Inside Team Sky (14 page)

And then the finale, designed by race organisers keen to inject a little more thrill and spill into the race. The descent into the finish at Pinerolo was twisting, technical and steep, and
described memorably by Andy Schleck as ‘fatally dangerous’. Collectively the peloton was nerved by the prospect. Sticking in the group meant danger. Going fast enough to get away meant
danger.

Kerrison had brought the Sky boys here before, though. They had done this three times in one day. Back to back. Kerrison hadn’t left it at that. He had filmed the descent. He showed it to
them before they went to bed in Embrun the night before. He showed it to them on the team bus on the way to the stage. Every twist and turn was implanted in their brains.

On the descent Edvald Boasson Hagen rode with glorious abandon and won the stage. Two riders, Thomas Voeckler and Jonathan Hivert, on the other hand, rode straight into a private driveway.
Nobody died but everybody was forced to tread carefully. Everybody except those who knew what they were doing.

Kerrison moved to Nice this spring. It’s just a thought, but France has the toughest anti-doping laws in the world. If Kerrison were the new dark overlord of doping, well, Nice
wouldn’t be the place to fetch up. That stretch of Med from Nice to Monaco has become a home-from-home for the Team Sky lads, though.

What the Manchester velodrome was for the track boys and girls, the Riviera is for the road warriors. Richie Porte is in Nice. Froome is up the road in Monaco. G Thomas, Ben Swift, Joe
Dombrowski, Ian Boswell, Luke Rowe, Ian Stannard – they are all around. And Team Sky bought a house on the Promenade du Soleil for other riders to drop down to. So between training camps they
don’t float unsupervised. They get daily face-to-face guidance and contact.

Kerrison has come to appreciate the history and lore of cycling both for better and for worse. The climb in the Med from which Team Sky are building their own database is the Col de la Madone
– the ride out from Menton to the Col and then down to Peille. It has been used for a long time, but most famously in recent times by Armstrong and Ferrari in the weeks leading up to a
Tour.

Aha! Gotcha. Cuff him, lads.

The taint is inescapable and regrettable, but every working day of his life Kerrison feels Armstrong’s bony claws reaching out from the past and contaminating his present. Kerrison is a
scientist though. Armstrong and Ferrari having been on the mountain does nothing to diminish the mountain or its fitness for purpose.

Oh . . .

‘Everyone knows it was a test climb of Armstrong’s and Ferrari’s back in . . . the bad old days . . . So we have some reference data, but then that sort of reference data you
never quite know in what condition they did it, and you hear lots of stories about times and time trials up there. [ . . .] It is the most conveniently located climb for us to use as a test climb,
so we’ve started using that and we’ve started to build up a database of our own times up that climb.’

The idea of coaches being present on a daily basis – watching, learning and cajoling – seems too obvious for it to ever have been new, but having Shane Sutton tag along with Bradley
Wiggins, or Bobby Julich with Chris Froome, brought considerable benefit. Julich was initially old school in his view of Kerrison’s gospel.

‘At first when I saw the way Tim was working I was pretty sceptical. Then as soon as I’d figured it out I was like wow! Why doesn’t everybody do it like this?’

Kerrison hoovers up cycling data with an addict’s voracity. Numbers are his bricks and from the bricks he can build models. The models tell him how to determine what it takes to be the
best in the world.

He casts a cold eye on this year’s craze, the hula-hoop which is home-brewed power stats.

He sees people happily making big assumptions while watching a rider perform and then throwing the assumptions into the mix as a power-to-weight quantity is determined. The result is a set of
rules which supposedly determine the physiological limits of an athlete. Any athlete going past those limits is red flagged. These home-brewed stats are much like their liquor counterparts: rough,
inconsistent, and coming with a distinct risk of blindness.

Contaminated evidence.

If you live on a diet of numbers it is interesting to watch but not definitive. His own range of data occupies that no-man’s land between Team Sky’s desire for transparency and Team
Sky’s need for a competitive edge. As a scientist he doesn’t discourage the use of data to make for more informed viewing of the sport but he is saddened by the notion of guilt by
association. Saddened but somewhat used to it.

