Inside Team Sky (37 page)
Authors: David Walsh
I met the people. With great respect to the man, the team doctor Alan Farrell is almost entirely tone deaf when it comes to the tragic opera of cheating. It’s not his music, nor his world.
If Team Sky are doping as alleged, there would have to be a medical team hiding behind the curtains. Nobody could spend five minutes speaking with Alan Farrell and then start dropping hints about
needing a little Edgar Allan (as Lance’s confederates called EPO). Farrell would need the request spelled out to him in large letters, delivered in triplicate with the correct documentation,
and then there would be a good chance that he would convulse with anger before bringing the story to Brailsford.
Ellingworth? Central casting couldn’t create a more old-style cycling man. You see the disappointment which almost smothers him like a smog when a rider does badly, when a rider quits or
when a rider fails to appreciate what a wonderful hand of cards his career is. You see that and you know that Rod isn’t designed for a world of lies and deceit. It would break him.
Tim Kerrison? To spend time with Kerrison is to encounter a savant who sees and understands the world of sport differently. He can lose himself in long paragraphs expressing his shy enthusiasm
about equations and figures and the science of performance. I spent many hours speaking to him or about him, looking for the darkness, wondering if he was the Svengali genius operating an
enterprise which I just couldn’t see. I found him to be a man so in love with and so convinced of the science of performance that the pollution of his mental database with fraudulent
statistics would break his heart.
And Brailsford? There is no doubt that he is an operator. No man could build the empire that is Team Sky without knowing how to duck and dive a little. But he is astonishingly open. As a
journalist I felt able to ask him just about anything. We had discussions which ranged from his life, to the world of cheating as he saw it, and on to the queries about Geert Leinders and Jonathan
Tiernan-Locke. With respect to the privacy of some of the people we spoke about, there were things he couldn’t or wouldn’t say, but he is a man who puts his hands up when he makes a
mistake (and he would allow you to enter several big mistakes on the balance sheet), and also a man fascinated by the challenge of doing things properly and being seen to do things properly. He
isn’t just the brains behind Team Sky, he is the heartbeat at the team’s core.
He opened the doors to me and let me at it. He sat down with me and talked any time I needed him to. He picked up the phone, even when he knew what was coming and would have preferred not to. I
put things to him which might have hurt him or offended him. I could feel him wince, but he never ducked, and never danced away. He took his shots and kept on.
People see the bespoke Volvo buses and the Jaguar team cars, they laugh at the obsession with detail and sneer at Brailsford’s motivational buzz phrases. He knows that, but he believes in
what he is doing. He believes that cycling has permitted its philosophy on performance to be entirely coloured by drugs down through the decades. He is in love with the idea that there is a
different way and that he can be the man to chart that way. It’s ego, it’s the love of a challenge, it’s obsession.
I never found evidence pointing to any conclusion other than that, for Dave Brailsford, cheating would diminish the fun and the sense of achievement. Had he reached the South Pole in a hot-air
balloon, Roald Amundsen wouldn’t have truly enjoyed his return to Norway. Brailsford cheating his way to the top would know the same emptiness.
For 2014 Team Sky’s story will keep unfolding in interesting ways. It is a tall order for them to hope to become more successful and also more loved and trusted. Narrowing the fissure
between Bradley Wiggins and Chris Froome just got a lot more interesting with the announcement of the route for the 2014 Tour de France. The second last stage is a 54km time trial, an immense test
of riders after three weeks of hard riding. A guy like Wiggins will know that on his best form he could do a minute’s worth of damage there. But as the penultimate stage, Wiggins could
conceivably have his go at winning the Tour without even endangering the team. He could come along as a
domestique
and, as long as he were in touching distance coming into the time trial,
could take his leadership rather than wait for it to be awarded. Will the thought tempt him, on the iciest days of winter, to slip on the earphones and churn out the wattage in that shed at the end
of his garden? And will the thought that he might be help to determine how Froome spends his own winter?
Of the young riders in Team Sky’s enviable roster, everybody will look forward to watching the progress of one or two. Josh Edmondson from Leeds impressed in 2013. His attitude, his
application, his willingness to learn – those things and his natural climbing talent were commented on again and again. He trains a lot with Yorkshire’s greatest heroes, the Brownlee
boys, and if he can live with them . . .
The same with Joe Dombrowski, who improved no end as 2013 wore on. For a kid coming from America to settle in the south of France, a good first year was a big ask. Before the season began, we
spoke in Mallorca and I didn’t have to put my finger behind his ear to feel the wetness. So it took him time but by the end of the season, everyone knew. The kid could climb. If he hits the
rising ground running in 2014, watch him soar.
Sky still yearn for credibility in the classics. Gabriel Rasch, a Norwegian, will ride the classics next year and ease into his apprenticeship as a
directeur sportif
with the team.
Catch them young and they will fly. His compatriot Edvald Boasson Hagen will be looking to improve on 2013, a year which brought more curses than blessings. Everyone loves Eddy so much it’s
hard to tell him he should be doing better.
