Felix Lowe

In January 2015, Dave Brailsford vowed to make Sky the best cycling team in the world by 2020. Felix Lowe looks at how he has fared

Felix assesses Dave Brailsford’s five-year plan for global domination, five years down the line

Five years ago I wrote a piece for Eurosport about Team Sky’s 2020 vision. Dave Brailsford had launched an ambitious five-year plan off the back of a dismal 2014 during which his lot failed to win even a single Grand Tour stage.

After initial Tour glory with Wiggins in 2012 and Froome in 2013, Sky had dropped to ninth in the UCI world rankings. Dave said he wanted his riders to bounce back and cement their place as ‘indisputably the best cycling team in the world, and to be viewed as one of the very best sports teams in the world’ by 2020.

With that year now upon us, it’s time to look back and assess just how close Sir Dave has come to realising his vision.

Firstly, with Sky’s future in doubt before Ineos took the reins one birth cycle ago, for a long time it was more a question of whether Brailsford would have a cycling team in 2020, let alone the best one in the business. And given the myriad scandals that beset Sky in their final months as title sponsor, whether or not he would be at the helm.

The ongoing saga of dodgy deliveries, TUES, lost laptops, brown envelopes, UKAD investigations and damning parliamentary reports means it is a minor miracle that the Sky/ineos train is still rumbling on. But let’s forget the soap opera of Dr Richard Freeman’s GMC tribunal and Shane Sutton’s bizarre testimony. Instead let’s focus on results.

Since Brailsford articulated his 2020 vision, his team have won every Tour de France through three different riders. If ‘the world’s greatest race’ is their Premier League, Champions League, rugby World Cup and Superbowl, that makes Ineos far more successful than Manchester City, Barcelona, the All Blacks or New England Patriots. Chuck in Froome’s wins in both the Giro and Vuelta, and there’s little disputing the team’s major stage racing credentials.

Yet the same team that hit new heights with a Tour one-two last July also tanked in the 2019 Giro and Vuelta. For all of Egan Bernal’s wins, Ineos still finished the season sixth in the UCI rankings, below Deceuninck-Quickstep, Bora-hansgrohe, Jumbo-visma, UAE Team Emirates and Astana.

In fact, Brailsford has failed to knock all-rounders Quickstep off their lofty perch, which poses questions over his success in turning Sky into ‘a more complete team’.

‘We need to win more Monuments,’ Dave stressed. Wout Poels broke that duck at Liège-bastogne-liège in 2016, with Michal Kwiatkowski following suit at Milan-san Remo. But that’s slim pickings considering EF Education First have won four of the five Monuments since Sky’s inception. Quickstep have won four in the past two years.

So, Ineos are still far from the complete package. Their record with sprinters is woeful, their one-day results far from classic. As a Grand Tour machine, though, they’re better equipped than the rest – provided the big guns are fit. This year Ineos will have four previous winners on their books in Froome, Bernal, Thomas and Carapaz – just as well given the Dumoulin-roglič-kruijswijk triumvirate at Jumbo-visma.

What of Brailsford’s desire to produce a French Tour winner? ‘I think about it quite often. It has to be done,’ he said in 2014.

But the Elissonde experiment didn’t work out – they really did kill Kenny – and it was Colombian Bernal’s brilliance that doused French flames when Messieurs Alaphilippe and Pinot were on fire last July.

Are Ineos one of the best sports teams in the world? Undoubtedly. But are they cycling’s best team? It’s hard to say. Come back to me in July. In any case, Ineos have clearly got to the top at a huge financial and ethical cost. Keeping them there in the current climate will surely be the alldancing Brailsford’s next jive.

Felix limits his own plans to five minutes