Sky’s the Limit: Wiggins and Cavendish: The Quest to Conquer the Tour de France. Richard Moore
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if a more science-based approach hasn’t been tried, all the more reason to try it. It would be remiss of Brailsford not to at least explore the possibility. Like Boardman, Brailsford has successfully engaged ‘outsiders’ – in particular sports scientists with no previous experience in, or knowledge of, cycling – asking them to look afresh at the sport; to ask questions too obvious to be put by ‘experts’; to identify ‘market inefficiencies’.
But a key member of Brailsford’s team has helped in another crucial area, giving his athletes – and indeed coaches – the mental ‘tools’ to think logically rather than emotionally.
‘It’s not about switching off emotional thoughts, because that would be impossible,’ says Steve Peters, the psychiatrist employed by Brailsford, and now a member of his senior management team, along with Shane Sutton. (Boardman, who had been the fourth member of that team, stepped down after Beijing.) ‘It’s about bringing emotional thoughts under control,’ continues Peters, ‘overriding them with logic.’
Peters works with many athletes across many sports, and one of his techniques is to help them identify, and isolate, their ‘chimp’ – their ‘chimp’ being the emotional part of the brain. Each of the gold medallists in Beijing spoke with fear of being ‘hijacked by my chimp’. They rode in fear of their chimp; or, rather, they rode with their chimp caged. Chris Hoy, the sprinter, said that his tears on the podium after his third gold medal owed to the fact ‘I’d kept my emotions in check for the whole five days of competition; that was it all finally coming out.’ The tears were the doing of his chimp, unleashed from its cage and running amok.
Also central to Brailsford’s modus operandi – and the phrase for which he became best known following Beijing – is his ‘aggregation of marginal gains’. In fact, Billy Beane in Moneyball is similarly preoccupied with taking such a detailed, no-stone-unturned approach. There is another name for it: Kaizen, the Japanese philosophy of constant and continuous improvement.
John Herety mentioned the ‘empowering’ aspect to Brailsford’s management style when he took over from Peter Keen as performance director at British Cycling. This is Kaizen in action: it hands responsibility to everyone within an organisation; from the cleaner to the CEO, everyone is encouraged to participate in the organisation’s activities, and to think about and improve their performance. It doesn’t have to be a big improvement; just marginal ones. ‘We encourage everyone to make a 1% improvement in everything they do,’ Brailsford explained. ‘Everyone, from the mechanics sticking on a tyre to the riders; their eating, sleeping, resting; everything.’
Central to Brailsford’s ‘aggregation of marginal gains’ and Steve Peters’ training of athletes to keep their emotional chimp under lock and key, is a focus on the process. The process is everything. ‘There’s no point in looking at consequences, because they could be out of your control,’ says Peters. ‘All you can do … all you can control is the process.’
Brailsford and his team – or most of it – bought into this in the run-up to the Beijing Olympics. Bradley Wiggins, by publicly admitting he was aiming for three gold medals, might have been an exception. When Wiggins failed to do this – winning ‘only’ two – he seemed slightly disappointed. (Speaking to Peters after the Olympics, he alluded to this in passing, when talking about the difficulties the non-medal winning cyclists were having post-Beijing: ‘It’s awful for Brad. He did his best and was superb. Double gold – unprecedented, until Chris [Hoy] got his three!’)
Brailsford didn’t make that mistake. In the run-up to Beijing, and even while the Olympics were on and his cyclists returned with gold medal after gold medal, he steadfastly refused, despite being asked repeatedly, to be drawn into predicting how many golds his team might end up with.
It is this that makes one aspect of the mission statement that Brailsford outlines at the Lanesborough Hotel puzzling, more particularly because it is the big one: the one that will make all the following day’s headlines. That stated goal, to win the Tour de France, seems to fly in the face of Brailsford and his team’s usual approach. It’s an outcome, not a process.
‘Control’ appears to be another important word to Brailsford. It is a big reason for him wanting to run a professional road team, to bring his top athletes back under the umbrella of British Cycling, to be able to call on them for events – world championships and Olympic Games – in which they compete for the national team, rather than being at the mercy of their pro teams.
As Brailsford now knew all too well, with riders scattered around Europe, ‘control’ could be difficult to exert even when British riders raced in GB colours. The 2005 World Championships in Madrid had proved that, while also revealing some of the murkier aspects of professional road racing – including the deals and unofficial alliances previously alluded to.
In Madrid, two British riders – Tom Southam and Charly Wegelius – puzzled observers, and indeed the British coaching staff, now headed by Brailsford, by working at the front of the peloton in the early stages of the race. Their efforts were considerable, and did not appear to be in British interests. But there was a good reason for that: they weren’t. Though wearing British jerseys, the two were actually working on behalf of the Italian national team.
John Herety, the road team manager at that time, now explains: ‘Tom and Charly told me there was the potential for it happening.’ Southam and Wegelius both rode for Italian professional teams. ‘They were told it’d be in their interests to ride for the Italians. Their motive was not financial, I’m sure of that – it was to keep in with the sinister group of riders who ran cycling in that area [in the north of Italy]. They were looking after their jobs. I didn’t like it, I was uncomfortable with it, but …’ Herety, who’d ridden as a professional on the continent in the 1980s, and managed teams since the early 1990s, understood the rules of the game, and that, at the world championships, riders from ‘lesser’ countries would be encouraged, perhaps even obliged, to ride for the country in which they plied their trade professionally.
As Southam explains: ‘In any other world championship, up to that point, it would have been the correct thing to do [as a British rider]. It was based on career. I can’t speak for Charly, but he was very embedded in Italian culture. His contemporaries, the people he trained with, were in the Italian team. These were the people he worked with and who influenced his career. For me, I was in my second year, I was trying to break into that … circle of riders. I thought I needed to show these guys what I could do.
‘The suggestion made to us at the World Championship the previous year was that we should make the most out of this race: to do the best we could for our careers. And I went into Madrid with the same attitude, but the climate had changed and I didn’t take that into account. Like I say, in any other world championship it would have been the correct thing to do …’
When Southam says ‘the climate had changed,’ he is referring to Britain’s rising status as a world cycling nation, even if this still owed only to their success on the track, particularly at the previous year’s Athens Olympics. As Herety explains: ‘One of the big things Dave was trying to create was this belief that we were just as good as everyone else – the Aussies, the Italians, the French, Belgians, Spaniards. This kind of thing had been going on in cycling for years and nobody cared. But the environment was definitely changing. Britain was trying not to be seen as second-class citizens. And so Dave had to be seen to be doing the right thing.’
While Southam and Wegelius were told off (Brailsford phoned Southam in the week after the road race. ‘He wasn’t unpleasant,’ says Southam. ‘He just said, “You fucked up”’), the furore that followed Madrid was such that Herety offered to resign as British Cycling’s national road manager. ‘I was hoping they’d say no,’ he says with a bitter laugh. ‘But they said, “Okay, then.”’
The ramifications of what happened in Madrid were far-reaching, while the episode also provided further retrospective vindication for Peter Keen’s original decision not to pour resources into road cycling. Never mind the drugs, it was murky in so many other respects; a game played to its own rules, in a bubble that could resemble a mafia state.
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