click, click, click. Over three hours Team Sky placed themselves front and centre of cycling’s battle to escape the past.

  Upon review, Brailsford and company felt that the session had worked well. So in Tuscany in September 2013 it was planned to offer a similar session to the Italian media, who are among the most caustically critical of the Team Sky operation. After Froome’s victory on Mont Ventoux, Italy’s foremost sports daily, La Gazzetta dello Sport, had its physiology expert proclaiming Froome’s power output incredibly high and lacking credibility.

  Sky has a sister station in Italy (and another in Germany), so bringing the Italians around wasn’t going to be purely an academic exercise. Team Sky’s ownership is as follows: 60 per cent is owned by BSkyB, the British broadcasting arm of News Corp, 25 per cent is owned by Sky Italia and the remaining 15 per cent belongs to News Corp itself.

  Cycling is an unusual sport. It clearly doesn’t have the mass casual following that Premiership football enjoys. For many people, cycling at an elite level barely even exists beyond the three weeks when the Tour de France generates its pretty images and epic narrative for millions of viewers. Yet it is a sport with huge grassroots participation and those who take an interest often do so with a passion that means opinions aren’t merely expressed. They are fired as bullets.

  Sky Broadcasting would be the first to concede that they get a good deal commercially with their finger in the cycling pie. Their involvement in city-centre Sky Rides is estimated to have put 750,000 people back on bikes in the first two years of operation alone. Coupling these with a pro cycling team is a branding master class. The popular success of the GB track cycling team has been matched on the roads. If people can believe the story then the possible returns are huge and Sky could find itself at the popular heart of a major sport – certainly a change from perceptions of it as the sugar daddy enabler to the corrupt Babylon of Premiership football.

  But every time the word doping gets mentioned in a media report or suggested by Google after just about any cycling search term, the value of cycling as a business takes a hit. When the Tiernan-Locke story broke, Sky’s bosses wanted to know how this story could have got into the public domain when it was just a preliminary letter sent by the UCI to its rider. Cycling is cycling. Tyres puncture and stories leak. They had bigger problems than sourcing the leak. Their anxiety confirmed the weight of the story, though. Rule number one in such cases: mind your back.

  In that sense Sky are no different from so many other sponsors in the game. There is a bottom line. There must be a return. No matter how much people at the upper echelons of the company like cycling and enjoy it, if the tainted elite cycling world continues to contaminate Sky’s brand image, well, perhaps the experiment will have to finish.

  For example, the German and Italian spin-offs are welcomed by Sky. But, if coverage in Italy is always to be coupled with the sort of colourful accusations which the domestic media specialises in, then Brailsford’s challenge of becoming the most admired sports team in the world is doomed. Tiernan-Locke had received only an enquiring letter but he’d provided the media with another big stick with which to beat Team Sky, thus turning himself into something more than the small fish he really was.

  The patience of sponsors, any sponsors, will always be finite. And cycling lives off the generosity of its sponsors.

  Those sponsors get their money’s worth. For less than £10 million a year you can give a pro team the same name as your company. The Team Sky deal represents excellent value. Estimates of Sky’s broadcasting contribution to the team in 2011 put the figure at about £6 million. The annual report and accounts for that year suggest that BSkyB spent a total of £1.2 billion on marketing. The involvement in Team Sky represented considerably less than 1 per cent of that outlay.

  The deals come at a discount because cycling is a minefield of scandal and cynicism. What happens if a team with your firm’s name becomes synonymous with cheating?

  Cycling’s difficulty is cynicism as much as it is drugs. When 2013 produces a winner like Chris Froome, a healthy sport should be looking at pushing its market into Africa. When a teammate of Froome’s is asked about irregularities in his blood passport, though, people think it is 1999 all over again. In 1998 cycling had the Festina affair. It promised 1999 was the new beginning. It was. It was the beginning of the Armstrong machine, the most cynical doping operation any sport has ever seen.

  In 2012, the Armstrong Report opened everybody’s eyes to what a noxious sham all that talk of reform had been. Was 2013 a mirror image of 1999? I don’t think so, but it would be hard to blame fans and sponsors for standing back from cycling.

  What was the financial impact of the Lance years? Well, Lance did very well for himself but the sport as a whole has been retarded in terms of its own potential. Sponsorship is vital to top-level cycling teams, but because reputable brands suffer the risk of fire damage if associated with a scandal, they pay less than they would otherwise do. Interestingly, major global brands like Nike and Budweiser who backed Armstrong as an individual never got seriously involved in the sport in Europe – the cockpit where Armstrong made his name.

  They still got burned in the end but their instincts were probably correct.

  In 2013 Rabobank, a long-standing team sponsor, announced that they’d had enough. ‘International cycling is rotten, including some of its highest institutions,’ said Rabobank’s chief financial officer Bert Bruggink, bringing to an end a seventeen-year association with the sport.

