Inside Team Sky (2 page)

From 212 I look down on the car park in front of the hotel and admire the matter-of-fact cycling people go about their work. Bikes are checked, cars washed and, because I haven’t seen some
of these guys for five weeks, I wander down their way.

‘Did you see last night’s game, Spain and Italy?’ David Fernandez, the mechanic asks.

‘No,’ I admit.

‘Spain won seven-six on penalties, Jesus Navas got the winning penalty, the one who’s going to Manchester City.’

There is general agreement that the mechanics and
soigneurs
work longer hours than everyone else in the team. For the mechanics, the Tour is a particular challenge as the riders all get
new bikes for the race and they have to be set up exactly how each guy wants it.

For the Tour each rider has three road bikes and two time trial bikes, except Chris Froome and Richie Porte who have three road, two time trial and one other bike that is especially light and
the one they will use in the mountains. That’s forty-seven bikes and regardless of which mechanic gets a bike ready and passes it fit for racing, lead mechanic Gary Blem will then examine it
and give it the second and final ‘Okay.’

It is 7.30 on this beautiful Corsican evening when Brailsford returns from somewhere. Since I’ve been around the team he has been consistently friendly, helpful, at times disarmingly
honest, and always interesting. The courtesies extended by the staff are in part a reflection of their respect for Brailsford. It was, after all, the boss’s idea, so they all more or less
bought into it.

We meet in the car park. Something’s playing on his mind. There had been a press conference that afternoon and it hadn’t passed smoothly. Now, a few hours later, he’s gently
shaking his head as if by doing so he can clear it.

‘How did the press thing go?’

‘It was all right, except for Paul’s question.’ Paul Kimmage is one of my closest friends and three years previously he was in my exact position, all ready to travel with Team
Sky on the Tour de France. The Kimmage/Team Sky marriage didn’t survive the honeymoon. Kimmage’s take on the divorce was straightforward. Brailsford had offered full access to the team
but when he started to ask tough questions, they didn’t like it.

Brailsford says he was deeply embarrassed by the way things turned out because he had given an undertaking that he couldn’t honour. According to him, Kimmage rubbed people up the wrong way
and they came to Brailsford with their objections. Part of the difficulty was that, while the team’s policy precluded the employment of any rider or staff member with a doping past, not every
rider or staff member was going to be comfortable with the kind of scrutiny that Kimmage wished to exercise.

Feeling that Kimmage’s presence would negatively impact on the team performance, Brailsford withdrew the offer. Kimmage was furious. Their relationship never recovered.

‘What did he ask you?’

‘Towards the end, he asked a question about Eddie [Team Sky rider Edvald Boasson Hagen]. He said something like, “A few years ago Edvald was being spoken of as the next Eddy Merckx,
why is he then not a contender here?” I expected Paul would ask a doping question and wasn’t sure I’d heard correctly. So I repeated Paul’s question back to him, saying
“Are you asking why Edvald is not a contender here?” He said “Yes.” He asked the question quietly but I still thought it was incredibly insulting to Edvald.

‘He’s a young guy, he’s sitting there in front of hundreds of journalists and he’s being made to look like he’s some kind of failure. If the circumstances had been
different, it would have been a fair question. Say Paul was interviewing me, one on one, or he was at a press conference where Tim Kerrison and I were being quizzed about the team performance, that
question would have been fine.

‘It’s one we’ve discussed many times within the team. Eddie’s a bit of a conundrum. He started really well within the team, then didn’t progress as much as we
expected but we feel like we’re beginning to understand him better. Last year he didn’t have a brilliant first half to the season, but rode really well at the Tour and finished second
at the World Championships.

‘This season it’s been the same. Okay in the first half of the season but he’s improved as he did last year and comes into this race on very good form. He’s a very
important member of the team and a really popular guy with the other riders. You could feel the other riders bristle when Paul asked that question because they would have felt it was disrespectful
to Eddie. I thought it was too, and I just said, “You have your opinions and you’re entitled to them and I have mine.”

