anything it’d be 100% clean. We’ve got this young generation coming through, riders who don’t want to cheat. And there’s wider enthusiasm; untapped potential. We saw it in London and on the road to Canterbury; the crowds, screaming by the roadside … despite all the doom and gloom and the negativity around the doping stories.’
And what about the older guard – Wiggins and the reformed doper David Millar? Would they be involved? ‘You’d like to think it’d be possible to do this before they’ve retired,’ says Brailsford. ‘I want to bring together lots of different elements in cycling in Britain. Instead of factions, let’s get behind this thing and see what we can do.
‘It’s dependent on these riders progressing and coming through,’ he adds. ‘We’re not going to do it until the riders are good enough to do it; until we have the critical mass of British talent we can’t do it. It’s unlikely you’re going to get 25 British riders, but you need the critical mass; we wouldn’t do it with an international team. But knowing what I do of the young lads coming through, there’s plenty of talent. That’s not the issue.
‘And with Cav, we’ve got a winner. He’s your goalscorer.’
Brailsford mentioned doping, and doing it clean. The British track team had proved it could be done: there was no mud sticking to them, yet they were winning left, right and centre. But it was quite different to the road; track cycling didn’t have the ingrained doping culture of road cycling, which was precisely why Brailsford’s predecessor, Peter Keen, had decided, back in 1997, to ignore the road.
Blond-haired and boyish, and blessed with infectious enthusiasm, Keen, when he was appointed performance director, was acclaimed as a visionary. He was the sports scientist who had coached Chris Boardman to an Olympic gold medal – the first by a British cyclist in 84 years – in Barcelona in 1992, and subsequently helped Boardman with the difficult transition from track to road racing, going from his Olympic and world pursuit titles, and world hour record, to winning the prologue time trial and wearing the yellow jersey at the Tour de France.
But in 1997 Keen accepted an even bigger challenge: to turn round the fortunes of the British Cycling team. For the first time, the sport had money, thanks to lottery funding. Keen was given an annual budget of £2.5m and charged with drawing up a plan that could transform Britain’s cyclists from mediocrity to … well, just about anything would be an improvement on performances that, with the odd exception (Boardman, Graeme Obree, Yvonne McGregor), ensured Britain occupied the lower tiers of world cycling.
Keen’s proposals, to focus the country’s efforts, and funding, exclusively on track cycling, were radical and controversial. But he had thought about it long and hard, and he felt that he had little choice; that to try and produce a road team that could compete with the best in the world would be pointless. ‘My view at the time,’ Keen told me in 2007, ‘was that men’s professional road cycling was almost completely dominated by an underlying drugs culture. And … in the context of the programme I was charged with creating, having a drugs system, or even a tolerance of a drugs system, was just not an option.
‘The idea that you could plan for men’s road racing success at world level … to me it couldn’t be done,’ continued Keen, for whom planning is like breathing. ‘It seemed to me that the furthest we could go with road racing for men was to create a development programme where we could take promising young riders to that line in the sand – of what I’d call performance credibility – and then say, “If that is the world you want, as far as we understand it, then off you go and good luck.”’
As he spoke, Keen measured his words carefully, but the implications and subtext to what he was saying were as devastating as they were damning. That phrase, ‘performance credibility’, had particular resonance, not least because of Keen’s intimate knowledge of the sport. He was speaking not as an outsider, but as someone whose protégé, Boardman, was now part of the world he was describing. Although Boardman had showed flashes of brilliance in road races, the highlight perhaps being his second place – to five-time Tour de France winner Miguel Indurain – at the 1995 Dauphiné Libéré, his potential on the road appeared to be limited. By what? His limitations over the longer distances, or the three-week duration of the Tour de France? Or his refusal to take drugs? Keen wouldn’t say explicitly. But he might have said that Boardman’s performances fell within the realms of ‘performance credibility’, and left it at that.
Nevertheless, for many, Keen’s track-focused plan was tantamount to treason. Ignore road cycling? Pretend the Tour de France doesn’t exist? He was trampling on the dreams of all those – the overwhelming majority of cycling fans – who are drawn to the sport by the glamour and excitement of the greatest race in the world.
Keen argued that he had no choice; he was under pressure to produce a return on the new funding under the terms dictated by the distributors of lottery cash. UK Sport was the agency charged with sharing out the money among all the governing bodies, but the cash came with conditions attached and targets to be reached. For UK Sport, the challenge was this: how to set comparable targets across all sports. The answer was to focus on world championships and Olympics. Sports would be assessed and evaluated purely on their performances in these events. Olympic and world medals would effectively write lottery cheques. Conversely, no medals would see funding reduced.
In cycling, the maths was simple. At the Olympics there were 12 gold medals available on the track, just four on the road (and two in mountain biking); and it was the same at the world championships. Keen concluded that a British rider could win the Tour de France or the Paris-Roubaix Classic and become a household name in mainland Europe, but it would count for nothing as far as UK Sport was concerned. So he had no choice: the bulk of the money had to be directed towards the track.
But Keen went further than that. As he settled into his office in the Manchester Velodrome in 1997 – having first visited a used furniture shop to buy a desk and chair – he pored over files describing road races all across Europe to which British teams were invited every year. And every year they went, invariably to be soundly thrashed by their continental rivals, blowing holes in the budget with no tangible return. As far as Keen was concerned it was madness. Even worse, it was pointless. So he took a more radical step than merely cutting funding for a men’s senior road squad: he took his axe to it. In the British cycling revolution, at least in its first phase, it was not – to paraphrase Lance Armstrong – all about the bike. It was all about the track.
Ten years later, even as Brailsford, who took over from Peter Keen in 2004, spoke in Bourg-en-Bresse with such breezy optimism of running a clean team and entering the Tour de France, the omens seemed less than encouraging.
In fact, Keen’s prescience had proved remarkable, and his decision not to fund a road programme eminently sensible. A year after he drew up his World Class Performance Plan, with its track focus, a major doping scandal erupted at the 1998 Tour de France. It blew the lid on the scale of organised, endemic doping at the highest level of professional road cycling. The so-called ‘Festina affair’ – involving the world’s number one team – proved to be merely the start, however. It was followed, over the following years, by a drip-drip-drip of doping allegations, revelations and scandals.
Drip-drip-drip they went, like an irritating leak that isn’t quite bothersome enough to actually fix. Finally, in 2006, came the next deluge: an international blood doping ring uncovered by a Spanish investigation, which removed the favourites, Ivan Basso and Jan Ullrich, on the eve of the Tour de France. This, coupled with a positive test for the eventual winner of that year’s Tour, Floyd Landis, seemed, finally, like it could be the tipping point, and the catalyst for change. If the first step to changing is to admit you have a problem, then such a step appeared to be taken towards the end of 2006, cycling’s annus horribilis, when the sport’s world governing body, the UCI, commissioned an independent audit to discover the extent of the doping problem: a small step, but a significant
