Inside Team Sky (5 page)

The teams are presented to the public at a ceremony by the sea in Porto-Vecchio on Thursday. As the previous year’s Tour de France winners, Team Sky are presented last. The team arrives
like nine James Bonds atop a large white cruiser which cuts across the port. Some of the riders take photos of the scene ahead with their distinctive iPhones. Chris Froome stands to the side
looking out to sea like Columbus who was born here, his Tintin profile peering towards either his destiny or a good spot for the spear fishing he enjoys so much. When the boat hits Porto-Vecchio a
ramp descends and the nine Team Sky riders roll down onto the dockside on their Pinarellos. When you were a gangly spotty teenager there was always a tall, smooth, blue-eyed and Brylcreemed boy who
turned heads everywhere he went. Team Sky are that boy. Most of you hated him. He knew that but he didn’t mind. You’re only human.

This is my first time at the race since disillusionment caused me to hand in my little green accreditation badge in 2004.

‘
Au revoir, messieurs, la victoire pour les tricheurs
[Goodbye, men, the victory for the cheaters],’ I thought at the time. Through the years from Armstrong’s seventh
in 2005 – featuring Landis, Rasmussen, Vinokorouv, Contador,
et al
– to Wiggins in 2012, I hadn’t covered the Tour, and I hadn’t missed it. Armstrong’s
banishment changed things; exiting the building, he left the door half-open and finally I had a way back in.

‘It’s your comeback Tour, how do you feel?’ says a photographer colleague bumping into me in a corridor.

‘Excited and holding on to scepticism,’ I say.

I’m not just entitled to my scepticism, it is my job to have it with me at all times. We’ve all been fooled, duped and suckered by this race. ‘For years they fucked us,’
Jean Michel Rouet, a colleague at
L’Equipe
once said. I never forgot that. Lamentably there are ties cycling is unwilling to cut. On page 46 of the Tour de France bible, the official
road book, there is a full-page photograph of Richard Virenque advertising a Festina watch. In the photo Virenque looks handsome, almost distinguished. If you didn’t know his story or
understand what he had stood for, you could look in the road book and see cycling’s George Clooney, the same tinges of grey.

But beyond the image, there is reality.

Virenque doped throughout his career, his team got caught and they came out with their hands up. All except their leader Virenque, who lied for more than two years and might never have told the
truth if he hadn’t come up before Judge Daniel Delegove in the autumn of 2000.

By then Virenque’s dishonesty had plummeted into pathos, so much so that you weren’t sure whether he deserved stoning or pitying. Presiding at the ‘Festina Trial’ in the
autumn of 2000 Delegove, weary no doubt from having heard so much about cycling’s sordid business, looked at Virenque in the witness box and said, ‘Do you accept this reality, that you
used doping products?’

‘It was a like a train going away from me,’ replied the still self-pitying Virenque, ‘and if I didn’t get on it, I would be left behind. It was not cheating. I wanted to
remain in the family.’

Virenque cheated to win, and his team celebrated with a lethal recreational drug concoction called
Pot Belge
. And still they fete him at the Tour. Officially. Festina is a name
synonymous with that shameful 1998 Tour which began in Ireland but exploded when their
soigneur
and principal drug runner Willy Voet was arrested. And still they remain a Tour sponsor.

For Rod Ellingworth, Team Sky’s master planner, the road book is the bible. So on the day he gets it, he riffles through the pages, checking the details that underpin his planning. He gets
to page 46 with its photo of Virenque and it disgusts and confuses him. Ellingworth can be diplomatic, understated and restrained when talking about most things. Doping is different and in his eyes
Virenque has stood for everything he despises about the sport. He stops at page 46, turns the page over to check there’s nothing too important on the other side, and tears Richard from the
book and bins him.

Returning to the Tour was straightforward for me once the sport had accepted the truth about Armstrong. There would be a new grammar, I hoped. Every new rider, every new
effort, every iconic stage wouldn’t be compared with how things were when people believed in Lance.

