Inside Team Sky (18 page)

Before you meet Mario you know that you will like him. All the charm of an Italian matinée idol but none of the arrogance. And even his name has a lyricism to it that makes you want to
repeat it again and again. Mario Pafundi. MARIO PAFUNDI! Eeeeeeeeeeet’s MARIO PA-FUNDI!

Mario is the oil on the wheel, the pacemaker in the heart, the guy Dave Brailsford met in 2006 and told, ‘If I start a professional cycling team, you will come and work for me.’ He
is head
soigneur
or lead carer depending on whether or not you speak fluent Sky. As with all jobs in Team Sky though, demarcation is a dirty word. Mario does something of everything, says
no to nothing.

Chances are it is hot outside, temperature in the high twenties, and when you meet him, inevitably it will be in a hotel lobby. You’re loitering. He’s hustling through. He spends
more time in hotel lobbies than most concierges. Mario will be setting up the hotel for the arrival of the riders hours later. He may be hauling three physio tables along the corridor but he knows
the score.

Everyone knows Team Sky likes to work on the outer boundaries of what’s physiologically possible and they will wax lyrical about the accumulation of marginal gains, but morale of the team
is built on simpler values.

‘If you see somebody struggling with a heavy bag,’ says Brailsford, ‘if you’re not willing to go, “Hey, come on, I’ll give you a hand with that,” and
you walk past them because you’re the doc or the physio, you’re in the wrong team. The physios have been more challenging in this regard.

‘“I’m a trained physio, I’m a professional, I’m not here to wash bottles.” Those guys should never have been part of a sports team. I mean someone saying,
“I’m not here to do this.” Right, come on, mate. I wouldn’t work with them. They’d be gone. In a nanosecond. I used to tolerate it, but I now know it causes
aggravation, it causes friction. You can’t build a team with people who want to be precious and individual about themselves.’

Mario fits into this team because he gets it. The Pafundis are from a small town, Pietragalla, near Potenza, in the south of Italy. To give their son a better chance, his parents sent Mario to
Turin to continue his education when he was fifteen. Mario missed home but learned to live with loneliness and after a time, he didn’t feel it anymore.

Mario was especially close to his dad, Canio. They could talk about anything. Canio treated his son as if he were a man and so Mario tried to act like one. Once the boy spoke with his father
about the loneliness he’d felt through the early months in Turin. Canio asked his boy to see this in another way. ‘You were sad,’ he said, ‘but can you imagine what it was
like for parents to be separated from a son they loved?’

Early in life Mario understood the world did not revolve around him.

Gracie
,
Papa, gracie.

It was almost as if Canio knew Mario would one day work for Team Sky.

There are people who envy you, Mario, who think you have an exciting job?

‘I am glad you are seeing this,’ he says as he hauls massage tables along tight corridors, ‘that this is what it is like when you get to the hotel.’

Rooms, beds, bottles,
musettes
aren’t prepared by accident and when you joke with Mario that actually his life is pretty unglamorous, he agrees.

‘Yes! Yes!’

Mario brings people with him. No request from him seems excessive and when Sky’s army turns up at the hotel later in the day, they find enemy defences have been dismantled. Team Sky, staff
at the hotels say, are a nice team but that’s mostly because their first impression has been created by Mario.

He has been around riders long enough to know it’s different for them. Physical exhaustion can make ‘
bonjour
’ feel like an effort.

Like thoroughbred athletes in every sport, they adhere to a non-negotiable schedule and move with such languid grace when not at work that you would hardly know they’re in the hotel. Each
man serves as wingman to another, lest their thoughts be interrupted by a fan or, worse, a journalist. Some of them insulate themselves with headphones.

For all but the dullest and most meaningless of stages, their heads will have been programmed full of information about terrain, distance, corners, inclines, ascents and descents. They are
walking sat navs. They then race for four or five or six hours, are forced to hang around for thirty or forty minutes at the finish and by the time they get to the hotel, they’re ready for a
lie-down.

For them the hotel is a place to rest and eat and sleep and rest.

