Inside Team Sky (31 page)

‘Nobody saw me down on my hands and knees.’

‘Bobby, you should be proud that you got down on your hands and knees, you are rolling up your sleeves, showing the other people you are prepared to do the job. You shouldn’t worry
what other people think. What does it matter what other people think?’

That is Rod Ellingworth.

It must be the upbringing, but he has a constant suspicion of glamour. No fat cat ever impresses him. In the morning of a rest day when the riders take a spin to stretch their limbs, it is often
suggested to Rod that he go along with them. There are good reasons for it and it would make a nice snap or news clip: Rod Ellingworth, former Witham Wheeler, out between the superstars and the
sunflowers yesterday . . .

He stays behind, though. He feels part of his job is to be around; if there are ten things people need to know or twenty questions they need to ask, he will be around and the team’s day
will move forward a little bit easier.

‘Anyway, I like to get down for breakfast with the mechanics and the carers, not every morning but most mornings, because if somebody from the management team isn’t there, it
doesn’t send out the right message. They should see that you are doing just as much as they are.’

One evening when we arrive at the team hotel they are three beds short for the Team Sky group. That’s three people who’ll have to drive half an hour up the road to get their kip and
half an hour back at the crack of dawn. Rod is first to put his hand up.

These days are long and he talks sometimes to Dave Brailsford about how much the team asks of everybody. Everybody here works harder than they would on any other team. Harder and longer. They
are a young team but Rod knows so much is being asked that good people will start falling away, just burnt off the surface. He’s thinking about a way of making sure that Sky holds on to its
best people.

Often in the car we spoke about doping and at one point he pondered his own career. He wasn’t making a fuss about it but he hadn’t doped and, like everyone else
rowing a boat against the blokes with outboard engines, he didn’t get very far. ‘I was the same era, more or less, as guys like George Hincapie, Bobby Julich and even David Millar.

‘They were good riders, but I felt I trained as hard as they did, I wanted it as much as they did, but they went on to have great careers. I thought about it a lot, why they went so far
and why I went nowhere. What I believed is that they were much smarter than me. They trained better, they were cleverer in races and I felt I just wasn’t bright enough.’

Rod was filled with doubt over his own intelligence for years. To meet Rod now, who has traditional intelligence to rival his emotional intelligence, this is almost unthinkable. But until the
true cause for his competitors getting so much more out of their training and races came to light, his self-confidence was shaken.

Cycling’s ultimate short-cut is pharmaceutical. When others took that route fifteen years ago, it hurt Ellingworth. Now, just one Team Sky rider taking that short-cut and getting caught
could destroy the team and leave people like Ellingworth wondering what they wanted to do with the rest of their lives. You know Rod’s answers on the subject, but you want to torture him
anyway because on a Tour with so many ghosts and bad memories you can never have enough reassurance.

‘It would be absolutely gut-wrenching, wouldn’t it, you know?’ he says. ‘That’s always the fear, isn’t it? Oh we’ve had a few conversations about
somebody doing something on their own, and it coming out and it’s just, just everything you do or have done it’s just . . . ah . . . it’d just be . . .’

Chris Froome once said that he couldn’t be left in a room with a teammate who had cheated. Assault charges would follow. He left the rest to your imagination. Rod is more specific. A
baseball bat, if you were wondering.

Meanwhile, it’s summer and it’s France and the former Witham Wheeler has miles to go and promises to keep. When it all ends he has more work to get into, but holidays beckon.

The Isle of Wight. Hitting it at 9am of a morning, taking in a small music festival that will be going on down there. Himself and Jane and their little Robin, Rob Hayles and his wife and their
two kids, and a few more friends. A few days of camping and chilling.

You’d never see a fat cat under canvas.

How is it going, Rod? Good, thank you.

They really tried with the post-Tour party this year.

And by Team Sky’s standards, it was deemed a notable success. ‘Definitely, the best we’ve ever had,’ said Rod Ellingworth.

