Inside Team Sky (15 page)

Sky had to chase Quintana, spend a lot of energy in the process and they would then be vulnerable on the final climb. It was a shocking miscalculation by Movistar because Quintana was much
stronger than Valverde and, before the Tour would end, he would show he was easily the second best rider in the race. Not bad for a man being used by his own team as cannon fodder.

In Team Sky they fret a little that this long stage race is too much too young for Kennaugh. I don’t think anybody dares say that to the face of the Isle of Man rider. He’s saucy and
tough and does a brilliant ride to the top of Pailhères. On the descent he gives life to the expression ‘poetry in motion’ and Froome is comfortable taking his teammate’s
lines into every corner.

Quintana had a minute at the top of Pailhères. Thirty seconds after the descent.

As a postscript, Kennaugh rode at lunatic pace into the final 7.8km climb to Ax 3 Domaines. He was astonishing, almost comical to watch in his fury. He paid the price, dropping away with 6km
left, but his work was done.

As planned, that left Richie Porte to pace his friend and roommate Froome. Porte grew up riding the Sideling, a famous climb in Tasmania, and he looked comfortable here at the other end of the
world as the two Sky boys reeled Quintana in.

Just the finish left to execute. Froome, relatively fresh, took a look around and surveyed the state of his competitors before striking off on his own for a win which hurt all his rivals.
Quintana and Contador lost 1'40", and he put more than four minutes of hopelessness into Cadel Evans. He reached the top 50 seconds before teammate Porte and, when the jerseys were re-allocated, he
had yellow.

Froome was the story of the day, but Kennaugh’s toughness on the descent of Pailhères is highlighted by another tale to which little attention is being paid.

The Pyrenees should have been the making of one Thibaut Pinot, France’s great climbing hope. He finished tenth on his Tour de France debut last year. Unfortunately, for a great climber,
Pinot finds there is one thing he can’t do. Come down again.

‘Some people are afraid of spiders or snakes. I’m afraid of speed. It’s a phobia.’

On Pailhères today when Pinot was separated from the yellow jersey group on the way down he lost six minutes.

Poor boy. Imagine the horrors to come.

Sunday, 7 July

The horrors came.

Mainly for Dave Brailsford.

On the other hand, if Team Sky wanted to send out a message about the ethical nature of their work they could hardly have done better than today. Chris Froome had breakfast with his team and
then scarcely saw them again until they reconvened for dinner twelve hours later. ‘Hey, guys, what’ve you been doing today?’

Guys like Porte, Kennaugh and Vasil Kiryienka, who all did shifts at the coalface yesterday, might have been forgiven more moderate performances today, but no one at Team Sky could have been
persuaded it was possible for their team to collapse quite as it did.

Consider the basis on which the team was picked: Porte, Kennaugh, Kiryienka, G Thomas, David López and Kosta Siutsou were selected because they should all be able to help Froome in the
mountains. But, today, they didn’t have it. Just not there. There could be good reasons why two or three struggled, but all six?

If Team Sky are cheating, it seems like they are doing it with just one rider. Everybody else in the team should ask for a little of whatever Chris Froome’s having.

It was a gripping and engrossing stage in the Pyrenees that saw Kennaugh go down in an early crash, falling off his bike on the descent of the first climb, the Col de Portet-d’Aspet.
‘When he was down, we drove past him and didn’t even know he’d crashed. Luckily, Servais Knaven came in the second car and helped him,’ Brailsford said later. Kennaugh never
really recovered.

Porte, who looked so strong on Saturday as he helped Froome claim yellow, slipped badly off the pace and eventually finished long after the stage winner. Starting the day in second place in the
General Classification, the Tasmanian lost time on the first climb and continued to lose more time until business closed with him 18 minutes behind, the team having finally told him to cool it and
save his energy for what lay ahead. Kiryienka would have settled for that. Unfortunately he had tracked down a lot of early breaks and then run out of steam.

Kiryienka is a tough Belarusian. You suspect that Belarusians aren’t available in any other model than tough. I haven’t got to know him. Nor will I. This is Kiryienka’s first
year with the team and one glance at his lantern jaw suggests why he is here. He was hired to shovel coal into the furnace on hard days, and yet no rider in the team pedals with anything like
Kiryienka’s classily elegant body position.

