NED BOULTING
SO, THE SKY HAS FINALLY FALLEN IN
There are many fans who yearn to see close competition. I am one of them
NED BIDS FAREWELL TO TEAM SKY
To be honest, I’d been anticipating the end of Sky’s sponsorship for a number of years, especially during the height of the ‘jiffy bag’ drama, when the team’s good name was seemingly being traduced on a daily basis in the national press.
It struck me as surprising how loyal the satellite pay masters remained to the Brailsford project, when lesser, or at least more sensitive, sponsors might well have been scared off. Your average Dutch bank, for example, might have taken its guilders and scarpered. Sky, on the other hand, seemed to redouble its commitment.
But Sky’s obstinacy was never going to please its many doubters – a decent-sized group, though probably substantially outnumbered by the quieter majority, who applaud what is arguably the most successful British team in the history of international sport. For the sceptics, Team Sky’s ambition was tainted from the first moment it started to fall short of its stated, and largely unrealistic, goal of being whiter than white. Such a hue does not exist in professional road racing. You might wish it did, just as you might wish for everyone to pay their taxes in full and on time. But it isn’t going to happen.
Nevertheless, Sky’s departure from the scene, as a sponsor and a team, will be significant. To what extent the team set the standard for others to follow is a matter for debate, but the last decade, coinciding with its presence in the peloton, has witnessed a paradigm shift in the propriety of the sport.
Where once it was considered unprofessional to ride clean, it’s now the dopers (and they do still exist) who are gambling with others’ livelihoods. Whatever Team Sky’s shortcomings may be, I do not think that its sudden absence will necessarily usher in a cleaner era in the sport we love. These have been, on balance, good times for the credibility of the sport, especially when set against the decades that preceded them.
Anyway, with 2019 serving as a last hurrah for the team that has dominated the Tour de France there is an intriguing sense of the pack being shuffled. In whichever guise Brailsford and co resurface, it seems unlikely that they’ll be able to repeat the same trick. Sky had afforded the team, by its own admission, ‘rarefied air’. Sponsors like that don’t come around often.
So, will other teams’ backers now be emboldened to reassert themselves? Will they dig deeper, sensing an opportunity to pick the cream of Team Sky’s crop? Will the playing field level? Who knows, but there are many fans who look beyond teams and nationalities, who admire individual riders, whoever they’re riding for, and simply yearn to see close competition. I am one of them. What made Simon Yates’s 2018 Vuelta-winning season so remarkable (and let’s not forget how close he came to winning the Giro d’Italia as well) was the fact that he wasn’t a Team Sky rider. He was the first rider since Tom Dumoulin in May 2017 to win a Grand Tour who wasn’t in the race to sell satellite dishes and broadband.
Yates may not have been from Team Sky, but he is British. And to return to narrow parochial concerns, 2018 was an astonishing chapter in the story of one nation’s domination. Five Grand Tours in a row is a ridiculous achievement. And before you suggest that Chris Froome is not especially British, he is demonstrably the product of a system designed in the UK; in Manchester, to be precise.
Another intriguing knock-on effect from Sky’s disappearance is that it opens the door for another British team to make a bid for WorldTour status. This, surely, is the most interesting possible outcome for British cycling fans and will appeal to those of us who yearn for a time of more limited ambition and perhaps only sporadic success.
One day, perhaps, when Mark Cavendish has retired and memories of Team Sky have faded, we can get back to celebrating a more modest British rider picking up a podium place on the Scheldeprijs, or making a bid for the King of the Mountains jersey in Paris-Nice. When such events occur once again, we’ll truly know that Britain has become a real cycling nation. In fact, it would make us a bit like France.