Inside Team Sky (12 page)

‘People are accusing us of not being transparent, but, we really are trying to be transparent. It’s not just the anti-doping, it’s everything surrounding that, so it’s
about the education and changing the culture, it’s about things like the first international federation to introduce a no-needle policy into the sport. Massive, massive change. It got that
culture of an athlete requiring an injection of anything, out of the sport. So successful was that that a lot of other sports are taking that policy on now as well. The summer Olympic Games 2012 in
London was the first no-needle games – so if anyone required a needle or injection of any description, they had to bring that to the attention of the medical authorities in charge of the
London games.’

He is aware too of cynicism surrounding the biological passport and isn’t naïve enough to believe that any testing system will ever produce a 100 per cent deterrent in a world where
cheating can mean survival or riches. But within a changing culture he sees the passport as a useful tool.

‘People say that the biological passport hasn’t been that effective; well certainly some of the information we have regarding reticulocyte percentage [immature red blood cells,
typically composing about one per cent of the red cells in the human body] and haemoglobin values, has been one hundred per cent effective. I would argue that an effective deterrent shouldn’t
catch anybody. People say the passport hasn’t caught many people; it absolutely has changed the culture of the sport.

‘But obviously the collaboration with the police and a more forensic approach to the use of drugs and sport is another part of that . . .. Another tool in the toolbox. So you’ve got
your anti-doping, you’ve got the education, you’ve got no-needle policy, you’ve got collaboration with the pharmaceutical industry, collaboration with the policing organisations,
more interaction between the national anti-doping organisations – the international federations, the athletes’ entourage including coaches, doctors – more of an appetite to get
drugs out of sport. And cycling is doing a good job of that. It’s got a bit to go, but it’s doing a good job. I definitely think there are a few other sports that really, really are in
the Stone Age when it comes to this.’

Still, he knows that his own sport has yet to fully deal with its past and cannot bury that past. A lot of talk on this Tour concerns the recent publication of
Blood Brothers
, a book
written by two Dutch journalists. The book throws a little more light on what was going on through the first decade of the new millennium. It is the story of the Rabobank team and it is
extraordinary. It is also a little chilling that one recalls Rabobank so often cited as an example of a team with good ethics.

Head of the US anti-doping agency, Travis Tygart, described US Postal’s doping as the most sophisticated in the history of sport, but Rabobank’s wasn’t far behind, though
manager Theo de Rooij denied that the team either suggested doping or paid for it. They had a recognised world authority in haematology, Paul Hocker, supervising their transfusions at a clinic in
Vienna. They washed the water from the red cells, added glycerol, froze the blood and re-infused it when it was needed. US Postal by comparison could only chill their bloods in a fridge. Being able
to freeze the blood gave Rabobank total flexibility as to when they used it.

As the UCI’s testing improved, Rabobank’s team bosses bought a Sysmex XE-2100, the same $100,000 machine the authorities were using to test riders’ blood. With that, Rabobank
ensured that their riders didn’t test positive.

The single most remarkable story in
Blood Brothers
concerns the Rabobank leader Michael Boogerd, who the authors say got a blood transfusion directly from his brother Rini the day
before winning the Alpine race to La Plagne in the 2002 Tour de France. Boogerd denies this took place but the journalists claim to have two sources for the story.

Blood Brothers
makes difficult reading for anybody involved in Team Sky, as Geert Leinders is depicted in the book as a central figure in Rabobank’s doping programme. According to
Michael Rasmussen, a rider who has now admitted his doping, it was Leinders who advised the riders to persuade a family member to donate their blood for transfusions.

It was when these homologous transfusions became detectable that Rabobank’s riders turned to the clinic in Vienna and started transfusing their own blood.

Leinders is no longer working in the sport and the Rabobank team has changed, evolving into the more credible Belkin team. Sky have no option but to learn from their own mistake.

