All aboard the magic bus, part two
Inside Team Sky at the 2011 Critérium du Dauphiné
by Lionel Birnie
Concluding a behind-the-scenes account of my week spent with Team Sky at the 2011 Critérium du Dauphiné. This part includes some direct quotes which contain uncensored bad language.
THURSDAY – Stage four, La Motte Servolex – Mâcon
With the yellow jersey to defend, Sky are in for a challenging day. There’s more than the usual attention around the team’s bus in the morning but this is nothing compared to what they may face at the Tour. Despite the job ahead of them – or perhaps because of it – the atmosphere is upbeat but relaxed, the sun is shining and music is blaring out of the bus. Even though it’s not to his taste, and he agrees it sounds like a bad holiday in Benidorm, to the doc, this is a good sign.
‘It means they’re up for it,’ he says. ‘I have to say, some of the lyrics are a bit much. During the Tour, Dave had to ask them to tone it down a bit.’
Yates, who currently has a CD by The Eagles on a loop in his team car, steps out of the bus and leaves them to it.
I get into the car with Maarten and Mario, the two carers who are heading to the feed zone. They are like chalk and cheese. A laid-back Dutchman and a hyper-active Italian and the journey is enlivened by their double act.
The feed zone is on a long, straight road, as they often are. Maarten picks a spot and pulls over.
About an hour before the riders are due, Maarten hangs eight musettes on the car’s tailgate and begins to load them: three energy gels, two bars, a small rice cake wrapped in foil, a bidon, a little can of coke. Mario goes off to talk to his friends at Liquigas.
‘You wanna be careful,’ Maarten tells Mario when he comes back. ‘It looks bad for you. I do all the driving, then I do all the work while you go and chat. You’ll be sleeping next.’
‘No, no, don’t write that,’ says Mario, before launching into the best Shane Sutton impression I’ve ever heard from an Italian, although in truth it sounds more like the drawling Marlon Brando in The Godfather. I mention this and Maarten says: ‘Mario is from the south of Italy, Salerno. He’s almost Mafia.’
Mario used to race. He was a promising under-23 with the amateur Vellutex team at the same time as Yaroslav Popovych but says he became depressed and gave up racing. He begins to talk about his depression but his English is not quite good enough to explain the nuances and it leaves him a bit frustrated, so we go back to comfortable small talk.
The bunch passes through and the bags are grabbed without incident. Wiggins and Boasson Hagen do not take the risk of trying to take their bags, so Mario passes them to the team car. One of the riders will drop back for them later.
* * *
We’re in the bus, watching the race on the pull-down screen. Sutton is playing a cricket game on his iPhone. ‘I’m trying to beat New Zealand.’
He seems able to concentrate on two things at once. ‘The finish is a bit like a mini version of Bordeaux, isn’t it? You come into the town, over the bridge, right-hander, then quite wide roads,’ he says without looking up from his game.
We watch as Team Sky set up Boasson Hagen for the finish. Thomas puts in a big effort to open the gap for the Norwegian but he just mis-times his effort and is pipped into second place by John Degenkolb, the HTC rider who won two days ago in Lyon.
‘Shit,’ says Boasson Hagen when he gets back to the bus, but there are no recriminations.
‘Thanks man,’ he says to Thomas when he arrives.
‘No problem. Happy to do it.’
The riders head off to the hotel by bike but Nicolas Portal’s Jaguar is not going anywhere. The automatic gearbox is faulty. ‘It’s only using two gears and it won’t go more than 90 kilometres an hour,’ explains Alan, who laughs when I suggest he should get under the bonnet. ‘I’ll stick to bikes.’ At the Tour, Sky have a Jaguar mechanic with them in case the cars go wrong. ‘I’ve rung Jaguar,’ says Alan. ‘But it’s not going to be fixed before the weekend.’
The cars do a lot of kilometres – often at slow speeds – up and down mountains, so the automatic gearboxes take a lot of the strain.
* * *
The Hotel L’Escatel in Mâcon is not the best. If you arrived here on holiday you’d probably consider sleeping in the car. There’s a mangy-looking cat curled up on a chair in reception. It wakes up and hops down onto the floor and walks, with a slight limp, into the dining room.
