Inside Team Sky (19 page)

‘
Allez le Pelvis!
’ he says. ‘
Allez le Pelvis.
You know? Geraint Thomas.’

Old friends. Lots of old stories. Characters. He looks forward to that part of the day, listening, getting the inside stuff. That’s why he ran away with the circus. But he never forgets
that however close he feels to those who come to lie on his massage table, he doesn’t work for one member of the team. Not for Team Le Pelvis. Not for Team Wiggins. Not for any rider. It is
Team Sky who employ him.

This lies at the heart of what is bothering Mario as the Tour snakes its way from Brittany towards Mont Ventoux and the Alps. Suddenly his mood isn’t as cheerful as it has been and on
different evenings, he is seen having heart-to-heart conversations with Dave Brailsford in the hotel. He is concerned that David Rozman, the carer who has been looking after Chris Froome, is
spending so much time with Froome that he struggles with his other chores.

One of the Slovenians in the team, Rozman is good at his job and has worked closely with Froome for some time. Much earlier in the year, when Rozman’s partner delivered their child,
Christian was going to be the name if it was a boy. But that changed in the moments after the birth when David understood he wanted to name the boy Chris after a guy he considered a great athlete
and an even better person.

Mario, though, feels Rozman has temporarily lost sight of who he works for. ‘When you are a father, there is one favourite child. You will not say this, but you cannot hide it. But you
don’t need this to take away the stuff for the rest of the children. You need to give one hundred per cent for everybody and one hundred and one per cent for your favourite. Until now, we
understand this.

‘But if you give one hundred and eighty-one per cent to one person and just nineteen to the rest of your children, that’s not right. If that happens, the rest of the carers need to
cover for the eighty-one per cent you forgot, while you were giving so much to just one rider.

‘At the Giro d’Italia, you never see me come to dinner one and a half hours late because I was spending one and a half hours more with Wiggins. You never see me not carrying all the
other suitcases because I’m taking just his suitcase from the room. You never see me walk straight to him when everybody else is around. You see, at the Giro I was in the same position as
David Rozman.

‘When everybody else is around, I treat Brad same as everyone else. When we were just me and him, I give him five per cent more. I think if David Rozman speak with the rest of the carers
and say, “Guys, I need your help because Chris is the strongest one and we need to support him more and how can we do this without damaging the other eight guys?” that would have been
the right way.

‘But he spoke with the management and tried to cut out the other four guys [carers] and that wasn’t the right way. The carer must remember that his mistake might help the rider to
lose the race but he cannot do anything to make him win it. When they win, it is by their performance, not ours.’

Brailsford listens when Mario says something isn’t quite right. They’ve been together since the start and there is mutual trust. When Sky sent Mario his first contract, he called
Brailsford and said, ‘The salary is wrong. What we agreed was in euros, but in the contract you’re paying me this amount in sterling. It’s too much.’

‘Mario,’ said his boss, ‘you deserve what we’re giving you.’

When a stage finishes, the hierarchy of the peloton is never felt more keenly. There are media and podiums and doping control for some. For others a wait on the bus until it is
time to move. With Froome leading the race and needing to do podium, press conference and anti-doping, he gets caught up in so much protocol that the bus cannot wait for him. A car will take him to
the hotel half an hour or so after the bus.

Team Sky handle all this stuff pretty much as they deal with all detail. They see what can be got out of it. It bothered head of performance Tim Kerrison that Froome had to do so much after the
stage ended. So they timed him from the moment the race ended to the moment he got in the car waiting to take him to the team hotel. It came in at forty minutes.

That showed Kerrison it was pointless for Froome to warm down when he got back. But Sky’s way is to find a solution and so a warm-down bike was positioned right at the finish for Froome.
And so the warm-down came before the podium, press conference and anti-doping. Sky was first to initiate warm-downs, a development so obvious that you wonder about the collective wisdom that went
into a century of cycling before that.

