Inside Team Sky

by Walsh, David

  For the 2014 season, the biggest of Team Sky’s signings has been Mikel Nieve, a Spanish climber from the Euskaltel team, who has a proven Tour record.

  What were the protocols this time?

  First and foremost, clarity. Team Sky stressed relentlessly the importance of the rider understanding team policy in relation to drugs and where Team Sky are at the moment.

  Next, the rider hands over his biological passport passwords. With these, Sky can mine and examine data that stretches back to 2009, when the rider first became part of a WorldTour team. Normally Sky would request this data set from the UCI. With permission the UCI will supply more information on the blood samples. If the team has questions, they can zoom in on particular values at particular times: was he training that day, was he racing or at what point of the season did that test take place?

  The bio-passport data is then sent off to independent experts who have zero interest in whether Nieve or anyone else joins Team Sky, only that their bio-passport numbers stack up. Sky has a sort of ranking system with which to analyse the results.

  Additionally they spoke to several people at great length about Nieve. Not just stakeholders in his career, but a contact they trusted who had worked with Nieve at Euskaltel. They went to their sources and looked as deep as they could for intelligence.

  At the other end of the spectrum from Nieve was the signing of Nathan Earle, a well-respected young Australian making the same step up from Pro Continental level which brought Jonathan Tiernan-Locke to Team Sky’s attention. Earle was tested to within an inch of his life.

  Signing new riders is a competitive business, though. So what Sky have said is that in future they will commit to a rider only when the ‘i’s are dotted and the ‘t’s crossed. That is, they have gathered the intelligence and satisfied themselves about the data. Until that moment, they will retain the right to release the rider without penalty.

  For Sky, though, that is never enough. Correcting mistakes is one thing. Finding a better way forward is another. Brailsford and Kerrison have made a point of stepping down off the pedestal and engaging and speaking with cycling people with greater experience of doping. Their backgrounds, far from the doping heartland of the old continent, have been no help. To better make your way in a clean world, you need to know the terrain of the doper.

  And they have taken apart the biological passport system for a forensic analysis.

  Their conclusions on just how robust a tool the passport is will make interesting reading. There is a growing feeling within the world of drug testing that, with the best will in the world, authorities are trying to make this tool work at a level of sensitivity that it isn’t designed for. If there are chances of a false positive, the entire system will be undermined.

  As it stands the disciplinary panel look at data anomalies in isolation. They ask themselves how can this quirk be explained through the context of doping. Would microdosing fit the picture? Blood doping maybe. Then they ask the athlete to explain why the anomaly wouldn’t be down to doping. Generally the athlete isn’t equipped to know.

  Much of the winter of 2013 was spent reviewing what had happened during the summer. Brailsford’s feeling during 2013, successful though it had been, was that the ripples from the USADA report into Lance Armstrong and co had been so seismic that the team hadn’t spent enough time the previous winter assessing and revising their own protocols. It had been a time to just get up on the roof and fix everything that might need fixing. A cruel and brutal time.

  At the end of 2013, Brailsford intended to set aside the first week of December and dedicate it to reworking the core values of his team. He wanted to do a lot of work on the behavioural side of what Team Sky do. He is talking again about ‘winning behaviours’.

  He intended to ask the staff and riders what would stop them winning the Tour de France in 2014. What would stop them winning a longed-for classic. What might cause disharmony. From small groups answers would be fed back, a list of losing behaviours if you like. From there the task would be to find the winning behaviours. That is our way.

  To many of his detractors that would sound like typical Dave Brailsford speak. Everything has a label as if being sold from a shelf, but speaking to him as he talks about his desire to keep winning and to be trusted he says things which challenge the usual rap against him.

  He talks of needing even more openness and transparency. Maintaining the same level of performance is very important, but Team Sky will be looking to collaborate more openly with science community experts to provide more evidence and be more open. Blood data, power data, training regimes; he would hand them all to genuine experts in a heartbeat. Let them draw conclusions that would be beyond reproach.

  Even the small things with the team are up for review. Through the long season that brought the second Tour de France, Chris Froome, the star of the production had virtually his own personal soigneur (or carer) in David Rozman. This helped Froome but it caused small ripples. Rozman was occasionally unable to perform the other tasks that soigneurs were asked to do. Someone had to cover for him. Lead carer Mario Pafundi thought it wasn’t right.

  So Brailsford and Rod Ellingworth and Tim Kerrison talked about it. David Rozman had worked hard and done a good job, but he wasn’t employed by Chris Froome, he worked for Team Sky. Within the team’s inner sanctum, any move towards individual relationships is considered a slightly dangerous thing. So Rozman was gently told he wouldn’t be doing Froome that much in 2014. Like Premiership footballers, Sky’s carers will be rotated. In most teams, if the star rider wanted to be rubbed down every evening by Scarlett Johansson, someone would try to make it happen.

  That is what keeps me interested. Team Sky are organic, a work in progress. They get things wrong, of course they do, but they plan and build in a post-nuclear winter. As such they are pioneers.

