Team Sky to move base and so cut last link with British Cycling
Team Sky are to sever their final remaining physical ties with British Cycling and move into rented premises in Manchester.
The Daily Telegraph understands that Sir Dave Brailsford’s team have agreed a lease at the Manchester Institute of Health & Performance, a few hundred metres from the National Cycling Centre velodrome, where they have been based since the team’s inception in 2009.
Team Sky will occupy offices on the top floor of the state-of-the-art facility, which is funded by Manchester City Council, Sport England and Manchester City’s owners, City Football Group, and is operated by HCA Healthcare UK. The lease will be at least five years, which would take it up to the end of Team Sky’s current secured funding cycle in 2024.
The move will bring to an end a long drawn-out split with British Cycling, with the closeness of the relationship between the two a longstanding issue. Brailsford formed Team Sky while he was still performance director of British Cycling and initially the two entities shared everything from medical personnel and coaches to intellectual property and mechanics.
In 2010 consultancy firm Deloitte conducted an audit into possible conflicts of interest, which determined there was actually a benefit to Olympic and Paralympic riders from their relationship with the Sky programme but cautioned that a close eye needed to be kept in relation to “financial accounting and transparency between the two”.
When the wheels began to fall off at British Cycling two years ago, and an independent review was ordered in the wake of Jess Varnish’s allegations of bullying and sexism, it soon became clear that the line had become blurred. When the mystery surrounding the Jiffy bag, a medical package delivered to Sir Bradley Wiggins at the end of the Criterium du Dauphine race in June 2011, came to light, it was clear that British Cycling and Team Sky were going to need to divorce.
Simon Cope, a British Cycling women’s team coach at the time, had dropped his other responsibilities and drove to France with the Jiffy bag, working on a freelance basis for Team Sky. The investigation was later dropped with UK Anti-doping unable to establish the contents of the package.
Although the two organisations had been weaning themselves off each other for a while, with Brailsford stepping down from his role at British Cycling in 2014, Sky having been replaced by HSBC as title sponsor, and any joint resources having been drastically scaled back in recent years, questions were still being asked about the relationship.
Team Sky’s offices at the velodrome were a visible reminder of that relationship. Board members at British Cycling were understood to have pushed for a split last year, with then chairman Jonathan Browning asking Team Sky to find alternative arrangements.
Sky’s deal with HCA Healthcare UK to move into the MIHP, which houses everything from X-ray machines and running tracks to cryotherapy chambers and hydrotherapy pools, brings that search to an end.