Inside Team Sky

Read Inside Team Sky for Free Online

Book: Read Inside Team Sky for Free Online
Authors: David Walsh
Ellingworth and
is a work of art. It lists who will travel with whom from the hotel to the start, then who travels with whom from the start to the finish and, finally, how everyone gets from the finish to the
hotel.
    It can happen that a staffer will travel in three different vehicles for those three journeys and everything is underpinned by the need to make sure nothing encroaches upon the team performance.
What never happens is someone stands around the team bus and vehicles at the end of a stage and asks who he is travelling with. Should that happen Ellingworth will say, ‘Oh, did you not get
the plan?’ which might sound like a question but isn’t.
    The teams are presented to the public at a ceremony by the sea in Porto-Vecchio on Thursday. As the previous year’s Tour de France winners, Team Sky are presented last. The team arrives
like nine James Bonds atop a large white cruiser which cuts across the port. Some of the riders take photos of the scene ahead with their distinctive iPhones. Chris Froome stands to the side
looking out to sea like Columbus who was born here, his Tintin profile peering towards either his destiny or a good spot for the spear fishing he enjoys so much. When the boat hits Porto-Vecchio a
ramp descends and the nine Team Sky riders roll down onto the dockside on their Pinarellos. When you were a gangly spotty teenager there was always a tall, smooth, blue-eyed and Brylcreemed boy who
turned heads everywhere he went. Team Sky are that boy. Most of you hated him. He knew that but he didn’t mind. You’re only human.
    This is my first time at the race since disillusionment caused me to hand in my little green accreditation badge in 2004.
    ‘
Au revoir, messieurs, la victoire pour les tricheurs
[Goodbye, men, the victory for the cheaters],’ I thought at the time. Through the years from Armstrong’s seventh
in 2005 – featuring Landis, Rasmussen, Vinokorouv, Contador,
et al
– to Wiggins in 2012, I hadn’t covered the Tour, and I hadn’t missed it. Armstrong’s
banishment changed things; exiting the building, he left the door half-open and finally I had a way back in.
    ‘It’s your comeback Tour, how do you feel?’ says a photographer colleague bumping into me in a corridor.
    ‘Excited and holding on to scepticism,’ I say.
    I’m not just entitled to my scepticism, it is my job to have it with me at all times. We’ve all been fooled, duped and suckered by this race. ‘For years they fucked us,’
Jean Michel Rouet, a colleague at
L’Equipe
once said. I never forgot that. Lamentably there are ties cycling is unwilling to cut. On page 46 of the Tour de France bible, the official
road book, there is a full-page photograph of Richard Virenque advertising a Festina watch. In the photo Virenque looks handsome, almost distinguished. If you didn’t know his story or
understand what he had stood for, you could look in the road book and see cycling’s George Clooney, the same tinges of grey.
    But beyond the image, there is reality.
    Virenque doped throughout his career, his team got caught and they came out with their hands up. All except their leader Virenque, who lied for more than two years and might never have told the
truth if he hadn’t come up before Judge Daniel Delegove in the autumn of 2000.
    By then Virenque’s dishonesty had plummeted into pathos, so much so that you weren’t sure whether he deserved stoning or pitying. Presiding at the ‘Festina Trial’ in the
autumn of 2000 Delegove, weary no doubt from having heard so much about cycling’s sordid business, looked at Virenque in the witness box and said, ‘Do you accept this reality, that you
used doping products?’
    ‘It was a like a train going away from me,’ replied the still self-pitying Virenque, ‘and if I didn’t get on it, I would be left behind. It was not cheating. I wanted to
remain in the family.’
    Virenque cheated to win, and his team celebrated with a lethal recreational drug

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