There is a wonky table tennis table pushed up against the wall and an old babyfoot table. The little wooden footballers are chipped and jaded. The idea of lugging around eight mattresses for the riders begins to make more sense.
Fortunately, I don’t have to stay here. Because the hotel is full, with the Garmin and Saur-Sojasun teams also staying, a couple of us are down the road in another hotel. It’s no better, although Garmin’s Dan Martin refuses to believe it’s any worse than the L’Escatel, when I bump into him.
On the other side of reception is one of those novelty massage chairs where you insert a euro and the thing wobbles about for five minutes curing aches and pains.
‘You could save a fortune on soigneurs,’ I joke to Tim Kerrison.
‘Have you used one of those chairs? They’re actually pretty good. Maybe we should get them on the bus!’
Wiggins is the last rider to arrive, having been delayed by the podium presentations, press conference and dope control – the holy trinity of responsibilities that mark you out as an achiever.
We walk across to the hotel and Wiggins explains that he’s feeling confident about tomorrow’s finish at Les Gets. ‘It’s not that hard,’ he says. ‘Saturday is the big day, but the team is so strong I think we will be alright.’
In reception a couple of journalists from a French newspaper are waiting for him.
* * *
FRIDAY – Stage five, Parc des Oiseaux – Les Gets
Last night, Wiggins lit up Twitter. ‘Anyone fancy working as a press officer for me out here? Getting pulled left and right, need help?’ he wrote.
The response is predictable. Dozens of people, from PR specialists to eager fans, volunteer to get on the next flight. A few say they relish the opportunity to ‘crack a few journos’ heads.’
Earlier in the day, Sutton had said that if he had his way, he’d ban the riders and staff using Twitter. ‘You make a negative story if you ban it so it’s not worth it. But last year a few things got said that weren’t the image we wanted to project. We’ve told the riders, you’ve gotta be careful.’
The Dauphiné is hardly a pressure cooker and it doesn’t bode well for the Tour if he is struggling to cope with a handful of approaches a day but he says he was only joking. ‘This was supposed to be a dry run for the Tour in every respect but the press officer couldn’t come here because he’s on holiday,’ he says with a roll of the eyes.
Sutton knows that the media can be Wiggins’s Achilles heel. ‘It’s something you have to cope with at the Tour. Everyone wants you if you’re doing well. I remember at the Worlds when Nicole Cooke won the junior road race and she reacted a bit strongly when there was one camera in her face and I pushed a guy away to give her a bit of space. The next day I saw Jan Ullrich and he was absolutely surrounded. There were hundreds of them and he could hardly move but it was like he didn’t see them. He just blocked them out.’
* * *
Dave Brailsford arrived last night and after the race rolls out from the start, he travels on the bus to the finish at Les Gets. On the way, he makes and receives a dozen or more calls as the bus becomes his office, discusses the cost and timetable of some crucial repairs the buses will need later in the year, and then outlines his vision for a more appealing, televisual and investment-friendly sport.
As we drive through the péage, one of the toll booths on the autoroute, the Katusha team bus veers across in front of us. Clearly the driver hasn’t seen us and Slarky has to drive into the layby to avoid a coming together.
‘That’s payback for Swifty, that was,’ says Brailsford, referring to the signing of Ben Swift when he was under contract with the Russian team. ‘Actually, no, payback will be worse than that.’
* * *
The team hotel in Les Gets is an attractive, if stereotypical, mountain chalet. The mechanics and some of the other staff have already arrived and are tucking into pizza and beer. This is a rare afternoon when the punishing and repetitive schedule eases slightly. A hotel two minutes from the finish line offers the chance to get a proper lunch and get on with the work.
Wiggins defends the yellow jersey comfortably. The French rider Christophe Kern takes the stage and Wiggins is alert and composed in his yellow jersey.
He arrives back at the hotel to find his turbo trainer and bike have already been set up in the little wooden porch of the hotel.
The hotel owner’s ageing labrador dozes next to the bike. Someone has balanced a Sky baseball cap on the dog’s head but he doesn’t seem to mind. He only opens an eye when Wiggins gets on the bike and the turbo whirrs.
Sky’s terrier-bulldog cross, Sutton, is by Wiggins’s side as he warms down.
