Sky’s the Limit: Wiggins and Cavendish: The Quest to Conquer the Tour de France. Richard Moore
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When they weren’t in meetings, they mooched around the reception area and the Starbucks by the entrance, their tans and tracksuits marking them out from the businessmen in suits who hurried past. (Brailsford had been more or less living in a similar hotel nearby for many of the previous months, as he worked around the clock to set up Team Sky, while also fulfilling his responsibilities as British Cycling performance director. His long-term residence at the Holiday Inn led some colleagues to christen him ‘Alan Partridge’, after Steve Coogan’s comic character, who was also a long-term resident in an anonymous hotel.)
But the weather hardly dulled the sense of anticipation. There was a sense that the riders were involved in something new, something different, something exciting. It was infectious.
On the first night a reception was hosted by Brailsford, who called the riders to the stage, one by one. There, he presented them with their new team jersey. It was the first glimpse they’d had of the striking Adidas black-and-blue kit. It was stark, minimalist, far removed from the garish collages of sponsors’ names and logos sported by some of the other teams in the peloton; the shorts were retro black, with the shirts featuring black on the front (black disperses heat) and white on the back (white reflects heat) with a thin sky-blue line (symbolising the ‘narrow line’ between success and failure).
‘When we were presented one by one on the stage, and handed the jersey by Dave B, it was pretty emotional,’ said the Australian rider Chris Sutton, Shane’s nephew. ‘It was the first time we’d seen it. It gives meaning to what you do. I wasn’t going to cry, but …
‘It’s blown me away actually,’ continued Sutton. ‘The way they’ve organised things, the structure they’ve set up for this team, and what they want you to achieve. I expected big things but the camp exceeded my expectations. Everyone seems to be on the same wavelength, and to want the same thing. I’ve known about the British track programme for a long time through Uncle Shane and Dave B. I could see that it was all about the riders – that the emphasis is on them, and they’re really supported. It’s why I wanted to join the team.’
There were riders involved who’d been in big teams, yet they’d never experienced anything like the buzz of being part of Team Sky. Even little details – sky-blue, Team Sky-branded M&Ms, sky-blue, Team Sky-branded iPhone covers, not to mention the iPhones and laptops – helped foster a sense that this would be, above all else, different to other teams. The very fact that the week wasn’t a training camp, but a get-together, with the emphasis on talking and planning, was in itself different. ‘We had one meeting that lasted five hours,’ said Steve Cummings, a straight-talking, down-to-earth Merseysider. ‘I still haven’t got over it, to be honest.’ At school, he admitted, ‘I didn’t like the classroom, I’d rather be out doing things, playing football, riding my bike.’ But he appreciated the need for planning and the attention to detail. He was a professional, now 28, who had also ridden for another team that had upped the ante, Lance Armstrong’s Discovery Channel squad. ‘Discovery Channel was better than anything else at the time,’ said Cummings, ‘but this is different, it’s more advanced; it takes it up a level. The attention to detail, wanting to go that little step further for every rider …’
For Geraint Thomas, another of the British riders, it was ‘a dream’. The Academy graduate had ‘dreamed of becoming a pro, and of riding with a British team. We’re there now; we’re on the map. If we can take the principles from the track team across to the road I don’t see why we can’t be the best in the world. It’s mega. Seeing all the riders come together, the kit, it’s really exciting. I can’t wait to get going.’
For Serge Pauwels, a Belgian rider who’d signed from Cervelo, another team that had upped the ante when they entered the peloton in 2009, there was a different focus at Team Sky. ‘Last year in Cervelo there was also a lot of attention to detail, but there the focus was on technology, not on performance,’ said Pauwels. ‘Here, performance is the focus.’ And for Michael Barry, an experienced Canadian who’d ridden with Lance Armstrong’s US Postal team, and also alongside Mark Cavendish at HTC-Columbia, it was all about the ‘philosophy’. ‘I’ve noticed what they’ve done on the track, what they’ve accomplished,’ said Barry. ‘A lot of teams select riders based on their results in the past, and based on their proven potential rather than their projected potential. This team wants to get the most out of every individual, and for an athlete that’s the perfect environment to be in. Because we all want to get the most out of ourselves. If we have the support to do that, we can achieve more than we’ve achieved before.’
Barry, one of the more thoughtful and eloquent members of the peloton – who had written a book about his experience with Armstrong’s team – was also attracted to the team’s wider goal: its mission to encourage people to ride bikes. Strange as it may seem, promoting cycling is not a common goal for professional cycling teams. In fact, it is unheard of. ‘I mean, yeah, we might motivate people to ride bikes by what we do,’ said Barry, ‘but here there’s a direct correlation between the team and getting more people riding bikes. This really appeals to me. Thinking back to when I was a kid, and why I wanted to be a cyclist, it was the interaction we had with cyclists, seeing what they do, being inspired by them. That connection, between racing cyclists and cycling for fun, or for transport, is very rarely made.
‘Basically,’ added Barry, ‘this sounded like a team with a new philosophy and I thought, oh man, I want to be part of it, it sounds exciting. It’s about thinking outside the box. Cycling tends to be a very traditional sport. People are scared to make changes or try new things; they’re apprehensive. But this team has the personnel and the resources to do that.’
Mat Hayman, an Australian domestique and cobbled Classics specialist who had joined Team Sky after 10 years with the Dutch Rabobank team, was similarly impressed. In fact, he had wondered whether the idea he’d been sold had been too good to be true. ‘I spent two days trying to get to Manchester,’ said Hayman. ‘I missed my connecting flight to Europe, and I was trying to phone all the guys – Dave Brailsford, Shane Sutton, Scott Sunderland. All their phones were turned off, and at that moment I was thinking this might be a big hoax.’ Hayman’s scepticism was understandable. Four years earlier, the legendary Italian directeur sportif Giancarlo Ferretti announced that he’d secured sponsorship from Sony-Ericsson and began signing riders, only to then learn that he’d been the victim of a hoax (and not even a very elaborate hoax; Ferretti had concluded the deal entirely by email, with a ‘Sony Ericsson’ executive using the email address: [email protected]).
‘At the start some of the things that Scott and Dave were telling me sounded too good to be true,’ Hayman continued. ‘But what Sky have done, it seems to me, is that they’ve put their faith in Dave and that British Cycling group. I can imagine those guys walked into a room and said what they want to do for cycling, and that’s why they bought into it. They sold it to me on the basis that the riders would have control, which is something I can’t see Italian teams going for …
‘Listen, this is killing the Aussies,’ Hayman continued, ‘because we’ve been trying to get something like this off the ground for years. The British guys don’t know how lucky they are, to go in at ground zero on this. There’s Russell Downing, he’s fought for every minute to get here. It’s great for the young guys, they’ve got the world in front of them, and for Russ, who gets the chance he probably deserved a few years ago.
‘It’s a British team but a few of us were reflecting, it hasn’t been “British this, British that”. We’re Team Sky. If the Union Jack had been on the kit I’d have got my pen out and added some stars.’ They wouldn’t be playing ‘God Save the Queen’ in the bus in the mornings, Hayman added. ‘Although the old girl is still my queen, too.’
Dan Hunt, one of the coaches who Brailsford had promoted from his work with the track cycling team (Hunt coached Rebecca Romero to her gold medal at the Beijing Olympics), said that their ambition was no less than ‘to become the best sporting team in the world, across all sports’. Barry shrugged his shoulders as he was asked whether that was achievable. ‘For sure that is achievable. It’s a big reason I came here. There’s a lot of work. But I wouldn’t want to come to a team that said: our goal next year is to be average.’