Inside Team Sky (24 page)

So what did he do? What could you do after reaching the top of one France’s toughest climbs?

‘I went and rode it myself again afterwards, just on my own. At a faster pace.’

The fun ride was over. Now time for the serious stuff. This time, without nostalgic flashbacks rehearsed for the cameras and no one to worry about leaving behind, he could get a proper feel for
the slopes. Although alone on two wheels, he had his professional, and personal, support following him on four, in the form of
directeur sportif
Nicolas Portal and girlfriend Michelle
Cound. With his head down but his eyes open, he started plotting the perfect climb.

When Chris Froome hits Ventoux and closes down Quintana like a lion about to make lunch of an antelope, Gary Blem shifts his head into neutral. If he thinks about what is
happening, his closeness to it all, he’ll feel intimidated and awestruck.

He will make a point of not watching this on television later. Then his thoughts might wander to the size of the audience he is part of. He might begin to notice the fanatics who press forward,
narrowing the path for Froome and Quintana to race up. The fact that this is a mad and crazy phenomenon for which, in his own little way, he is responsible might just dawn on him.

‘So long as I don’t see television, they’re just another rider wearing cycling kit, and I treat them like a normal, an average human being, nothing special, you
know?’

Froome and Quintana soar past a
stèle
at the side of the road. It is the monument to British rider Tom Simpson whose life, forty-six years and one day previously, was claimed by
this mountain while riding on a cocktail of alcohol and amphetamines. It is a monument which marks a different time.

Does Blem ever wonder if the men he serves are part of the brotherhood of the needle? He has thought about it. No man who has been around cycling for years hasn’t. No way, he thinks.

‘As a rider you’d have to be an absolute fool to dope in this team. It’s the wrong team for you if you want to dope. Chris did this last year as well. But what’s nice is
it’s consistent now. It’s not erratic, it’s not like he’s coming up to this thing going bam, and then disappearing. He’s been really, really, really
consistent.’

Nairo Quintana won’t go away. Every time Froome tries to leave him behind, the Colombian finds another air pocket which gives him enough energy to live off. Froome has one tactic left and
it’s not a surprising one. He burned Contador off with 6.5km to go by injecting a short burst of acceleration into the climb. At the end of a long day, it is a deadly weapon.

He uses it on Quintana again and again, and is beginning to reconcile himself to not taking the stage win today when the youngster runs out of responses. For the last 1.5km the gap grows and
Froome wins by 29 seconds. Afterwards people will say he should have let the Colombian win the stage for it was his attack that ignited the race. And after his victory in the Pyrenees, Froome
didn’t need it.

But the argument is not logical and owes something to the general tiredness with Team Sky’s dominance. Froome didn’t need the victory on Ventoux, though it is the greatest of his
career so far, but he may need the extra time that his final acceleration has gained on all rivals. He was prepared to let Quintana have the stage, but unprepared to wait for him.

As Froome crosses the line, he throws his right arm into the air and allows his left hand to rest close to his heart. Had he been listening carefully he would have heard, in the midst of the
cheering, the noise of people booing. Almost six hours have passed since leaving Givors; the attacking, the counter-attacking, the chess-like plays on the mountain that foretold the final surge,
and when you arrive? The sound of disapproval.

Froome hears but is not listening. Some don’t believe, others don’t like Sky. Always suspicion hangs in the air and his aggressive style of racing causes the clouds to thicken. When
he breaks clear of Quintana, he seems unnaturally strong but nothing he does on the mountain is much different from what he does in training.

Christophe Bassons, the clean French rider in the Festina team of the 1990s, used to say he never had any problem climbing with Richard Virenque on training rides. It was just in the races that
Virenque was a different animal, transformed by the stuff he was taking. When Brailsford and Kerrison examine Froome’s numbers after Ventoux, they will agree they were good but not as good as
some of the training numbers.

Doping is not the sole cause of disaffection.