‘That was great today,’ he says.
‘I felt shit at the start. It was full on at the start, like the old days, but on the climbs no one is doing anything ridiculous. They’re attacking but then they just stay there,’ says Wiggins.
‘That’s what’ll happen. They’ll get 30 metres and that’ll be it so there’s no need to panic,’ says Sutton. ‘Even when G was on the front, they weren’t getting anywhere. The package is there, just stay calm mate. Even if you feel you’re coming down a bit, don’t worry because they’re getting tired too.’
Gerrans, as chirpy as ever, walks through reception. ‘The first 100k were ridiculous. It was like a criterium with attacks going left and right. We couldn’t control it, no one could. If too big a group went, we shut it down. The problem was, it was on big roads so it was really hard for a break to get away. On smaller roads you can control more because you can brake through a corner and let the gap open. But when it’s big roads everyone’s trying to go across, the group gets too big, so you shut it down. Then the attacks start all over again. A hundred kilometres for one guy to get away?’ He shakes his head. ‘Pfft.’ The lone escapee was Jason McCartney of Radioshack.
* * *
In the evening, Carsten Jeppesen, the team’s head of operations arrives. Perhaps it is the configuration of tables in the restaurant’s little dining room but from this point on there seems to be more of a subtle split between the management and the staff. Whereas earlier in the week management and staff ate at one big table, now there appears to be more of a hierarchy. Brailsford, Sutton, Jeppesen, Kerrison and the doc are at one table; everyone else is at another.
Yates does not appear for dinner. He popped down earlier, saw no one was there, didn’t particularly fancy raclette for dinner and went back to bed. Considering he is usually up at dawn to go for a ride and is training hard for the upcoming national 50-mile time trial, it seems unthinkable to miss a meal after a hard day behind the wheel.
* * *
After his dinner, Wiggins sits down to talk. He explains the difference between last year’s faltering season and his current demeanour, which seems a world away.
‘I wasn’t leading the team in any sense and I was becoming quite withdrawn,’ he says. ‘I felt I needed to change and I let people start to help me a bit more. I feel confident to lead this team now, confident to tell people what to do. Last year I just couldn’t. It had been such a drastic change. I went from going to the Tour to help Christian [Vande Velde] to finishing fourth. I don’t think I understood what a change that was going to be. I was the underdog and if I’d cracked in the last week and finished ninth, no one would have said anything. I made a few cock-ups last year, media-wise too.
‘When I came to Sky, Rod Ellingworth was designated to coach me. I just said “Yeah, okay.” But I didn’t have faith in Rod’s coaching. It wasn’t anything to do with him but I didn’t know him and he didn’t know me. I don’t think he had that rapport with me. I was very good at telling him what he wanted to hear and convincing him of what I needed to do.’
So, Wiggins was steering things rather than the coaches?
‘I think so, yeah, and I take full responsibility.
‘Shane never lets me cut corners or shy away. He just cuts the bullshit out. Last year I didn’t ride the Nationals because I didn’t feel I wanted to get out there and race a week before the Tour. Instead, I went and tested on my local climb in Girona and set a record up it so I thought I had the form. But I had nothing to back it up.’
* * *
SATURDAY – Stage 6 Les Gets – Le Collet d’Allevard
The doc is in the hotel’s bar, laptop open, phone pressed to his ear, looking concerned.
Rigoberto Uran has been suffering with breathing difficulties for the past couple of days and Dr Freeman is trying to get a Therapeutic Use Exemption for a drug to treat him.
‘It can be very tricky, especially at the weekends,’ he says. Yesterday, Dr Freeman contacted the race’s anti-doping doctor and put the case for a TUE. The drug is a steroid that can mimic a corticosteroid in the urine and can be misused.
‘Rigo has got a chest problem,’ he says. ‘With most asthma patients, you will never find out specifically what causes it. We’ve tested for pollen and in Rigo’s case it doesn’t appear to be that.
‘The ADAMS [World Anti-Doping Agency’s Administration and Management System] website can be tricky. Your worst fear is that you’re stuck in the mountains with no internet connection but we would not give anything that’s on the [restricted] list to a rider until we had everything confirmed through the proper channels.’
