Sky’s the Limit: Wiggins and Cavendish: The Quest to Conquer the Tour de France

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Something else is afoot here in Bourg-en-Bresse, however, and it has nothing to do with Beijing, and it has nothing to do with track cycling. Brailsford, even as he basks in the afterglow of his team’s domination of the recent World Track Cycling Championships in Palma, and plots the 13 months to Beijing with the kind of supreme confidence that can only come from such domination, appears to be looking beyond all that, to some distant, imagined horizon. You can see it in his piercing blue eyes; they blaze with enthusiasm and sparkle with the excitement of a child catching a first, thrilling glimpse of … well, of the Tour de France.

As he outlines his dream, his enthusiasm intensifies; in fact, the plan seems to be progressing rapidly and taking shape in his imagination right here, under the large canopy of a tree, just outside a bar in Bourg-en-Bresse.

There have been several catalysts, says Brailsford, which all add up to ‘a critical mass’, or a tipping point. ‘That was a good effort from Brad today,’ he says. ‘Good to see him having a go.’ But Wiggins’ big day out had been the icing on the cake – or the cherry on the icing on the cake. A few days earlier, Brailsford and a million or so others had been in London for the Tour’s first-ever Grand Départ on British soil. The Tour had got underway with a prologue time trial around the British capital, passing the Houses of Parliament, Buckingham Palace and Hyde Park, before, the next day, a road race stage took them to Canterbury along roads lined the entire way with spectators. It had been extraordinary – a weekend in which you’d have been forgiven for thinking that London was cycling’s spiritual home – and which prompted Christian Prudhomme, the Tour director, to eulogise London and Britain in a way that no Frenchman had done since Napoleon III. ‘I do not know when we will come back,’ said Prudhomme. ‘But one thing is certain: it is not possible for us not to return.’

Yet Brailsford feels that something even more significant than the London Grand Départ is brewing. Five British riders are riding – the biggest British participation since the last British team to ride the Tour, the ill-fated ANC-Halfords squad, took part in 1987. And among those five riders are two highly promising youngsters, Mark Cavendish and Geraint Thomas.

This has got Brailsford thinking. Twelve months after watching the then 19-year-old Cavendish win a gold medal at the World Track Championships in Los Angeles, Brailsford and Sutton found themselves at the Commonwealth Games in Melbourne. It being the Commonwealth Games, at which riders compete for the home nations rather than for Great Britain, Brailsford and Sutton were not as occupied, or under as much pressure, as they’d usually be during a major championship. They spent a fair amount of time sitting together in the stands, watching Cavendish win another gold medal on the track, this time for the Isle of Man, and they discussed the future. They cast their minds back to the Manchester Commonwealth Games in 2002, and forward to the Delhi Games in 2010. In between, of course, were the Olympics. But a sense of repetition, of being locked into a cycle of major games, was evident. Because that is the limitation of track cycling: it’s all about the major games and world championships; there is no velodrome-staged equivalent of the Tour de France or Giro d’Italia, or Tour of Flanders or Paris-Roubaix. These road races are the monuments of the sport; where the history, the prestige and the money is. ‘We were thinking,’ Sutton said later, ‘that we can’t keep doing this forever. We’ve got to do something different.’

The conversation went no further. But 10 months later, back in Los Angeles for a track world cup meeting, Brailsford and Sutton once again found themselves with time to kill, and again they began to project beyond Beijing. Ironically, this owed to a stroke of misfortune for one of the latest of the talented young British riders to emerge, Ben Swift. Swift had been due to ride the madison with Rob Hayles, but he crashed and broke his collarbone. ‘Shane and I had a lot of time on our own and a lot of time to chat,’ Brailsford said, ‘and we inevitably got to talking about future plans.’

And so to Bourg-en-Bresse, and the bar in which Brailsford is sipping water as the late afternoon turns to evening. What is always most striking about Brailsford is his enthusiasm; his shoulders hunch, and he cups his hands in front of his face, almost like the rugby player Jonny Wilkinson preparing for a goalkick; then he moulds those hands into constantly shifting shapes as he talks. ‘I was inspired by London,’ says Brailsford, ‘but this is something I’ve been thinking about for a long time, and I feel that the time’s coming for a British pro team.’

