FEATURE: NICOLAS PORTAL
A tribute to Nicolas Portal, the late directeur sportif at Team Ineos, who took the team to seven Tour wins
The first time I saw Nicolas Portal was when he was riding for Caisse d’Epargne in one Tour de France or another in the mid2000s. It was a rest day at the Tour, and he was entertaining some friends in the lobby of his team hotel, where I’d gone for interview duties. He was all spiky hair and mid-20s confidence in a way that is quite specific to young French men, but I do remember thinking a little harshly at the time that perhaps him being French on a Spanish team gave him a better chance of Tour selection than if he’d been with his previous team, Ag2r. To me, he didn’t quite fit in with the climbers and grand tour specialists of Caisse d’Epargne, which would later become Movistar.
I also raised an eyebrow when he was one of Team Sky’s initial line-up in 2010. The British team created a lot of noise and attention when it was first set up, but looking back it’s clear the first roster was, as with every new cycling team, the best they could do with what was available. They had three future Tour winners that year, but with none in Tour-winning form, the rest of the team hadn’t given Sky much to fall back on. I didn’t give Nicolas Portal much thought at the team launch in London that January, and I can’t remember seeing him there, nor did I pay much attention to his thin palmarès as a rider - one win, one second, one third, all taken before 2005.
All of which shows that surface appearances and race stats don’t count for much. When his racing career came to a relatively early end, Portal was hired as a team manager at Sky. And what not many people outside his team knew was that his racing brain was extremely sharp. Sky team principal David Brailsford saw this, and also saw beyond the Frenchman’s lessthan-perfect English at this point. Brailsford is a fluent French speaker and he understood that Portal had excellent communication skills and was naturally empathetic. As a team manager, he was a natural. Some directeurs sportif will always be ex-riders, a small number of whom fall into the job for want of anything else to do. But Portal was less a directeur sportif who’d been an ex-rider; rather he was a future directeur sportif who happened to be a rider for a while.
When Portal died, at the shockingly early age of 40, this spring, he’d become one of the most successful team managers of all time, in the space of just nine seasons. He’d been in the team car for every Sky grand tour win except that of Bradley Wiggins in 2012, when Sean Yates drove team car 1, making a total of eight wins. He was the tactical brains behind Chris Froome’s victories, but his man management was also key - while Wiggins and Froome famously fell out in 2012,
Portal navigated any potential issues between Geraint Thomas and Froome in 2018, then Thomas and Bernal last year, without much in the way of obvious friction.
His last great skill was as a PR man, though this was an unwitting role for him. He was one of the most approachable team managers in the entire peloton, and given Sky and Ineos’s troubles with adverse headlines and a well-founded reputation for intransigence and obtuseness with the media, Portal was exempt from that. For the media he was a clear, honest and friendly communicator of the team’s performance - the acceptable face of the behemoth; for the team he created goodwill and a positive image.
Not many other team managers have had so much success, even over much longer careers. The role of the directeur sportif has changed considerably over the years, and Portal’s antecedents as multiple grand tourwinning managers were also running the logistics, doing the sponsor liaison and generally running the show. Portal’s role was much more specialised - modern WorldTour teams have staff to take care of the admin, backroom jobs and financial side of things, so team managers these days are hired to be the tactical brains for the sport, not overworked multitaskers.
However, his achievements were still hugely impressive. By comparison, the French manager Cyrille Guimard was the manager for 11 grand tour wins - seven Tours, two Vueltas and two Giros between Lucien Van Impe, Bernard Hinault and Laurent Fignon (Hinault and another protégé, Greg LeMond, would win a further four Tours between them after leaving his team). These took eight years to accumulate, but his last win came in the 1984 Tour, and he spent another two decades managing teams without repeating his success. José Miguel Echavarri at Reynolds/Banesto saw Pedro Delgado and Miguel Indurain to nine grand tour wins between 1988 and 1995. Johan Bruyneel’s complicated palmarès don’t include Lance Armstrong’s seven Tour wins any more, but add those to Alberto Contador’s grand tour wins between 2007 and 2009 and one each for Paolo Savoldelli and Roberto Heras, and he claims 13.
When Portal died, at the shockingly early age of 40, this spring, he’d become one of the most successful team managers of all time, in the space of just nine seasons
Portal’s debut win as a manager came in the 2013 Tour, which on the surface looked like the most straightforward of all of Chris Froome’s wins in the race. In subsequent years, Froome had occasional wobbles, or just wasn’t able to put as much time into his rivals as previously, but in 2013 he was physically untouchable and clearly the strongest rider. However, he was still inexperienced at that point and on the second Pyrenean stage to Bagnères-de-Bigorre, he’d been isolated by aggressive riding from Movistar. However, the Spanish team prioritised getting rid of Sky’s second-string leader Richie Porte, and didn’t take advantage of the opportunity to work Froome over. Froome felt isolated, but Portal was a calming voice on the radio, pointing out that the way Movistar were riding wouldn’t have been any different to Sky setting the pace and that the situation actually suited Froome very well. Porte was indeed out of the picture, but Froome just sat on their pace and survived what could have been a dangerous stage.
Portal was a quiet but key part of all of Sky and Ineos’s grand tour wins. The team have been able to sign the best riders and strongest domestiques, but the business of getting all the moving parts to work together is not easy, and Portal was a key element. He understood exactly the way each Tour victory was engineered. I recall him explaining to me after Froome’s 2016 win that the British rider having resorted to running up Mont Ventoux when his bike was broken in a crash was not panic, but a demonstration of Froome’s lucidity and presence of mind. It looked chaotic on television, but Portal understood the way that Froome’s mind worked and saw him make the best decision he could on how to get to the finish line as quickly as possible. The following year, he explained that Froome’s confidence in being able to deliver a good result in the final time trial in Marseille meant that he’d been calm during the mountain stages, even though his lead at the top of the final summit finish, the Col d’Izoard, had only been 23 seconds.
Portal’s untimely passing has left Ineos, Froome, Thomas and Bernal without a key part of their Tour wins, and the recent speculation about Froome leaving the team would be unimaginable if Portal was still there. Ineos have had the best Tour de France riders of the last 10 years on their books. But they also had the best manager.