Consider this from a French point of view. Twenty-eight years have passed since Bernard Hinault’s victory in the 1985 Tour. With the exception of Laurent Fignon in 1989, no French rider
has worn a yellow jersey anywhere near the Champs-Elysées since then. Along comes an Englishman in 2009, sets up a team that he enters in the 2010 Tour and three years later his team is
about to win the race for a second time.

Two weeks of the Tour have passed. Froome is trying to roll with the punches. Nothing for it but to wait by the finish for his rivals to make their weary way to the summit of Ventoux before the
end of day rituals of media bites, podium presentations and doping control.

In the scant moments of calm he gets a chance to think back to the race as he dreamed it two months ago, as he rode alone up the now conquered peak. How similar was the race stage, peloton and
all, to May’s battle plan?

‘I’d sort of pictured it to be pretty similar to how it panned out. I had planned to hit the bottom with the whole team pulling at the front, so that we were in prime position. But
then once we were on the climb, I’d envisaged that it would be easier then to back off a little bit, and let other teams take it up. Which is exactly what happened and I was left with Richie
and Pete, who then, later on on the climb, came and started working. And setting a really hard pace, so, I’d sort of seen the bottom really steep part, I’d figured out that other teams
were going to take that up anyway, and it didn’t really matter if it was us or someone else pulling at that point, but I thought it was better to try and save the guys for a little bit later
on.’

So far so good. But what about that ambitious solo attack from 8km out?

‘Yeah. I had thought Richie would be there until the final sort of two or three Ks, but given that it was so hard up until that halfway point and he was already in pieces I thought, okay,
here. I can really gain big time if I go here and the guys are left chasing for the last eight K, could open up some big gaps.’

But all in all a successful recce?

‘Yeah, it wasn’t far off.’

Chris Froome is in the A-Team, and he loves it when a plan comes together.

He smiles broadly and thanks his confederates. It has been a long day but he has taken time on everyone, and has extended his overall lead to more than 4 minutes on Mollema and
Contador.

Gary Blem knows there is a week of racing to go, and a tough one at that, but the likelihood now is that he will be back home in Pretoria next Tuesday in time for little Hannah’s birthday,
and that he will return home as part of the Tour de France winning team. The nice man who came to their house for the barbecue will be champion.

And tomorrow, Monday, is a rest day. He might look forward to that, but there is a record-breaking gust about to hit Ventoux. Accusations and insinuations flying at 198mph. The questions will
come by reflex, thrown in the knowledge that anybody who loves cycling has a right to ask questions, but thrown without much constructive thought as to how to move the discussion or the inquiry
forward.

Froome has hardly stepped off his bike, but the humming wires of the social media universe can be heard conveying the doubt and outrage of the armchair jury. The doubts which had been festering
all season and through the first week of the Tour about Team Sky and their collective strength vanished after the team’s collapse in the Pyrenees. Now it’s just the yellow jersey they
worry about.

Nobody could do what we have just seen Chris Froome do and sleep soundly at night.

Why not? They just couldn’t.

Coming down the mountain, the forest echoes with the sound of statistics being fired in anger. The Ngong Hills are very far away indeed.

A few nights before Ventoux I had a fascinating evening in the company of Dave Brailsford and Tim Kerrison. The men were discussing an email that Dave had received from Antoine
Vayer, the French sports scientist who, with his co-author Frédéric Portoleau, has created a model that allows them to estimate the power output of riders on the climbs of the Tour de
France.

They compare these power outputs to what they believe is possible without doping and then, depending upon the extent to which a rider exceeds this limit, he is deemed suspicious or even more. In
Le Monde
the previous day, Monday, Vayer wrote that Froome’s performance on the 7.8km climb to Ax 3 Domaines was beyond the limit of what’s possible clean. He had more or less
accused Froome of having doped.

Because of his sports science background and his refusal to be involved in doping when working with the notorious Festina team in the 1990s, Vayer has credibility on the subject of doping. So
much so that some see him as a Breton Caesar, sitting in the tribune and delivering a thumbs up or a thumbs down to what he sees. A coach and teacher in physical education, Vayer writes for
Le
Monde
during the Tour and his take on the race is generally interesting and hard-hitting.