‘Here,’ he clarifies. ‘In the Tour de France. From a personal point of view, if someone asked me what I wanted to do next, that would be it. We had a gut feel that Cav [Cavendish] and Geraint would come through at this level, but thinking it and seeing it are two different things. When I saw Geraint leave the start house for the prologue in London it was that moment of realising that it’s not just something we’re thinking about. I see Cav and Geraint now and think: it’s on.’

Brailsford outlines how such a team could work, in particular with regard to funding. Because what he’s talking about would need serious backing, with a sponsor able and willing to pump millions into the project. ‘The type of partner we’d be looking for would be British. It would be a British initiative. We’d be all about innovation and about doing it clean. In the first instance it would be about being competitive: that’d be our aim. But ultimately you’d want to win. You wouldn’t run a pro team if you didn’t want to win. It wouldn’t fit our mentality not to aim to win.

‘The money? It’s difficult to be clinical about it, but there’s a huge amount of money floating around the City, and a very small circle of people managing a huge amount of money. If you’re in that circle … it’s not finding money that’s the obstacle. I don’t think so. I mean, all the teams here are investing between £3m and £8m a year. It’s a shed load of money, and they’re all committed for four years, but if there weren’t decent returns on that, they wouldn’t be doing it, would they?’

But how would Brailsford do it? Would he combine running a Tour de France team with his current job, as British Cycling’s performance director? ‘It’d have to be done as a private enterprise – or as part of the governing body, which would be a first,’ he says. ‘No other governing bodies run a pro team. But not many countries have the kind of funding structure for elite sport that Britain has.’

One of the reasons for Brailsford being here at the Tour, he explains – and apart from riding l’Etape du Tour in a few days’ time – is to negotiate some of the British riders’ contracts. He is almost, it seems, acting as their agent, which is curious. But this too has highlighted a problem – or an opportunity. The problem is that the riders are contracted to, and under the control of, teams that operate independently of British Cycling, and with fundamentally different – even opposed – priorities. They are not, for example, remotely interested in the Olympics. Which is a problem for Brailsford, and a frustration. The riders in question, with Cavendish and Thomas to the fore, have been nurtured and developed by British Cycling. Brailsford wants to bring them back under an umbrella that he is holding.

‘The lads here know I want to do this [set up a pro team] and they’re all absolutely mad for the idea,’ says Brailsford. ‘I’m here negotiating their contracts for them; so I know what’s in their contracts. And I know – or I’m learning – how the teams are structured and how they operate.

‘We’ve got a set philosophy about doing things at British Cycling,’ he continues, ‘with the riders at the centre. But look at a lot of teams here at the Tour – that’s not how they operate. Between races they don’t even see their riders. They don’t know where they are, never mind what they’re doing. It’s bonkers.’

It is also, thinks Brailsford, one reason why a doping culture is so prevalent in professional road cycling; the theory being that expectation/pressure coupled with absence of care/responsibility equals ideal conditions for such a culture to develop. He’d do it differently, he says. ‘If we did anything it’d be 100% clean. We’ve got this young generation coming through, riders who don’t want to cheat. And there’s wider enthusiasm; untapped potential. We saw it in London and on the road to Canterbury; the crowds, screaming by the roadside … despite all the doom and gloom and the negativity around the doping stories.’

And what about the older guard – Wiggins and the reformed doper David Millar? Would they be involved? ‘You’d like to think it’d be possible to do this before they’ve retired,’ says Brailsford. ‘I want to bring together lots of different elements in cycling in Britain. Instead of factions, let’s get behind this thing and see what we can do.

‘It’s dependent on these riders progressing and coming through,’ he adds. ‘We’re not going to do it until the riders are good enough to do it; until we have the critical mass of British talent we can’t do it. It’s unlikely you’re going to get 25 British riders, but you need the critical mass; we wouldn’t do it with an international team. But knowing what I do of the young lads coming through, there’s plenty of talent. That’s not the issue.

‘And with Cav, we’ve got a winner. He’s your goalscorer.’

