Inside Team Sky (11 page)

David Brailsford can’t accept that. He himself often sleeps through portions of race stages in the afternoon so that he will be fresh and at his best when he swings back to work later.
Days are long, beginning with a cycle with other staff at 6.30 in the morning. There is little for Brailsford to do when the riders are on the road and he trusts his staff entirely. He recharges
daily and stays fit and sharp. As such, the decision to fly riders to Nice but to send those whom the riders depend on by boat made no sense to Brailsford. He investigated the cost of a private
plane, found it to be good value, and flew the fourteen staff who didn’t have to drive the vans and cars onto the ferry straight to Nice. Little wonder that the view which other teams hold of
Team Sky is jaundiced by some jealousy.

For Alan Farrell his days during a race are long and hectic. He doesn’t have the luxury of running in the mornings or taking a spin on the bike with his colleagues. Availability he sees as
being a key part of his job. He is available in the team hotel first thing in the morning. He goes to the race in the bus so he can continue to be available. He is in the race car during the race,
available for any calamity the stage might bring. Coming up to a stage finish there is a deviation for the support cars, so when he gets dropped off he has to get himself to the finish to be at
anti-doping with any of his riders chosen for testing. To be there he has to get through the crowds and the security. He doesn’t have to be there but he likes to be. Availability.

Today’s team trial means a short day on the road. For the riders the effort is short and intense. For the team around them the day allows time to catch up on all the other things which
make Team Sky tick.

When life slows down for Alan Farrell he will probably appreciate the strangeness of these days. For now the young doctor is immersed in this world. When Thomas cracked his pelvis and rode on
Farrell wasn’t much fazed by it, or unduly surprised. The heroics were wonderful and Farrell knows that the more Thomas works on the bike, the more pain he cycles through, the better he will
feel. Everybody has their reasons for running away with this circus. The sense that anything can happen during a working day on a Grand Tour is one of the attractions.

Farrell had been working in pro cycling for just six weeks when he found himself acting as Sky’s full-time doctor on the 2012 Tour de France. The first major issue he had at the Tour was
when Kanstantsin Siutsou [Kosta, to the team] broke his leg on the third stage. One of those moments. You’re not in Kansas anymore, Dorothy.

Farrell learned quickly that this job was different from any he was used to before. He was an Irish doctor. Here he had a rider from Belarus who was living in Italy, riding his first Tour de
France for a team based in the UK. When Kosta broke his leg Alan Farrell was up all night trying to organise a flight to get the rider to the UK to have an operation. At the last minute he realised
that being a Belarusian, Kosta didn’t have a visa for the UK. He would be turned away. Alan Farrell switched his attentions to Paris, found what he was looking for and resolved to improve his
linguistic capabilities.

Today’s team trial isn’t an annual feature of the race. Last year for instance it didn’t figure at all but when the team trial is included it makes for a fine spectacle. Teams
operate what they call a rotating pace line with the members of the team, taking it in turns to lead the group. This is called taking a pull. Thus the cyclists share the responsibility of punching
a hole through the wind. That’s the theory. The challenge is discipline. You want the group to maintain a steady pace rather than have each rider who goes to the front upping the ante until
the team gets strung out and the system breaks down.

In this context G Thomas is expected to be dead wood today. Yesterday in Corsica was wonderful but winning is about pragmatism, and finishing close to the top of the pile in Nice will send Team
Sky towards the Pyrenees in pretty good shape.

When he finished his medical studies at Trinity College, Dublin, back in 2001, Farrell taught anatomy for a year in the University. He served an internship in a Dublin hospital and then did a
year and a half of anaesthetics before heading off to travel for six months. He returned to Ireland and settled into life as a General Practitioner for four years. His last job in Ireland was
working in an urgent care centre, best described as a halfway house between an A&E department and a GP surgery, where he dealt with people with acute injuries. By then he had fallen in love
with cycling, but nothing suggested to him that he would someday be watching Geraint Thomas be helped onto his bike to head off with a cracked pelvis.

