Shane Sutton grew up in the small country town of Moree, Australia, as a self-confessed “rough bastard”, who was always getting drunk and into brawls. As a solid professional cyclist, and hugely successful coach, he survived a long battle with the bottle as well as spectacular fallouts with riders such as Nicole Cooke and Victoria Pendleton. But a steady drip of accusations surrounding his alleged sexism, bullying and abusive comments about Paralympic cyclists – which he strenuously denies – left the 58-year-old facing one battle he was never going to win.
And so exactly 100 days before Sutton was due to lead British Cycling into the Rio Olympics, which should have been the crowning moment of his career, he was instead falling abruptly on his sword. Many in British Cycling were delighted. Many were devastated. Few were left nonplussed. Sutton rarely leaves people on the fence.
As a cyclist he was good enough to win a Commonwealth gold medal in 1978 and to ride in the Tour de France. In 1990, towards the tail end of his career, he also won the Milk Race. He was renowned as tough and uncompromising in the saddle but he had the capacity to surprise. When Sutton’s father died halfway through one of his races, his team assumed he would fly home. But Sutton was on course to win £14,000, which he knew would be distributed among his team-mates. “I can’t just walk out on people who have family to support,” he thought. So he stayed.
But it was as a coach that he truly excelled, first at Welsh Cycling, and then from 2002 with British Cycling. In his early days at British Cycling he would go drinking in the pubs of Didsbury with Bradley Wiggins during the off-season. But he would bond with the cyclists in other ways, too. They enjoyed his many stories from his professional career and appreciated his uncanny ability to read a race. As Sir Dave Brailsford once put it, “I don’t know what it is with Shane – but he is watching cycling in colour TV when the rest of us are watching in black and white.”
Wiggins, who credited Sutton with helping him achieve Olympic titles and his Tour de France victory, was even more poetic. “The only person who understands me inside and out is Shane,” he wrote in his autobiography. “From the moment we became mates this guy would do anything for me, literally anything. Then again, if you get on the wrong side of him, you’ve got an enemy for life. But if you’re on the right side, he’ll take a bullet for you.”
Such was Sutton’s influence in British Cycling he was at the formation of Team Sky, along with Brailsford and Fran Millar, at a dinner in Los Angeles the evening after they had watched David Beckham play for LA Galaxy.
But he could be rough, blunt, cut-throat and politically incorrect, calling women “Sheilas” without thought and, according to the Malaysian cyclist Josiah Ng, using the term “Boatie”, which could be interpreted as a reference to people sailing from Asia to seek asylum in Australia. Though Ng believed it was ignorance not racism, such behaviour summed up Sutton’s stunning lack of awareness. Sometimes it was as if Crocodile Dundee had been catapulted into the 21st century.
Yet Sutton has strenuously denied he is sexist, pointing out that before Pendleton moved into a new house in Wilmslow in 2008 he spent weeks getting it ready, sometimes staying until 2am to paint before going into work early the next day. He once admitted: “Of course, part of my motivation was that she was bloody good. But in my head I was thinking: ‘What do I do to make everything the focus of winning gold in Beijing and not the stress of moving house?’” One afternoon he went to the house and the plumbers had left the water on, leaving the place flooded. He stayed until everything was cleaned up. Even so, the relationship with Pendleton shattered to such an extent that they barely talked in the lead-up to London 2012.
While Brailsford provided the blue-sky thinking Sutton did the day-to-day groundwork, usually from trackside in his polo shirt. His influence grew to such an extent that in the spring and summer of 2012, while Brailsford was off with Team Sky at the Giro d’Italia and Tour de France, Sutton oversaw the final stages of the Olympic team preparations which led to Team GB winning seven of the 10 track cycling gold medals at the London Games.
Successes in the Beijing and London Olympics left British Cycling being referred to as the Medal Factory. But the steady trickle of world and Olympic titles perhaps meant that some who felt Sutton’s behaviour was inappropriate were unable to go public. However, when he was promoted in 2014 to the role of technical director, in effect replacing Brailsford who decided to concentrate on Team Sky, Sutton’s personality was always likely to rub more people up the wrong way.
The team sprinter Jess Varnish finally broke the omerta last weekend, claiming that Sutton was sexist and had created a “culture of fear” after she was released from the world-class cycling programme.
Those close to Sutton insist he is devoted to evidence-based coaching and that all of his decisions come from what the data is telling him. In this case it was that Varnish was simply unable to produce enough power to win a medal at the team sprint.
Sutton may have been able to ride out that controversy. But when a number of Paralympic cyclists came forward on Wednesday to say that Sutton had called them “wobblies” and “gimps” his 14-year journey with British Cycling was always going to come to an abrupt – and, for Sutton, shattering – end.
