Inside Team Sky (27 page)

Not winning against Thomas, Brailsford returns to safer terrain.

‘But Mont Ventoux. Centenary Tour. Yellow jersey. To win like that at the top of Mont Ventoux – fuck me, that is an incredible, incredible performance, you know? And that’ll
last for years and years. Legendary stuff. So well done everybody, but let’s stay on it.

‘Ready, ready Pete? You start it.’

The last sentiment is a request to Pete Kennaugh to initiate Team Sky’s celebratory chant. Kennaugh passes it on to the second
directeur sportif
Servais Knaven. ‘He’s
better than me at this, he’s my inspiration.’ Knaven stands holding his glass in the air and begins: ‘Oooohhhhhhh.’ Then everyone joins in:
‘AaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhHHHHHHHHHH.’

It lasts for seven or eight seconds but with every voice contributing to the rising volume, the effect is stunning. And here, not far from the scene of Froome’s triumph on Ventoux, the
team shows it is getting the hang of celebrations. Everyone sits down and smilingly drains their champagne. Nineteen days on the Tour, this is a high point.

But then the spell is broken.

He walks in unannounced, a youngish man, mid-thirties, medium height. Before anyone realises who he is or why he’s come, he goes straight to Froome. They speak for a minute or so and then
this young man walks back towards the door, pulls up a chair and sits alone, facing the riders’ table.

By now everyone gets it. He is a doping control officer and has come for a sample of Froome’s blood. One of his colleagues had come to the hotel that morning, another blood test, and
Froome had done the post-race urine test, an obligation for the wearer of the yellow jersey.

Three tests in one day but there isn’t a hint of disapproval. Not a scintilla of resentment towards the one who killed the music. He’s got his job to do. As for the celebration, it
was like a cow’s tail. All it lacked was length to reach the moon.

Before the sun goes down on any particular day Team Sky are already preparing for what will happen when the sun comes up again the next.

If it is too cold or too hot, the mechanics are in a special climate-controlled truck washing the bikes and checking the tyres. Every bike. Every tyre. The physios and
soigneurs
are
performing a similar service on the riders. Neil Thompson, the mechanic from Jaguar, is checking the fleet of cars. Provisions are being prepared.

Tomorrow is Alpe d’Huez. A special circumstance. Rod Ellingworth and Mario Pafundi have already talked it through. The logistics of getting the Team Sky armada to the top of the
Tour’s most famous climb while that climb is temporary residence to the population of a decent city are too much. The bus won’t be seeing the summit.

This sounds like a small thing. It isn’t. The aftermath of a stage is key to recovery. The bus is key to the aftermath. Team Sky own two of the celebrated Volvo 9700 buses. They are maybe
the symbol of how Team Sky do things. Getting ready to launch in January 2010, and having completed the controversial and expensive signing of Bradley Wiggins from Garmin-Sharp, the team needed a
chariot to bear him in.

Not content with merely looking like a Decepticon waiting to transform, the Volvo has even played a part in claiming the scalp of one of Sky’s original Autobots.

There were many reasons why it didn’t work out between Team Sky and its first ‘senior’
directeur sportif
Scott Sunderland. For a start, Scott liked the word
‘senior’ before his job title. Big mistake. An Australian, Sunderland had enjoyed a long career in the European peloton and knew his way around. There was much he felt he could teach
the fledgling Team Sky, but he didn’t seem to get it that Dave Brailsford didn’t want his team to be a newer version of the old continental European model.

Brailsford dreamt of something very different. For example, when Sunderland thought the team should have more or less the same team bus as the best European teams, he unwittingly insulted
Brailsford’s intelligence. Why, thought Brailsford, would we do that when every time he stepped on board a traditional team bus, he was struck by how badly designed they were on the inside?
What Brailsford saw was an interior designed by people who saw riders as just one part of the team, not the central part.

So he employed designers who had worked with Formula 1 teams Honda and Benetton to create a bespoke high-spec performance vehicle in which to convey his prize assets. The buses were refitted
from scratch over a period of four months. It’s not, however, so easy to refit humans from scratch and midway through his first full season with the team, Scott Sunderland departed. As
he’d signed a three-year contract, there was a financial settlement and an agreement that ensured both parties would in the future speak glowingly of the other.