Farrell had given up his own athletic pursuits when he was in his twenties. Middle age wasn’t exactly crowding him when he decided to get back out and do a bit of running, but he felt the
need for exercise and for competition.

He joined a triathlon club in Mullingar in the Irish midlands and that got him back into running again. He was a novice swimmer and that was hard work, but the bike? The bike just sang a siren
song to him.

As soon as he started cycling properly he was out of the triathlon business and pledging himself to the bike. He bought himself a Trek 1000, the bikes used in the Discovery Team, bought it at
Trevor Martins, a bike shop in Longford. Trevor had raced at a decent level and the connection and the 6000 euro Alan paid for the bike fuelled his interest. He still has the bike, preferring it to
the Pinarello he got from Sky.

Soon he was addicted. He went from feeling slightly comical wearing a cycling helmet to staying up into the small hours devouring YouTube footage of old races.

By 2009 he could no longer conduct the affair by long distance. He went to the Tour de France, three of them driving from Ireland. They met with some other lunatics – three from the UK and
two from Australia – when they were in the Pyrenees and they joined forces cycling around after the Tour like a supporting trip. In Longford where Farrell comes from you could stand on two
phone books and see for ever, so the mountain terrain was very new from a cycling point of view. Now he was racing his new friends up mountains and finding that he had the legs for it and that he
certainly had the competitiveness for it.

For six weeks they were based in Barèges, a village in the high Pyrenees just to the west of the Col du Tourmalet. It was 2009, Lance Armstrong’s comeback but the beginning of the
end of cycling’s lowest period. Farrell sat on top of the Tourmalet as the race passed over the summit. Thinking. Thinking.

The addiction bit him hard and wouldn’t let go.

Still. Nobody predicted what would happen in the spring of 2012. Late one night in Dublin, with his girlfriend Rhona away in Boston on a trip to see her sister, Farrell was enjoying a quiet
evening in, watching the television and sipping a glass of wine. Still thinking, thinking, thinking. He would like to work in professional sport, he thought to himself. What sport would that be?
Cycling. What team would he like to work for? Well, language was going be an issue. He had just the standard Irish person’s linguistic skills – fluent English and Gaelic. And game to
try anything else.

So. Cycling. A doctor. English speaking. Sky were the newest team on the block and the obvious choice. So he literally Googled ‘Team Sky Cycling Doctor’ and the first thing that came
up was the
British Medical Journal
and an advertisement for a job with Team Sky with the closing date two weeks later. His jaw fell open as if its hinges had been removed. He had actually
Googled his specific dream job. Eureka. The phone rang. Rhona, from Boston. He told her what had just happened. She heard him say it and some voice inside her told her that he was going to get the
job.

He wasn’t so sanguine.

‘I applied, not expecting a reply. I got news of the interview in an email on a Saturday night. I was running a race, a ten k, in Carrick on Shannon the next day. It was a particularly
hilly ten k. I smashed forty minutes, I broke it. I was on an absolute high. I was thinking I’m not going to get this.’

Still. It was a high just to be getting interviewed.

Two weeks later on 14 March he went for the interview in Manchester. He wore his good suit and his competitor’s face. He was offered the job that day. He was leaving Manchester when his
phone rang and they asked him to come back into the velodrome. Tim Kerrison and Dr Steve Peters were there.

‘Look, do you fancy this?’

He did.

The interview had been freighted with small reminders of what the world of cycling was going through and clear messages as to what Team Sky saw their response and their responsibility being. One
scenario put to candidates was to tell the interview panel (Kerrison, Peters and Dr Richard Freeman) how they would deal with a young athlete coming in and saying, ‘Look, I want to try this .
. . uhm “method”.’

What would the doctor do in that situation? Bring it to management? What would the response be to the athlete?

Farrell was quite direct. First and foremost from a doctor’s point of view was concern for the health of the athlete. One reason why the athlete would be told to scrap the idea. And
secondly?

