Inside Team Sky (33 page)

Leinders is still under investigation by Belgian authorities.

Cycling was fortunate that the Californian consumer goods manufacturer Belkin eventually stepped into the breach after Rabobank’s exit, but it won’t always be like that unless reform
is visible and effective. Belkin began their connection with cycling by talking about zero tolerance. Now though, all of a sudden, the market leaders in zero tolerance are struggling to explain
themselves.

The news about Tiernan-Locke came when team owners were campaigning for radical changes to what is a conservative business environment. Ideally this would involve simplifying the racing calendar
at World Tour level, so the three Grand Tours and a selection of other races would attract the top teams and give the season some continuity. There would also be revenue sharing to make pay
structures more competitive.

As it is, cycling works in a peculiar way. Teams are beholden to major sponsors for most of their income. As payback, teams operate under the names of sponsors. This in turn means that when the
sponsor changes, goes broke or withdraws because of a fresh scandal, the team virtually ceases to exist to the fans.

Those teams, despite raising the bulk of their cash from sponsors, receive a very small slice of the big pie in return for success. Chris Froome won €450,000 for coming home first in the
Tour de France in 2013. By the standard of major world sporting events that is small beer. Factor in that this is a uniquely gruelling event and that Froome has to share the money out with his
riders and staff, and the system seems distinctly feudal. Of course, Froome’s contract with Team Sky will allow reward for success but in broad picture terms, Froome will be paid less than
many Premiership footballers.

He received less than half what a golfer gets for winning a middle-ranking event on the PGA Tour in America. Then his team will receive little financial reward for his success. The appearance
fee for a team in the Tour de France is €55,000.

The total prize money pool for the Tour de France comes to roughly €2 million, a sum which includes payments to the various jersey winners and €8000 a day for the stage winner and so
on. Eight thousand euros for winning a stage is derisory. The other Grand Tours – the Giro d’Italia and the Vuelta a España – dangle prize money of €1.38 million and
€1.1 million respectively, so the derision is at least multilingual. According to the Australian Financial Review, writing in the summer of 2013, the Tour includes a paltry further €1.6
million in allowances for participating teams.

Even in macro terms, cycling continues to underperform as a business. The Tour de France, for instance, takes in just €200 million for global broadcasting rights for a three-week race which
bills itself as the third biggest sporting event in the world. Analysts place that figure at a fraction of the Tour’s earning potential. The Tour is beamed to 190 out of all 196 countries.
These rights fees account for 60 per cent of the Tour’s income. By comparison the 2011–12 cycle of Olympic activity generated $3.91 billion in rights income.

The total budget for Team Sky, considered to be the Manchester City of the game but probably more fairly bracketed within the top four or five teams in terms of budget, is estimated to be in the
£25-30 million mark. That sort of money would buy a single half-decent Premiership footballer, but not a player from the very top echelon. In cycling it makes Team Sky the envy of most other
outfits.

Again, compare. Sky’s modest sponsorship has brought two Tour de France wins. To be one of the sponsors in The Olympic Partner (TOP) programme for a winter games/summer games cycle costs
about $100 million. Eleven TOP sponsors generated $957 million for London. There are a further three tiers of sponsors beneath the TOP strand. That’s forty-four more companies squeezing their
corporate logos into the picture.

So for cycling’s sponsors and teams, the payback is as modest as the input. So the spin had better be good. Cycling, however, has a perverse and contrary constituency.

On the Tour in 2013, one of Froome’s principal rivals was Alberto Contador – former winner of the Tour who had since served a ban for discrepancies in his biological passport. One of
the oddities of the spite shown against Froome was the general tolerance shown for Contador – the Barabbas Syndrome. In the Bible when the crowd are offered the choice to free Jesus or
Barabbas – a known criminal – their resentment of Jesus causes them to cry, ‘No, not him! Give us Barabbas!’ The Tour creates an unlikely rerun. The mob were absolving
Contador, the known sinner, while calling for Froome’s crucifixion. (Contador’s boss is the Dane, Bjarne Riis, who has admitted to having won the 1996 Tour de France while on EPO and
other drugs, but who remains a leading figure in the sport.)