Every living winner of the Tour has been invited back to this centenary race. Every champion welcomed except the evil one. It makes me laugh a little. Yes, Armstrong is no longer a past winner
but plenty of known dopers are (Riis, Ullrich, Contador, to name just three of the more recent) and this parade of champions is best enjoyed by those with the ability to suspend their
disbelief.

Still, I’m glad that he who once controlled everything can no longer get on the list of invites. His fall has given the sport a new chance but this monster’s head has been severed
many times before and always it has reappeared.

Sure enough, on the day the race begins, Lance gives an interview to the French quality daily
Le Monde
. He is determined not to go away.

The interview is the usual greatest hits collection from the cave of his disgrace. The writer Geoffrey Wheatcroft summed up its content perfectly in the
New Republic
.

Still, I dream, we will make new memories and finally their weight will crush the past.

Stage One brought the predicted carnage, but with a side order of comedy. First though, Chris Froome, one of the most accident-prone men ever to reach the higher echelons of
this sport, had his first mishap. The Tour has two starts. It begins with a 3km ceremonial ride through the town. The riders stretch and preen, the populace cheers, the sun shines. The mood is set.
These few kilometres aren’t for racing, they are a neutral zone.

Alone of the peloton, Froome punctured in the neutral zone. A more superstitious man might have gone home but he, while the mechanic put on the new wheel, would have thought, ‘My good luck
that it happened here.’

The carnage came later. Chaos among the athletes and their bikes and parts of each were left on the scorching roads of Corsica in pile-ups and spills.

These scenes of fallen riders and running medics went on as those gathered at the finish line were treated to a pantomime so bizarre and comical that it would have embarrassed a vicar running a
village fete. As the peloton steamed towards the finish in Bastia, the Australian Orica-GreenEDGE team bus was going through the finish line when its roof got caught on the timing bridge above the
line.

There, under a big sign for Vittel mineral water, the bus got jammed, seemingly unable to move forward or back. When something unforeseen happens on the Tour, the space between the incident and
a proper understanding of how it came about is filled with hearsay. These can be juicy and the excitement lasts until the truth comes out.

So this is what came off the production line at the rumour mill: driver is cruising along the road to Bastia when he decides what he’d really like to do is watch the second test of the
rugby union series between Australia and the British and Irish Lions. So he stops, orders a sandwich, watches the game, arrives late at the finish line after the gantry has been lowered and his bus
gets stuck.

The president of the race jury, Vicente Tortajada Villarroya from Spain, sees the pictures of the bus wedged into the timing bridge and decides to switch the finish to the 3km-to-go mark and
communicates this to the team managers. This causes panic among the riders because they’re guessing the new finish is now located in the midst of narrow roads, sharp corners and short
straights.

What dissuaded Señor Tortajada Villarroya from stopping the race until the bus was freed and then re-starting it, no one knows. But, just in time, the bus extricates itself from the
timing bridge and it’s decided to revert back to the original finish line. Problem being that some of the riders now knew about the change and others didn’t.

Chaos.

Pandemonium.

And the crashes that might have taken place before the hastily chosen new finish line happen just before the original finish line. The stage is won by Marcel Kittel, the German sprinter with the
Argos team. People presume this is typical of what happens in the first mass sprint when everyone is fresh and the result is not to be trusted. Kittel, it is assumed, shouldn’t beat
Cavendish. The following three weeks would dismantle that assumption.

Similarly, the assumption about the rugby-loving Aussie bus driver proved to be false. Garikoitz Atxa who drove the Orica team bus into Bastia that afternoon is in fact Spanish, and is not a
rugby union fan.

Things improved for the race from there on. A second stage streaked over the jagged mountains from Bastia towards Ajaccio and Team Sky, depleted and sapped by the first day’s crashes, had
the pleasure of seeing Froome attack alone on one of the climbs.