Let him go boys, there ain’t no flies on this one. Case dismissed.

Saturday, 6 July

Kaboom!

Chris Froome blew up the Tour de France today and almost got lynched for it. On the short final climb of Ax 3 Domaines he ascended in what we were told was the third fastest time ever. He might
as well have had a cannula in his wrist attached to a giant IV drip marked ‘EPO’.

Suddenly, this Saturday evening, it is raining conclusions. People are shaking their heads in sadness. Some are wagging their fingers in anger. To me it is all meaningless. Now, I’ve never
worn the leader’s jersey in the race for a Field Medal in mathematics, but I do know this: today is only the fifth time that the Tour has used Ax 3 as a climb. It is also the earliest ever
appearance which the climb has had in the race.

Today’s stage was the eighth and the riders are fresh (in 2001 Ax 3 was on the twelfth stage, on the thirteenth stage in 2003 and was fourteenth stage fodder in both 2005 and 2012). The
length of the stage was different each time. Straight off the bat this is a flimsy and unreliable shred of evidence for anybody to be drawing any conclusions from.

Inevitably times set in the doping era will someday be surpassed by clean riders. A well-supported and talented rider doing that on a climb that lasts a little less than 24 minutes is not going
to convince anybody that the Tour has gone needle crazy again.

So you would think.

It took until just the third question of the press conference before somebody confessed to having had a US Postal flashback. Froome was asked to assure everybody that what they had seen was bona
fide.

Herein lies part of the disconnect between the riders and the media. When I spoke to Froome about the questions, he was of the view that most media believed in his team because there was no
concrete reason not to. In reality it is more likely that journalists
won’t
believe in a team because there is little concrete reason
to
. These competing starting points
inevitably cause problems. Froome thought that the questions came from a need, especially post-Lance, for journalists to be seen to be asking questions about doping. But without real suspicion
based upon real evidence, the inevitable doping questions lack rigour and mainly serve to just irk those within Team Sky more than anything else. It’s not exactly Pulitzer material.

I remember during the Armstrong years doing an interview in the course of which I said that no one part of the evidence I had amassed amounted to a smoking gun. The evidence was substantial: a
suppressed positive, eyewitness testimony of Lance listing what drugs he had done, the tales of Emma O’Reilly, the confession Betsy Andreu heard, Stephen Swart’s inside story about
Lance pre-cancer, the Ferrari/Conconi chain etc. etc. What I meant in that interview was that, taken together, this evidence amounted to a serious case to answer for, but I didn’t consider
any one piece of evidence alone to be proof of Lance’s guilt.

That seemed reasonable to me and still does. Tonight it seems that the damage done by the Lance era has led us to an environment where one short performance can be taken as conclusive evidence
of guilt.

I am uncomfortable with that.

Just as alarming as the outbreak of statistics is the death by anecdote routine gaining popularity. To pull this off, you just need to quote one Ax 3 figure and then drop in a line about how
this performance has come from a guy who was disqualified for taking a tow on a mountain in Italy not so long ago.

This is the obligatory reference to the 2010 Giro, which Froome raced in following a bout of sickness (it was a habit of his in his early times as a pro to keep his mouth shut about feeling
unwell). Anyway, on Stage Eight his knee gave him trouble and by Stage Nineteen, trailing the stage leader by 35 minutes going up Mortirolo, he was in agony.

There was a feed zone at the top of Mortirolo, and Froome decided to abandon the race and jump in the team car when he reached it. He grabbed the back of a police motorbike, got a pull to the
top, stepped off his bike and duly quit.

A commissar saw him hanging off the bike and, thinking that Froome was stealing an advantage and was still in the race, the commissar reported him. He was fined and disqualified, somehow, having
already quit.

Ergo? Froome could never climb. And as an aside, if you were going to take an illegal tow would you really choose a police motorbike?

I like to tell another motorbike story which Froome told me. It goes back to the 2007 Giro delle Reggioni in Italy, an Under-23 race. This was where Rod Ellingworth first spotted Froome.
Ellingworth is no mug. Froome wasn’t long out of Africa (two weeks at the UCI World Cycling Centre in Aigle) and admits sheepishly that he didn’t know back then that downhill riding is
done 90 per cent on the front brake. He crashed four times on the first stage. Next day was a mountain finish.

