Inside Team Sky (32 page)

Wiggins wasn’t sure he could make all the sacrifices necessary to get himself to peak condition just to help someone else. A year of gruelling training rides day after day after day?
Taking yourself to the brink of exhaustion come wind, rain or shine? All that to help somebody else fulfil their dreams while yours remain buckled in your pannier bags? It’s a tough ask for
anybody, let alone a proud, stubborn, former champion of the Tour de France.

But that still left Brailsford with the question of how the team could get value for the money they were paying Wiggins. Without the Tour de France, it would be impossible. Wiggins then went to
Verbier in the French Alps to train at altitude and Brailsford made sure he was there. Given how much he is being paid, Wiggins should, perhaps, just do what he’s told. Brailsford’s
bosses at News Corp would almost certainly subscribe to this view. But Brailsford has a keener understanding of how highly strung the best athletes can be and coercion wasn’t going to work
with Wiggins. If forced to simply turn up at the Tour and ride for Froome, he might not find the motivation to prepare as thoroughly as he would need to.

They spoke at length and tried to find a way forward.

When it comes to problem-solving, Brailsford doesn’t get wound up by others taking a difficult or even unreasonable position. Instead, he reminds himself that the ultimate goal is not
winning the argument, it’s winning the Tour de France. The focus is on doing everything to make that more likely to happen. Team Sky need Wiggins in the 2014 team riding for Froome, and doing
so of his own volition.

Brailsford gets on well with Wiggins and usually when they talk, they can work things out. The appeal needed to be to Wiggins’s intelligence and his sense of fair play and, after Verbier,
the Sky boss felt he was getting there. In his discussions with Wiggins, he would have pointed out that the money he’d not given Froome after the 2012 Tour needed to be paid in full. Without
that happening, there would never be resolution.

Verbier helped Wiggins get into good shape and he rode at the Tour of Britain to record his victory of the season. That was an important week, as Brailsford brought along Wiggins’s old
sidekick and mentor Shane Sutton in the hope that the naturally funny Aussie could help the mood within the team. That played to Sutton’s strength, and his gentle and not-so-gentle banter got
everyone laughing and Brailsford thought it one of the most enjoyable weeks of the season. More importantly, Brad was back in the fold.

Brailsford then went to Monaco to discuss things with Froome. On the surface you might imagine this was the less complicated part of the jigsaw, because Froome is clear headed and fair minded.
But he can also be obstinate and he wasn’t prepared to accept that everything was suddenly okay just because Wiggins was feeling better. Brailsford appealed to Froome’s calculating
spirit. What’s the ambition? To win the Tour in 2014. Who would be leader? Chris Froome. Would Froome’s chances be helped by having Wiggins as willing
équipier
? Of
course.

Froome thought it wrong that he hadn’t had his cut from the 2012 prize money.

The money was paid.

The World Championship Road Race was down for the Sunday, but the main event was happening in the meeting rooms of an old Florence building in which Machiavelli once lived.
Brian Cookson was taking on Pat McQuaid for the presidency of the UCI. Much had been made of Machiavelli’s distinction between politics and morality. The campaign had been vitriolic and
stained with carelessly flung battery acid. Both men promised a new beginning for the UCI. In the end, Cookson convinced more people that he was the man to deliver that new beginning.

Once upon a time . . .

Whether a fresh start would be at all possible was a moot point. Cycling has many stakeholders and few are willing to loosen their grip in the name of progress.

The Tour de France and several other races are run by the Amaury Sports Organisation (ASO) and they cut their own deals and make their own rules. The sport has several layers of professional
activity and a calendar which is poorly designed and full of silly overlaps and bad planning. Team owners and team sponsors are constantly looking for a fairer shake of the proceeds and better
rewards for their riders’ success. And the entire caravan travels under the cloud of doping. So when the cycling world gathered to find a World Champion and to elect a new president, it was
always likely to come away with more questions than answers.

For Team Sky, though, a third factor was intersecting with the election and the race in Tuscany that weekend. Between the vote and the race the word leaked out about the Jonathan Tiernan-Locke
case.