He comes across as a serious and proud man. When he joined Team Sky they gave him a light-hearted questionnaire to fill out so that fans could get a flavour of him. Under ‘Interesting
Facts’ he recorded, ‘I have no special talents.’ Asked about his interests away from cycling he says earnestly ‘I’d like to have a role in the development of my
country. I am worried for the future of my children and my nation.’

He’ll get to see those children a little sooner now, but it won’t be a happy flight home. The Belarusian exceeded the time limit by one minute and was forced to abandon the race.
Kiryienka’s pride means that his loss is a serious blow. This evening at the Majestic hotel in La Baule, most of the talk is about him.

‘Kiry okay?’

‘Devastated. Feels he’s let people down.’

No one sees him depart and those who got to speak with him say that his eyes looked towards the ground. How could it happen? Why wasn’t the second team car behind Kiry? Encouraging him,
coaxing him? In the end, he only missed the cut by a minute. Shame.

While Team Sky struggled they had to watch Movistar doing a passable impression of themselves, pushing the tempo on the front of the bunch. They achieved the first leg of their master plan which
was to get rid of Porte and isolate Froome, but things got tougher after that.

Froome was part of a thirty-two-strong group which included most of the race favourites and, instead of bellyaching about his loneliness and isolation, the radio conversation with Nico Portal
revolved around improvisational tactics. (It was a characteristically classy touch of Froome’s when questioned afterwards about how he felt being alone in the group to point out that in fact
he wasn’t alone, he’d had Nico with him the whole way.)

You deal with the problem by reducing it in size. So Froome doesn’t have thirty-one rivals in that lead group, he has just three. He needed to keep the cuffs on the Movistar pair Valverde
and Nairo Quintana, and Alberto Contador of Saxo-Tinkoff.

The Movistar boys maintained a strong presence at the front of Froome’s group but couldn’t shake off Froome in the valleys. Valverde tried to break clear on the flatter valley roads
but Froome was on to him every time. Because he reacted decisively, Valverde got discouraged after the third or fourth attempt.

One final throw of the dice. They would try to bust him on the day’s final mountain climb.

Three times Quintana attacked. Three times Froome reeled him in.

Contador should then have been able to profit from the energy the race leader spent on the Movistars, but the Spaniard in the Saxo colours just didn’t have it. The favourites reached the
top of La Hourquette d’Ancizan together and though Garmin’s Dan Martin would escape with Jakob Fuglsang and beat him in a two-up sprint, that didn’t hurt Froome.

Afterwards Brailsford was thrilled with Froome’s tactical nous. A lot of time and energy at Team Sky has gone into teaching Chris Froome to be patient and discerning about his use of
energy.

‘When he was attacked on the flat, he had the wherewithal to go with Valverde; when Quintana went on the climb, he had the wherewithal to go with him; he knew he couldn’t let those
guys go. Then when Dan Martin and Fuglsang went, he knew to sit there with the other guys.’

In the end Dan Martin won the stage, clear from Fuglsang. The final 30km had been largely downhill and the leading pair got home 20 seconds in front of the bunch. That Froome was in the bunch
was enough to keep him in yellow.

Not a great day for Team Sky though; Brailsford had a lot to think about.

‘It was one of those days that was challenging, and the hammer blow if you like, the thing that made the day a lot worse was Kiryienka missing that cut-off time. The Pyrenees were a game
of two halves, you’ve come out in the first half, absolutely screaming and you’ve taken a two-nil lead. Then in the second half you’re a different team and you’ve taken a
mauling, you go down to nine men and you’ve still won the match two-nil. It felt like we just scraped through three-two, but the reality is it’s still two-nil. It felt like we had lost,
but we came out of the match having won. With Richie, it was the element of surprise. I don’t think any of us saw that [time loss] coming.’

Post-race? The match might have been won but there were many casualties, and Brailsford had a job on his hands.

