STORMY CLOUDS IN THE SKY

Illnesses, injuries, bad luck and bad results; the ingredients that combined for Team Sky this spring were by any measure a toxic mix. Take away a near clean sweep at the Settimana Coppi e Bartali and March and April were wretched months. In the Ardennes the team thudded to a new low – only Nathan Earle made it across the line in Liège-Bastogne-Liège, in 70th. While the balance sheet didn’t look good, Sky’s management will feel that critics have shown a lack of perspective. They are, after all, far from the only WorldTour team to have struggled in 2014. Astana, for instance, had chalked up only four victories up to the time of writing, two of them in Langkawi. The British team have also surely achieved enough to warrant a little indulgence from both press and public.

Not that Dave Brailsford can afford to sit on his hands. There are issues, one of them highlighted by Adam Yates’s Tour of Turkey win. Adam’s brother, Simon, summed it up when he told American journalist Andy Hood why the twins had shunned Sky’s advances: “They’re set up for their leaders, so it’s hard for a young rider to get established… I don’t want to be caught in that web.”

Even Brailsford now ought to be wondering how it is that the six riders aged 24 and under on the Sky roster have mustered a single race win between them in a combined ten seasons in the pro peloton. This paltry return can brook no argument, from Brailsford or anyone else: either Sky have a problem with recruitment or with development.

Brailsford has long said that the lack of any transfer system in cycling, with fees for the seller, disincentives teams from nurturing young riders. Even so, a team born as a subsidiary branch of the British Cycling talent factory needs to do much, much better...