Mario gives them their room numbers, so they bypass reception. Inside their rooms, their suitcase and water awaits them. Bedding is in place, sheets washed, pillow cases pristine and
they’re at the back of the hotel, away from the noise. They know all this doesn’t happen by accident.

One thing, Mario.

Could you have been a contender? He was riding bikes in the south of Italy from the time he was eight years old. In Turin he got better. A pro contract was the dream. He got it, lived it for six
months and then turned his back on it. He had six months as a pro and decided to do something else.

So, could he have been a contender?

‘Yeah, yeah,’ he says with a grin that precedes humility. ‘Maybe not strong enough for do this job. The rider, you need to be a superman.’

On the Tour he is beloved. Welcomed everywhere. You know Mario Pafundi? Most people know Mario. The young woman at reception who pretends not to have noticed him. Daryl Impey, the South African
who now rides for the Orica-GreenEDGE team, says he can never forget him. They crossed paths at Barloworld four years ago.

Seeing Daryl become the first African to wear
le maillot jaune
in this Tour brings Mario back to that time. Daryl was in the leader’s jersey for Stage Eight of the Presidential
Tour of Turkey. Close to the finish line Theo Bos, the Dutch rider, appeared to grab Impey and fling him into the railing. Impey smashed three vertebrae and his mandible, and lost a tooth in the
bargain.

As the race moved on, Impey was left in a hospital at Antalya, a long way from home. Feeling for him, his team asked if he would like anybody to stay behind with him. Daryl asked if Mario could.
The team booked a hotel for Mario and it was agreed he would stay for a week and see Daryl through the worst of it.

At the hospital, they suggested Mario slept at the hotel during the day and spent the night in the hospital with his friend. Just call a taxi around midnight and it’ll take you to the
hospital. He rang for the cab and when none came he walked the couple of kilometres to the hospital. He asked why taxis were so scarce.

‘It’s very dangerous at night,’ they said and asked how he’d got to the hospital.

Mario said he’d walked.

‘Crazy man,’ they said, ‘you are a crazy man.’ Maybe.

Still, he got the message. After that he spent twenty-four hours a day in Daryl’s room. He would sleep on the sofa. The doctors weren’t sure of the extent of Impey’s internal
injuries and worried that he would suffer internal haemorrhaging.

Mario waited night after night with Impey. Don’t give him food, the doctors said, don’t give him water. Nil by mouth. Impey was stuck on his back, immobile, unable to move a muscle.
He would beg his friend.

‘Mario please, water! Mario please, some water.’

It killed Mario to say no. He was allowed only to wet Daryl’s lips with a sponge. Mario saw how Daryl suffered, how he dealt with it and the experience brought them close. Tough though it
was for Daryl, it was still a special time in their lives. ‘Always,’ says Mario, ‘when he always see me he says, “I never forget what you have done for me.”’

Impey’s day in yellow pleased Mario. The best victories are wrung from adversity.

But don’t misunderstand him. Mario’s sympathy is not for one rider, nor for one team but for all those who take on the challenge of racing a bike for a living. Anytime he sees a
crash in the peloton it feels like one of his children has gone down.

Everyone in Team Sky has their special tasks. When the team are on the move, which is most waking hours, they operate like worker ants, with fierce efficiency and the ability to move more than
their body weight when needed.

Everybody is a leader although, as Mario says, some are ‘leaders without the wallet’, referring to himself.

And by the way, just because you ran away with the circus doesn’t mean that you get to see the circus. When the big top goes up, Mario goes to work.

Every day starts the same. Movement. Out of a hotel and onto the road. Mario is always the first to leave. A one-man recce crew. He hits the road and stays in radio contact with everybody
behind. How is the road? Any diversions? Any change of route for the truck or the bus?

New hotel. First job is to charm the manager. Things to impress upon the manager. Good parking. Space for the mechanics to work. Quiet rooms away from the road. Bags of ice. Oh, and fill him in
about the special mattress and beds with gels that will be arriving soon. And remind him that the team chef Søren Kristiansen will need access to the hotel kitchen for a while later. Mario
calls this process ‘introducing our priority’.

