Richard Moore - Sky’s the Limit - Wiggins and Cavendish - The Quest to Conquer the Tour de France

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Prologue The Start of the Journey

Chapter 1 Critical Mass

Chapter 2 The Academy

Chapter 3 Goodbye Cav, Hello Wiggo?

Chapter 4 The Best Sports Team in the World

Chapter 5 Unveiling the Wig

Chapter 6 A Tsunami of Excitement

Chapter 7 Taking on the Masters

Chapter 8 Pissgate

Chapter 9 The Classics

Chapter 10 The Recce

Chapter 11 It’s All About (the) Brad

Chapter 12 It’s Not About the Bus

Chapter 13 So Far from the Sky

Chapter 14 Take Two

Chapter 15 Gerbils on a Treadmill

Chapter 16 La Promenade des Anglais

Chapter 17 Froome Power

Acknowledgements

Index

Picture Section

Copyright

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE

THE START OF THE JOURNEY

‘They’ll use technology that we’re all going to look at and go, “Woah, I never saw that before.”’

Lance Armstrong

Rymill Park, Adelaide, 17 January 2010

It’s a sultry hot summer’s evening in downtown Adelaide, and, at the city’s Rymill Park, a large crowd begins to gather. Families line a cordoned-off rectangular 1km race circuit, around the perimeter of the park, while the balconies of pubs fill up with young people drinking beer out of plastic cups.

The road cycling season used to start six weeks later in an icily cold port on the Mediterranean, with the riders wrapped in many more layers than there were spectators. But the sport has changed in the last decade: it has gone global. And no event demonstrates that to the same extent as the season-opener: the Tour Down Under.

This year, though, there is another harbinger of change. Possibly. Wearing a neatly pressed short-sleeved white shirt, long black shorts and trainers, rubbing sun cream into his shaved head as he paces anxiously among the team cars parked in the pits area, is a man who bears more than a passing resemblance to a British tourist. It’s Dave Brailsford.

In his native Britain, Brailsford has gained a reputation as a sporting guru. Since 2004 he has been at the helm of the British Cycling team, which, at the Beijing Games in 2008, he led to the most dominant Olympic performance ever seen by a single team. But that was in track cycling, not road cycling. Road cycling – continental style – is a whole new world, not just for Brailsford but for Britain, a country that has always been on the periphery of the sport’s European heartland.

There have been British professional teams in the past. But they have been, without exception, doomed enterprises, Icarus-like in their pursuit of an apparently impossible dream. The higher they flew – to the Tour de France, as one particularly ill-fated squad did in 1987 – the further and harder they fell. And the more, of course, they were burned in the process. In fact, it seems oddly fitting that after more than a century of looking in on the sport with only passing interest, and limited understanding, Adelaide in Australia, on the other side of the world, marks Brailsford and his new British team’s bold entry into the world of continental professional cycling.

Bold is the apposite word. Everything about the new team, Team Sky – from their clothing, to their cars, to the brash and glitzy team launch in London just days earlier – screams boldness and ambition. They don’t just want to enter the world of professional road cycling. They aspire to stand apart; to be different. And by being different, and successful, they aspire to change it, almost as the team’s sponsor, British Sky Broadcasting, has changed the landscape of English football over the past two decades; almost as Brailsford and his team ‘changed’ track cycling, not merely moving the goalposts, but locating them in a different dimension.

Team Sky is Brailsford’s creation, along with his head coach and right-hand man, Shane Sutton. Sutton, a wiry, rugged, edgy, fidgety Australian, is the joker to Brailsford’s – with his background in business and his MBA – straight man. They are as much a double act as Brian Clough and Peter Taylor, the legendary football management team. And similarly lost without each other. Here in Adelaide, an hour before the first race of the season, and the first of Team Sky’s existence, Sutton is missing. Brailsford keeps checking his phone and finally it beeps. ‘The eagle has landed,’ reads the text message. Sutton’s delayed flight from Perth has arrived. Brailsford looks relieved. ‘Well, Shane needs to be here for this,’ he says.

Sutton arrives. Has he brought champagne, ready to toast the occasion? ‘Nah, none of that bullshit,’ he replies testily. He is wearing the same team-issue outfit as Brailsford; but if Brailsford looks like a businessman on holiday, Sutton, in his white shirt and long black shorts, has the mischievous, scheming air of a naughty schoolboy. Brailsford reaches into the giant coolbox parked in the shadow of the team car and pulls out a couple of cans of Diet Coke, tossing one at Sutton. They open their cans, take a swig, and wait for the action, which is just minutes away.

Brailsford has hurried back to Rymill Park from the team’s hotel, the Adelaide Hilton, where he gave the seven Team Sky riders – Greg Henderson of New Zealand, Mat Hayman and Chris Sutton of Australia, Russell Downing, Chris Froome and Ben Swift of Britain, Davide Viganò of Italy – a pep-talk. Earlier, the riders had been presented on stage by the TV commentators, Phil Liggett and Paul Sherwen. ‘I never thought I’d see the day we’d have a British team in the ProTour,’ said Sherwen. The ProTour is cycling’s premier league of major events.

Though all experienced professionals, most of whom have competed for big teams, the seven Team Sky recruits find themselves riven with nerves as they prepare for their debut. The dead time between the presentation of the teams in the middle of Rymill Park and the start of the race acts as a black hole into which spill fears, doubts and anxieties. ‘We were all nervous, just sitting around, waiting,’ Mat Hayman will recall later. ‘Pulling on the new kit, being given this opportunity to be part of this new team … We all know what’s gone into this team: more than a year’s work, so much thought and organisation. We’re excited about it, too, because we’ve all bought into what Dave and Shane and Scott [Sunderland, the senior sports director] are trying to do. And we all said that it had been a while since everyone had been so nervous about lining up.’

Just before they left the hotel, to pedal the 10 minutes to Rymill Park, Brailsford addressed them. ‘This is a proud moment for me,’ he said. ‘And it’s a unique occasion. We’re only going to make our debut once. This is it, lads. It’s a privilege. Enjoy it.’

Brailsford had been in Adelaide for 48 hours ahead of the big kick-off, with Sunday evening’s circuit race followed, two days later, by the six-day Tour Down Under. He had checked into the Hilton late on Friday evening and then wandered into the hotel lobby. ‘I’m a worrier,’ he said. ‘I always worry. I’m always wondering, what if we’d done this, or that. I’m sure that’ll never change, but I’m confident that we’ve done everything we could to prepare. It’s a huge moment. I’m excited.’ But he sought to add a note of caution. ‘You can’t go from having a group of individuals come together in Manchester to an elite team in six weeks,’ Brailsford pointed out. ‘It’s a process.’

Despite the late hour, Brailsford drank a coffee, then another. And he kept talking, stopping only to yell at Matt White, the director of a rival team, Garmin-Transitions, as White walked through the lobby. ‘Hey, Whitey!’ he yelled, though White didn’t appear to hear him. ‘Whitey!’