  No sport has ever laid waste to itself like cycling has. No sport has had to vacate the winner’s podium seven times in its iconic event. No sport has records so liberally spangled with asterisks cautioning us that the adventures within may be entirely fictional. As Sandro Donati once said, the good thing about the theatre is that the audience knows it’s not for real.

  Team Sky are yomping across territory which no team has previously explored. And they have chosen to hobble themselves with their zero tolerance policy. When they make a mistake, they go back and they stand at the drawing board conscious that the air is filled with laughter and sneers and envy. In fact, even when they succeed they find their way back to that drawing board. They are always looking for ways to fail less and to succeed better.

  They won the 2013 Tour de France but along the route to Corsica and the start of that race, they know they got so much wrong.

  Dave Brailsford once said to me that his team’s expedition through the wastelands of modern professional cycling was jeopardised by the fact that the people the team depended upon – Tim Kerrison, Rod Ellingworth, Alan Farrell and himself – had all come from the clean side of the tracks. I believed him. They don’t think like cheats.

  For the cynic – and the legacy of Lance has ensured cycling is littered with cynicism so potent it is only rivalled by his career – this is a hard line to digest. Many still believe that for Team Sky to succeed not only do they have to be cheating, but they have to be cheating better than anybody has ever cheated.

  That is what I set out to examine when I went to live within the tent Brailsford has pitched. That is why this book concerns itself more with the hands who hold the reins than it does with the hands which grip the handlebars. For Team Sky to cheat on the levels which their detractors allege – and in social media those allegations come in blizzards of libel – they would have to be operating a cheating wing to the organisation which consumed as much time and energy as the actual cycling did.

  I bow to no man when it comes to cynicism and scepticism about extraordinary achievements in cycling. But like the apostle Thomas, I need to put my finger on the scar left by the EPO needl
e. To speak to someone with more than just a gut feeling. I came to Team Sky after more than a decade fishing in the toxic world of Lance. I came with the stories of Tyler Hamilton and Floyd Landis in my bloodstream. The first thing that occurred to me was that no team operating like Lance’s teams operated could ever afford to invite a journalist into the tent. Too much to keep hidden. Rozman put his finger on it: ‘You will know,’ he said, ‘from the conversations that stop when you walk into the room.’

  I met the people. With great respect to the man, the team doctor Alan Farrell is almost entirely tone deaf when it comes to the tragic opera of cheating. It’s not his music, nor his world. If Team Sky are doping as alleged, there would have to be a medical team hiding behind the curtains. Nobody could spend five minutes speaking with Alan Farrell and then start dropping hints about needing a little Edgar Allan (as Lance’s confederates called EPO). Farrell would need the request spelled out to him in large letters, delivered in triplicate with the correct documentation, and then there would be a good chance that he would convulse with anger before bringing the story to Brailsford.

  Ellingworth? Central casting couldn’t create a more old-style cycling man. You see the disappointment which almost smothers him like a smog when a rider does badly, when a rider quits or when a rider fails to appreciate what a wonderful hand of cards his career is. You see that and you know that Rod isn’t designed for a world of lies and deceit. It would break him.

  Tim Kerrison? To spend time with Kerrison is to encounter a savant who sees and understands the world of sport differently. He can lose himself in long paragraphs expressing his shy enthusiasm about equations and figures and the science of performance. I spent many hours speaking to him or about him, looking for the darkness, wondering if he was the Svengali genius operating an enterprise which I just couldn’t see. I found him to be a man so in love with and so convinced of the science of performance that the pollution of his mental database with fraudulent statistics would break his heart.

  And Brailsford? There is no doubt that he is an operator. No man could build the empire that is Team Sky without knowing how to duck and dive a little. But he is astonishingly open. As a journalist I felt able to ask him just about anything. We had discussions which ranged from his life, to the world of cheating as he saw it, and on to the queries about Geert Leinders and Jonathan Tiernan-Locke. With respect to the privacy of some of the people we spoke about, there were things he couldn’t or wouldn’t say, but he is a man who puts his hands up when he makes a mistake (and he would allow you to enter several big mistakes on the balance sheet), and also a man fascinated by the challenge of doing things properly and being seen to do things properly. He isn’t just the brains behind Team Sky, he is the heartbeat at the team’s core.

  He opened the doors to me and let me at it. He sat down with me and talked any time I needed him to. He picked up the phone, even when he knew what was coming and would have preferred not to. I put things to him which might have hurt him or offended him. I could feel him wince, but he never ducked, and never danced away. He took his shots and kept on.

  People see the bespoke Volvo buses and the Jaguar team cars, they laugh at the obsession with detail and sneer at Brailsford’s motivational buzz phrases. He knows that, but he believes in what he is doing. He believes that cycling has permitted its philosophy on performance to be entirely coloured by drugs down through the decades. He is in love with the idea that there is a different way and that he can be the man to chart that way. It’s ego, it’s the love of a challenge, it’s obsession.

  I never found evidence pointing to any conclusion other than that, for Dave Brailsford, cheating would diminish the fun and the sense of achievement. Had he reached the South Pole in a hot-air balloon, Roald Amundsen wouldn’t have truly enjoyed his return to Norway. Brailsford cheating his way to the top would know the same emptiness.