‘This team,’ says Farrell, ‘it made very difficult decisions at our London meeting about its no-tolerance policy [parting ways with Steven de Jongh and Sean Yates. The American
Bobby Julich had gone earlier] and even though I was sad to see some of the people that I’d worked with leave the team, I believe that they made the right decision. But that’s not to
say that the staff on this team, we’re not machines, we’re not robots, you’ve seen us, we’re pretty normal people, you build up relationships with people that you’re
working with, especially when you’re working on the road like this. So when I saw people like Bobby having to leave the team, and Steven de Jongh, that wasn’t something for us to
celebrate, it was a sad day. But at the end of the day that’s the team’s policy, and I fully support that.’

Alan Farrell represents some of the hard-earned wisdom which has come to Brailsford and Sky. He is the sort of clean break from the past which cycling needs. A man who doesn’t want his
personal adventure contaminated.

Out on the streets of Nice there is a story unfolding which explains why an Alan Farrell would choose to run away with the circus.

Geraint Thomas, whom Alan Farrell says has more physical courage than anybody he has ever met, hasn’t been dropped by Team Sky right at the beginning of the time trial.

Dave Brailsford had spelled it out the night before. It would be unreasonable in view of his injury, to expect that G Thomas would be part of that team time trial in terms of really being able
to contribute. The team could live with that. G would be a dead man riding.

G Thomas hasn’t been dropped though. And he hasn’t just stayed in touch. He has pushed the team on, taking his pulls at the front. He was there for 24 of the 25km, making his last
contribution just at the return to the Promenade des Anglais at the end of the stage. He submitted another significant turn at the front, shouting at the boys and telling them to give every last
ounce of gas they had. How could anybody not?

Then, job done, he dropped back.

The team finished third. Three seconds off first.

It was an ideal result but those gathered at the end including Alan Farrell would have noticed a cloud of disappointment cross the face of one rider. A Team Sky win would have put Edvald Boasson
Hagen, the team’s highest ranked rider, into the yellow jersey.

The race though is about the team and its needs. Chris Froome, the team’s leader, had made up 6 seconds on Alberto Contador and 23 seconds on Cadel Evans, perceived in these early stages
to be major rivals. Froome is seventh overall, now just 3 seconds behind Simon Gerrans, the Australian race leader who is commonly perceived to have a very short-term lease on the yellow
jersey.

At this stage of the Tour the team emphatically do not want to be defending the yellow jersey and wasting energy for a marginal advantage. Geraint Thomas has established the mood of the day.
Poor Edvald Boasson Hagen’s personal ambitions or disappointments are of no interest for now.

There are warm-downs and doping tests to be looked after. Today has been one of the days that Alan Farrell dreamed of when he ran away with the Tour.

When the Tour leaves Nice, and after the drama of the team time trial, we have a few days of shadow boxing and photo opportunities as we meander to Marseille and on to
Montpellier and then to Albi. Three days of drum roll before we get to the Pyrenees.

Froome narrowly escapes a crash in the last kilometre to Marseille but otherwise there is a dearth of drama. He arrives in Albi lying seventh in the General Classification, 8 seconds behind.
It’s been an eventful first week for Sky. Bad luck with Thomas’s crash, worrying performance into Calvi on the last day in Corsica, but that was then countered by the boost of the team
time trial.

By and large, judgement on the team is being reserved. Those who expect a re-enactment of their performance of 2012, gathering around their leader in a protective cluster, haven’t been
paying attention.

Fans and journalists collect around the bus in the morning, crowding around like Freddie Mercury has reanimated for one last reunion tour. And how do people try to comprehend this celebrity
treatment? To explain it they talk about what they imagine lies beneath. And mustn’t what lies beneath be all lies? No? That’s the residual taste in our mouths from the Armstrong era.
Shan’t get fooled again.

They have to be micro dosing. They have to be taking something which isn’t even banned yet. They have to be. Doesn’t that drug AICAR make you thin? Aren’t they really thin? How
else? Faulty syllogisms that wouldn’t pass in a philosophy undergraduate’s logic class. X was a doper. Yesterday Y was faster than X ever was. Therefore Y is a doper.