Could he not use the ADAMS hotline and make a phone call? ‘That works well Monday to Friday but not so well at the weekends,’ he says wryly, acknowledging that the onus is always on the athlete and the team doctor to ensure everything is done properly.
It took a few tries but eventually, he got through to Dr Mario Zorzoli of the UCI and gained the necessary permission.
But isn’t there an argument that if Uran is unwell and his breathing is seriously affected, he should pull out of the race? ‘He may well do that. But he’s an ambitious young man who wants to support Bradley and he wants to secure his place in the Tour team.
‘We are not talking about performance-enhancement here. The TUE is designed to enable an athlete to take medication that a normal human being would be prescribed by a doctor. It cannot be right that you and I could go to a doctor and be prescribed something that an athlete with the same condition could not use.’
Dr Freeman used to work for Bolton Wanderers Football Club before joining Sky. He’s also worked on golf’s European Tour. Despite the challenges of being away from home for so much of the year, he enjoys the role.
I ask what he makes of the UCI’s new no-needles policy. ‘I think it’s fantastic,’ he says. ‘It takes away a large window of opportunity for a lot of products. It means that there are no short cuts to proper rest and recovery. And it also removes that ladder of progression. If riders get used to vitamin injections as a matter of routine, it makes it easier to not question what’s in the syringe.’
* * *
This is the crucial day of the Critérium du Dauphiné. If Team Sky can defend Wiggins’s yellow jersey over the Col des Aravis, the Col de Tamié, the Col du Grand Cucheron and on the hors-catégorie Collet d’Allevard, he will clinch the biggest road race win of his career.
Yates delivers his team talk in his usual sparse fashion. The riders are not overloaded with information. ‘There’s a lot of guys in the hurt box. I watched the highlights yesterday and Bradley was riding fantastic [sic] and doing things super coolly and clever, which bodes well. I think you can see that Bradley is in super form and that is great for our confidence.’
He talks them through the stage, warns them of the dangerous descent on the Aravis. ‘The break should go on the first climb. Yesterday it took a long time to go so if we are a bit on the edge, it’s not the end of the world if seven or eight go.’
‘I think we need to take advantage of the villages,’ says Gerrans. ‘If you could tell us when the villages are coming up, we can let a group go just before and then let it go away as you go through a few corners.’
Yates finishes his talk reminding the riders to pay attention to their eating and drinking. ‘When it’s up and down all day it’s easy to forget so just make sure you are keeping fuelled. And more importantly, make sure Bradley has everything he needs because if he runs out, we’re all fucked.’
He hands over to Brailsford.
‘All I’d say is I thought you rode fucking great yesterday guys. You deserve a huge pat on the back,’ he says. ‘At the finish yesterday, Johan Bruyneel came to find me, and I get on well with Johan, and basically he said: “You know what, your guys, your team there were fucking brilliant. You were super strong and everyone’s saying it.” I think you should take a lot of pride and confidence from that. When one of the best guys in the world at what he does says that, you should take a big pat on the back. Now you can raise your game, you’ve got something to ride for, you’ve got purpose.’
* * *
Driving up the Collet d’Allevard is a shock. The climb is much harder than even the race manual would lead you to believe. There is barely any respite.
Brailsford gets into the bus with Jeppesen. ‘That is a very hard climb. Harder than Alpe d’Huez, I’d say.’
There’s a crash on the descent of the Grand Cucheron when a couple of cows wander into the road.
The race reaches the bottom of the Collet d’Allevard and Vinokourov’s Astana team come to the front.
‘He looks good, eh?’ says Jeppesen, referring to Wiggins, who is in the perfect position.
‘Let’s see how he is at the top,’ says Brailsford. ‘I think Brajkovic could be good today. We need to be wary of him.’
With 8.5 kilometres to go, Janez Brajkovic is dropped. ‘You see, this is why I am sitting here in the bus rather than down there in the car!’
Boasson Hagen puts in an astonishing turn and shreds the lead group. When Joaquin Rodriguez attacks, Wiggins rides sensibly. He uses other riders to help him close gaps and he refuses to get sucked into matching those who are more comfortable with the frequent changes of pace.
At the summit, he hasn’t just kept his yellow jersey, he’s extended his lead over Cadel Evans to 1-26.