  For 2014 Team Sky’s story will keep unfolding in interesting ways. It is a tall order for them to hope to become more successful and also more loved and trusted. Narrowing the fissure between Bradley Wiggins and Chris Froome just got a lot more interesting with the announcement of the route for the 2014 Tour de France. The second last stage is a 54km time trial, an immense test of riders after three weeks of hard riding. A guy like Wiggins will know that on his best form he could do a minute’s worth of damage there. But as the penultimate stage, Wiggins could conceivably have his go at winning the Tour without even endangering the team. He could come along as a domestique and, as long as he were in touching distance coming into the time trial, could take his leadership rather than wait for it to be awarded. Will the thought tempt him, on the iciest days of winter, to slip on the earphones and churn out the wattage in that shed at the end of his garden? And will the thought that he might be help to determine how Froome spends his own winter?

  Of the young riders in Team Sky’s enviable roster, everybody will look forward to watching the progress of one or two. Josh Edmondson from Leeds impressed in 2013. His attitude, his application, his willingness to learn – those things and his natural climbing talent were commented on again and again. He trains a lot with Yorkshire’s greatest heroes, the Brownlee boys, and if he can live with them . . .

  The same with Joe Dombrowski, who improved no end as 2013 wore on. For a kid coming from America to settle in the south of France, a good first year was a big ask. Before the season began, we spoke in Mallorca and I didn’t have to put my finger behind his ear to feel the wetness. So it took him time but by the end of the season, everyone knew. The kid could climb. If he hits the rising ground running in 2014, watch him soar.

  Sky still yearn for credibility in the classics. Gabriel Rasch, a Norwegian, will ride the classics next year and ease into his apprenticeship as a directeur sportif with the team. Catch them young and they will fly. His compatriot Edvald Boasson Hagen will be looking to improve on 2013, a year which brought more curses than blessings. Everyone loves Eddy so much it’s hard to tell him he should be doing better.

  The story I tried to cover, it rolls onward like a long mountain stage; at times it will be gruelling, at times spectacular. With every steep incline, though, Team Sky will learn something and the higher the altitude the more interesting they will become. There will be those who doubt them and those who stand on the side of the road shouting abuse. There will be very few people, though, who won’t watch with interest and, in time, I hope, with respect. You can’t live and breathe with Team Sky on the road without knowing that something different this way comes.

  I recall the team having a celebratory drink in Annecy the evening before the ceremonial final stage to Paris and Tim Kerrison mentioned he was on his way back to the team’s base in Nice that night.

  ‘You’ll come to Paris tomorrow morning,’ I said, ‘to see the first night-time finish on the Champs-Elysées?’

  ‘I’ll come to Paris in the late afternoon,’ he replied. ‘Some of our other riders, guys who didn’t make the Tour team, are doing a training ride up the Col de la Madone in the morning and I’d like to be with them for that.’

  ‘Wow,’ I thought.

  That enthusiasm, that dedication, that madness will be enough to keep me watching and hoping that the team’s influence in terms of integrity, openness and willingness to learn proves to be contagious in the bleak post-Lance winter.

  Acknowledgements

  On the fourth day of the 2013 Tour de France, Team Sky’s directeur sportif Nico Portal drove the number one race car into Boulevard Jean Jaures in Nice. And then noticed he had a flat tyre. Front right. Merde! With the importance and imminence of the team time trial, Portal had much on his mind and hadn’t bargained for having to change a wheel. The bike mechanics couldn’t help. They were checking and re-checking nine time-trial bikes about to be used for the first time.

  No one panicked.

  Sky’s performance manager Rod Ellingworth told Portal to just concentrate on the team’s race against the clock. The puncture would be taken care of. El
lingworth has never worn sleeves that weren’t rolled up, and in a flash the bus driver Claudio Lucchini saw what was needed and was at Ellingworth’s side. They laughed as they got to work, cursing the law that makes it compulsory for the spare to be a uselessly thin wheel designed to take you no further than the next garage.

  So they removed the punctured wheel, took a proper wheel off the nearby carers’ car, put the short-term spare onto that vehicle and then bolted the good wheel onto Portal’s car. They worked like beavers, Ellingworth the performance manager and Lucchini the bus driver. Their twenty minutes of doubling up as mechanics reflected what it was that made being around Team Sky so much fun.

  They dig in. They do the long hours. They don’t complain. Team doctor Alan Farrell packs away the poles used to create the cordoned-off area for the riders by the bus. Operations manager Carsten Jeppesen stands by the roadside and hands out food and drink to the riders. More than that, they were okay about allowing a non-contributing stranger into their world and they made sure I didn’t feel unwanted.

  For their welcome and their company and their help, for helping me to believe again in professional cycling I thank each and every one of them.

  In part this book is a tribute to their work.

  There are others, too, that are entitled to feel a stake in this book. As has always been his way, my sports editor at the Sunday Times, Alex Butler, has been supportive. I know I’m running low on credit. And there’s my remarkably patient editor at Simon & Schuster, Ian Marshall. We go back some way and I don’t think it’s stretching things to say that from me he’s learnt patience. If you wait long enough, it arrives.