  Rabobank had long spoken about zero tolerance in their team. It emerged, though, that in 2007 the team had purchased a brand spanking new Sysmex XE–2100 machine, the same as that used by anti-doping authorities, to measure their own blood cell counts. Testimony given by Michael Rasmussen, a former Rabobank rider, suggested that Geert Leinders had used the machine and that Leinders had, among other things, stored Dynepo – a form of pharmaceutical EPO – in the fridge on the team bus.

  Leinders is still under investigation by Belgian authorities.

  Cycling was fortunate that the Californian consu
mer goods manufacturer Belkin eventually stepped into the breach after Rabobank’s exit, but it won’t always be like that unless reform is visible and effective. Belkin began their connection with cycling by talking about zero tolerance. Now though, all of a sudden, the market leaders in zero tolerance are struggling to explain themselves.

  The news about Tiernan-Locke came when team owners were campaigning for radical changes to what is a conservative business environment. Ideally this would involve simplifying the racing calendar at World Tour level, so the three Grand Tours and a selection of other races would attract the top teams and give the season some continuity. There would also be revenue sharing to make pay structures more competitive.

  As it is, cycling works in a peculiar way. Teams are beholden to major sponsors for most of their income. As payback, teams operate under the names of sponsors. This in turn means that when the sponsor changes, goes broke or withdraws because of a fresh scandal, the team virtually ceases to exist to the fans.

  Those teams, despite raising the bulk of their cash from sponsors, receive a very small slice of the big pie in return for success. Chris Froome won €450,000 for coming home first in the Tour de France in 2013. By the standard of major world sporting events that is small beer. Factor in that this is a uniquely gruelling event and that Froome has to share the money out with his riders and staff, and the system seems distinctly feudal. Of course, Froome’s contract with Team Sky will allow reward for success but in broad picture terms, Froome will be paid less than many Premiership footballers.

  He received less than half what a golfer gets for winning a middle-ranking event on the PGA Tour in America. Then his team will receive little financial reward for his success. The appearance fee for a team in the Tour de France is €55,000.

  The total prize money pool for the Tour de France comes to roughly €2 million, a sum which includes payments to the various jersey winners and €8000 a day for the stage winner and so on. Eight thousand euros for winning a stage is derisory. The other Grand Tours – the Giro d’Italia and the Vuelta a España – dangle prize money of €1.38 million and €1.1 million respectively, so the derision is at least multilingual. According to the Australian Financial Review, writing in the summer of 2013, the Tour includes a paltry further €1.6 million in allowances for participating teams.

  Even in macro terms, cycling continues to underperform as a business. The Tour de France, for instance, takes in just €200 million for global broadcasting rights for a three-week race which bills itself as the third biggest sporting event in the world. Analysts place that figure at a fraction of the Tour’s earning potential. The Tour is beamed to 190 out of all 196 countries. These rights fees account for 60 per cent of the Tour’s income. By comparison the 2011–12 cycle of Olympic activity generated $3.91 billion in rights income.

  The total budget for Team Sky, considered to be the Manchester City of the game but probably more fairly bracketed within the top four or five teams in terms of budget, is estimated to be in the £25-30 million mark. That sort of money would buy a single half-decent Premiership footballer, but not a player from the very top echelon. In cycling it makes Team Sky the envy of most other outfits.

  Again, compare. Sky’s modest sponsorship has brought two Tour de France wins. To be one of the sponsors in The Olympic Partner (TOP) programme for a winter games/summer games cycle costs about $100 million. Eleven TOP sponsors generated $957 million for London. There are a further three tiers of sponsors beneath the TOP strand. That’s forty-four more companies squeezing their corporate logos into the picture.

  So for cycling’s sponsors and teams, the payback is as modest as the input. So the spin had better be good. Cycling, however, has a perverse and contrary constituency.

  On the Tour in 2013, one of Froome’s principal rivals was Alberto Contador – former winner of the Tour who had since served a ban for discrepancies in his biological passport. One of the oddities of the spite shown against Froome was the general tolerance shown for Contador – the Barabbas Syndrome. In the Bible when the crowd are offered the choice to free Jesus or Barabbas – a known criminal – their resentment of Jesus causes them to cry, ‘No, not him! Give us Barabbas!’ The Tour creates an unlikely rerun. The mob were absolving Contador, the known sinner, while calling for Froome’s crucifixion. (Contador’s boss is the Dane, Bjarne Riis, who has admitted to having won the 1996 Tour de France while on EPO and other drugs, but who remains a leading figure in the sport.)

