Inside Team Sky (21 page)

At first Valverde’s Movistar teammates swarm around him clucking with concern and vowing to reclaim those 37 seconds. If they were that concerned, one of them should have switched bikes
with Valverde the moment he noticed the puncture, but Movistar haven’t been working like clockwork on this Tour. Subsequent glimpses show poor Valverde at the front of the Movistar group
doing most of the grunt work for himself. It won’t be a happy evening meal for these boys.

As the afternoon sun keeps rising, this stage gets more interesting. Valverde is riding with the desperation of a man knowing his Tour is on the line. Kittel’s foot soldiers try for a time
to help but in this cat-and-mouse game, momentum is everything. And it is with the leaders.

They smell blood and the chance to kill Valverde off. The sprinters’ teams are also pleased to have Kittel back there, out of their sight. Encouraged, this coalition of General
Classification and sprint teams increases the pace. The gap stretches.

We should freeze the frame here for a second. For all the talk of how Team Sky have made the Tour a procession and how boring they have become, we have a stage here today, a flat stage with just
one bump in the road and the plot is almost Shakespearian. The race is all strung out. Knives are being flashed at Valverde by the GC boys and at Kittel by the sprint set. Froome is gritting his
teeth and settling in for another hard shift. If it all goes wrong he could be handing over the jersey. It’s that unstable right now.

A few minutes later, Kittel and his team accept that in a race that will run for another nine days, there are no prizes for flogging a dead horse. They accept today will not be their day.
Valverde keeps pushing, in second overall he’s got to. This turns into one of the most thrilling days on the Tour and the Spaniard shouldn’t feel too depressed, he’s just had a
puncture on the wrong day.

Some of the guys at the front, who would have been counting their blessings to be on the right side of the split, are now counting the cost. The lead group is coming apart like an ageing boy
band right now. Richie Porte is struggling again. Richie was told he could give his all in the time trial two days before. Is he getting the bill for that today?

Bilharzia. It sounds as unattractive as it is. You meet up with your little parasitic friend in the waters of Africa and from then on as it develops into a flatworm it chomps
your red blood cells, promotes rashes, lethargy, headaches, fever and lots of other nice surprises. For an endurance athlete the impact is crippling. Having something consuming your red blood cells
and depriving you of oxygen is a nightmare. Your bilharzia eats the body, steals the breath and gnaws the confidence.

For Chris Froome it was something to be ridden through. His time in the neutral zone was extended considerably by the fact that he paid no attention to the debilitating bouts of sickness.

When people are being cynical about Team Sky, one of the things they are most cynical about is bilharzia. Which is odd. It is a rampant disease in Africa and the fact of Froome’s condition
is easily ratified if anybody ever cared to ask. After malaria, bilharzia is the world’s second most common parasitic disease. He has been straight up about it since diagnosis. Late in 2010
in Kenya, while seeing his brother Jeremy, the UCI performed a routine blood check on him for his biological passport. Given the patchworked history of his health he asked the doctor to scan his
blood for anything irregular (doping mastermind?) and the doctor told him that his insides were crawling with bilharzia.

For those interested, the treatment for bilharzia isn’t a dose of EPO or anything else which might provide an excuse for elevated numbers of red blood cells. The treatment is a drug called
praziquantel (or more ominously, biltricide) and it just lays waste your flatworm population.

The idea is that having paralysed or killed most of the flat-worms, your immune system will do the rest. If you are consistently underweight and riding yourself to the brink of exhaustion, your
immune system may not get around to finishing the job.

Froome had his first dose in January 2011. The side effects are brutal. The drug doesn’t question and ID everything it finds. It just wipes stuff out. For a week to ten days the patient is
wiped out as well. By spring of 2011, Froome was showing signs that the treatment was working and he raced well through March and April. In May, though, at the Tour of California the bilharzia was
back in business.