‘We tend to leave them on their own, emotions are running high, you want to take information in calmly, react rationally, but that’s a very difficult thing to do just after
you’ve competed. I think that’s something we’ve taken off the track in British cycling, we let them do their warm-down, we leave them to it. Our urge as a management team is to
want to talk about it, most people cope with stressful situations by talking about it. But in reality it’s not the greatest thing to do from a rider’s perspective, we tend to leave
it.’

And what about Kiryienka? To have seen Geraint Thomas suffer an early injury in the Tour was unfortunate. To lose a second engine through being one minute outside of the cut might seem a little
careless. One of those casualties which can occur in the fog of war.

‘If you are the last car, and you have to go forward, what you say to one of the other teams is, “Just keep on the lads for me.” Back towards the end of the race on a mountain
day, you are not racing. You’re all just trying to survive. So if your guy gets a puncture, he will be given a wheel by one of the other teams. From what I gather, Kiryienka was dropped when
he was really struggling, and he came back again, and then I think Matt Goss might have been dropped and the Orica-GreenEDGE car was looking after him. And Kiryienka dropped out behind, then he was
gone, and nobody knew. There was no malice.’

Brailsford recognises that Kiryienka, being such a proud man, would never have said, ‘Look, I’m really struggling here.’

‘I think with hindsight, he should have said something because our guys would have dropped back and got him home within the time limit. On the other hand if somebody is literally walking
the bike up a hill, there’s no point in losing other riders.’

What did he find when he spoke with Kiryienka that evening?

‘You have to recognise how devastated he is, because he’s a proud guy. You could tell that he felt he let people down and in that situation you’ve got to reassure someone. He
didn’t do anything wrong, and he certainly didn’t do it deliberately. Get yourself home and get yourself right, there are moments where you can push people and moments where what the
person needs is one hundred per cent support. No matter what, you’ve got to put your arm around someone and say “Look, it’s going to be okay.”’

That was one of those moments.

The Tour is going into a rest day. Brailsford can leave his team to eat and think tonight but there are too many signs that Team Sky aren’t functioning as they did last summer. Tomorrow
will be about calming things down and putting together a rational review of the situation.

Team Sky do still have the yellow jersey. Things could be worse. They certainly are for Thibaut Pinot, the speed-fearing French racer. Today he lost another 25 minutes when he came in with the
gruppetto
and was in tears soon after the finish.

Speaking candidly to
L’Equipe
afterwards, the tachophobe said: ‘When I saw that I was not able to stay on the wheel of a rider like Mark Cavendish on the descent off a
mountain pass, I asked myself, “What am I doing on the Tour?” I received the clear response that I have nothing to do here.

‘This is a very sad situation for me, I’m the person who is most disappointed about it . . . I don’t know if I will be able to get over this trauma. During yesterday’s
stage my only objective was to survive. I don’t know if I will recover, but that’s life and that’s cycling.’

Pinot’s difficulties go back to a crash he suffered when he was younger, which has resulted in him being extremely tentative on descents. Imagine if he gets his head right. The time
improvements. The things which will be written. Death by the firing squad of social media. Commentators armed with anecdotes each expressed in 140 characters or fewer.

Monday, 8 July

Often on a Grand Tour Dave Brailsford arrives home fitter than when he left. He likes to get up early and hit the roads on his bike for about two hours.

This Monday morning though he has a management task. Not something that would get studied in an MBA class. Not a case-study from a text book. Eight riders whose heads are all over the place. One
leads the Tour, the other seven aren’t sure where they are. The ninth is going home. This Monday morning Dave Brailsford doesn’t go for his usual ride. He waits. Morning rides are
Brailsford’s little slice of sanity during the race. Today he’s brought the whole cake to share out.

When the team go out on their bikes to loosen the limbs and clear the minds, he slips into Lycra and goes with them. Wordless. He has seen his team virtually in disarray but this morning that
same team are comfortable with his presence. He just hangs there.

One by one the riders drop back to him and speak. These are men who spend their working lives in the saddle and talking frankly while riding comes easier to them than while sitting down across a
desk. So one by one they drop back and open up, and by the time the ride has ended Brailsford has gathered together the pieces of the jigsaw.