Brailsford mentioned doping, and doing it clean. The British track team had proved it could be done: there was no mud sticking to them, yet they were winning left, right and centre. But it was quite different to the road; track cycling didn’t have the ingrained doping culture of road cycling, which was precisely why Brailsford’s predecessor, Peter Keen, had decided, back in 1997, to ignore the road.

Blond-haired and boyish, and blessed with infectious enthusiasm, Keen, when he was appointed performance director, was acclaimed as a visionary. He was the sports scientist who had coached Chris Boardman to an Olympic gold medal – the first by a British cyclist in 84 years – in Barcelona in 1992, and subsequently helped Boardman with the difficult transition from track to road racing, going from his Olympic and world pursuit titles, and world hour record, to winning the prologue time trial and wearing the yellow jersey at the Tour de France.

But in 1997 Keen accepted an even bigger challenge: to turn round the fortunes of the British Cycling team. For the first time, the sport had money, thanks to lottery funding. Keen was given an annual budget of £2.5m and charged with drawing up a plan that could transform Britain’s cyclists from mediocrity to … well, just about anything would be an improvement on performances that, with the odd exception (Boardman, Graeme Obree, Yvonne McGregor), ensured Britain occupied the lower tiers of world cycling.

Keen’s proposals, to focus the country’s efforts, and funding, exclusively on track cycling, were radical and controversial. But he had thought about it long and hard, and he felt that he had little choice; that to try and produce a road team that could compete with the best in the world would be pointless. ‘My view at the time,’ Keen told me in 2007, ‘was that men’s professional road cycling was almost completely dominated by an underlying drugs culture. And … in the context of the programme I was charged with creating, having a drugs system, or even a tolerance of a drugs system, was just not an option.

‘The idea that you could plan for men’s road racing success at world level … to me it couldn’t be done,’ continued Keen, for whom planning is like breathing. ‘It seemed to me that the furthest we could go with road racing for men was to create a development programme where we could take promising young riders to that line in the sand – of what I’d call performance credibility – and then say, “If that is the world you want, as far as we understand it, then off you go and good luck.”’

As he spoke, Keen measured his words carefully, but the implications and subtext to what he was saying were as devastating as they were damning. That phrase, ‘performance credibility’, had particular resonance, not least because of Keen’s intimate knowledge of the sport. He was speaking not as an outsider, but as someone whose protégé, Boardman, was now part of the world he was describing. Although Boardman had showed flashes of brilliance in road races, the highlight perhaps being his second place – to five-time Tour de France winner Miguel Indurain – at the 1995 Dauphiné Libéré, his potential on the road appeared to be limited. By what? His limitations over the longer distances, or the three-week duration of the Tour de France? Or his refusal to take drugs? Keen wouldn’t say explicitly. But he might have said that Boardman’s performances fell within the realms of ‘performance credibility’, and left it at that.

Nevertheless, for many, Keen’s track-focused plan was tantamount to treason. Ignore road cycling? Pretend the Tour de France doesn’t exist? He was trampling on the dreams of all those – the overwhelming majority of cycling fans – who are drawn to the sport by the glamour and excitement of the greatest race in the world.

Keen argued that he had no choice; he was under pressure to produce a return on the new funding under the terms dictated by the distributors of lottery cash. UK Sport was the agency charged with sharing out the money among all the governing bodies, but the cash came with conditions attached and targets to be reached. For UK Sport, the challenge was this: how to set comparable targets across all sports. The answer was to focus on world championships and Olympics. Sports would be assessed and evaluated purely on their performances in these events. Olympic and world medals would effectively write lottery cheques. Conversely, no medals would see funding reduced.

In cycling, the maths was simple. At the Olympics there were 12 gold medals available on the track, just four on the road (and two in mountain biking); and it was the same at the world championships. Keen concluded that a British rider could win the Tour de France or the Paris-Roubaix Classic and become a household name in mainland Europe, but it would count for nothing as far as UK Sport was concerned. So he had no choice: the bulk of the money had to be directed towards the track.

But Keen went further than that. As he settled into his office in the Manchester Velodrome in 1997 – having first visited a used furniture shop to buy a desk and chair – he pored over files describing road races all across Europe to which British teams were invited every year. And every year they went, invariably to be soundly thrashed by their continental rivals, blowing holes in the budget with no tangible return. As far as Keen was concerned it was madness. Even worse, it was pointless. So he took a more radical step than merely cutting funding for a men’s senior road squad: he took his axe to it. In the British cycling revolution, at least in its first phase, it was not – to paraphrase Lance Armstrong – all about the bike. It was all about the track.