‘In terms of world ranking points, Eddie is twelfth. He’s a very good rider and I just wanted to lean over towards him when Paul asked that question and say, “Don’t pay
any attention to this, Eddie, this isn’t about you, this is about this guy getting at me and getting at the team.” In that setting, I thought it was a cheap shot and I can understand
why the riders were pissed.’

I find myself in the unusual position of hearing about a small journalist/manager contretemps but from the point of view of the latter. Boasson Hagen thought the question slightly unfair but
wasn’t bothered by it. Laid back and ultra calm by nature, it would take more than that to ruffle his Norwegian feathers.

‘After you gave Paul the answer about your opinion differing from his, I presume you then defended Edvald?’ I say, suspecting that in his anger at Kimmage he’d not done
this.

He looks at me silently, confirmation of what I’d imagined.

Through years of success with the Team GB track cycling team, and more recently with Team Sky, Brailsford regularly lauded the influence of forensic psychiatrist Steve Peters who worked with him
and a high percentage of the athletes who passed through the GB system. One important Peters contribution was his ‘chimp model’ analysis, that both athletes’ and managers’
performances diminished when actions were inspired by the irrational side of their personalities. The ‘chimp’ is essentially an emotional machine that behaves independently of us. It is
neither good nor bad. It competes with our ‘computer’, the logical and calculating side of our character, and if left to dominate can result in bad decision making. We are not
responsible for the nature of our chimp but we are responsible for managing them. If you understand that part of your own brain, the part that reacts emotionally rather than logically, you will be
more effective.

It is a concept that has been embraced by Team Sky’s management, and within the team different individuals talk about the chimp and the need to keep it in its place. Brailsford is an avid
believer, or at least he was until Kimmage asked that question. Then it was over to you, Mr Chimp, you tell Kimmage what you think of him.

In 2012 Dave Brailsford felt his chimp straining at the leash a lot of the time on the Tour. He was taken aback at the ferocity of the questioning his team faced on the doping issue and this
year he had assumed that the issue would have faded away.

‘Last year it seemed full on, and I had never been exposed to that level of aggression. I couldn’t get my head around how unjust it was, and this time last year I felt just rotten. I
felt terrible for Tim [Kerrison] who I had persuaded to come into this sport.’

Dave Brailsford is not often wrong, but on this assumption he was. Nothing had faded away. His antagonism towards Paul Kimmage’s edgy but not particularly disrespectful question at the
pre-race press conference showed his chimp had made the journey to Corsica. It is remarkable a man so bright can so easily lose his ability to be rational and do what is best for the team.

As the Tour unfolds there will be press conferences far more hostile than that opening salvo on the cruise ferry. And Brailsford knows he will have to do better.

By now Brailsford is sitting on the low shelf that runs across the back of the camper van, SKY 18. He senses he’s made a bad start to his media performance at the Tour
and though he barely shows the disappointment, it is there.

Rod Ellingworth, the team’s performance manager, comes to where we’re talking. Affable, enthusiastic, an outstanding planner. He has been for a walk and arrives with beads of sweat.
Most mornings Brailsford and Kerrison, and general facilitator Dario Cioni will rise around six and be out on their bikes before seven. A former bike rider, Ellingworth has previously said he
wouldn’t be comfortable disappearing at that time in the morning, preferring instead to hang about, breakfasting with the carers and mechanics, available to anyone with a problem he can help
solve.

Empathy comes easily to him and underpins his role within the team. A lot of the staff find it easy to relate to him, and him to them, and as well as his people skills he is a master planner.
Quickly picking up on the fact that Brailsford isn’t his usual self, Ellingworth makes a little small talk and soon carries on to the hotel.

Chris Haynes walks from the hotel, as quietly and as unobtrusively as he does most things in life. He is softy spoken, polite, gentle even, and you wonder how he was ever persuaded to head up
Team Sky’s media operation. His day job is in London with the ultra-successful Sky Sports television channels, where he is head of media and, though he consulted with and offered guidance to
Team Sky, it was never more than an adjunct to his primary role.