Contador rode for Saxo–Tinkoff in 2013. Soon after the Tour ended, the second part of that sponsorship arrangement broke down when Oleg Tinkoff took his cheque book away. More confusion
for the casual fan.

Dave Brailsford’s burden goes beyond the corridors of the velodrome in Manchester and the team’s house and office on the Promenade du Soleil in Nice. By advertising his team’s
virtue so aggressively, he seemed set to put Sky (the team and the business) at the centre of the reform and growth of the sport. When Brailsford fails, however, he doesn’t get credit for his
efforts and his ambitions. He gets crucified.

Nail Brailsford. Give us Riis!

Though he tries not to show it, this gets to Brailsford. He knows his record in the sport and insists he is 100 per cent clean. There is no evidence, not a scintilla, to counter that. Yet he can
often feel the vibe of resentment rippling towards him and the team. Call him naïve, but he doesn’t understand it.

I imagine Dr Steve Peters talking to him, asking him to consider where this resentment comes from. Of course, most of those who work in the sport have links to its past. Ex-riders who once doped
or team bosses who, if they didn’t organise the blood transfusions, looked the other way when someone else did. When Geert Leinders got into trouble because of his time at Rabobank, and UCI
asked Tiernan-Locke some accusatory questions, this was manna from heaven to many traditionalists in the sport.

In public his bosses at BSkyB speak glowingly of the environment Brailsford has created at Team Sky, but they continue to demand a return on their investment. Namely, success. And they like
their success neat; that is, without any contaminated mixer. They understand scepticism goes with the territory, but when a Leinders happens or when they are told that the UCI wants an explanation
from Tiernan-Locke, they are not so understanding. It is Brailsford who then feels the heat.

Having set themselves as the most zealous zero tolerance unit in the game, Team Sky have unwittingly fallen into a rivalry with the Garmin team – who spearhead the truth and reconciliation
movement within cycling. Jonathan Vaughters, Garmin’s Brailsford, has been a leading voice in calling for cycling reform and it is fair to say that Vaughters has occasionally got under
Brailsford’s skin more than a little.

The difficulty for Team Sky is that every failure of the zero tolerance policy gets written up in larger print than a failure in an environment which says let’s forgive and . . . not
forget . . . but learn and move on.

At the end of 2013, Team Sky, despite their ambition and their success on the road, had a reputation that was all shot through by snipers. They had two very highly paid stars and a roster of
ambitious young men behind them. Keeping all those plates spinning was going to be impossible. The team had lost ground and lost influence in the battle to reform cycling both financially and
ethically. They were no nearer to becoming the most admired sports team on earth.

They had won two Tour de France titles back to back within four years of becoming a team, a monumental achievement. The great smoking slag-heap of cycling’s decades of failure and mistrust
loomed over that monument, though. There is no public relations spin which will shift that dark mountain. It’s a job for shovels and backbone, a job that will take years.

Cycling’s problem has always been the search for something easier than getting the hands blistered by the shovel. There are no shortcuts and lots of backsliding on the road to reform.

It’s not certain that the job can ever be completed. Cycling on the old continent has its past but, more than that, there is an ambivalence to doping. I have read and re-read the thoughts
of Antoine Blondin – the late French novelist and sports columnist for
L’Équipe
– on how traditional fans of the sport respond to those who dope:

‘In a rider’s life there are moments and places where circumstances require that he transcend himself. Each struggles to face up to that obligation. As sports fans we prefer to dream
about angels on wheels, Simon Pures somehow immune to the uppers and downers of our own pill-popping society.

‘My own opinion is that there is, all the same, a certain nobility in those who have gone down into lord knows what hell in quest of the best of themselves. We might feel tempted to tell
them that they should not have done it. But we can remain, nevertheless, secretly proud of what they have done. Their wan, haggard looks are, for us, an offering.’

