Inside Team Sky (10 page)

‘We needed a doctor with experience and the guy I met [Leinders] appeared very ethical, very professional and very compassionate,’ says Peters. ‘He was also very knowledgeable
about cycling, training, the different races. This wasn’t an appointment made lightly. Dave [Brailsford] and I had spoken a lot about how we could get tarnished by our involvement in pro road
racing and how that would diminish everything we achieved with the track team. It was a massive fear.’

Peters doesn’t claim to have an encyclopaedic knowledge of sports. When he moves into a new discipline he asks questions constantly until he understands the nuts and bolts. As such his
experience and expertise at the time of the interview were in track racing and its world. On that October day in 2010, Steve Peters knew little about professional road cycling.

He didn’t approach the interview as an interrogation. It was one professional interviewing another. He didn’t know about Rabobank, the cycling team Leinders had been with from 1996
to 2009, and he didn’t ask Leinders what he knew about the team’s Michael Rasmussen being withdrawn while leading the Tour de France on suspicion of doping. Neither did he ask what
breach of ‘internal rules’ had led to Thomas Dekker being kicked off the team.

‘I could have grilled him and grilled him but when someone assures you that he has not been involved in doping, that doesn’t seem appropriate,’ says Peters.

After Peters’s interview, Leinders was then interviewed by Richard Freeman, another doctor, who quizzed the Belgian on his medical skills and was impressed. Peters and Freeman recommended
Leinders be hired and Brailsford offered a contract that meant he could be asked to work for up to eighty days in 2011. He worked sixty-seven days for Team Sky that year, starting with the Tour of
Oman and covering some one-day races in Belgium, the Giro d’Italia and the Vuelta.

He was liked by the riders for his ability and admired by the management for his professionalism. If he treated a rider for an injury he would follow up with phone calls and advice after the
race. If the truth and reconciliation movement within cycling was looking for a poster boy, Leinders might have been it. Sky found him in tune with their policies and keen to make a
contribution.

Peters insists that Leinders was scrupulously ethical in his time with Sky. ‘We agreed as a team that if a rider, suffering from asthma, got into trouble with pollen we would pull him out
of the race rather than apply for a therapeutic use exemption on his behalf.

‘Once, one of our riders was in this situation and the doctor got in touch with me and asked if we could get an exemption because the guy was in a bad way but was very keen to finish the
race.

‘Using my discretion, I said “Okay.”

‘It was Geert who rang me afterwards to tell me I was wrong.

‘“We’ve got to have consistency,” he said.’

Leinders had worked forty-four of his eighty-day contract in 2012. Leinders was present for a couple of days in Majorca at a team training camp, then spent a week on Paris-Nice, worked six
one-day races in Belgium before working the Tour de Romandie and the Critérium du Dauphiné.

Then in April Theo de Rooij, former
directeur sportif
at Rabobank, did an interview with journalist Mark Miserus for the Dutch newspaper
de Volkskrant
. De Rooij said there had
been a doping programme at Rabobank and that Leinders had been part of it. Brailsford asked for an explanation and Leinders claimed de Rooij’s words had been misinterpreted and insisted that
he, Leinders, had not been part of any doping programme.

In his modest and obsessively uncluttered office in Manchester, Brailsford thought deeply about the problem. He judged finally that to keep Leinders on while this allegation was being
investigated would damage the reputation of the team. Brailsford has a fondness for coinages which sum up situations. This was a reputational risk.

Leinders’s contract was paid up for 2012 and he was told the team would not use him again. Since then, Leinders has given interviews to Miserus and another Dutch journalist, Maarten
Scholten, from
Handelsblad
. To both he said his role with Sky was ‘minimised’, meaning he had worked purely as a doctor. With Rabobank, he was involved in the conditioning and
preparation of the riders and, it is alleged by Rasmussen, Dekker and Danny Nelissen, in doping. The fall-out continues for Team Sky.

Just last week when Richie Porte won the Paris–Nice his greatest challenge came in the press conference afterwards. Half the questions concerned doping. The Australian, riding for the
English team was even asked to pass judgement on the state of Dutch cycling vis-à-vis Rabobank.