* * *
The race has come full circle. We’re back at the Best Western in Chambéry, where the week began, except this time there’s a wedding taking place. How the bride and groom feel about sharing the hotel with a cycling team is anyone’s guess.
Jeppesen drives Wiggins and Sutton back in his unmarked Jaguar, the only one that isn’t plastered in Sky logos. Wiggins takes a phone call and talks quietly. I just about hear him say: ‘Yeah, it was good… Bloody hard, though. Bloody hard.’
Wiggins arrives back at 7.40pm. Because of the late finish, the nightly text message from Nicolas Portal makes grim reading for any of the staff with a rumbling stomach. Dinner isn’t until 9.45. Portal sends a text every night listing the evening’s dinner time, what time the riders have to wake up and have breakfast the following morning, when their suitcases must be in reception and when they leave for the start. It also details the dress code, which alternates between white shirts and black.
Tonight is a white night and Thomas is wearing black. Brailsford calls over to the table and says: ‘We’ll take this into account when it comes to contract negotiations, G.’
* * *
SUNDAY – Stage seven, Pontcharra – La Toussuire
Brailsford and Sutton are in the hotel foyer at 7.30, drinking a black coffee and ready to ride. Jeppesen has left his cycling shoes in a team car and has to wake one of the mechanics to get them out.
We’re going for a ride all the way around the lake at Aix-les-Bains. It starts off civilized enough. The sun is up early and glints off the lake but as we begin to climb, Jeppesen and I are in trouble. Sutton drops back and offers some stern words of encouragement. When we get over the top he asks how much riding I’m doing. I answer honestly but get the feeling he doesn’t believe me. I need to lose a bit of weight to cope with hills, I say.
‘Losing weight is an endurance event, mate. I say to anyone who wants to lose weight – it’s simple. Prepare to feel fucking hungry.’
Once the climbing is over, it’s a flat-out run back to Chambéry on rolling roads. Sutton, who is 53, rides at the front the whole way. ‘The bulk of my riding the last ten years has been like this,’ says Brailsford. ‘No breakfast, just a black coffee, and an hour-and-a-half or two hours sat staring at his backside.’
Back at the hotel, Jeppesen looks like I feel. His face is red and his accountant’s haircut unusually ruffled. ‘That little smoking fucker,’ he says. ‘Twenty five kilometres he rode on the front and no one gave him a turn.’
* * *
At the start, despite the two-and-a-half hour ride, there’s a spring in Sutton’s step as he bounds back to the bus with a pile of pizza boxes under his arm. ‘The boss must be knackered. He wants pizza.’ Some of the staff tuck in under the shade of a tree.
Brailsford has an easy manner about him this morning. He asks how the week has been and I reply that it’s been illuminating.
‘There’s nothing going on here,’ he says, answering a question that hasn’t really been asked.
‘Absolutely nothing at all. I know that’s not good enough for some people. It’s like the no-needles policy. I think that is absolutely great but how’s it being enforced? I’ve spoken to Pat [McQuaid, UCI president] and I told him the UCI needs to get out here and enforce it. Where are they? They need to be on the buses. There are 20 teams, how hard can it be to have an observer on each bus? That’s your window of opportunity for recovery there, between the finish and the hotel, so get someone on the buses.
‘The doctors are scared, you know. Okay, so if you give someone something to go uphill faster, that’s one thing. But very few people are prepared to risk going to prison to make someone go uphill faster.’
* * *
I’m in the second team car with Nicolas Portal. We’ve barely got underway when a break of 11 gets clear. In it are Andrey Zeits of Astana and Alexandr Kolobnev of Katusha. Team-mates of Vinokourov, who is a potential threat, and Rodriguez, who although three minutes down, might try a long attack from the Col du Glandon.
Yates is on the radio asking the Sky riders to let the gap go out to about five minutes ‘just in case Katusha are thinking of getting Rodriguez away so he can bridge across to Kolobnev’.
A few kilometres later, Yates is on the radio again. ‘McGee [Bradley, the Saxo Bank sports director] has come alongside me and said they don’t want it more than five minutes because they want the stage for Chris Sørensen. So let the gap go a bit more and they’ll ride.’