The new beginning, hopefully, is arriving. Maybe not quite ‘Once upon a time . . .’, but a consensus is forming. Doping is wrong and it will not be tolerated. Testing is better. Many
teams are ethical, and Sky certainly is part of this group. But there are dissenters, some of whom could be inside your tent, and while others take the long road to full reform, they still seek
shortcuts.

Team Sky have the appetite for success. That’s been proven.

Only time will tell if they have the hunger for anything beyond that.

Alarms don’t just ring in the morning.

It was a Thursday afternoon, late in September, three days before the World Championship Road Race in Tuscany, and the press agency report was nondescript in every respect but one. Jonathan
Tiernan-Locke, one of the Team Sky riders selected for Team GB for Sunday’s road race, had pulled out of the team and would be replaced by another Sky rider, Luke Rowe. According to the first
agency report, Tiernan-Locke’s withdrawal was for an ‘unspecified reason’.

Some PR person had messed up. Unspecified? That was a bit cryptic. Why unspecified? Unspecified to whom? By whom? He wasn’t a footballer who had played badly in a training five-a-side or
strained his groin the day before the game. He wasn’t Lord Lucan, he hadn’t just vanished. After a few hours there would be a corrective update, some hidden hand trying to erase
suspicion. Tiernan-Locke had pulled out because he wasn’t riding well enough to help Chris Froome win the rainbow jersey of world champion. The rider posted a tweet.

‘Was sorry I had to withdraw from the worlds line up, just don’t have the form to help the lads there. Good luck to team GB though.’

Hmmm. Too late. The alarm had sounded. You can’t unring that bell.

This new version was just about plausible because Tiernan-Locke had endured a terrible first season with Team Sky. Within the team his name was rarely mentioned. Like the aunt hidden away in the
attic, no one let on he was part of the family. But why hadn’t this poor form been mentioned in the first instance? He didn’t lose his form after learning of his selection. He never had
it. Why did Tiernan-Locke wait until so late in the day to decide that this poor form, which had coloured his entire season, meant he wouldn’t be able to do himself justice in Tuscany?
Unspecified. That was the word of the day. The petard upon which the PR exercise was hoisted.

That Thursday evening I was in London speaking with a group of cycling fans, mostly corporate guys working in the City. Three of them in turn asked about Tiernan-Locke and the unspecified reason
for his withdrawal from Team GB. They thought something was up. As the Inspector Clouseau of cycling, I felt I should have had an answer for them. I didn’t, but at least mine wasn’t the
only suspicious mind. The more I thought about it, the more I sensed that this smelt more fishy than an anchovy’s armpit.

Next day I rang Dave Brailsford. He was in Tuscany. He didn’t pick up. Slight relief for me, as this was going to be a tough call. I left a message saying there was something I needed to
check. I knew things would have been fraught in Italy with the Cookson/McQuaid shootout cum election going down the following day and the ongoing Froome/Wiggins peace process still at a delicate
stage, but it was still unusual for Brailsford not to return the call.

Time spent on the Armstrong case had led to relationships with people committed to anti-doping. People with the inside track. Drugs wonks. Deep Throats. They continue to be helpful. Calls are
picked up. Questions are answered.

Curiouser and curiouser, as we often say while exploring the shady wonderland of doping. I called people in other teams, sources close to the dark heart of the Union Cycliste Internationale
(UCI) and people involved in the anti-doping movement. There
was
a story behind Tiernan-Locke’s withdrawal.

According to one source, the rider had been sent a letter by the UCI asking him to explain an irregularity in his biological passport. Another source simply knew that a Team Sky rider had some
kind of issue related to a discrepancy in his biological passport. Some anti-doping people feared the case was being used as a political tool in the UCI presidential election.
³

Here’s what I put together.

Earlier that week a letter had been sent from the UCI’s headquarters in Aigle, Switzerland, to Tiernan-Locke. Because he had ridden in a lower-tier continental team, Endura, he had not
been part of the biological passport system for most of 2012. This changed after he won the Tour of Britain in September, when it was public knowledge he would ride with Team Sky in 2013.