The team have noticed that when they go badly the questions subside. There is a danger therein which they need to address. Failure bringing the reward of a little peace is a dangerous
concept.

In Tenerife Mat Hayman, the thirty-four-year-old Australian rider, took a call from a cycling journalist who wanted to know about his memories of working with Leinders at Rabobank. Hayman said
he would prefer not to comment, an answer that didn’t please Brailsford.

‘It was a legitimate question and Mat should have addressed it.’

Sitting on a couch in the lobby of Hotel Parabor, I asked Hayman how he looked upon his ten years at Rabobank.

‘From the beginning, I let it be known I wouldn’t dope and no one tried to push me. I didn’t want to go to bed worrying about testing positive. I suffered because of that,
never got to ride in the Tour de France, and settled for the life of a
domestique
. I felt it was unfair and there were lots of performances I was suspicious about, from riders in other
teams and riders in my own team.’

And Geert Leinders?

‘I have no proof, I didn’t see any doping, but I felt there were riders in the team who used doping and I was sure some members of staff were helping them.’

‘I spoke to a lot of guys from Rabobank, both on and off the record,’ says Mark Miserus. ‘They pointed the finger at each other but no one mentioned Hayman in connection with
doping.’

Brailsford accepts that Sky’s recruitment processes weren’t sufficiently rigorous. ‘We asked questions about Geert, no one raised an alarm and we didn’t see the need to
grill people. As the person responsible for bringing him in, I thought maybe I should resign. I got it wrong and if the board had wanted me to step down, I would have.’

In the post-Armstrong era many saw echoes of Armstrong everywhere. Leinders was depicted as the new Ferrari. Online cynics began referring to Team Sky as UK Postal. Leinders never covered a Tour
de France for Team Sky but his ghost haunted the 2012 Tour and even though he had been dismissed in October 2012, he would still be a feature of press conferences at the 2013 Tour.

Brailsford points out anytime he is asked that there is no evidence, no hint that Leinders was ever even slightly unethical in his time with Sky. He was a good doctor, an excellent one. He
understood the job and, in an environment where riders are being pushed to their limits day after day, Leinders was an invaluable asset as a medical practitioner.

And yet, he concedes with a sigh, it was a mistake. Not to have asked more. Not to have dealt emphatically with the issue sooner.

After Leinders’s departure, Team Sky reverted to its policy of employing doctors who haven’t previously worked in cycling and the new head doctor is Alan Farrell, recruited from a
practice in Dublin.

On the Tour I will ask Farrell about the Leinders appointment and for such a genial man he will be quite blunt.

‘Erm, when all you have to go on is rumour, and not facts, it’s difficult that one. I’m glad I wasn’t in that position. I think, I think, given the undeniable history
surrounding the sport and the influence that doctors with questionable ethics had had on the sport, I think that hiring somebody from that era would surely have come with a couple of question marks
. . .’

And if the team could turn the clock back would they ask more searching questions, do you think?

‘Or even not involving themselves with anyone from that era. But, in fairness, as soon as it materialised, his association with doping and the Rabobank team, what more could they do other
than expel him? Once the decision was made that I was going to the Tour, Geert was no more really after that.’

Geert Leinders was no more. Not in body. But his ghost still haunts them. Back on Tenerife where Michele Ferrari used to calibrate Lance, Geert Leinders is another spook from the past. Team Sky
press on, trying to exorcise him, trying to find their space in the brave new world. Sometimes they wonder if cycling is interested in a brave new world at all.

They have been to this island eight times now on training stints. Every time they fill out the forms telling the authorities which riders will be where and for how long. Tenerife is a two-hour
flight from Spain and the hotel is a fifty-minute drive through spectacular landscape. Only once in those eight times has a random drug-testing team made the journey to see them and test them.

‘Now that,’ says Tim Kerrison, ‘is truly disappointing.’

Some things send a peloton of shivers racing down a man’s spine. In the team car Alan Farrell could hear the voices of the Team Sky riders ahead of him, familiar voices
crackling on the radio.