Bradley Wiggins and a moment of breathtaking madness changed that. After the finish of the eighth stage of the 2012 Tour, Wiggins was asked in a press conference what he had to say to critics on
Twitter who publicly accused him of doping. Perhaps the journalist asking the question didn’t realise it, but this was one question guaranteed to evoke a vitriolic response from Wiggins.

Two months before he’d won the Tour de Romandie but soon after, while recovering with his family, he’d gone on Twitter and was sickened by what he read. A lot of people, mostly under
the cover of their anonymous Twitter names, accused him of doping. For all the cool, Wiggins needs to be respected, even loved, and he couldn’t just dismiss those accusing him as people who
didn’t know what they were talking about.

Instead he looked at himself as others were looking at him: dominant cyclist who wins time trials and occasional sprints, who stays with the best climbers in the mountains, yeah, he could see
why there were suspicions. He thought it would be better if he didn’t win his next race, the Dauphiné Libéré, as another victory would only make things worse. He worried
what winning the Tour de France would do to his reputation. He told his wife Cath that he didn’t want to win the Tour.

Shane Sutton, the mate and Team GB coach who wasn’t afraid to stand up to him, told Wiggins to ignore the accusers. He said he wasn’t able to do that. Tim Kerrison told him to accept
that he was going to get this kind of criticism. He stopped checking Twitter, tried to put it out of his mind, but it lay there, in a quiet corner, waiting to be roused.

So the question comes at him like a grenade. He catches, pulls the pin, and flings it back into the crowd.

‘I say they’re just fucking wankers. I cannot be doing with people like that. It justifies their own bone-idleness because they can’t ever imagine applying themselves to doing
anything in their lives. It’s easy for them to sit under a pseudonym on Twitter and write that sort of shit, rather than get off their arses in their own lives and apply themselves and work
hard at something and achieve something. And that’s ultimately it. Cunts.’

To get ‘fucking’, ‘wankers’, ‘shit’, ‘arses’ and ‘cunts’ in one answer must be a record, possibly even more rare than winning
Paris–Nice, Tour de Romandie, Dauphiné Libéré, Tour de France, and an Olympic gold medal in the same season, as Wiggins did. You could rightly argue about how he
expressed his frustration, but if he was clean, as he insisted he was, then it was easy to understand what drove him to say exactly what was on his mind, and in exactly the way he wanted to say
it.

Back at BSkyB’s headquarters, the corporate bosses may have empathised with the sentiments but they wouldn’t have liked the expletives. Wiggins’s targets could have been Sky
subscribers! Chris Haynes was on the next plane to France. Wiggins once said, ‘I’m not a well-trained corporate dream.’ That much was apparent when he made the air turn blue in
the small Swiss town of Porrentruy.

Haynes, though, is a paragon of reasonableness and it is difficult not to agree with most of what he says. Before he took his place in the front line at Team Sky there had been accusations of
Team Sky trying to influence what was asked at press conferences. They’d ask journalists not to ask about such-and-such doping case because there was always the fear that Wiggins or Cavendish
might react badly.

That desire to control the agenda irritated journalists and offered another reason to any journalist inclined to dislike the team. Of which there were plenty.

Haynes came with a more grown-up attitude, extolling the virtues of openness and encouraging the riders to see doping questions as inevitable and understandable. He reminded Wiggins that his
knowledge of, and appreciation for, cycling’s history was something that would endear him to fans of the sport, especially to continental Europeans. By the end Wiggins was in his element
speaking with reporters, eloquent and utterly engaging, maybe even almost a ‘well-trained corporate dream’.

The improvement changed Haynes’s life, as he was seconded from BSkyB to Team Sky and he now divides his time between both. We ran together one morning during the Giro d’Italia, up a
hill from our Italian hotel, round a few corners, then down a long straight road and past an unmanned border crossing and into Slovenia. Alas, we didn’t have the stamina to reach Marko
Dzalo’s home town.

That morning Chris spoke a lot about his son who was about to go to his first Tottenham Hotspur game without an adult and Chris was both excited and nervous about this rite of passage
experience. A few days before he had been speaking about his family and told me that although the boy was from his partner’s previous relationship, he loved him as if he was his own son.