Inside Team Sky by David Walsh Page B

context G Thomas is expected to be dead wood today. Yesterday in Corsica was wonderful but winning is about pragmatism, and finishing close to the top of the pile in Nice will send Team
Sky towards the Pyrenees in pretty good shape.
    When he finished his medical studies at Trinity College, Dublin, back in 2001, Farrell taught anatomy for a year in the University. He served an internship in a Dublin hospital and then did a
year and a half of anaesthetics before heading off to travel for six months. He returned to Ireland and settled into life as a General Practitioner for four years. His last job in Ireland was
working in an urgent care centre, best described as a halfway house between an A&E department and a GP surgery, where he dealt with people with acute injuries. By then he had fallen in love
with cycling, but nothing suggested to him that he would someday be watching Geraint Thomas be helped onto his bike to head off with a cracked pelvis.
    Farrell had given up his own athletic pursuits when he was in his twenties. Middle age wasn’t exactly crowding him when he decided to get back out and do a bit of running, but he felt the
need for exercise and for competition.
    He joined a triathlon club in Mullingar in the Irish midlands and that got him back into running again. He was a novice swimmer and that was hard work, but the bike? The bike just sang a siren
song to him.
    As soon as he started cycling properly he was out of the triathlon business and pledging himself to the bike. He bought himself a Trek 1000, the bikes used in the Discovery Team, bought it at
Trevor Martins, a bike shop in Longford. Trevor had raced at a decent level and the connection and the 6000 euro Alan paid for the bike fuelled his interest. He still has the bike, preferring it to
the Pinarello he got from Sky.
    Soon he was addicted. He went from feeling slightly comical wearing a cycling helmet to staying up into the small hours devouring YouTube footage of old races.
    By 2009 he could no longer conduct the affair by long distance. He went to the Tour de France, three of them driving from Ireland. They met with some other lunatics – three from the UK and
two from Australia – when they were in the Pyrenees and they joined forces cycling around after the Tour like a supporting trip. In Longford where Farrell comes from you could stand on two
phone books and see for ever, so the mountain terrain was very new from a cycling point of view. Now he was racing his new friends up mountains and finding that he had the legs for it and that he
certainly had the competitiveness for it.
    For six weeks they were based in Barèges, a village in the high Pyrenees just to the west of the Col du Tourmalet. It was 2009, Lance Armstrong’s comeback but the beginning of the
end of cycling’s lowest period. Farrell sat on top of the Tourmalet as the race passed over the summit. Thinking. Thinking.
    The addiction bit him hard and wouldn’t let go.
    Still. Nobody predicted what would happen in the spring of 2012. Late one night in Dublin, with his girlfriend Rhona away in Boston on a trip to see her sister, Farrell was enjoying a quiet
evening in, watching the television and sipping a glass of wine. Still thinking, thinking, thinking. He would like to work in professional sport, he thought to himself. What sport would that be?
Cycling. What team would he like to work for? Well, language was going be an issue. He had just the standard Irish person’s linguistic skills – fluent English and Gaelic. And game to
try anything else.
    So. Cycling. A doctor. English speaking. Sky were the newest team on the block and the obvious choice. So he literally Googled ‘Team Sky Cycling Doctor’ and the first thing that came
up was the
British Medical Journal
and an advertisement for a job with Team Sky with the closing date two weeks later. His jaw fell open as if its hinges had been removed. He had actually
Googled his specific dream job. Eureka. The phone