Inside Team Sky by David Walsh Page A

The Tour is the Tour. There is no need to see it any other way.
    David Brailsford can’t accept that. He himself often sleeps through portions of race stages in the afternoon so that he will be fresh and at his best when he swings back to work later.
Days are long, beginning with a cycle with other staff at 6.30 in the morning. There is little for Brailsford to do when the riders are on the road and he trusts his staff entirely. He recharges
daily and stays fit and sharp. As such, the decision to fly riders to Nice but to send those whom the riders depend on by boat made no sense to Brailsford. He investigated the cost of a private
plane, found it to be good value, and flew the fourteen staff who didn’t have to drive the vans and cars onto the ferry straight to Nice. Little wonder that the view which other teams hold of
Team Sky is jaundiced by some jealousy.
    For Alan Farrell his days during a race are long and hectic. He doesn’t have the luxury of running in the mornings or taking a spin on the bike with his colleagues. Availability he sees as
being a key part of his job. He is available in the team hotel first thing in the morning. He goes to the race in the bus so he can continue to be available. He is in the race car during the race,
available for any calamity the stage might bring. Coming up to a stage finish there is a deviation for the support cars, so when he gets dropped off he has to get himself to the finish to be at
anti-doping with any of his riders chosen for testing. To be there he has to get through the crowds and the security. He doesn’t have to be there but he likes to be. Availability.
    Today’s team trial means a short day on the road. For the riders the effort is short and intense. For the team around them the day allows time to catch up on all the other things which
make Team Sky tick.
    When life slows down for Alan Farrell he will probably appreciate the strangeness of these days. For now the young doctor is immersed in this world. When Thomas cracked his pelvis and rode on
Farrell wasn’t much fazed by it, or unduly surprised. The heroics were wonderful and Farrell knows that the more Thomas works on the bike, the more pain he cycles through, the better he will
feel. Everybody has their reasons for running away with this circus. The sense that anything can happen during a working day on a Grand Tour is one of the attractions.
    Farrell had been working in pro cycling for just six weeks when he found himself acting as Sky’s full-time doctor on the 2012 Tour de France. The first major issue he had at the Tour was
when Kanstantsin Siutsou [Kosta, to the team] broke his leg on the third stage. One of those moments. You’re not in Kansas anymore, Dorothy.
    Farrell learned quickly that this job was different from any he was used to before. He was an Irish doctor. Here he had a rider from Belarus who was living in Italy, riding his first Tour de
France for a team based in the UK. When Kosta broke his leg Alan Farrell was up all night trying to organise a flight to get the rider to the UK to have an operation. At the last minute he realised
that being a Belarusian, Kosta didn’t have a visa for the UK. He would be turned away. Alan Farrell switched his attentions to Paris, found what he was looking for and resolved to improve his
linguistic capabilities.
    Today’s team trial isn’t an annual feature of the race. Last year for instance it didn’t figure at all but when the team trial is included it makes for a fine spectacle. Teams
operate what they call a rotating pace line with the members of the team, taking it in turns to lead the group. This is called taking a pull. Thus the cyclists share the responsibility of punching
a hole through the wind. That’s the theory. The challenge is discipline. You want the group to maintain a steady pace rather than have each rider who goes to the front upping the ante until
the team gets strung out and the system breaks down.
    In this