Nothing too serious, just a boyish checking out of his own powers and a desire to poach a little lead so that, when they began the descent, he would be able to pick his own lines and decide how
fast he wanted to go. While not the worst descender in the peloton, neither is Froome the best. Instead, he uses his class going uphill to pick and choose in whose company he negotiates the
descents.

And if the stretching of legs sent a little flare over the heads of his rivals, that would have pleased him. No one with half a brain mistakes Froome’s politeness and softly spoken
sentences for expressions of timidity. He has come to the Tour to win it and, such is his desire, the challenge for him is not the courage to attack but the discretion to know when not to.

Jan Bakelants of RadioShack took the stage on a day when Geraint Thomas was Sky’s big concern. His horrific crash at the end of the previous day’s stage left him sore around the hip
and pelvis but an initial X-ray didn’t show up any break. But soon after leaving Bastia, Thomas was in trouble and immediately after the finish in Ajaccio, he was sent for another X-ray. Not
many around the team expect him to last more than another day or two.

Thomas is someone that the team’s brains trust – Brailsford, Kerrison and Ellingworth – believe could develop into a Tour de France contender. Without the injured Wiggins, the
Welshman’s role in this race is greater because his intelligence and outgoing personality make him the obvious man to captain the team on the road.

Brailsford fools around with Thomas in a way he doesn’t do with any other rider in the team, but only because Thomas understands that the mickey-taking is an expression of affection. To
lose him in the first few days would be a blow.

On Sunday, for television reasons, the Tour raced towards Calvi and then sidestepped the city to finish along a stunning coastal road a couple of miles away. The pictures justified the
inconvenience for everybody else but the race was taken from the people of Calvi and the finish played out before a relatively small crowd.

In Calvi one of the sport’s newest stars, the Slovakian Peter Sagan, was surprisingly beaten by Aussie, Simon Gerrans, and so two days after the marriage of their bus to the timing bridge,
Orica-GreenEDGE were back in the news. Good news. Brailsford and Ellingworth seek out the Orica bosses and offer their congratulations. For all the guff about the English–Aussie rivalry, Team
Sky feel an affinity with their Australian counterparts.

The Tour had to move on quickly, all the riders had to board a fleet of coaches waiting to take them to Calvi Airport from where they would fly to Nice. Time was important because planes can
only fly in and out of Calvi in daylight hours and pilots need special training before being allowed to do their job there.

If the riders were rushing to get to the airport, staff members had more time to get to the harbour in Calvi for the six-hour ferry crossing to Nice. In the clamour of this migration from island
to mainland not a lot was said about the final climb of the day, the second category Col de Marsolino, which came just before the drop down to the finish outside Calvi.

Of Sky’s nine riders just two got over the top with the leaders, Froome and Richie Porte. Edvald Boasson Hagen almost made it but was dropped before the top, and then rejoined on the
descent. So three finished in the main group of ninety riders and the other six didn’t make it. Their time losses ranged two to ten minutes.

Something was wrong.

Sky’s team is loaded with riders who can climb and support a leader where he will most need support: in the mountains. So here on the straightforward second category Col de Marsolino,
which rises just 425m over 12km at an average gradient of 3.5 per cent, two thirds of Sky’s riders are scattered like pieces of paper on the mountain.

A week before the Tour, I had been part of a two-man panel with Team GB’s Shane Sutton at a
Sunday Times
event in London. Pretty much everyone in the audience believed Froome was
the likely winner of the race and I felt they needed to be reminded that it was the Tour de France they were talking about and there were reasons for wondering if Froome would do it.

Primarily there were legitimate questions about the quality of the team, because it was obvious the team wasn’t as strong as the previous year. For different reasons, they wouldn’t
have three of the strongest men from the 2012 team: Wiggins, Christian Knees and Michael Rogers. Wiggins was injured, Knees had ridden the Giro and wasn’t at his best, Rogers had joined the
Saxo-Tinkoff team.