My worry is this: from 1999 onwards it was easy to add up the questions that Lance Armstrong should have been answering but wouldn’t answer. A lot of people who got fooled and refuse to
get fooled again didn’t want to know back then. A lot of those same people don’t want to know now when there are rational arguments for not pointing the finger at every exceptional
performance.

If we allow ourselves a culture of not believing anybody whose performance rises above the mediocre, we’re not avoiding getting fooled again. We are asking to be fooled again. If we
believe nothing, if we take away the stigma of cheating by denouncing the entire peloton as cheats without asking the right questions, we leave nothing of value left to defend. The right of an
honest athlete not to be accused just because he is an excellent athlete is worth defending.

I go back to Bradley Wiggins speaking to me in a bar in Mallorca earlier this year. He is talking about his dad, a man who once smuggled amphetamines in Bradley’s nappy.

‘He left me when I was two years of age. That always stuck with me since I’ve had children, I can never allow what happened to me to happen to them. My kids must stay true to their
mother and respect their parents and I want them to look up to me when they’re adults and go, “He was a great father,” and I never want them ever to say, “I don’t like
me dad,” like I grew up saying.

‘It would crucify me if they did that.

‘How I conduct myself in my sport is the same. They can come into this bar [in Mallorca] in twenty years’ time and my yellow is hanging over there. They can walk in and say,
“That’s my dad’s, he won the Tour de France,” and be proud of that. Not coming in and going, “He did win the Tour but he tested positive later,” and that means
more to me than anything. I would rather not have won the Tour de France, not been knighted, and not got all the other stuff, just been a professional bike rider and not have any issues and go back
to work in Tesco’s but still have my children be proud of who I was as a father.’

When a man says something like that to you he shows you what is in his heart. Men can’t always live by what is in their heart but when you know it’s there; when you hear Wiggins
articulate all this in his soulful way, it moves you. You have a responsibility to tread softly when you decide that he is very good and therefore very guilty. You have a responsibility to go and
gather all the evidence before you frame a question. Even with Lance we had that responsibility. We need to remind ourselves of that more than anything now.

Let me offer up a confession here.

On the last Sunday of the 1999 Tour de France, I advised readers of the
Sunday Times
not to applaud Lance Armstrong as he rolled down the Champs-Elysées in the yellow jersey.
Mistrust was based on his radical improvement, his bullying of the anti-doper Christophe Bassons, the US Postal cover-up of a positive test for cortisone and Armstrong’s refusal to engage in
intelligent conversation on cycling’s doping culture.

We called the story ‘Flawed Fairytale’.

I didn’t actually feel great about that story. I was certain Armstrong had cheated but a gut conviction wasn’t evidence. But from the moment the 1999 Tour ended and there was time to
delve I wanted to find the evidence that would convince others of what I knew. And I can’t recall this without a nod of appreciation to Sandro Donati, Stephen Swart, Betsy Andreu, Emma
O’Reilly, Greg LeMond and many others.

I’ve been with Team Sky for some time now on and off. Living with them and talking with them. I do my best. I keep my eyes peeled for a ‘Motoman’ character
ferrying drugs through traffic. I check the car park for a camper van in which the health freak and bean sprout addict Chris Froome might perform blood transfusions on himself.

I check the trash for syringes. I look at the riders’ arms and legs for puncture marks. I narrow my eyes when I see Søren Kristiansen, the chef, just to let him know I am on to him
if he tries anything. I am on the alert for East German doctors. I would know a testosterone patch if I saw one. I ask Claudio Lucchini, the driver, if I can help him hoover the bus in the evening,
so I can check for things hidden under the seats. I drift over and block the exit if a doping control chaperone comes into the room.

Nothing so far.

It might be better and more logical journalistically to sift through the available evidence first. Take what we can see and hold it up to the light. The things which Team Sky reckon make them go
faster? Let’s see if they all add up. Many of those things come straight out of the head of Tim Kerrison, the team’s head of performance, who comes up with those marginal gains which so
many denounced as madness at first. Let the investigation of Kerrison and his so-called ‘science’ commence.