Mario likes the attention to detail. Water? Well, Mario would like it fresh and cold if he was riding these white hot roads, but too much ice on the drink is dangerous. There has to be sugar for
energy and of course it shouldn’t be too warm either because some riders just like to pour it over their heads.

The
soigneurs
make up two bottles. One is filled with a special drink made by British Cycling nutrition management. It is full of electrolytes and some carbohydrate, and given a neutral
taste. This bottle is denoted by an ‘x’. Not too much isotonic reaction, says Mario, because that can be hard to digest and there is a risk of diarrhoea and, well, there are those
sheets to maintain . . .

The other is a bottle of water. But some riders have their own favourite drink as a mid-race treat. Some want protein shakes, and Mario lets them choose between strawberry, vanilla or banana. A
key thing for Sky is their own drink, a special hydration tipple, which riders get as soon as they step onto the bus.

The
musettes
handed out to riders at feed stations during the race have as much thought in them as food. Tart with jam or some baguette, and rice cakes which the team prepares in the
hotel the day before they get used so that they can have a twelve-hour setting in the fridge.

When a stage is climaxing you will always be able to find a man somewhere nearby making rice cakes for the next day. Detail, detail, detail. Give them a little flavour. Some soft cheese, agave,
special nectar or honey. Maybe a little chocolate or chestnut jam. The feedback is good. The rice cakes get wrapped in special paper, not aluminium foil (the horror!), a softer wrapping so that
riders don’t cut their lips trying to open them as they ride.

That’s the life. With the team, parallel to the team. For the team.

Mario has a son. Christian is three years old.

How does he feel about the possibility of Christian going into cycling?

‘Yes. I can suggest him into this sport,’ he says. ‘But, he likes the food a lot, the only problem! A grandmother always say, they say the boy looks really skinny but
he’s, already . . .’

As big as Richie Porte?

‘No, I don’t want to say, I don’t want to say this, Richie’s really professional guy. No, I mean he’s a really good Italian, he likes eating well, you
know?’

He also has a wife, Tiziana. He travelled the world meeting women and ended up marrying the girl he went to primary school with and he couldn’t be happier. Sometimes she nudges him and
asks if they might move. Somewhere more exciting, somewhere a little nearer the team’s new base in Nice.

The Côte d’Azur has much to recommend it but it’s not for Mario. ‘If you found a place where you drink amazing coffee espresso in the morning, sixty cent [as it is
Pietragalla], then we move there.’

He is satisfied with what he’s made of his life.

‘Because when I go to sleep, I sleep on seven pillows. Like in Italy, they say when you have nothing wrong in your life, they say that you sleep on the seven pillows. Like, “Aahhh no
problem.” I haven’t done anything wrong, nothing can talk bad about me.’

I’ve come to know Mario. I understand why Dave Brailsford wanted him in the team three years before he got the team on the road. Mario’s important, a keeper of high standards and
good morale. He can be like this because he was nurtured by a good man. Canio Pafundi.

Seven days into the Tour, I ask Mario to take me with him on the 200km journey to the next hotel, that I want him to tell me about Canio. And to tell me what happened when he came to that fork
in the road that offered him a choice: this way one year as a lion; that way twenty years as a rabbit?

We are alone, the road disappearing beneath our wheels, the distance that separates us diminishing with each mile.

‘Mario,’ I say, ‘you speak well of your father?’

‘The car was the best place for us to speak. In the car together we would speak about important things.’

He recalls telling Canio about Tiziana when he knew she was the girl for him. He’d known her from their days in the village primary school at Pietragalla. Then he’d left for Turin at
fifteen, travelled round the world with cycling teams, met the most beautiful women, there was a Swedish woman, an Australian, good times, but not what he wanted.

‘You know you go all the world looking for something, you feel you have it but you don’t know where you put it. Then you see you’ve left it in the most obvious place. The women
I met, they helped me, but it’s only when I arrive back where I start that I find it. Tiziana is a fantastic, amazing girl.’

