Of the six Tours since Team Sky first appeared at la Grande Boucle in 2010 they have won three overall with two riders, Sir Bradley Wiggins and Chris Froome, and taken 12 stages, a record which is beginning to bear comparison with some of the best-known teams in cycling history such as Bernard Hinault’s Renault and Miguel Indurain’s and Pedro Delgado’s Reynolds-Banesto.
Looking purely at the Tour de France, Sky have dominated the post-Lance Armstrong era, even if they have yet to win a major one-day classic. It is a far cry from the spring day in 2009 when Dave Brailsford – pre-knighthood – summoned the press to the Lanesborough hotel to announce his intention of winning the Tour with a British cyclist within five years, and of doing it “clean”.
In those six years Sky have variously been the object of envy, curiosity and – at times – derision. Their largely black kit, machine-like riding style and a perceived disregard for the traditions of cycling have turned them into cycling’s Marmite team – loved or loathed, with little in between. But what cannot be denied is Sky’s success.
Brailsford made much of two things that he wanted to bring from the track “medal factory”: a belief in coaching and in “marginal gains”. It could be legitimately suggested that Wiggins’s success – and that of Froome in subsequent years – came down to the exploitation of a “knowledge gap” in the sport. Teams had failed to invest in coaching back-up but concentrated their resources on sophisticated doping programmes; in the wake of the UCI’s introduction of the no-needle rule, there were stories of riders sitting on team buses at a total loss after stages without a drip to help them recover. Sky, coming to the sport with a clean slate, could simply get on with coaching their riders.
The core of Wiggins’s initial success was data put together by the formerswimming coach Tim Kerrison – now Sky’s head of athlete performance – during the 2010 and 2011 Tours, to calculate the power outputs his riders needed to win the race. In 2012 he unveiled a graph with two lines showing power output levels against the time they need to be sustained: one line represented what was needed to win the Tour; a second line portrayed what Wiggins, or other Sky Tour riders, could achieve relative to what they needed to do. The goal was to get the two lines as closely matched as possible.
“You can see from this team how much you can get by investing relatively small amounts in coaching. The gains are disproportionate,” Kerrison said in 2013. Sky have continued that philosophy, continuing to invest in coaching support – the employment of the British coach Simon Jones last year being a case in point – and in marginal gains such as a new super-aerodynamic Pinarello bike last year; a new machine for cobbles this season.
There are other keys to Sky’s success. They enjoy a resource level which is at the highest end of the spectrum and enables them to buy mature talent to support the likes of Froome. Last year’s signings, Nicolas Roche, Wout Poels and Leopold König are not in the stratospheric league but are well up cycling’s pay scale. They have enjoyed the resources of the British Cycling Olympic Team – riders and back-up such as physios and staff – and at times have seemed to be recruiting the best from Manchester without regard for the long-term effect on the structure that originally bred the team.
As for “doing it clean”, the core of that was a zero-tolerance policy on employing staff and riders with doping records. But the trust that Sky initially enjoyedon the anti-doping front evaporated rapidly when, in 2012, it was revealed that they had gone against their original plan to hire only doctors from outside cycling, and had unobtrusively employed the former Rabobank medic Geert Leinders.
That the appointment at the end of 2010 coincided with an upturn in their fortunes certainly did not help matters and the questioning began when Bradley Wiggins dominated the time trials in the 2012 Tour, with Froome the strongest rider in the mountains. For all of the questioning, no evidence of doping within Sky has been produced.
There are other explanations that can be put forward for their continuing success. The men at its head – Brailsford, Kerrison, the British coach Rod Ellingworth – are constantly reappraising what they do and how they do it, most recently after last year’s failure in the Tour, after which the coaching side was beefed up still further and the management structure tweaked.
That defeat, with Froome crashing out and the team failing to rally round, was probably key in this year’s success. “There was a two-year period when we won a lot and it’s hard to identify what to change when you are winning,” said Kerrison. “It’s a matter of making sure we still pay attention to all those details.”
Ellingworth puts it another way: “It was a matter of everyone getting back on their game. You need a good kick in the teeth every now and again.”
Source: https://www.theguardian.com