  Contador rode for Saxo–Tinkoff in 2013. Soon after the Tour ended, the second part of that sponsorship arrangement broke down when Oleg Tinkoff took his cheque book away. More confusion for the casual fan.

  Dave Brailsford’s burden goes beyond the corridors of the velodrome in Manchester and the team’s house and office on the Promenade du Soleil in Nice. By advertising his team’s virtue so aggressively, he seemed set to put Sky (the team and the business) at the centre of the reform and growth of the sport. When Brailsford fails, however, he doesn’t get credit for his efforts and his ambitions. He gets crucified.

  Nail Brailsford. Give us Riis!

  Though he tries not to show it, this gets to Brailsford. He knows his record in the sport and insists he is 100 per cent clean. There is no evidence, not a scintilla, to counter that. Yet he can often feel the vibe of resentment rippling towards him and the team. Call him naïve, but he doesn’t understand it.

  I imagine Dr Steve Peters talking to him, asking him to consider where this resentment comes from. Of course, most of those who work in the sport have links to its past. Ex-riders who once doped or team bosses who, if they didn’t organise the blood transfusions, looked the other way when someone else did. When Geert Leinders got into trouble because of his time at Rabobank, and UCI asked Tiernan-Locke some accusatory questions, this was manna from heaven to many traditionalists in the sport.

  In public his bosses at BSkyB speak glowingly of the environment Brailsford has created at Team Sky, but they continue to demand a return on their investment. Namely, success. And they like their success neat; that is, without any contaminated mixer. They understand scepticism goes with the territory, but when a Leinders happens or when they are told that the UCI wants an explanation from Tiernan-Locke, they are not so understanding. It is Brailsford who then feels the heat.

  Having set themselves as the most zealous zero tolerance unit in the game, Team Sky have unwittingly fallen into a rivalry with the Garmin team – who spearhead the truth and reconciliation movement within cycling. Jonathan Vaughters, Garmin’s Brailsford, has been a leading voice in calling for cycling reform and it is fair to say that Vaughters has occasionally got under Brailsford’s skin more than a little.

  The difficulty for Team Sky is that every failure of the zero tolerance policy gets written up in larger print than a failure in an environment which says let’s forgive and . . . not forget . . . but learn and move on.

  At the end of 2013, Team Sky, despite their ambition and their success on the road, had a reputation that was all shot through by snipers. They had two very highly paid stars and a roster of ambitious young men behind them. Keeping all those plates spinning was going to be impossible. The team had lost ground and lost influence in the battle to reform cycling both financially and ethically. They were no nearer to becoming the most admired sports team on earth.

  They had won two Tour de France titles back to back within four years of becoming a team, a monumental achievement. The great smoking slag-heap of cycling’s decades of failure and mistrust loomed over that monument, though. There is no public relations spin which will shift that dark mountain. It’s a job for shovels and backbone, a job that will take years.

  Cycling’s problem has always been the search for something easier than getting the hands blistered by the shovel. There are no shortcuts and lots of backsliding on the road to reform.

  It’s not certain that the job can ever be completed. Cycling on the old continent has its past but, more than that, there is an ambi
valence to doping. I have read and re-read the thoughts of Antoine Blondin – the late French novelist and sports columnist for L’Équipe – on how traditional fans of the sport respond to those who dope:

  ‘In a rider’s life there are moments and places where circumstances require that he transcend himself. Each struggles to face up to that obligation. As sports fans we prefer to dream about angels on wheels, Simon Pures somehow immune to the uppers and downers of our own pill-popping society.

  ‘My own opinion is that there is, all the same, a certain nobility in those who have gone down into lord knows what hell in quest of the best of themselves. We might feel tempted to tell them that they should not have done it. But we can remain, nevertheless, secretly proud of what they have done. Their wan, haggard looks are, for us, an offering.’

  The new beginning, hopefully, is arriving. Maybe not quite ‘Once upon a time . . .’, but a consensus is forming. Doping is wrong and it will not be tolerated. Testing is better. Many teams are ethical, and Sky certainly is part of this group. But there are dissenters, some of whom could be inside your tent, and while others take the long road to full reform, they still seek shortcuts.

  Team Sky have the appetite for success. That’s been proven.

  Only time will tell if they have the hunger for anything beyond that.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  ‘A phone call should be a convenience to the caller, not an inconvenience to the called.’

  Mokokoma Mokhonoana

  Alarms don’t just ring in the morning.

  It was a Thursday afternoon, late in September, three days before the World Championship Road Race in Tuscany, and the press agency report was nondescript in every respect but one. Jonathan Tiernan-Locke, one of the Team Sky riders selected for Team GB for Sunday’s road race, had pulled out of the team and would be replaced by another Sky rider, Luke Rowe. According to the first agency report, Tiernan-Locke’s withdrawal was for an ‘unspecified reason’.