‘This is cheating, okay. And then the question was would you bring this to senior management’s attention? And I said, absolutely. Of course I would. You have to respect . . .
there’s laws governing medical confidentiality, and I’m bound by those, but at the end of the day if somebody is doing something that is potentially endangering their own lives, then
you have an obligation to intervene there. So there are times that you need to breach that. If they’re a danger to themselves or others.’

Doping didn’t crowd his thoughts though. He had his views and was relieved that his new employers genuinely seemed to share them. They did what it said on the tin.

He saw himself though as getting into a medical job, not a policing job. He wanted to work as a healthcare professional in a professional sports environment. The job was described to him as
involving covering a lot of races and race days, but not big races.

‘It was kind of made, not clear, but, implied that – don’t think you’re gonna be covering the Tour de France. Don’t think you’re gonna be on Grand Tours any
time soon.’

He was still interested. He still wanted to get in the door.

What was on the other side of the door changed quickly. He did the Tour de Romandie. The Giro, the Tour de Suisse. Then went to Manchester for a catch-up with Rod Ellingworth, Tim Kerrison and
Carsten Jeppesen.

At the end of that day of talking and debriefing they asked him if he would be available for the Tour de France, starting just two weekends later. He gulped. He’d done the Giro
d’Italia. This would be his second Grand Tour in three months. The Tour de France!

It was sometime around then that they explained to him that Geert Leinders would no longer be working with the team. Farrell had heard the rumours running around but wasn’t sure how
seriously Team Sky were taking them. He wasn’t at the level to make a judgement. He’d spent a week with Leinders in Romandie and found him personable on the human level.

‘If you had asked me I would have said I’d be very surprised if they weren’t taking this very seriously, but I wasn’t privy to exactly what their position was.’

And so Leinders was gone and more painful bloodletting would follow later in the year as Team Sky discovered that their zero tolerance policy was a stick with which their detractors could beat
them. They had perhaps been a little naïve in trusting job candidates to answer a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ when asked at interview if they had ever been involved in
doping.

Farrell hadn’t been anything more than a spectator during the doping era. Pro cycling represented a new beginning for him. And in his own quiet way he represented part of a new beginning
for cycling. What team operating a doping programme would turn over the medical duties on the Tour de France to a bright young idealist who had been just over six weeks in the job?

He sees the extent to which Team Sky have gone, not just in terms of the painful sundering of relationships, but in educating their athletes, in batch testing any nutritional products a rider
might express an interest in. Chris Froome for instance expressed an interest in fish oils. Nigel Mitchell, who looks after this area for the team, wrote to the manufacturer concerned looking for
details. When no reply was forthcoming, no nutritional information received, it was decided that Froome had best abandon his interest in the supplements altogether.

These stories, these attitudes reassure and enthuse Alan Farrell. In the course of a long conversation he welcomes questions on the issue of doping and repeats his employer’s offer of
complete transparency so long as the rules of medical confidentiality aren’t breached.

As we talk he says things which would surprise the cynics and which surprise me. A frequent source of scepticism in chat rooms and tweets is the issue of TUEs or Therapeutic Use Exemptions.
These are exemptions granted to a team to administer a listed drug for a genuine medical reason and not for performance enhancement. There is a perception that TUEs are thrown about like confetti.
In his fifteen months with Team Sky, they have applied for two TUEs. One earlier this year, in season but out of competition, to treat a respiratory problem, the other to treat a medical condition
before the rider went for a surgical procedure. The rider specifically needed a medication which was on the prohibited list. The operation was at the end of the season and he didn’t compete
for another three or four months.

Other issues?

‘Having Festina as a sponsor of the Tour de France is not good for the image of the sport. I’m sorry I’ll probably get in trouble for saying that, but, I don’t care . . .
I think there are doctors still involved in this sport that would have been involved with teams in the dark days. Sponsors should be more insistent with that not being the case. Now this
isn’t going to go down well with my medical colleagues on the world tour, but I just don’t think it gives the right image. And sponsors need to show more power on that front, should put
pressure on people running teams to follow the lead of other teams, like ourselves.’