‘I’d trained really hard to get ready for it. I actually trained at altitude in Lesotho, which is an “island” entirely inside SA with very high mountains, and in
J’burg where I was staying at the time. I got over to the Reggioni and this second stage was the mountain-top finish. I was surprised how I rode away from the bunch; going up the last climb,
I was with a Russian and a Slovenian, Grega Bole, who is still on the circuit. We dropped the Russian, I think in the last kilometre.

‘Grega was on my wheel and he begged me to slow down. He said he would give me the stage, “Just don’t drop me, don’t drop me.”

‘I said: “Okay, okay, not a problem.”

‘We got to the last hairpin and they pulled the front vehicles away, the front motorbikes veered off. I was following the vehicles and blindly I followed them into the deviation when they
veered off ! That was one hundred metres before the finish line and the Slovenian went the right way and won the stage. I had to do a bit of a U-turn there and got second on that day.’

He got second place despite his chain going metres from the line.

A few days later they had another mountain-top finish in Montepulciano in southern Tuscany. This time Froome waited for nobody. He went early and then put in a sudden burst of acceleration on
the final 1.5km to the finish line. Something familiar about that.

‘I just went on my own, went from the last five kilometres, up through cobbled streets, it was beautiful, my first win in Europe. I was blown away.’

Guys like Rui Costa, Bauke Mollema, Ben Swift and Ian Stannard were behind him, gasping.

Ergo? Ergo, nothing actually. They are mere shards drawn from a career of thousands of races. A Reggioni yarn doesn’t trump a police motorbike tale or vice versa. It just doesn’t
work that way. Meanwhile, just because we want to urge people not to leap to conclusions by isolating performances, we shouldn’t fail to acknowledge when those performances are exceptional.
Froome has been trained and paid to be exceptional and today he was.

The stage was the moment on the Tour for Team Sky to lay its cards on the table. This is what we’ve got and we believe it’s good enough. Froome was the ace they were holding back and
the question, endlessly debated, was ‘when to play it?’ Twelve months before, Sky controlled the Tour by playing safe, covering every attack in the mountains and gaining enough in the
time trials to win.

But Froome is not Wiggins. He’s good against the clock but not as good as the Londoner. In the mountains he’s different and better. Can’t just sit there when the road rises, he
wants to attack. See what the others have got. He’d spoken so positively, not to say aggressively, about the stage to Ax 3 that Brailsford and Kerrison became pacifiers.

‘Chris, we know you’re going to attack on that climb but, mate, better not go too soon.’

Froome told them he’d waited the whole year for this stage and he knew if he felt good he’d just want to rip the race apart. And, dutifully, they reminded him that this was only the
first of six mountain stages.

When it came to the nitty-gritty of where and how the race would pan out, they saw Vasil Kiryienka making the tempo on the Col de Pailhères, then Kennaugh would take over, lead over the
top, make the descent and keep going for as long as he could. On the climb to Ax 3, Porte would take control and burn off many of those in the leading group. Then on a really steep section 4km from
the summit, 5km from the finish, Froome would launch his attack. They expected him to take the yellow jersey on this day because they knew he’d set his heart on it.

And he’s a pretty stubborn guy.

This was going to be a big hit. Some guys wouldn’t be getting up off the canvas.

The first 120km of flatness was unremarkable. A four-man break was indulged with a lead that stretched to 9 minutes at one point. The action on this stage comes at the end though. By the time
the race hit the
hors categorie
Col de Pailhères (bigger than its neighbour Ax 3), the breakaway boys could feel breath on their necks. The lead had been eroded away and was down to
around 60 seconds by the time the leaders had reached the Col de Pailhères. From Sky’s point of view, perfect.

There were some solo bids from here on, but it was young Nairo Quintana who made the attack that counted. He broke away on the Pailhères, so far from the finish it was clear his Movistar
team were sacrificing his chances for team leader Alejandro Valverde.