Sky’s the Limit: Wiggins and Cavendish: The Quest to Conquer the Tour de France
On Sunday 22 July, Bradley Wiggins became the first British rider ever to win the Tour de France. It was the culmination of years of hard work and dedication and a vision begun with the creation of Team Sky. This is the inside story of that journey to greatness.On Sunday 22 July, Bradley Wiggins became the first British rider ever to win the Tour de France. It was the culmination of years of hard work and dedication and a vision begun with the creation of Team Sky. This is the inside story of that journey to greatness.Sky’s the Limit follows the gestation and birth of a brand new road racing team, which is the first British team to compete in the Tour de France since 1987. Team Sky, as it is known, since it is to be backed by the satellite broadcaster Sky, set out on the road to Tour de France glory in January 2010.With exclusive behind-the-scenes access and interviews, Sky’s the Limit follows the management and riders as they embark on their journey - from their first training camp and team presentation in December 2009, all the way to the moment that Bradley Wiggins achieved what many had long thought impossible: a British rider from a British team winning the Tour de France.
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CONTENTS
Prologue The Start of the Journey
Chapter 3 Goodbye Cav, Hello Wiggo?
Chapter 4 The Best Sports Team in the World
Chapter 6 A Tsunami of Excitement
Chapter 7 Taking on the Masters
Chapter 11 It’s All About (the) Brad
Chapter 12 It’s Not About the Bus
Chapter 13 So Far from the Sky
Chapter 15 Gerbils on a Treadmill
‘They’ll use technology that we’re all going to look at and go, “Woah, I never saw that before.”’
Lance Armstrong
Rymill Park, Adelaide, 17 January 2010
It’s a sultry hot summer’s evening in downtown Adelaide, and, at the city’s Rymill Park, a large crowd begins to gather. Families line a cordoned-off rectangular 1km race circuit, around the perimeter of the park, while the balconies of pubs fill up with young people drinking beer out of plastic cups.
The road cycling season used to start six weeks later in an icily cold port on the Mediterranean, with the riders wrapped in many more layers than there were spectators. But the sport has changed in the last decade: it has gone global. And no event demonstrates that to the same extent as the season-opener: the Tour Down Under.
This year, though, there is another harbinger of change. Possibly. Wearing a neatly pressed short-sleeved white shirt, long black shorts and trainers, rubbing sun cream into his shaved head as he paces anxiously among the team cars parked in the pits area, is a man who bears more than a passing resemblance to a British tourist. It’s Dave Brailsford.
In his native Britain, Brailsford has gained a reputation as a sporting guru. Since 2004 he has been at the helm of the British Cycling team, which, at the Beijing Games in 2008, he led to the most dominant Olympic performance ever seen by a single team. But that was in track cycling, not road cycling. Road cycling – continental style – is a whole new world, not just for Brailsford but for Britain, a country that has always been on the periphery of the sport’s European heartland.
There have been British professional teams in the past. But they have been, without exception, doomed enterprises, Icarus-like in their pursuit of an apparently impossible dream. The higher they flew – to the Tour de France, as one particularly ill-fated squad did in 1987 – the further and harder they fell. And the more, of course, they were burned in the process. In fact, it seems oddly fitting that after more than a century of looking in on the sport with only passing interest, and limited understanding, Adelaide in Australia, on the other side of the world, marks Brailsford and his new British team’s bold entry into the world of continental professional cycling.
Bold is the apposite word. Everything about the new team, Team Sky – from their clothing, to their cars, to the brash and glitzy team launch in London just days earlier – screams boldness and ambition. They don’t just want to enter the world of professional road cycling. They aspire to stand apart; to be different. And by being different, and successful, they aspire to change it, almost as the team’s sponsor, British Sky Broadcasting, has changed the landscape of English football over the past two decades; almost as Brailsford and his team ‘changed’ track cycling, not merely moving the goalposts, but locating them in a different dimension.
Team Sky is Brailsford’s creation, along with his head coach and right-hand man, Shane Sutton. Sutton, a wiry, rugged, edgy, fidgety Australian, is the joker to Brailsford’s – with his background in business and his MBA – straight man. They are as much a double act as Brian Clough and Peter Taylor, the legendary football management team. And similarly lost without each other. Here in Adelaide, an hour before the first race of the season, and the first of Team Sky’s existence, Sutton is missing. Brailsford keeps checking his phone and finally it beeps. ‘The eagle has landed,’ reads the text message. Sutton’s delayed flight from Perth has arrived. Brailsford looks relieved. ‘Well, Shane needs to be here for this,’ he says.
Sutton arrives. Has he brought champagne, ready to toast the occasion? ‘Nah, none of that bullshit,’ he replies testily. He is wearing the same team-issue outfit as Brailsford; but if Brailsford looks like a businessman on holiday, Sutton, in his white shirt and long black shorts, has the mischievous, scheming air of a naughty schoolboy. Brailsford reaches into the giant coolbox parked in the shadow of the team car and pulls out a couple of cans of Diet Coke, tossing one at Sutton. They open their cans, take a swig, and wait for the action, which is just minutes away.
Brailsford has hurried back to Rymill Park from the team’s hotel, the Adelaide Hilton, where he gave the seven Team Sky riders – Greg Henderson of New Zealand, Mat Hayman and Chris Sutton of Australia, Russell Downing, Chris Froome and Ben Swift of Britain, Davide Viganò of Italy – a pep-talk. Earlier, the riders had been presented on stage by the TV commentators, Phil Liggett and Paul Sherwen. ‘I never thought I’d see the day we’d have a British team in the ProTour,’ said Sherwen. The ProTour is cycling’s premier league of major events.