Tactically, the stage begins perfectly. Sky are in control. Early on the climb of the Glandon, which turns to reach its summit on the Col de la Croix de Fer, riders are in trouble. We see three Movistar riders call it a day and turn round in the road to descend against the direction of the race.
But by the summit, Wiggins has just Uran for support, and he is hanging on. Boasson Hagen has been dropped.
We’re back with Flecha and Thomas and will follow them all the way in – even though they are destined to finish outside the time limit – while listening to Yates’s updates on the radio.
The doc tells a story about yesterday’s stage. ‘Flecha and Xabi were riding up and a group of Spanish fans clearly said something because Flecha stopped pedalling and gave them a bit back. I asked Flecha what they’d said and it was: “Look at these fat arses”.’
Over the top of the Glandon, Yates’s tone is reassuring. His voice is never raised, it’s just the same languid register. ‘Perfect, perfect. Remember, we’ve got Kanstantsin if we need him,’ which suggests some sort of agreement has been made with the HTC rider, Siutsou. [Siutsou joined Team Sky the following season.]
* * *
Even before Wiggins had won the Dauphiné, some journalists and armchair experts were predicting that he had come too good, too soon. The assumption is that a good Dauphiné usually leads to a bad Tour.
But Kerrison is adamant they’ve got their planning right. ‘I am 100 per cent convinced there’s more to come at the Tour.’
He talks through some of Wiggins’s numbers. ‘The first 30 minutes of the Collet d’Allevard, his power was 430 watts, average. That tailed off to 408 for the last seven minutes. His cadence also tailed off a bit. The first 15 minutes of the Grenoble time trial, going uphill, he was doing 480 watts.
‘There were two reasons I was nervous about [Wiggins] riding the Dauphiné for GC. Firstly, if he had to go super deep to defend the jersey. But the first five days were not at all stressful. The last two were hard but today is short. I’m not worried. We didn’t want to put him into a hole we couldn’t get him out of in time for the Tour but we haven’t done that. Secondly, it will increase expectations. Last year he had all that expectation and he didn’t perform well. This year, he’s been under the radar and he’s done well.
‘But the Dauphiné has been carefully planned. Winning it is fantastic – or would be fantastic,’ he says, careful not to get ahead of himself. ‘If it had been planned as a peak, then sure, it might have been difficult to get back up for the Tour but it wasn’t. He didn’t back off after Bayern [Ründfahrt, the German stage race] and taper. He raced well at Bayern, then had a good week of training. He came here already fatigued. He’s not come into this race fresh, so it’s been good to see what he can do in a race on the back of a block of work. After this we’ll do four more days at altitude in Sestrière and then taper for the Tour.’
In May, Wiggins and a few other riders spent time in Tenerife, training at altitude. ‘It’s the best, most productive thing I’ve ever done,’ he says. ‘Last year I suffered when the Tour went high and it goes higher again this year. I basically lost 100 watts every time it went over 1,500 metres. After ten days in Tenerife I had that 100 watts back. It’s not just about being at altitude, it’s about training to perform at altitude.’
As Kerrison says: ‘People underestimate the impact of being at altitude.’
* * *
Yates is on the radio. We’ve still got seven kilometres to go, following the riders who are outside the time limit but up ahead, the race is won.
‘Nico… On a gagné.’ There is barely a hint of elation in Yates’s voice.
‘Have you opened the Champagne?’ asks Portal.
‘Red Bull for me.’
We pass a group of British supporters, from Yorkshire judging by the accent.
‘…’as he done it?’ they ask.
Portal doesn’t understand at first, so the doc explains.
‘…’as he done it, they asked. So you reply. “Yes, ee ’as done it”.’
‘Yes, eee has done it,’ says Portal in the closest you’ll get to a Frenchman doing a Yorkshire accent.
‘That concludes today’s English lesson,’ says the doc, who is now on great form. As we draw alongside Thomas, he hands him a bottle and says: ‘Beautiful scenery, isn’t it G?’
Thomas looks to his right at what is, admittedly a stunning view, although with sweat pouring from his brow and his jersey zipped to the waist he’s probably not in the perfect frame of mind to enjoy it. ‘Yeah. Lovely!’ he replies, deadpan.
