Achieving clarity while racing the Tour de France for Dave Brailsford with two leaders is bad enough but three would be a very crowded marriage indeedTo understand how it is that six weeks before Chris Froome might have been starting out on his quest for a fifth Tour de France he is contemplating his imminent departure from his team of 10 years, you have only to consider two of Sir Dave Brailsford’s favourite catch phrases. Mission clarity. Compassionate ruthlessness.The unhappy 2012 Tour when Bradley Wiggins and Froome failed to gel perfectly taught Brailsford about mission clarity: make sure your leaders know the hierarchy and be certain they will stick to it. The emergence of a young, thrusting talent in the...
Dave Brailsford’s lofty ideals when setting up Team Sky have been exposed under the pressure of top-level competitionTo judge from Dave Brailsford’s words the other day it seems he still doesn’t get it. He was talking in a press conference about the business of the abnormally high salbutamol level in a urine sample taken from Chris Froome in Spain last September but not revealed – by this newspaper and Le Monde – until three months later. While re-emphasising his belief that Froome had done nothing wrong, he added that the finding should not have been made public.But when Brailsford set up Team Sky eight years ago it was on the basis of absolute honesty and openness. We are going to...
Eradicating exemptions seems fairer than allowing athletes to use artificial means of lifting themselves back up to their natural level of performanceIn more optimistic times, the news that Dr Michele Ferrari’s appeal against a doping conviction was turned down by an Italian court this week would have felt like a superfluous postscript to a story whose denouement had been revealed years ago. Instead, the decision to uphold the verdict on the man who introduced Lance Armstrong to EPO seems like a footnote to a story that has simply moved on.For a while after Armstrong’s fall it looked as though enough good work was being done to permit the provisional victory of hope over ingrained scepticism when it came to the...
Articulated race hub for the Vuelta a España shows not only the disparity between teams but also how far cycling has moved away from its more rustic pastIn these troubled days, we’re learning that you can watch a bad thing developing in front of your eyes, in real time, and yet feel utterly powerless to stop it. Fill in the blank with your own choice of contemporary socio-political phenomenon. But it can happen at a much more modest level, too, even in something as essentially trivial as sport. Which is how we come to the appearance of Team Sky’s “race hub” at the Vuelta a España.The race hub is a large articulated vehicle decorated with the team’s logo and those...
Even by the standards of modern public life continuing to be Team Sky chief takes some front and there is something mesmeric about his total lack of regretDoes Sir Dave Brailsford intentionally model the tone of his public utterances on Nigel Farage speeches to the European parliament? That is certainly the effect he achieves. The Team Sky principal has had what most would regard as an “awkward” year, yet does not appear to have moderated his public persona one iota. Rather, he seems to have amplified it. Perhaps Sir Dave applies his famous “marginal gains” philosophy even to the business of being bumptious. Perhaps he is simply never satisfied, always finding new ways to be just that little bit more...