Froome battled on until the Tour de Suisse where his legs turned rubbery on the hills. When the Tour was finished he took another dose of biltricide and with his preparations already behind he
said goodbye to the Tour de France for that year.

Meanwhile, 2011 was the year he began working with Bobby Julich, the retired American rider who had set up home in Nice. Froome had moved from Italy to Monaco and was getting specialist coaching
every day. The components of a great racer were already there for anyone to see. The right-sized block of good-quality stone.

Julich just needed to keep chipping away. Life skills. Bike skills. Race skills.

According to Team Sky’s daily plan for Stage Thirteen to Saint-Amand-Montrond, Rod Ellingworth and Carsten Jeppesen must travel ahead of the race and, among other things,
they will check which way the wind is blowing and how it will affect the race. Like scouts in old Westerns, they go ahead of the cavalry and send back messages.

Jeppesen drives while Ellingworth writes notes in his race bible on the page that shows the day’s itinerary. At the top of the page, he writes ‘56km, out of town, straight and open
roads, full crosswinds’. Often Ellingworth asks Jeppesen to stop the car so he can get out and feel the wind on his face and better understand how it will be for the riders.

From 50km to the finish, his pencil works a double shift. At the town of Segry, he notes, ‘real open after town and heavy surface’. On the right margin little arrows point towards
the last 30km: ‘small roads and crosswinds,’ ‘open road and headwind’. Ellingworth then texts his notes to the two
directeurs sportifs
, Nico Portal and Servais
Knaven, in the race cars and the information is passed on to the riders.

Riders need to know what’s coming up, but knowing is not a guarantee they will act upon it. And there are a few teams sensing possibility for carnage now.

The first beneficiary of the chaos is a big fish. Alberto Contador, who up until now, with about 30km left, has been content to hang in with the lead group and let his teammates contribute to
the workload. They have been buffeted for much of the day but they’ve a plan that will show the truth in an old maxim: it’s an ill-wind that blows no good.

Suddenly, Contador and his five teammates are gone as if they have heard a signal outside of everyone else’s audible range. The move is initiated and led by Mick Rogers. Later, there will
be rueful smiles in Team Sky land. A year ago Rogers was doing this sort of thing for them.

Others in the lead group sense what is happening as the Saxo riders gather at the front. Mark Cavendish, finding himself alongside Geraint Thomas, whispers a warning that something’s going
to happen. Be ready. Thomas isn’t in the best position, trapped a little on the right-hand side.

Then the Saxos have gone, created a gap, and because there are six of them, they team time trial at the front, open a gap and create a no-man’s-land between their break-away and the
pursuit. The ten seconds after the attack are vital. Cavendish is lucky. ‘I nearly missed the final split. Kwiatkowski [teammate Michał] got me halfway across and then I shouted to him
to move left. I sprinted and just managed to get in the echelon. When echelons form it’s similar to falling through ice . . . you’ve got five seconds to save yourself or it’s all
over.’

They latch on like two drifters catching a departing train.

All eyes switch to Froome. The membership lists are closing for this break right now. Mollema is safely there, so too his teammate ten Dam. In fact, every rider who will be in the top seven this
evening is there. Except Froome. Fifteen are gone and not coming back.

In their team cars and on the bus, Team Sky’s back-up men are surprised. Why isn’t he there? What was he thinking? ‘I looked at Cav’s back wheel and thought,
“I’m going to get there,” but Cav took a hand sling from one of his teammates and then sprinted to get on. Minute I saw that, I thought, “No way am I going to be able to do
that on my own.”’

Froome’s brothers Jeremy and Jonathan are accountants and Chris, the youngest, received the same calculating gene. If he surges after Cavendish he enters the open space between breakaways
and those behind and he will end up fighting the wind on his own.

He’s strong, he’s determined, even bloody-minded, but he’s not a sprinter like Cavendish and he’s not stupid. Refusing to plunge into that no-man’s-land is probably
the single smartest thing he has done on the Tour. Instead he looks around to check on what support he’s got.