* * *
There’s an end-of-term feeling at the top of La Toussuire. Everyone is packing up to go their separate ways. The riders will head to Sestrière and will celebrate Wiggins’s win with a pizza and a glass of wine. Raj and Alan, the mechanics, will drive back to the team’s service course in Mechelen, near Brussels. The satnav tells them they can be there by 3am if they don’t stop for long. Raj will set off again tomorrow, to drive to the south west of France for the Route du Sud. Yates will drive his Jaguar all the way home to southern England. Probably without stopping.
It all seems very low-key, considering this is the biggest win Team Sky has enjoyed so far.
But that’s life on the road. Once the job is done, another one is there to be started.
For Alan the mechanic. That means a week prepping the Tour bikes. As we descend La Toussuire in one of the Mercedes vans a thought suddenly strikes him.
‘I didn’t even get to say well done to Brad.’
* * *
Wiggins is a mass of contradictions. He can say one thing to the press one day, and something else the next. It’s difficult to know what he really thinks.
During the race, he told French television that the Tour couldn’t have been further from his mind and that he was concentrating simply on the Dauphiné. A few days later, he tells me that the Dauphiné was just part of the plan for the Tour. When I point out the apparent conflict in the two statements he explains that it’s possible to live in the moment while working towards a longer-term goal.
But there was no feeling of relief or joy after the Dauphiné for him. ‘It still hasn’t really hit me,’ he says. ‘I don’t know what I’m supposed to feel from it really. It was about going there and racing hard and building form into July.
‘I knew I was in great shape but I never felt like I was in great form. I was actually quite tired off the back of six weeks of hard work. I’m still in the middle of it, I’m going to a training camp rather than going home to have people tell me how great it was.
‘I’ve always raced fresh but this was about building the conditioning to cope with the demands of a three-week race. Last year I went to the Giro and won the prologue but I had no depth. This year I’ve had five days off since Roubaix. At the Tour of Romandy I was 70th in the prologue and everyone’s asking what went wrong but I’d done five hours each of the two days before. It is hard to explain to people and they just think you’re making excuses.
‘People will say I’ve peaked too soon but imagine this, if I’d been a minute slower in the time trial, or if I’d sat up one day and lost a bit of time, and then raced the last three days exactly as I did – following the wheels – people would have said: “Oh he’s well on track for the Tour, there’s more to come”. You can’t win really. I know where I’m at.
‘I think the whole team shone. Christian is like an old school Sean Yates. He does things instinctively without being asked. I thought “I could do with a bottle” he’d turn up with ten up his jersey. Edvald’s climbing was brilliant, G did a lot of work. I think as a team, that’s the best we’ve ever ridden, and it’s taken 18 months to get to that point.’
Critérium du Dauphiné final top five
1 Bradley Wiggins (GB) Sky 26-40-51
2 Cadel Evans (Aus) BMC at 1-26
3 Alexandre Vinokourov (Kaz) Astana at 1-49
4 Jurgen Van den Broeck (Bel) Omega Pharma-Lotto at 2-10
5 Joaquim Rodriguez (Spa) Katusha at 2-51
TEAM SKY’S RULES
A poster stuck to the wall inside the bus listed rules suggested and decided by the riders themselves.
• We will respect one another and watch each other's backs
• We will be honest with one another
• We will respect team equipment
• We will be on time
• We will communicate openly and regularly
• If we want our helmets cleaned we will leave them on the bus
• We will pool all prize money from races and distribute at the end of the year
• Any team bonuses from the team will be split between riders on that race
• We will give 15% of all race bonuses and prize money to staff
• We will speak English if we are in a group
• We will debrief after every race
• We will always wear team kit and apparel as instructed in the team dress code
• We will not use our phones at dinner - if absolutely required we will leave the table to have the conversation
• We will respect the bus
• We will respect personnel and management
• We will ask for any changes to be made to the bikes (gearing, wheel selection etc) the night before the race and not on race
• We will follow the RULES
EPILOGUE – WHAT HAPPENED NEXT?