Ten years later, even as Brailsford, who took over from Peter Keen in 2004, spoke in Bourg-en-Bresse with such breezy optimism of running a clean team and entering the Tour de France, the omens seemed less than encouraging.

In fact, Keen’s prescience had proved remarkable, and his decision not to fund a road programme eminently sensible. A year after he drew up his World Class Performance Plan, with its track focus, a major doping scandal erupted at the 1998 Tour de France. It blew the lid on the scale of organised, endemic doping at the highest level of professional road cycling. The so-called ‘Festina affair’ – involving the world’s number one team – proved to be merely the start, however. It was followed, over the following years, by a drip-drip-drip of doping allegations, revelations and scandals.

Drip-drip-drip they went, like an irritating leak that isn’t quite bothersome enough to actually fix. Finally, in 2006, came the next deluge: an international blood doping ring uncovered by a Spanish investigation, which removed the favourites, Ivan Basso and Jan Ullrich, on the eve of the Tour de France. This, coupled with a positive test for the eventual winner of that year’s Tour, Floyd Landis, seemed, finally, like it could be the tipping point, and the catalyst for change. If the first step to changing is to admit you have a problem, then such a step appeared to be taken towards the end of 2006, cycling’s annus horribilis, when the sport’s world governing body, the UCI, commissioned an independent audit to discover the extent of the doping problem: a small step, but a significant one for an organisation that stood accused of burying its head in the sand, or, worse, being complicit in the problem. Meanwhile, and under pressure from the World Anti-Doping Agency (founded in response to the Festina affair), the number of anti-doping tests were stepped up; and the first steps were taken by the UCI to establish ‘biological passports’ for riders. When these were finally introduced, for the 2008 season, they were hailed as being at the vanguard of anti-doping.

But in Bourg-en-Bresse, as Brailsford spoke about lifting the ‘doom and gloom and negativity around the doping stories’, his optimism was to prove premature. The 2007 Tour was hit by a series of catastrophic scandals, from the yellow jersey Michael Rasmussen’s series of missed drugs tests before the race had started, to double stage-winner Alexandre Vinokourov’s positive test for an illegal blood transfusion.

‘La mort du Tour,’ read the front page headline of the French newspaper Libération, in thick black letters, above the ghostly silhouette of a racing cyclist, as the Tour stumbled towards the finish in an ever-thickening fog of drugs-related scandals. France Soir even devoted its entire front page to an official-looking ‘death notice’, announcing the passing of the Tour de France on 25 July 2007, in Orthez, ‘at the age of 104 years, as a result of a long illness’. The paper stated that ‘the funeral will be held in a strictly private circle’.

Wiggins, who had consistently spoken out against doping – and, indeed, offered this as one reason why he had continued to focus his efforts on the track rather than the road – even found himself indirectly implicated when a Cofidis teammate, Cristian Moreni, tested positive for testosterone in the final week. Moreni was arrested at the summit of the Col d’Aubisque, the gendarmes having waited for him as he finished the 228km stage before carting him off in his cycling kit, while the rest of the Cofidis team, including Wiggins, were given a police escort off the mountain.

Speaking an hour later from a police station, Wiggins admitted he had found the situation ‘scary’: ‘I don’t want to be caught up in this in any way. It makes you think about your future as a professional. What is the point? I could be doing better things than pissing about like this. But then you think, why shouldn’t I continue doing something I get a lot of pleasure out of?’

Not that Wiggins had a choice about continuing in the 2007 Tour, with the organisers requesting their withdrawal and Cofidis obliging. Wiggins was disgusted with Moreni, with his team and with the Tour. He couldn’t bear to wear his Cofidis leisurewear to Pau airport, so he borrowed a T-shirt belonging to David Millar (ironically, Millar’s team, Saunier Duval, later lost a rider, Iban Mayo, to a positive test). Wiggins stuffed his Cofidis clothing in a bin at the airport 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.