Brailsford had ideas that Sunderland would never have conceived, and certainly had never seen during his racing days. Team Sky’s psychiatrist Dr Steve Peters was commissioned to design
mood-lighting to help the riders relax. The front of the bus carries the riders in large comfortable seats which swivel and recline, just nine seats because there will never be more than nine
riders at one race. The rear of the bus is a meeting room cum treatment room cum work area. It is here, on long flat stages of the Tour, that Brailsford will catch up on lost sleep.

Each rider has a personal WiFi, and a fold-away table for laptops, a socket panel containing charging docks. And of course there are Sky Boxes. On the ride back to a team hotel or the journey to
a stage, riders can Skype, surf the net, watch a movie, listen to music or just sleep.

Energy drinks and food are on their seats when they board the bus. There are showers, toilets and fridges, and a washing machine and drier so that gear can be washed on the road. Open the fridge
you’ve got an assortment of chilled drinks, freshly made tuna pasta dishes, yoghurts. Everyone swears by the coffee-maker.

That coffee-maker won’t be making it to the summit of Alpe d’Huez tomorrow, but preparations must go on regardless. As one by one the staff finish their tasks and turn in, I watch
Mark Dzalo and David Rozman, two Slovenian carers, complete their final job of the night – filling the big cooler box in the team cars with ice. Through this Tour, these guys have handled
more ice than a gang of workers in a fish factory. The Alpe tomorrow. Biggest day of all. They are ahead of themselves. In the morning they can top the bag up with more ice. Bring it on.

There are 177 riders left and for those who have hung in there through sheer bloody-mindedness or just to defy their broken pelvises, today is a perverse reward of sorts.
You’d have to be a cyclist to love this place. Alpe d’Huez! The mountain put on this earth to break men. You pass two churches on the way up, just in case you feel like it’s time
to make your peace with the Man above.

If you are riding out today though, this is the climb you tell the grandchildren about. And some day when you are dandling them on your lap, they will brace themselves well for the story of this
particular day. The Tour has channelled Levi Roots for this year’s stage planning – Alpe d’Huez is so nice you’ll climb it twice.

Here is the gnarled spiritual heart of the Tour de France. The first summit to host a finish, back in 1952. Before that, mountains were just obstacles on the way to finishes on the flat. Each of
those draining switchback hairpin bends is named after a stage winner on l’Alpe. Today the estimates of the crowd lining the twenty-one hairpin bends range from 750,000 to double that. People
claimed the best spots a week ago. The climb is 13.8km with an average gradient of more than 8 per cent. It starts with a few kilometres at 10 per cent. Just as a meet and greet.

At the summit we will be at an altitude of 1,850m. We will also be in a car. For this much, thanks.

Of course it would be too easy if the riders just rode up l’Alpe twice in an afternoon. Far too easy . . . Instead, the final climb will come at the end of a gruelling 172km stage with a
series of four lesser climbs and a spin up l’Alpe along the way. That’s more like it. All that and fans pushing and pulling at riders in the afternoon sun. This is cycling’s
waterboarding.

From the start the pace is hectic. Jens Voigt, one of the peloton’s breakaway addicts, is restless. He makes an early break, gets caught, and then surfs the wave created by
Saxo-Tinkoff’s early aggression. Good old Jens. Who said that the Germans don’t do optimism?

Eventually an escape group of nine establishes itself and pushes on down the road, hoping for the best. After 60km they have a decent lead of nearly 6'30", but they know that when the peloton
wants to it can reel them back in at a rate of one minute every 10km. Doing the maths has never been more depressing.

It would seem Saxo-Tinkoff have had a hearty breakfast and an inspiring team talk. They are full of ideas and gambits. Just a week ago these boys made a little theatrical production out of
toasting themselves following a modest success on Stage Thirteen.

Since then all has not gone well for Saxo-Tinkoff. Yesterday was another setback. Froome won the time trial, with Contador second. Sport can be brutal. By this point in the race, Contador knows
he can’t take Froome’s yellow jersey and he’s just trying to get something for himself, one victory he can look back on and think, ‘Yeah, that was a good day.’