Jonathan Tiernan-Locke, a Team Sky rider, had been sent a letter by the UCI requesting an explanation for anomalous readings in his biological passport data. The readings under question were
from a blood sample taken after Tiernan-Locke won the Tour of Britain in 2012, soon before signing for Team Sky. The nitty-gritty facts of the Tiernan-Locke business would be compelling in their
own right, but in one key sense they didn’t matter at the time. This was Team Sky. This was the wrong sort of drama for a team which proclaims to be at the vanguard of cycling’s reform.
He was given a period in which to make his response to the request, with a British Cycling official stating that no comment would be made until the case was resolved.

There had been plenty of noise around Tiernan-Locke’s reputation before he joined the team and, when it emerged that Sky and Brailsford hadn’t properly explored reservations
expressed seven months before, sympathy for Brailsford and company was muted. No one was saying Tiernan-Locke was guilty, but Sky should have spent more time working out why some of his rivals at
the Tour Méditerranéen considered his performance suspicious.

Geert Leinders had been a mistake, a costly one, but the cycling world expected the centurions at the gate would prevent such a thing happening again. One imagined Team Sky would now vet
everybody like vice-presidential candidates in an American election. The timing was almost darkly comic. Here was Brailsford fighting a rearguard action just as cycling was talking about its new
beginning.

Once upon a time indeed . . .

The case would be a considerable embarrassment for Team Sky and for Brailsford, but more critically it would come at a time when cycling stood at a crossroads. The sport needed to reform itself
in all sorts of ways. If Team Sky could gather the respect and admiration to match their success, they would be big players in determining the future of cycling. If Team Sky kept shooting
themselves in the foot, that future might not happen at all. So Team Sky had come to Tuscany with two things in mind. The World Championships was one, of course. But also more media massaging.

In January 2013 in Mallorca the team had entertained a large swathe of the British media. The key element of the trip as far as Sky were concerned was a three-hour media presentation on what the
team were about. The first question asked was by Dave Brailsford himself as he began the PowerPoint presentation.

‘How are you going to succeed in winning admiration, if people can’t be sure you are clean?’

That established the theme for the next 179 minutes. How would Team Sky become the most admired sports team in the world? One imagined that the first thing they needed to do was stop talking
about becoming the most admired sports team in the world, but there is something almost endearing about the manner in which Brailsford wears his ambition on his sleeve. ‘Call me naïve,
but . . .’ he says occasionally, and there have been plenty of times when he has been.

So the PowerPoint presentation aimed to hose down that chorus of overheated former pros who pronounce on everything from their media talking shops without actually being familiar with the
scientific approach the sport has now taken. This was a particular bugbear of Tim Kerrison’s. Sky talked of the philosophy of marginal gains and how it worked. Click, next slide. Their faith
and investment in sports science. Click. The benefits of state-of-the-art equipment. Click. Coaches that know the human body as much as they do the sport. Click. The injustice of the growing
tendency to establish guilt by performance. Click, click, click. Over three hours Team Sky placed themselves front and centre of cycling’s battle to escape the past.

Upon review, Brailsford and company felt that the session had worked well. So in Tuscany in September 2013 it was planned to offer a similar session to the Italian media, who are among the most
caustically critical of the Team Sky operation. After Froome’s victory on Mont Ventoux, Italy’s foremost sports daily,
La Gazzetta dello Sport
, had its physiology expert
proclaiming Froome’s power output incredibly high and lacking credibility.

Sky has a sister station in Italy (and another in Germany), so bringing the Italians around wasn’t going to be purely an academic exercise. Team Sky’s ownership is as follows: 60 per
cent is owned by BSkyB, the British broadcasting arm of News Corp, 25 per cent is owned by Sky Italia and the remaining 15 per cent belongs to News Corp itself.

Cycling is an unusual sport. It clearly doesn’t have the mass casual following that Premiership football enjoys. For many people, cycling at an elite level barely even exists beyond the
three weeks when the Tour de France generates its pretty images and epic narrative for millions of viewers. Yet it is a sport with huge grassroots participation and those who take an interest often
do so with a passion that means opinions aren’t merely expressed. They are fired as bullets.