Wiggins went to the 2011 Tour de France where Team Sky were third in the team time trial and he rode well on the Mûr-de-Bretagne to lie sixth overall after six stages. But then, on a benign section of a road about 40 kilometres from Chateauroux, he crashed, breaking his collarbone. His Tour was over after a week. The following summer, he won the Dauphiné again and this time followed up with victory in the Tour, the first British rider to wear the maillot jaune in Paris.
However, the 2011 Dauphiné was to play a far bigger role in his legacy. Following the Fancy Bears hack, which leaked details of Therapeutic Use Exemptions he’d applied for, and been granted, to allow him to take controlled medication before some of his biggest road race objectives, including the 2012 Tour de France he won, it emerged that a Jiffy Bag had been couriered to La Toussuire by Simon Cope, a member of team staff, on the final day of the 2011 Dauphiné. What was in it? We still don’t know. Cope said he didn’t know what he had been asked to take to the race on its final day. Wiggins, Team Sky, Brailsford and Dr Freeman all deny it was a banned substance, or that it was medication permitted with a TUE but administered to Wiggins in the bus after the stage – which would have been an anti-doping rule violation.
My assignment to spend the week travelling with Team Sky came about because of the fall-out from an interview I did with Dave Brailsford in 2009, as he was preparing to launch the team. This period is covered in much more detail in a three-part series I made called Covering Team Sky but, in brief, asking Brailsford to define his statement that Team Sky would not hire anyone who’d had an association with doping led to a breakdown in relations between me and him. At the end of a difficult 2010 season, someone in British Cycling’s press relations department persuaded Brailsford to meet me to clear the air and as part of that conversation we agreed that I could travel with Team Sky at a race the following season, travelling on the inside in order to see first-hand the culture. Nothing would be off-limits. I could speak to any rider or member of staff, as long as I accepted they were free to decline if they didn’t want to talk to me. That seemed fair enough.
It was a fascinating week, which I hope came across in the piece. The thing that struck me was just how hard all the staff worked to facilitate the riders. They were up earlier and to bed much later than I was. They seemed to have very little down time and what breaks they did get were spent poised to tackle the next task. The routine was intense, but also quite boring, as we moved from hotel to start town, finish town to hotel. Unlike when covering a race as a journalist, there was no way to break out of ‘the bubble’. Even something as simple as going for a coffee wasn’t really possible for most of the staff. The sandwiches prepared by the carers were very nice, especially on day one, but as the week wore on I craved something else to eat. The food laid on for the staff at the hotels most nights was pretty basic and was greeted with the enthusiasm of someone on a budget all-inclusive holiday who had long grown sick of the buffet.
Looking back now, 14 years on, I reflect on how much has changed. Even Graham Watson’s photos make it look almost like a different sport. The jerseys are baggy, the bikes far less aero than they are today. Team Sky were ruthlessly organised on the road and it was clear they were in the process of getting their act together after a chastening debut season. They’d arrived with a fanfare and slightly brash statements about modernising (and improving) the sport. They were mocked for lugging their own mattresses to races. People sniggered at the post-stage warm-downs on the turbo trainers – not because it was a brand new idea, but because warming down wasn’t necessarily a new concept. Riders had long been riding back to the hotel to spin the lactate out of their legs. It’s just that Sky was formalising these processes and they were, to a great degree, ‘outsiders’.
Of course, I was there as one of cycling’s biggest stories of the decade broke around me and I was completely oblivious. As I said in Covering Team Sky, I have a vague memory of seeing Simon Cope at La Toussuire that day but I couldn’t have sworn to it in a court of law. Cope was well-known in British cycling circles and his presence at a race wasn’t unusual.
But I have often reflected on my conversation with Dr Freeman about TUEs. There we were, talking about Rigoberto Uran’s circumstances, and the ethical line medical staff in the sport had to navigate on a daily basis. In a matter of weeks, Team Sky were applying for a TUE on Wiggins’s behalf so he could use triamcinolone to treat his asthma – something which was within his rights, and within the rules, but which would undoubtedly have put a very different complexion on his Tour victory if it had been in the public domain at the time.
Further listening: Covering Team Sky was released as an audio series in 2021 and is available now for all Friends of the Podcast subscribers to listen to. Sign up here.
Superb episode with JV, Lionel. A really enjoyable and interesting listen. Reminds me of your ‘lunch with’ pods. You really do excel at these long form conversations.