Richie Porte is gone. Pete Kennaugh has just slipped off the back like a drowning man disappearing beneath the surface. Kosta Siutsou is visibly fading. David López drove himself hard
early on as per instructions and his race is already ridden. Geraint Thomas is residing in his private house of pelvic pain for this Tour, yet it will be himself and Ian Stannard who are in
position to help. Thomas will be the last to fall away.

The lead stretches. Soon it is clear that Sky’s reduced and bedraggled team are riding not to catch the leaders but to limit the damage they will suffer. With 5km to go they are one minute
behind but Froome is on his own, leading the chase, refusing to panic. He now shows the rider he has become. When everyone misses the bus, what matters is how you react after it’s
departed.

Froome keeps pedalling. But he’s not desperate and he doesn’t waste energy wondering why the team hasn’t been better today. Most of all he lives to fight another day. Ventoux
is ahead, looming ominously in the schedule. If he can get to Ventoux with as much energy as possible, then he can be the pied piper and others will dance to his tune.

And the accountant in him knows that on flat stages like this one, a minute only seems like a long time. In the mountains, a minute is what you lose riding from one hairpin to the next. When we
speak a few days later he won’t deny the loss he and the team have suffered but neither will he see it for more than it’s worth.

‘The way Contador and his team rode shows you can’t let your guard down. Before yesterday I thought Valverde was my biggest rival but he was knocked out of contention, and Contador
is now the most dangerous. In the mountains and the time trial, I will be okay. When there’s crosswinds and any team lining up near the front, I’ve got to be on their wheels. End of
story.’

Notably he didn’t say, ‘We’ve got to be on their wheels.’ The more I see of Froome, the more I warm to him.

Into Saint-Amand-Montrond Mark Cavendish takes his win. His twenty-fifth in an outstanding career. He points his fingers at the skies. One day they toss urine at you, the next day it is laurels.
Chris Froome rolls over the line 1'09" behind. His advantage in the General Classification has had a big lump taken from it but he lives. The yellow jersey is still his. He even allows himself just
a razor thin smile when receiving it. He is just 2'28" ahead of Mollema in the GC. Contador is third at 2'45". Valverde has vanished.

This evening I travel from the finish with Ellingworth and Kerrison. They’re talking about how they’ve seen the day.

Ellingworth says it’s been a hard day for everyone in the team.

‘I worry a little bit about G and Ian and Pete because they fucking nailed themselves out there.’

I sit silently, letting two of the best brains in the business air their thoughts, hopes and nerves without interruption. As I look out upon Auvergne’s hills and pastures, post-stage
analysis as my soundtrack, I am acutely aware of the access I am enjoying. Other journalists will now return to their hotels for another round of dinner, sleep and breakfast with only their
speculations to cling on to between stages and press events. Instead, I live among the riders, coaches, managers, mechanics and carers that keep this team in the yellow jersey, following the Tour
from inside Team Sky.

Julich solved the mystery of Chris Froome like a veteran detective working a complex case. Brailsford’s old adage about a £900,000 rider with a coach would be
proved true. Froome says that one of the greatest misapprehensions people have about him is that he is naturally skinny, that he could live on a diet of Big Mac meals and not gain a pound. The
truth is that he is obsessive about food, snacks on nothing more fattening than bean sprouts, and has to work at his conditioning.

His tutelage under Julich coincided with the growing influence of Tim Kerrison’s ideas. Bradley Wiggins, somewhat envious himself of Froome’s build, has noted that when he got
serious about road racing his weight fell away. He was between 81-82kg at the Beijing Games in 2008 but weighed 73kg the following summer in France. For Froome it was a similar story as he adopted
the regime of no breakfast rides. In the spring of 2011 he weighed 73kg. In September he weighed 68kg. Consider that the UCI imposes a minimum weight limit of 6.8kg for bikes used in the Tour.
Froome shed almost the weight of a bike from his 6 foot 1 inch body.