He told all this to Canio, who spoke solemnly to him.

‘Mario, you can play your game with whoever you want but if you play the games with this girl, from our village, where we all know our story, it is different. The distance between you and
Sweden or Australia is great, the difference between you and the other side of the street is nothing. Whatever happens between you and Tiziana will affect your parents and your brothers and her
parents, and all our families.’

Mario never listened to anyone else as he did to Canio because his advice was never wrong and his support was unwavering. ‘When I was a little boy, he told me I had two parents, I would
never have any more. I had two brothers, never any more. If you don’t like each other, you will still be brothers.

‘He grew us up. He never touch any of us with his hand, he always try to teach us. All three of us, no one ever smoked, no one drank, no one got in trouble with the police, no one ever did
anything very wrong.’

Mario became a professional bike rider in 1999, the year of Lance Armstrong’s first Tour de France victory and a time when most riders wouldn’t go to the start without EPO coursing
through their veins. But Mario decided against eating that mushroom and turning into Super Mario.

‘Ah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But, you know that I think, my private opinion, it’s not private, it’s just a legal one. Maybe at the height of it the UCI, they chose a haematocrit
limit of fifty. It was like you can steal, but you can steal just five thousand euro. But your mum and dad they say since you was young, you are not allowed to steal anything. Anything! A lollipop
. . . you are not allowed to steal. If I say I have stolen the lollipop, my dad say, “Yes, but it doesn’t matter, you have stolen.” Yeah but it was just a Haribo.
“Doesn’t matter, you have stolen.”

‘That was the principle they put on me. They say you have a surname and you have family, our little village are so proud about you. They tell me I can live one year like lion? Or twenty
years like rabbit? It’s just a choice. I have lived twenty years like a rabbit but I have stolen nothing.

‘In 2010, Team Sky want everyone in the team to sign this paper, saying you have nothing to do with banned substance, that you never helped anybody to do something. I say, “Why not,
this is no problem for me.” And then last year, in October, they say you must sign this paper again. Nothing to do with doping. Easy for me, I sign.

‘And I realise, three years after he passed over, my father has given me the best thing.’

And so Mario continues to realise that the values Canio and his mother imbued in him were the right ones. The decision to quit racing rather than dope has meant that, over a decade later and
three years after Canio’s death, Mario can sign up to Sky’s zero-tolerance policy with a clean conscience. If he had lived one year like a lion, Mario would not be lead carer for Team
Sky right now. The decision to live twenty years like a rabbit proves itself once again.

Canio Pafundi was a carpenter, ‘ . . . like Giuseppe,’ says Mario. Towards the end he developed an allergy to wood dust and then got sick. It almost broke his son’s heart. When
it seemed sure that Canio wouldn’t pull through, Mario told him he would be lost.

‘When I see he is going to pass over, I said to him, “How can I do this, you need to still teach me. Without you, I don’t know anything. Every time you’ve given me a nice
advice. Every time I did the wrong thing, you tell me, “Okay, you did this mistake, but you now try to sort it out. We can find the solution.””

‘And you know what he tell me? He said, “I always thinking it’s much better for a child to lose a parent than for the parents to lose their children.” He passed over two
days later and this was the last advice he gave me, to help me through this difficult moment. Some of my friends and family have lost a child, and I say, “Fuck, I am lucky.”

‘After he passed over, everybody talks about him and I learn it was not because he was my dad but because he was the right person.’

After Christian was born, Tiziana said something Mario has never forgotten. ‘If this little boy loves you half as much as you loved your father, you will be a very lucky man.’

And Mario knows, he would be.

I’m taking the back stairs in the team hotel one night and I meet the leader of the Tour de France hiking the same route. I suspect he does this sort of thing a lot.
David Brailsford sometimes describes himself as a loner but he is an outgoing, gregarious loner. Chris Froome is more in the traditional mould. The dizziness and giddiness which come with the Tour
circus don’t appeal to him.