The story I tried to cover, it rolls onward like a long mountain stage; at times it will be gruelling, at times spectacular. With every steep incline, though, Team Sky will learn something and
the higher the altitude the more interesting they will become. There will be those who doubt them and those who stand on the side of the road shouting abuse. There will be very few people, though,
who won’t watch with interest and, in time, I hope, with respect. You can’t live and breathe with Team Sky on the road without knowing that something different this way comes.
I recall the team having a celebratory drink in Annecy the evening before the ceremonial final stage to Paris and Tim Kerrison mentioned he was on his way back to the team’s base in Nice
that night.
‘You’ll come to Paris tomorrow morning,’ I said, ‘to see the first night-time finish on the Champs-Elysées?’
‘I’ll come to Paris in the late afternoon,’ he replied. ‘Some of our other riders, guys who didn’t make the Tour team, are doing a training ride up the Col de la
Madone in the morning and I’d like to be with them for that.’
‘Wow,’ I thought.
That enthusiasm, that dedication, that madness will be enough to keep me watching and hoping that the team’s influence in terms of integrity, openness and willingness to learn proves to be
contagious in the bleak post-Lance winter.
On the fourth day of the 2013 Tour de France, Team Sky’s
directeur sportif
Nico Portal drove the number one race car into Boulevard Jean Jaures in Nice. And then
noticed he had a flat tyre. Front right.
Merde!
With the importance and imminence of the team time trial, Portal had much on his mind and hadn’t bargained for having to change a
wheel. The bike mechanics couldn’t help. They were checking and re-checking nine time-trial bikes about to be used for the first time.
No one panicked.
Sky’s performance manager Rod Ellingworth told Portal to just concentrate on the team’s race against the clock. The puncture would be taken care of. Ellingworth has never worn
sleeves that weren’t rolled up, and in a flash the bus driver Claudio Lucchini saw what was needed and was at Ellingworth’s side. They laughed as they got to work, cursing the law that
makes it compulsory for the spare to be a uselessly thin wheel designed to take you no further than the next garage.
So they removed the punctured wheel, took a proper wheel off the nearby carers’ car, put the short-term spare onto that vehicle and then bolted the good wheel onto Portal’s car. They
worked like beavers, Ellingworth the performance manager and Lucchini the bus driver. Their twenty minutes of doubling up as mechanics reflected what it was that made being around Team Sky so much
fun.
They dig in. They do the long hours. They don’t complain. Team doctor Alan Farrell packs away the poles used to create the cordoned-off area for the riders by the bus. Operations manager
Carsten Jeppesen stands by the roadside and hands out food and drink to the riders. More than that, they were okay about allowing a non-contributing stranger into their world and they made sure I
didn’t feel unwanted.
For their welcome and their company and their help, for helping me to believe again in professional cycling I thank each and every one of them.
In part this book is a tribute to their work.
There are others, too, that are entitled to feel a stake in this book. As has always been his way, my sports editor at the
Sunday Times
, Alex Butler, has been supportive. I know
I’m running low on credit. And there’s my remarkably patient editor at Simon & Schuster, Ian Marshall. We go back some way and I don’t think it’s stretching things to
say that from me he’s learnt patience. If you wait long enough, it arrives.
Speaking of patience, I am indebted to my family for whom, too often over the last twelve months, I have been a ship passing in the night. But whenever I get home, they are still there. Thank
you. And the next twelve months will be better.
In the course of writing this book, I had the good fortune to begin a working relationship with Connor Schwartz, a close friend of our youngest son Conor. At first I asked if he could do some
transcribing. Quick and accurate with his transcriptions, he was soon editing. Chapter after chapter, everything he touched he improved.
He’s only a kid out of university, but I tell you the country’s future is in good hands.
1
By the end of 2012 de Jongh would have moved on from Team Sky in difficult circumstances too. He elaborated on his career in an open
letter which included the passages:
My doping was done by me, and nobody ever forced me. Of course, I always knew it was wrong and was scared of the risks I was taking. And I will always regret what I did.
I took EPO on a few occasions from 1998 to 2000. It was very easy to get hold of and I knew it couldn't be detected. I was a fairly young rider, the opportunity was there right in front of
me and it was a pretty big challenge to stay away from the temptation. There was no pressure at all from my team, the Directors or the Doctors to take it. This was my choice.
2
The pride and eagerness with which G Thomas foisted the X-ray of his pelvic fracture upon anyone and everyone quickly became a running
joke within the team. Some claimed to have seen the photo many times and were still getting accosted by Thomas most mornings: ‘Have you seen my X-ray? Look, there’s my fractured
pelvis.’ Of course, the frequency of these was soon more than doubled by the other riders’ mickey taking and sarcasm: ‘Hey G, how’s your pelvis? I heard you might have a
picture of it on your phone. That sounds really interesting, can I have a look?’ Thomas could take the ribbing and return it with interest.
3
The thinking was that as Jonathan Tiernan-Locke was a British cyclist riding for a British team, an anti-doping case against him would
destroy the notion that Brian Cookson came from a country (GB) with no link to cycling’s doping culture. The sources said ‘political tool’. They meant ‘ice pick to
Cookson’s skull’.