Cloud of suspicion hovers over Sky
Brailsford’s prickly behaviour will not help team’s image even with Froome poised for title
When Sir Dave Brailsford got into his stand up-row with a reporter at Team Sky’s rest day hotel on Monday, the fracas made headline news. The row itself was not so remarkable.
Managers shout at journalists all the time. It just does not normally go reported. They ban them from time to time, too, if they do not like what they write about them. Sir Alex Ferguson was notorious for it. It is not necessarily acceptable, revealing a certain bullying nature on the part of the manager, as well as a desire to control the narrative.
But neither is it remarkable. To a certain extent, Brailsford’s actions were understandable. He did not like something that Barry Ryan, the cyclingnews.com reporter in question, had written about him – Brailsford contends that certain media have been writing lies about him and his team – and he was fighting back. It was a human reaction, if not a sensible one.
What it did underline, though, was that this is not a story which is going away in a hurry. And that is a problem for Brailsford and Sky.
Because, even if Chris Froome completes his fourth Tour de France victory in five years this weekend – and the 32-year-old finished safely in the bunch on yesterday’s largely uneventful 225.5km monster from the foothills of the Alps all the way down to Salon-de-provence near the Mediterranean coast and will now carry a 23-second advantage over Romain Bardet into today’s individual time trial – the clouds hovering over Sky’s manager are unlikely to lift.
Even a clean bill of health from UK Anti-doping regarding the notorious jiffy bag flown out to the Criterium du Dauphine in 2011 cannot do that. Nothing alters the fact that Sir Bradley Wiggins took three Therapeutic Use Exemptions for kenacort – a corticosteroid which has a long association with doping – before his three biggest races in 2011, 2012 and 2013, including the 2012 Tour de France.
Both Brailsford and Wiggins deny any wrongdoing. But their efforts to explain those TUES as medical necessities were far from convincing, and Brailsford’s claims that he did not know the drug’s connotations still less so. The suspicion remains that Sky gamed the system in a manner they suggested they never would. And as long as the jiffy bag remains unexplained that, too, adds to the fug of suspicion.
When even Lance Armstrong can question your transparency and your ethics – however hypocritical that might seem – as the Texan did on his Stages podcast this week, you know you have a problem. “To do that [have a row] in front of those journalists,” Armstrong said, incredulously.
“I see this trend with Dave Brailsford. That was a mistake to take on [a reporter]. No one knows who Cycling News is. They do now. They do not know about coverage Brailsford does not like. They do now.”
Brailsford’s problem, and Sky’s problem, is that there is nothing they can really say to make this go away. It is a shame because if Froome completes the job today – and he will barring calamity in the 22.5km time trial around Marseille – both he and the team will have deserved it. Sky have ridden a brilliant race once again; from Geraint Thomas’ opening day TT win to Michal Kwiatkowksi’s eye-catching turns, to Mikel Landa’s brilliant climbing. After coming home 12min 27sec down on the stage winner, former Sky team-mate Edvald Boasson Hagen, Froome last night played down his advantage.
“It’s still all to race for,” he insisted. “There is still less than 30 seconds between the top three on GC.” And it is true that all it would take is a badly timed mechanical or a crash. But only something of that order would derail him now, given his superior TT record. Far more likely is that Froome will end up breaking his duck of stage wins at this year’s Tour.
Even without the super skin suit with the dimples on the arms, which caused such a fuss at the opening-day time trial in Dusseldorf when Sky placed four riders in the top eight, he is one of the overwhelming favourites. “I’ve ridden in the skin suit provided by the race organisers almost every year since I’ve won the Tour and it hasn’t been a problem,” Froome replied when asked whether it was an issue wearing the yellow skin suit given to him by the race organisers rather than Sky’s own design. “At the end of the day, it’s all about the legs. Certainly at this point, it’s my race to lose.”