British Cycling’s performance director fulfilled his brief by providing medals galore and no one really cared how he went about itBack when there was an appetite for such things Sir Dave Brailsford offered “20 lessons in leadership” for the website of a financial services consultancy called Harrington Starr. “The one biggest bit of advice” Brailsford had to give his readership was “to make people feel valued”. This, they learned, was “absolutely critical”, “a subject area of real importance and significance” because “performance hinges on people feeling genuinely valued in an organisation”. And it is easy to do, as Brailsford explained. “When you are under pressure a smile from a colleague asking ‘are you OK and what can I do to...
Having sold themselves as the ultimate in professionalism, Team Sky and British Cycling are now asking us to accept a remarkable litany of basic mistakes as the anti-doping investigation rolls onWill the clean victories of British cycling turn out to be another story that Britain liked to tell itself, in the manner of the “special relationship” or our supernaturally accomplished SAS? For some, it is still too early to say, though somewhat less early than it was a few months ago, before UK Anti-Doping began its increasingly revelatory investigation into Team Sky and its partner British Cycling.By now, there will perhaps be raised eyebrows in the many organisations before which the Team Sky head coach, Sir Dave Brailsford, spoke so...
British Cycling’s reboot was somewhat derailed by the latest revelations in Parliament but its 39-point plan should draw a line under the era between the Athens and Rio OlympicsThe press briefing on Thursday morning by the British Cycling chairman, Jonathan Browning, and the UK Sport chief executive, Liz Nicholl, at British Cycling’s headquarters in Manchester should have been all about the governing body’s 39-point plan to revamp its culture and management. This appeared to have been planned as a pre-emptive strike against revelations in the much delayed Phelps report into the culture within the Olympic team prompted by the scandal last spring involving allegations of sexism made by the sprinter Jess Varnish.The agenda was immediately transformed, however, by the dramatic...
The man who has seemed such an authoritative presence at the head of Team Sky now looks like a malfunctioning robot having made a number of bad decisionsEarly on a July morning in 2012 a small figure in black cycling kit left the village of Vielha, on the Spanish side of the Pyrenees, and set off along the quiet two‑lane road towards the Col du Portillon, a winding tree-lined climb leading to the French border.The kit was that of Team Sky, but beneath the helmet and the sunglasses it was impossible to identify the rider, only to envy him the imminent experience of a picturesque climb. Just under five miles long, with gradients averaging 6.8%, the 4,200ft Portillon has occasionally...
Culture committee questions transparency in UK cycling after facing uphill climb to tease out facts about the most infamous Jiffy bag in the sportFor three hours in the Thatcher room in Portcullis House the air had all the ease of a dentist’s surgery as the committee for culture, media and sport slowly prised, like recalcitrant teeth, a series of facts from Sir Dave Brailsford, Shane Sutton and the British Cycling chairman, Bob Howden, about the most infamous Jiffy bag in cycling, an envelope delivered to Dr Richard Freeman at the Critérium du Dauphiné in 2011 that has come to symbolise Team Sky and British Cycling’s lack of transparency.The governing body and its offshoot professional team live by process; the session...