‘Awesome, G!’ they were shouting. ‘Awesome!’ It was Stage Three, the last day in Corsica, and Geraint Thomas had just hauled himself and his famous cracked pelvis out of
the grave to briefly join his team at the top of the field and roar them on. They were responding to his extraordinary courage.

Alan Farrell allowed himself a grin. When you run away with the circus, when you elope with the love of your life, these are the moments you cherish.

For the first three days of the Tour, Team Sky’s race headquarters and its media centre have been on a boat, the
Mega Smeralda
, a ferry anchored in the dusty old port of Bastia.
To get from the finish to the press centre, we journalists jumped on one boat. Then we get to work on another boat. It may have been
Smerelda
but it wasn’t mega. The Corsicans never
tire of pointing out that Christopher Columbus came from the town of Calvi where the third and final Corsican stage finished and Napoleon came from Ajaccio. Had either man seen the Tour’s
difficulties in extricating that bus from under the timing bridge at the finish line on Stage One, they might have gone out into the world a little more timorously.

For Team Sky the chaos and carnage of that first day of racing on the island are still being audited. Alan Farrell, the team doctor, is on his second Tour and the sight of Geraint Thomas lying
on the hot asphalt beside the kerb unable to get up, having somersaulted over his own handlebars, was novel but worrying. Ian Stannard had been brought down too and Froome had squeaked past,
narrowly avoiding the chaos.

Thomas, or G as he is affectionately known, was the principal casualty though. Very little stops G Thomas. Eight years ago his handlebar impacted with his torso so violently that he had to have
his spleen removed. After a few weeks of morphine-masked pain he was up and about, gleefully showing his scar to innocent bystanders and claiming that he had been bitten by a shark.

A regular X-ray on the day of the crash failed to show the small fissure in the rider’s pelvis. Thomas must have suspected he was suffering from a little more than bruising the next day,
however, when having been lifted onto his bike he set off on the second stage, an undulating 156km slog to Ajaccio. The first 10km of the race were punctuated by roundabouts and the process of
slowing into them, and accelerating out, produced an exquisite pain the like of which he had never experienced before. He couldn’t generate any power in his left leg and was seriously worried
that despite his bravery he would finish outside the time limit and everything would have been in vain.

By the time an MRI scan showed the full damage to his pelvis he had ridden the second stage and could see no reason to let the team down by not riding on. He submitted to a regime of pre-race
coffees, ibuprofen and paracetamol, as well as three sessions of physio and some acupuncture daily with Dan Guillemette, the team’s head physio and a former elite amateur cyclist himself.
Other than that he was devouring Jo Nesbo thrillers to keep his head occupied and to stop himself thinking about his mother’s encouraging words – that he should get some sense and quit
the race.

On Monday morning at Ajaccio the onlookers were wincing empathetically as G tried twice to get his leg over the saddle. In the end he was hoisted into place again.

Stage Three went fine for Team Sky, yet the moment on everybody’s lips at dinner that night was the same one that sent shivers down the spines of those in the team car. G, bloody G Thomas,
materialised on the shoulder of his colleagues, shouting at them to lift it. What a bloody war!

Nobody was sorry to leave Corsica behind but for G Thomas the road ahead is as treacherous as the road behind. Today, Tuesday, in Nice brings a 25km team time trial. Geraint Thomas has been told
that, as much as his teammates love him, they won’t be waiting for him. They can’t be waiting for him. When he gets dropped early as he inevitably will, he is alone with just his pain
for company.

C’est la guerre, mon amie, c’est la guerre
.

Nice, France. The Promenade des Anglais.

Team Sky is another country. They do things differently here. With the three Corsican stages out of the way the race organisers arranged to fly the riders to Nice for Stage Four. Everybody else
was to make the long schlep via ferry. People who have worked the Tour for a long time see nothing unusual here. The Tour is the Tour. As the miles go by, as the days pass and as the stages mount
up, everybody gets more fatigued and more jaded until a caravan of wall-eyed zombies rolls into Paris. The Tour is the Tour. There is no need to see it any other way.