Sky’s the Limit: Wiggins and Cavendish: The Quest to Conquer the Tour de France. Richard Moore
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and never competed for the French team again.
By this point, Mark Cavendish had been withdrawn by his T-Mobile team, who were keen not to overburden their hot young prospect, but Geraint Thomas was still riding, and riding strongly. The youngest rider in the race made it to Paris, in 139th place. He was second from last, but he appeared to have something to spare, and he cut a relaxed figure in the mornings before stage-starts, apparently unfazed by what was going on around him, his mood consistent and his understated humour intact. David Millar compared him to ‘one of the penguins in Madagascar.’ He meant the animated film, ‘where the penguins appear all cute and cuddly, but that disguises a core of steel and a real malevolent streak.’ The highlight of Thomas’ Tour had been an early stage into Montpellier, when the Welshman led the peloton at high speed in the closing kilometres, helping to set up his South African teammate, Robbie Hunter, for the sprint victory. It underlined his ability, his class.
The potential of Thomas and Cavendish, strongly hinted at during their debut season in the professional ranks in 2007, gave Brailsford grounds for optimism and acted as a counterweight to the ‘doom and gloom’ that, to so many other fans and observers of professional cycling, seemed so pervasive. But with the sport at such a low ebb – reaching its lowest point, perhaps, in December 2007, when the German communications giant T-Mobile withdrew their backing of Cavendish’s team – Brailsford might have argued that the time was right to get involved. It could be called the logic of the property market: buy when the prices are low.
Nine months after Bourg-en-Bresse, Brailsford’s search for a backer for his plans to set up a professional road team began in earnest. The road team would be phase three of the British cycling revolution (phase two had produced Thomas and Cavendish, and will be discussed in the next chapter). It seemed a big ask: Brailsford was looking for a British sponsor prepared to fork out around £10m a year. ‘Dave had been in negotiations with British Cycling over his contract,’ says Shane Sutton, ‘and bringing in a pro team was part of his re-negotiations, so after the Manchester World Track Championships [in March 2008] Dave said to me: “You run the Olympic [track] team, and I’ll go out and source some money.” Dave was in meeting after meeting in London; sometimes I went, too. It was good; it gave us a feel for what we wanted.’
One of those meetings was with executives from British Sky Broadcasting. ‘With Sky,’ says Sutton, ‘it wasn’t a case of us selling it to them. I think it was more that they looked at what we were doing, and thought: we need to get hold of these guys who are running cycling.’ In fact, the meeting with Sky was driven by Sky, who – according to one insider – ‘came to us and had a really clear vision of what they wanted to do and how they were going to achieve it.’ Jeremy Darroch, the BSkyB chief executive, told Management Today magazine in March 2010 that he’d been actively seeking a sport to back, which was ‘very much open to all, where it didn’t matter if you were a man or a woman, whether you were young or old. I’d heard about what Dave was doing and I was impressed.’
But as much as Brailsford and Sutton, it was Thomas and Cavendish – especially Cavendish, the ‘goalscorer’ – who seemed to hint at a future in which, as well as on the track, British cyclists also won on the road, maybe even at the Tour de France. Thomas and Cavendish, and others like them, were the rays of sunlight penetrating the gloom. They were the riders who, unlike Bradley Wiggins and the other talented British riders who had never seemed to quite fulfil their potential on the road, could put Britain on the map of continental road cycling.
‘We’re very confident we’ve got a conveyor belt of young talent working now,’ said Brailsford in Bourg-en-Bresse. ‘We always thought that’s what would happen, and I think we’re seeing it now.’
This ‘conveyor belt of talent’ was also known as the British Cycling Academy.
‘I didn’t want them sitting on their fat backsides with a PlayStation or drinking coffee, because this is a job.’
Rod Ellingworth
Quarrata, Italy, April 2010
Hidden away on a street that lies off the main road in the tiny Tuscan town of Quarrata sits what looks like a family home, indistinguishable from all the other family homes that surround it. Apart from one thing. In the drive, semi-hidden from the street and running down the side of the two-storey building, sit two vehicles: a silver estate car and a van, both decorated in swirling red, white and blue, and the words, ‘Great Britain Cycling Team’.
Entering the house via the drive and through a side door, you come into a large workshop. A row of Pinarello bikes hang by their front wheels from hooks on the wall, and a mechanic breaks off from working on a time trial machine that appears to be suspended in mid-air – actually it’s fitted to a bike stand – to point silently to an adjoining door. This leads into a living room dominated by an enormous flat-screen TV showing MTV, with the sound muted. And in the corner is a desk, behind which, with his back to us, sits Max Sciandri, in a scruffy navy sweatshirt and jeans, tapping into a Mac laptop, a huge and messy-looking year planner on the wall above.
The Anglo-Italian – born in Derby, raised in Tuscany – is coach to the British Cycling Academy, based in this house in Quarrata. Sciandri also lives in Quarrata, in a much larger house on the outskirts of the town. ‘It’s a great house,’ says the retired professional – of his own sprawling place, not this more modest one. ‘Lance [Armstrong] came with Sheryl Crow,’ says Sciandri, quickly overcoming any reluctance to name-check one of his former teammates. ‘Sheryl loved my house. And she must have seen some houses …’
Today, Sciandri has sent the five Academy riders on a two-hour recovery ride. He conducts a tour of the house. ‘I’ll show you some rooms, hopefully they’re clean.’ But after climbing the stairs, and before we come to the shared bedrooms, we are confronted by a mural. ‘Swifty [Ben Swift] started the wall,’ says Sciandri as we pause in awed admiration before it.
‘The wall’ is the extraordinary legacy of the riders who have now been through the British Cycling Academy; a collage of cycling photographs cut from magazines. It contains hundreds, possibly thousands, of images, mainly featuring the stars of the current peloton, though with some old-timers in there – even, if you look hard, Sciandri himself. ‘Yeah,’ he laughs dismissively. ‘But they’re too young to remember my career. I don’t talk about it.’
Sciandri, in his strong Italian accent (which has more to do with the cadence of his speech than his pronunciation), explains how the Quarrata base came about. ‘I called Dave [Brailsford] at the end of 2005 and I said, “Dave …”’ Then he stops himself. ‘You could see that British Cycling had so much potential,’ he tells me. ‘It was just bursting, waiting to grow. It’s like a tree – you can’t put it in a pot. It was bursting out of its pot; it didn’t have anywhere to go. It needs to go on a hill, you know? So I said to Dave, “Let’s do something in Italy.” I wasn’t ready to be a team director. Cycling had been my life, I’d done my years and I needed to step back, but I knew I wanted to be involved somehow.
‘Rod [Ellingworth] was appointed as the coach to the Academy, so I stepped back a bit. But I helped them set up here in Quarrata; I helped them get into races, because it’s not that easy in Italy – you need to have been around a bit; you need to know the right people, you know?’
While Sciandri is talking he is interrupted by a clip-clopping sound. The riders have returned and are walking across the hard floor of the workshop in their cleated cycling shoes. ‘Luke, Tim … Chris, Erick, Andy,’ says Sciandri as they file in with their GB cycling kit, peeling gloves from freezing hands and, at Sciandri’s prompting, extending them to shake.
‘We got caught in a bit of snow and turned around,’ one of them tells Sciandri.
‘Turned round straight away,’ says another.
They disappear to the shower area (in one of the many modifications