Sky Broadcasting would be the first to concede that they get a good deal commercially with their finger in the cycling pie. Their involvement in city-centre Sky Rides is estimated to have put
750,000 people back on bikes in the first two years of operation alone. Coupling these with a pro cycling team is a branding master class. The popular success of the GB track cycling team has been
matched on the roads. If people can believe the story then the possible returns are huge and Sky could find itself at the popular heart of a major sport – certainly a change from perceptions
of it as the sugar daddy enabler to the corrupt Babylon of Premiership football.

But every time the word doping gets mentioned in a media report or suggested by Google after just about any cycling search term, the value of cycling as a business takes a hit. When the
Tiernan-Locke story broke, Sky’s bosses wanted to know how this story could have got into the public domain when it was just a preliminary letter sent by the UCI to its rider. Cycling is
cycling. Tyres puncture and stories leak. They had bigger problems than sourcing the leak. Their anxiety confirmed the weight of the story, though. Rule number one in such cases: mind your
back.

In that sense Sky are no different from so many other sponsors in the game. There is a bottom line. There must be a return. No matter how much people at the upper echelons of the company like
cycling and enjoy it, if the tainted elite cycling world continues to contaminate Sky’s brand image, well, perhaps the experiment will have to finish.

For example, the German and Italian spin-offs are welcomed by Sky. But, if coverage in Italy is always to be coupled with the sort of colourful accusations which the domestic media specialises
in, then Brailsford’s challenge of becoming the most admired sports team in the world is doomed. Tiernan-Locke had received only an enquiring letter but he’d provided the media with
another big stick with which to beat Team Sky, thus turning himself into something more than the small fish he really was.

The patience of sponsors, any sponsors, will always be finite. And cycling lives off the generosity of its sponsors.

Those sponsors get their money’s worth. For less than £10 million a year you can give a pro team the same name as your company. The Team Sky deal represents excellent value.
Estimates of Sky’s broadcasting contribution to the team in 2011 put the figure at about £6 million. The annual report and accounts for that year suggest that BSkyB spent a total of
£1.2 billion on marketing. The involvement in Team Sky represented considerably less than 1 per cent of that outlay.

The deals come at a discount because cycling is a minefield of scandal and cynicism. What happens if a team with your firm’s name becomes synonymous with cheating?

Cycling’s difficulty is cynicism as much as it is drugs. When 2013 produces a winner like Chris Froome, a healthy sport should be looking at pushing its market into Africa. When a teammate
of Froome’s is asked about irregularities in his blood passport, though, people think it is 1999 all over again. In 1998 cycling had the Festina affair. It promised 1999 was the new
beginning. It was. It was the beginning of the Armstrong machine, the most cynical doping operation any sport has ever seen.

In 2012, the Armstrong Report opened everybody’s eyes to what a noxious sham all that talk of reform had been. Was 2013 a mirror image of 1999? I don’t think so, but it would be hard
to blame fans and sponsors for standing back from cycling.

What was the financial impact of the Lance years? Well, Lance did very well for himself but the sport as a whole has been retarded in terms of its own potential. Sponsorship is vital to
top-level cycling teams, but because reputable brands suffer the risk of fire damage if associated with a scandal, they pay less than they would otherwise do. Interestingly, major global brands
like Nike and Budweiser who backed Armstrong as an individual never got seriously involved in the sport in Europe – the cockpit where Armstrong made his name.

They still got burned in the end but their instincts were probably correct.

In 2013 Rabobank, a long-standing team sponsor, announced that they’d had enough. ‘International cycling is rotten, including some of its highest institutions,’ said
Rabobank’s chief financial officer Bert Bruggink, bringing to an end a seventeen-year association with the sport.

Rabobank had long spoken about zero tolerance in their team. It emerged, though, that in 2007 the team had purchased a brand spanking new Sysmex XE–2100 machine, the same as that used by
anti-doping authorities, to measure their own blood cell counts. Testimony given by Michael Rasmussen, a former Rabobank rider, suggested that Geert Leinders had used the machine and that Leinders
had, among other things, stored Dynepo – a form of pharmaceutical EPO – in the fridge on the team bus.