An upstairs bar in the team hotel was taken over and drinks and very fancy canapés and chocolates were served. I’d been a reluctant participant as the party seemed an occasion best
left to those who were genuinely part of the team. But in the end, the Slovenian
soigneurs
Marko Dzalo and David Rozman thrust a bottle of beer into my hand and ensured a late night became
a very late one.

Rozman told me again about how highly he regarded Froome and that it wasn’t just because he was a damn good cyclist. In Froome he saw a fine human being. We had spoken one day on the Tour
and I’d asked Rozman if he believed Team Sky was clean and if he did, what convinced him.

‘A small thing,’ he said. ‘I have worked with cycling teams before this one and I would walk into a room and two riders would just stop talking. That happened many times. In
this team, that has never happened. There aren’t conversations going on that people need to stop just because you’ve walked into the room.’

Gary Blem was looking forward to getting back to South Africa and seeing his family. He reminded me one more time about what defines and distinguishes Mark Cavendish. They were working together
at the Tour de France for the first time and Cav had just finished second in a bunch sprint.

‘Well done,’ said Gary, acknowledging a decent effort.

‘Gary,’ said Cavendish with the kind of post-race passion that is exclusively his, ‘don’t ever,
ever
, congratulate me on finishing second.’

You live and you learn.

At the nightclub the riders were there with their partners and G Thomas was talking rugby. ‘Gatland was right to pick Jonathan Davies before Brian O’Driscoll for that final Lions
test in Australia,’ he said, and then seemed disappointed that the Irishman in his company was agreeing with him. More than likely just happy G wasn’t reaching for that X-ray photo
he’s convinced no one has seen yet! For almost three weeks, this has been a fountain for banter and you might almost forget that he’s shown unimaginable courage in not just finishing
this Tour but making a significant contribution to the team. Whatever he earns in his career, he deserves.

Then there’s Richie Porte who once examined himself and diagnosed ‘small man syndrome’. This condition isn’t always helped by alcohol and by the time Richie gets to me,
he’s several to the wind. It’s like his index finger has fallen in love with my sternum. ‘You know when people spit at me on a climb and call me a doper, I think of all the
journos who accuse me and I get so pissed. I’ve never done anything wrong. Why should I have to put up with that shit?’

When that first wave of outrage crashes against the sand, Richie’s waters go still and conversation flows in a different direction. He’s amusing, engaging, fun to be around, and
it’s not hard to work out why Froome would rather share a room with ‘small man syndrome’ than bunk alone.

Celebrations are not Dave Brailsford’s tipple, for it is the process, not the result, that excites him. If you feel too good about the victory, you lessen your chances of repeating it. So,
to get through this long night, he has more than a few drinks.

Some dance to remember, some to forget.

Months after the Tour de France, with the Wiggins–Froome cold war all but forgotten, the two stars made nice to each other at a press conference before the World Road
Race Championships in Italy. That was just the public show of
rapprochement
. There was a more meaningful coming together on a Team GB training ride that, despite him being nowhere in
sight, had a distinct ring of Brailsford about it.

Back in July, Dave Brailsford decided to accompany the Sky riders out on a rest day training ride in an attempt to pick up the pieces of his team that had been strewn across the Pyrenees the day
before. One by one, the riders dropped back to Brailsford for a more honest discussion of their feelings than they ever could have managed out of their saddles. Now, months on, a morning ride was
again generating more than just sweat, hunger and leg ache, in the shape of much-needed communication. Only this time, instead of dropping back to get things off their own chests, the riders left
the heavy-chested together at the front. One by one, the riders splintered from the eight-man group until only the two golden boys remained, no one to talk to but each other.

‘Now, guys you’ve got to talk,’ was the collective message to Froome and Wiggins from the group and, finally, talk they did. It was a step forward on the road to
reconciliation, but no one was getting carried away. Such had been the enmity since the 2012 Tour that one harmonious week in Tuscany wasn’t going to blow away more than a year’s worth
of accumulated mistrust. Still, some seeds were sprinkled on what had seemed to be barren ground that week.