Just before the Tour he’d published a magazine,
Not Normal
, which examined the performances of twenty-one of the most successful modern riders – a range running
approximately from Greg LeMond to Cadel Evans, with a large slice of Lance in between. Having examined the performances Vayer then ranked them in an index of suspicion.

He came up with three categories of performance, the names of which are redolent of the old-school codes which the peloton would put on surprising performances.

Suspicious – A ride showing a power output of 410 watts at threshold.

Miraculous – A ride with a power output above 430 watts.

Mutant – A ride with a power output above 450 watts.

(He standardises the performances of riders against an ‘average’ rider weight of 70kg to allow him to compare the performances of heavier and lighter riders in the same way.)

After Froome’s climb on Ax 3 Domaines, Antoine pronounced a power output of 446 watts according to his calculations. (Scaled to a 70kg rider; the equivalent of 6.4 w/kg for Froome.)

Miraculous.

After Ventoux, the situation looked like Vayer standing in a small room and berating Froome for being a cheat. Antoine says, though, that all he is doing is letting people decide for
themselves.

So on the Tuesday of this week, Vayer emailed Brailsford and asked to meet him. A totally off-the-record, no-journalists-present meeting. He hoped Brailsford would be able to give him the
information that could, perhaps, allow Vayer to believe in Froome.

Antoine Vayer and I go back to the 1999 Tour and a clandestine meeting in the Gobelen bar of those journalists who weren’t buying the romance of a cancer survivor winning the Tour de
France clean. Back then he coached Christophe Bassons, cycling’s Mr Clean, and condemned in unambiguous terms the culture of doping that was destroying the sport.

He was what cycling needed then: a breath of clean air.

Now, I’m not so sure. Froome’s power at Ax 3 Domaines was deemed beyond suspicious but, in wanting to meet Brailsford and Kerrison, it seemed he was open to being persuaded that the
Team Sky leader was clean. It seemed to me there was a disconnect between the post Ax 3 Domaines conclusion and the possibility of being persuaded that it wasn’t miraculous at all.

Brailsford is inclined to meet him because he knows that Vayer’s figures on power output in the Tour de France are the basis for others’ calculations. Kerrison, too, because whatever
his reservations, he recognises the attempt to factor in many of the variables makes Vayer’s model better than most people’s. These calculations are this year’s craze.

Brailsford believes totally and passionately that Froome is clean. He wants to help Vayer to understand this. He asks Kerrison if he would come along to the meeting with Vayer as he believes it
would be helpful to have his sports scientist along – a man who understands completely the significance and the limitations of measuring power output.

Kerrison says he would like to go along because he disputes the idea of drawing a line and saying, ‘Beyond this is not possible without doping’ as a starting point. ‘In ten
years’ time people would look at that line and laugh because things will have moved on so much,’ he says. Both Brailsford and Kerrison have yet to see a model which would satisfy them
as being acceptably accurate. This frustrates them.

Brailsford asks me if I know Antoine.

I say I do. Antoine and I are friends and I add that his anti-doping stance while working for Festina was seriously admirable. He and two of his sons, Titoine and Benjamin, have come and stayed
at our home in England.

‘Is his mind made up about this?’

‘Hmmm,’ I say, ‘that’s something you will have to discover for yourself.’

All in good time.

It is the morning after Froome has won the stage up Ventoux and the air hangs thick with accusation as Brailsford sits down to Froome’s right at the head of the press
conference. Froome has a
bidon
of Gatorade which he sips from occasionally. Brailsford looks slightly bemused.

Not all the questions concern doping. It just seems like that. A lot of the questions are framed with that nervy intro journalists use when asking a question but not wanting to get offside.
‘What do you say to those who ask you . . .?’

Brailsford and Froome are patient and strong on the issues. Froome asserts yet again that he is not cheating. There isn’t much more he can say. ‘I can only be open and say to people,
I know within myself that I’ve trained extremely hard to get here. All the results I get I know are my own results . . . Outside of that, I can’t talk about that; I can’t talk
about that other stuff. I know what I’ve done to get here and I’m extremely proud of what I’ve done.’