The beds arrive in the second movement of vehicles. Once a rider shows for breakfast back in last night’s hotel, his cleaning, his bedding and his suitcases are swept away. The stuff goes
into the truck. Anything which will need to be replenished Mario keeps stocks of.

Having arrived first and spread the charm, he begins setting up everything he can till the bedding arrives. It doesn’t dawn on him to have a quiet espresso and swan about in his Team Sky
polo shirt for a while. No time for that.

The truck arrives and bang. The bedding goes to the allotted rooms. Five rooms for the riders, four being shared and in the odd one, David López the Spaniard on his own. Froome and Porte
are together, Stannard and Kennaugh, Thomas and Boasson Hagen, the two Belarusians until they lost one.

Five or six massage tables get set up. If there is bed linen to be washed it gets done. The routine is a two-hour 90-degree wash every couple of days if you are thinking of beginning your own
team. The riders have high metabolisms and sweat a lot at night, Mario says, so every second day the sheets get done. Sometimes if a rider has had a crash he’ll come in and lie down and take
the pristine look off things.

On his journeys through the lobby Mario will wonder what’s happening with the race. Maybe the boys are at the start area now. Dave Brailsford at the back of the black bus talking to a few
journalists. The riders stretching their limbs, warming up feeling where the strength is, if it is there at all.

Rest days mean ‘rest’ for the riders, not their valets. On the evening before the first, the riders fly from the south of France to Brittany, the support team make the 700-kilometre
journey by road. It doesn’t matter if the next hotel is in Timbuktu or in the adjoining building, everything has to be right for the riders to sleep well and be out on their bikes doing their
rest-day ride at ten in the morning. The long drive from the south leaves the carers and mechanics needing to do a lot of catching up.

If it’s a time trial, the day has a different texture to it. The riders will be waiting around for longer than they like. A few will race on full gas, others will take it easier, almost as
an unofficial rest day. For Mario, it’s just another day. Sure, if Froome does a good time trial and gains on his rivals, that will lift the mood of the team. Mario says the true professional
acknowledges neither victory nor defeat.

‘I don’t feel a difference between a big day and a little day, because I always do my work one hundred per cent. I try to put the rider in the best condition possible for them to
think just about the race. If it’s a flat stage or a mountain stage, I don’t care. I don’t want to say I don’t care because I am really happy when the rider wins. But I am
not disappointed when he loses, because I’m pretty sure I have done one hundred per cent.’

Generally on the Tour, each day unfolds like a decent-sized novel. Lots of scenery and sub-plots early on. The narrative takes the characters to a place of jeopardy. On good days that place is a
mountaintop and the story breaks men on the mountain. On bad days there are just breakaways which nobody heeds because the breakaways are just shoals of small fish. It takes more than that to bring
out the sharks.

By the sides of the roads the personality of the crowds change as the miles are left behind. Early in the day people are just out to see the race go by. The Tour is woven into the fabric of
France and they like to come and wave, to see the gaily coloured jerseys and to talk about old times. It’s a good day when the Tour passes through your village or valley.

But as the stage matures, the hard core take their places on the kerbs and grassy knolls. These are the students of cadence and chain rings, they know their history and get the tactics.
Appreciation of the near emaciated band of men is heightened by fans’ understanding of how much pain it takes to keep churning the power out at this rate. For cycling is democratic. These
roads and mountains will be empty tomorrow, just like they were yesterday, and anyone with the heart and the helmet can take up the gauntlet.

The
soigneur
has a unique bond with the rider. Not always but mostly. It was with Emma O’Reilly that Lance Armstrong let his guard down and his mouth loose. How that came back to
haunt him. Sometimes the
soigneur
can be just like a priest. Giver of counsel, taker of confession. Sometimes the massage takes place in silence.

The
soigneur
can be the connection between the rider and the team. Sometimes, says Mario, he is left knowing things which just need to be kept private. Sometimes he hears stuff that he
cannot keep private. He’ll need to talk to the boss. Sometimes the rider talks about family, about a wife or girlfriend, they talk about the kids they miss, the things they want to do when
the race ends.

This year Mario is working on two old friends. Kostas Siutsou who he has known since their Barloworld days, where he also met the other guy now in his care.