The time trial from Embrun to Chorges was that opportunity for Contador. At 32km, with two second category climbs and a weather forecast that made slippery descents likely, it favoured Contador
more than Froome. After all, the Team Sky rider had 4'30" cushion and mentally he geared himself up to ride conservatively and limit the time losses to his rivals.

Contador went for it, as did the other Spaniard, Joaquim Rodríguez, and when the Saxo rider beat his compatriot’s time by a single second, it seemed certain he would claim a stage
victory after all. Froome was the only one who could beat him and as the roads dried through the final third of the race, the Sky rider changed bikes to allow him to take better advantage of the
flatter final section of the course.

At the finish line Contador waited, knowing he was ahead of Froome at all of the intermediate time checks but fearing the race leader would keep on keeping on. He did, and by finishing strongly,
he bettered Contador’s time by 9 seconds. In Chorges that evening Alberto Contador was the picture of misery.

Commenting on the achievement of Contador and his team mate Roman Kreuziger leap-frogging over Bauke Mollema and claiming second and third in the overall standings, Saxo’s
directeur
sportif
said he was glad that his riders had ‘conquered the two lesser places on the podium’. With three Alpine stages to come, his talk of conquering podium places seemed as
premature as the little dinner-table celebration in Le Veurdre five days before.

Back at the Team Sky hotel in Embrun, Brailsford slept through most of the time trial, waking in time to watch the finish on television.

‘Chris has always been a good time-triallist,’ he said afterwards, ‘that’s where I first saw him, in Melbourne in the Commonwealth Games in 2006, first time I set eyes on
him. Nathan O’Neill won that time trial, we had Steve Cummings and the usual suspects. I was there with Doug Dailey and Shane [Sutton]. Shane’s saying [in Brailsford’s best
Australian twang], “You’re not going to believe this, some bloke’s turned up in sand shoes, jumped on his bike and look what he’s done. In a pair of fucking sand
shoes!”

‘We all looked and thought bloody hell that guy is impressive. He wasn’t up there, but it was impressive, you know, he caught the eye. And he was completely unknown. And then Doug,
being Doug, said, “Ah, I might have a word with him, lads,” they got in touch, and the rest . . . was history really.’

Arising from Contador’s gut-wrenching loss in the time trial is the likelihood of further disappointment. He gave that time trial everything he had, but it wasn’t enough and he knows
he can’t match Froome in the mountains. Who’d want two ascents of the Alpe after that? He came here expecting to duke it out with Froome. Instead he is being badly beaten and has been
denied the one victory that would have softened his fall.

Two of his Saxo comrades, Sérgio Paulinho and Nicolas Roche, are sent ahead of the main bunch, not so much to chase down the leaders but to be in a position to help Contador when the race
gets serious. Looking sprightly, they head off into the great unknown.

The nine men in the break hit the halfway mark of the stage with a lead of 7'15". There are 88.5km remaining. Too early for anybody to get excited. By this point Paulinho and Roche are still on
their own somewhere between the escapees and the main field. Though they are racing, they are also waiting for the moment when their services will be needed.

It is the kind of tactic a team uses when its main man is on the ropes.

At around half past one, lunch is done with and the riders sit up straight in their saddles and contemplate. Fed and watered, Team Sky lead the peloton. The break is still ongoing, but no one
there worries Froome. All are too far back. Contador is waiting, waiting, lurking behind Sky. He’s got one foot in the grave but he keeps pedalling with the other one.

At just after two o’clock the first five of the fragmented breakaway group hits l’Alpe for the first time. Chris Froome and Team Sky are still at the front of the peloton, winding
their way through the twenty-one hairpin bends that will take them to the summit. Ian Stannard has done his job and dropped back. Kosta Siutsou takes a shift driving the rhythm. Nicolas Roche gets
caught by the peloton.

The mountain is a world of chaos and a house of pain. The riders’ progress is impeded on each side of the road by the seething masses of fans. Hairpin corners offer the best observation
posts and attract the densest crowds. There is a ‘Dutch corner’ which has drawn a huge number of fans from the Netherlands that fill almost a kilometre of road.