Four years from conception Dave Brailsford and Shane Sutton’s Team Sky registered its maiden stage victory
It is almost four years since Dave Brailsford, British Cycling’s performance director, and Shane Sutton, its head coach, first discussed what at the time seemed a pie-in-the-sky idea. Why not transfer the formula that was bringing such success in the velodrome on to the road, and set up a professional team with the same ambition: to be the best in the world; and to win the Tour de France.
That was in Melbourne, at the 2006 Commonwealth Games, and this week the pair were reunited in Australia to witness the moment the idea came to fruition. But as Team Sky assembled on Tuesday morning in Clare, 140km north of Adelaide, for the Tour Down Under, 48 hours after their spectacular debut in the prelude to this first major race of the season, Sutton was nowhere to be seen.
Brailsford scanned his phone anxiously. Sutton had called a few minutes earlier. “I’m stuck in a bloody field,” he had said. “Mechanical problems – a loose nut behind the wheel.”
It was only later that the truth emerged: the “loose nut” behind the (steering) wheel was Sutton’s driver, an old friend from Australia. On the drive to Clare they got lost. And so Sutton missed the start of a project he had been instrumental in setting up, and in galvanising with his trademark energy and humour.
The incident is noteworthy for being a very rare example of a good old-fashioned cock-up. Brailsford’s reputation for attention to detail – his “aggregation of marginal gains” approach – means that Team Sky resembled a slick, highly professional outfit, drawing envious glances from other squads, even before a pedal had turned.
Some of the envy is directed at the annual budget, estimates of which range from £10m-£25m. “They have the biggest budget in the ProTour by far,” said a rival team owner, Bob Stapleton of HTC-Columbia. Which may or may not be true – Brailsford denies it – but other gossip was more fanciful. Brailsford’s favourite was that Prince William, visiting Australia this week, would be in the team car on one stage.
Fat chance of that. The three seats – two-thirds of the back being taken up by spare wheels – were occupied by the sports director Sean Yates, team principal Brailsford, and with the mechanic Kenneth van de Wiele wedged into the back, poised to leap into action.
His readiness could be a metaphor for the team’s approach to their first race. In the week before the Tour Down Under, while one French team was taking the traditional approach of convening every morning to ride for five hours in the forty-degree heat, Yates’s seven riders gathered for shorter, more intense sessions, during which they scouted out stage finishes, and rehearsed their lead-out train, intended to catapult their sprinter, Greg Henderson.
The approach borrows from the team pursuit, in which Team GB are the Olympic champions and world record holders. And in the conservative world of professional road cycling, it counts as radical. “Having a plan, and having the guys practice it in training, is unusual,” admitted Yates, who has lived in that conservative world, as a rider and director, for three decades, most recently with Lance Armstrong and Alberto Contador at Astana.
“Mind you, it’s easy to have the theory,” added Yates, a note of caution, if not scepticism, detectable. “Putting it into practice, and executing the plan in a race, is totally different.”
Before Sunday evening’s warm-up race, over a 51km circuit in the centre of Adelaide, the riders knew the plan; they were about to find out if they could execute it. “Leading up to the race we were sitting around in the hotel,” said the Australian, Mathew Hayman. “It was 15 minutes before we had to leave and the guys were saying how nervous they were.”
Brailsford sensed it and made a speech, telling them there was no pressure; that he felt proud. “I just told them this was a unique occasion,” said Brailsford. “We’ll only make our debut once.”
As the race unfolded the Sky plan didn’t seem obvious. For 98% of the race, the riders were anonymous. Lance Armstrong joined a five-man escape at half-distance, but with five laps to go it was closed down by HTC-Columbia, working for their sprinter, Andre Greipel. “Now we go,” said Stapleton, standing beside Brailsford, Sutton and Yates in the pits, as his men hit the front.
But with two laps to go six riders in blue and black suddenly took over, riding as a single unit, swamping the yellow-and-white clad HTC riders, and defending their positions when HTC responded. Hayman was immense, taking over from Russell Downing, spending almost a lap on the front, stringing the bunch out in a line behind him, before swinging off for Ben Swift to take over, followed by Davide Vigan, with Henderson and Chris Sutton – Shane’s nephew – finishing with a remarkable one-two.
“Textbook,” said Shane Sutton after embracing Brailsford, while Yates, with evident pride, said: “I think other teams will look at that and think, ‘They’ve just rocked up, put six guys in a line, they looked fucking mean, and they won the race.'”
“Everyone can be strong over 50km,” said a shrugging Greipel the next day, as Brailsford revealed that HTC’s star sprinter, Mark Cavendish, had phoned to offer grudging congratulations, and to promise that it wouldn’t happen at the Tour de France.
It hasn’t happened at the Tour Down Under, either. The HTC train has been dominant, Greipel winning three of the four stages. Henderson placed a good second on stage two, but, for the moment, Stapleton’s men remain masters in the art of winning races.
In Goolwa afternoon the seven Team Sky riders sat in a semi-circle, each locked in his own world. It had been a bad stage, their train derailed in the finale by mechanical problems for Hayman, Henderson only managing 13th. “We’re all really disappointed and dejected,” said Hayman. “Other days we were beaten but came away with positives. Today we don’t.”
Yet, overall, Brailsford is happy; “very happy,” he says. When the team gets to Europe they will also have the infrastructure that he thinks will give them an edge – the customised bus and vehicles, for example. “We’ve put a lot of thought and effort into our support vehicles, even having systems to understand weather conditions and transmit reliable information directly to the riders. Here we’ve had to improvise a bit, though it’s the same for all the teams. But we think we have things that will add to performance.”
One of the bus’s features is apparently a telescopic strobe light that extends from the roof, acting as a beacon for the riders to locate their on-the-road HQ amid all the other team vehicles. It probably wouldn’t have been powerful enough to help Sutton find them on Tuesday, though.
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