Froome will return to the 2014 Tour de France as defending champion and favourite. He will encounter tougher opposition than he did in 2013, not least because Vincenzo Nibali, the Sicilian, has
targeted the 2014 race. However, Team Sky believe that they can be far stronger as a team than they were this year. But not without Wiggins.

After the breakdown in relations in the second half of 2012, Team Sky thought the best way forward was to allow them to ride more or less separate programmes. Through the first seven months of
2013 they rode together only once, at the relatively low-profile Tour of Oman. Wiggins dutifully helped Froome to record his first victory of the year; Froome dutifully thanked him. Nothing
changed.

Thereafter, they went their separate ways. Froome raced the Tirreno–Adriatico, Critérium International, Tour de Romandie and Critérium du Dauphiné before tackling the
Tour. Wiggins had won Romandie and the Dauphiné the year before, but this year he chose a different route and asked to ride the Giro d’Italia as well. He imagined riding well in the
Giro and then showing up for the Tour de France five weeks later in good form.

Injury, sickness and a loss of confidence on wet and dangerous descents destroyed his Giro and, back at home, he needed to rest his sore knee for five days before starting back. He felt he
wouldn’t be able to get himself 100 per cent fit for the Tour. And that was that. The champion would not be defending his title. Though there was some sympathy for Wiggins, there was also
relief within Team Sky because relations between the two leaders were still chilly.

During the Tour, there were many occasions when Wiggins’s absence was felt – most keenly at the team time trial in Nice when a narrow defeat would have been a convincing victory had
Wiggins been there. That evening on the Promenade des Anglais, the lament around the Sky bus had a recurring theme: ‘We could have done with Brad today.’ Had he been on his best form,
Wiggins would have been alongside Richie Porte in the mountains, helping to control things for Froome.

Once a season begins, everything moves at a frantic pace and there isn’t much time for conciliation talks. Once the Tour de France starts, no one, certainly not Brailsford, would have been
keen on having such talks during the race.

In the immediate aftermath of Froome’s win in Paris, Wiggins didn’t publicly congratulate him and, given the frostiness, that wasn’t a surprise. Two weeks later he did,
however, acknowledge that Froome had earned the right to lead the team into the 2014 Tour, which was his way of expressing admiration for Froome’s performance in winning the race.

They are both stubborn, and Froome wasn’t going to read that comment and think everything could now be hunky dory between them. There was a problem, though, that neither seemed able or
even inclined to address.

They needed each other.

Froome needs Wiggins in the team for the 2014 Tour because his inclusion will make the team stronger and give Froome a better chance of winning again. Wiggins needs Froome because a man on a
Tour de France winner’s salary (£3-4 million) can justify his wages only if he actually rides the world’s greatest race. Furthermore, Wiggins’s targeting of the Giro
didn’t work out due, in part, to bad weather but that is always more likely to occur in May than during the Tour in July.

Team Sky also learned something about the Giro. After Wiggins departed, Rigoberto Urán was made leader and he rode an excellent race, won a mountain stage and climbed to second place
overall in 2013. Few even noticed how well Urán and the team had done in Wiggins’s absence. The Giro was just the Giro and second was nowhere.

That experience in Italy would have confirmed for Brailsford something he already sensed. If Wiggins was to do his job properly for the team in 2014, he must ride the Tour de France. And so the
diplomatic mission began. Brailsford went to see Wiggins and they spoke about his relationship with Froome and how 2014 might pan out.

Cycling has been Wiggins’s life and, in becoming Britain’s most decorated rider, he has been a highly dedicated athlete. In the past, however, the dedication was always for himself.
That didn’t make it easy and because he would have been hurting himself, he didn’t take shortcuts. It was true he found it hard to forgive Froome for what he saw as betrayal at the 2012
Tour, but his difficulty in adapting to the role of team rider wasn’t solely down to that animosity.