When Dave Brailsford was 20, he left his family home in Snowdonia and headed off to France with his bike, £600, and a train ticket to Grenoble, hoping to become a pro bike rider. Thirty-five years later, he watched a Welshman win the Tour de France, and, uncharacteristically lost in emotion, wiped the tears from his eyes.
Brailsford’s bulging trophy cabinet now includes another Tour de France victory, the sixth since 2012. They have been achieved with three different riders, and it seems there is nothing — media feuds, contract wrangles, internal rivalries, or anti-doping investigations — that can stop him.
Cycling’s Billy Beane has been in the business of making the impossible possible for well over a decade now, breaking down walls, both real and imagined, first at the Beijing and London Olympics in track racing, and then quickly turning his hand to dominating road racing with Team Sky.
There is no doubt that Brailsford, now 54, loves cycling. “He’s great at putting a team together, very good at hiring the right people,” his old business partner Dave Loughran said. “He knows you don’t find a world champion at 18 – he knows that you find them at 11.
“If he wasn’t working for Sky he’d be sitting at the side of the road watching. And that’s why he’ll work 60 hours a week to get success.”
While other team managers lounge around their team hotels, Brailsford still rides his bike, almost obsessively, emerging most mornings during the Tour from his luxury motor home in full Team Sky kit to ride for an hour, or more.
During the 2018 Giro d’Italia’s “big start” in Israel, one of the most striking sights was a lone Brailsford, speeding along a barren desert road to a stage finish in Eilat on the Red Sea.
In many ways Brailsford is a chip off the old block. His father John, a renowned ice climber, obsessive about detail, would drive the family to the French Alps, park his kids on a campsite and then disappear into the Massif des Ecrins for weeks on end.
“He was a blacksmith by trade and he loved it,” Brailsford recalls of his father’s own fascination with marginal gains. “He was a pretty driven bloke. He was always tinkering with his equipment, late at night, trying to get a bit more out of it.”
Like his father, Brailsford spends much of his year away from home on the road with his riders. “I feel very sad, very guilty for being an absent father,” Brailsford said in 2012. “But on the other hand, I don’t know anything else.”
There is little in the history of cycling to compare with Brailsford’s success. When Team Sky was founded, the idea of a British rider winning the Tour itself was fantastical, yet since 2010, Sky has won eight Grand Tours. “It’s about how we make the unbelievable believable,” he has said of Sky’s string of wins, using a turn of phrase that is both ambiguous and provocative.
Now four months since the damning DCMS select committee anti-doping report — revolving around the team’s strategic use of TUEs, its woeful medical record-keeping and the infamous Jiffy bag delivery to Bradley Wiggins — described Team Sky as “unethical”, Brailsford has bagged yet another Grand Tour with a rider who is both well-liked by his peers and by the media.
Fresh success emboldened Brailsford during this year’s Tour and he was more visible and open with the media than at any time during the previous 18 months. Buoyed by the humbling of Wada and the UCI, he has at times talked too much, particularly when musing about the mentality of small town mayors and the French nation’s supposed predilection for spitting.
Much of his renewed swagger was attributable to the collapse of the adverse analytical finding case against Chris Froome on the eve of the Tour which many within Team Sky saw as a vindication and a rebuke to their critics. Certainly, like his friends Alastair Campbell and Sir Alex Ferguson, Brailsford has at times tapped into a siege mentality to motivate his inner circle.
There is no doubt that throughout the 2018 Tour, Team Sky — with the exception of Gianni Moscon — raced smart, while some of their rivals, notably the AG2R team of Romain Bardet, rode like lemmings careering over a cliff. But in France the incredulity remains, if not specifically against Thomas, then against his team, who remain disliked and resented.
Yet any sense of vindication Brailsford may feel conveniently forgets much of what has gone before — the long-winded saga of Sky’s misplaced “zero tolerance” policy, the inept vetting of riders and staff, the allegations of “gaming the system” and the suspicions that dog Team Sky still and that will not, like a return-to-sender Jiffy bag, go away.
This was a Tour in limbo, dogged from the start by a tense build-up and a nagging sense of unease, both over Froome’s presence and Team Sky as a whole. Geraint Thomas’ tears after Saturday’s time trial, affecting though they were, should not obscure the misgivings that still swirl around a team whose unrelenting domination of the toughest of endurance sports shows no sign of ebbing away.
