I’M NOT A BULLY
Brailsford: I am full on — and some people can’t cope
SIR Dave Brailsford has defended his stewardship of British Cycling against allegations of ‘lies, bullying and harassment’, suggesting those accusers were not cut out for the demands of elite performance sport.
The under-fire boss of Team Sky could come under further scrutiny when a UK Sport-backed independent inquiry into the culture of Britain’s leading Olympic sport reports later this month.
The situation escalated last month when Ken Matheson, a former British Cycling coach, tweeted a series of accusations.
Matheson, who said he had signed a non- disclosure agreement when he left the sport’s governing body in 2003, said he was ‘talking now and sod the gagging clause!’.
And while he did not make specific claims about individuals, he said he had given a statement to the independent inquiry which included accusations of ‘ lies, bullying, harassment, wrongful dismissal of staff and financial misconduct’.
Matheson has since revealed he considered suicide under the ‘brutal’ regime at British Cycling.
In Majorca this week, Brailsford responded directly to the allegation of bullying: ‘Go and ask the lads here. Go and ask anybody, ask them that question.’ Brailsford (below), performance director at British Cycling from 2003 until he focused his full attention on Team Sky in 2014, then said he was unconcerned by the outcome of the independent inquiry.
‘Listen, I’m demanding,’ he said. ‘I’m uncompromising in trying to achieve performance.
‘We started off as a British team who were second rate — nowhere in the world, attitude of gallant losers — and we thought, “Actually, no. Why can’t we be the best in the world?”
‘And to be the best in the world, you have to set some standards. You’ve got to have some ambition. And then you’ve got to be pretty full on in terms of making sure those standards are achieved.
‘That’s not to say you’ve got to be vindictive or malicious but you do have standards. And I am uncompromising, I know that. Anyone in high-performance sport, that’s the environment you create. Some people can cope with that environment and some people can’t. ‘Those who can’t — it’s not a judgment, but they shouldn’t be in it. ‘When I took over at British Cycling I tried to push hard. Some people I felt should be there and some people quite clearly didn’t have the skills or the capabilities to be at the level where we wanted to go. ‘I’ll never make any excuses about that. I committed full on. I’ve committed a lot of my life to trying to improve and do things which people said couldn’t be done. ‘ It’s all right now, with hindsight, to say, “Oh, well, we knew it would work”. We didn’t. ‘When we launched Sky and said we wanted to win the Tour people laughed at me. And that was hard. Harder than now. And then when we didn’t do very well that was hard — really hard. But then you keep working at something and you achieve it.
‘Two years out from a home Games we started a brand new team (Sky), and I was running an Olympic programme all on my own.
‘ We had a brand- new team with no experience of doing it. That was full on but I don’t think I was vindictive, I don’t think I was biased, I don’t think I was malicious. I don’t think I treated people wrongly.’
Was he confident the inquiry would agree with him?
‘What I imagine is people who feel wronged will shout about it,’ said Brailsford, who also remains at the centre of the storm concerning a medical package ordered by his team for Sir Bradley Wiggins in June 2011.