There is a slightly awkward silence. Brailsford, in a navy blue British Cycling Adidas tracksuit top, blue jeans and trainers, is flanked by four men wearing smart suits and ties and polished shoes. One of them introduces Brailsford as the performance director of British Cycling. But we know that. Everyone in Britain now knows that, with Brailsford elevated to the status of sporting guru, and named coach of the year at the BBC’s Sports Personality of the Year awards (even though Brailsford is not, and never has been, a coach). He has been visited by Sir Alex Ferguson and his coaching staff at Manchester United; other sports are keen to speak to him, to hear his secrets. Ferguson had sat with Brailsford and Shane Sutton in the former’s office at the Velodrome, with Brailsford quizzing the great football manager on his knack of successfully re-building teams as players became old or ineffective. ‘Just get rid of the c**ts,’ Ferguson told him.
The invitation to come to the Lanesborough had come by phone only 48 hours earlier: ‘Be at the Lanesborough Hotel at 10.’ But we weren’t told why, and nor were we to tell anyone that we’d been invited to a meeting whose purpose we didn’t know.
The low winter sun cuts across the room, glancing off Brailsford’s head, forcing him to squint. ‘Well,’ he begins. ‘Thanks for coming to this … em, gathering.’ Then he spreads his hands and says: ‘We’re here to announce Britain’s new pro team, and the identity of our sponsor. Sky.’
The dam breaks; and now Brailsford quickly gets into his flow, rubbing his hands enthusiastically, forming them into descriptive shapes. ‘My world changes from today,’ he says. ‘This is new, it’s something people haven’t seen before. We’re setting out to create an epic story – an epic British success story. Now it’s down to business: to find out what it’s going to take to win the Tour de France with a clean British rider.’
What will the team be called, Brailsford is asked. He seems to hesitate. ‘It’ll be Team Sky. Yeah, Team Sky.’
And what will the budget be? The men in suits fidget. ‘Enough to be competitive,’ says one. ‘Enough to achieve our ambitions,’ says another. Brailsford smiles and shakes his head at the suggestion that they will be the Manchester City of professional cycling – the football club made newly wealthy thanks to an influx of Arab money.
‘It’s a bit like fantasy football, or fantasy cycling, at the moment,’ says Brailsford when asked how far advanced he is in assembling, from scratch, a squad of around 25 riders. ‘It’s a lot of fun. We’ve had some fantastic discussions. And we have created a monster database of the top professional cyclists. But at the end of the day it’s like Moneyball: it’s all about doing your homework.’
But what about his aim of winning the Tour with a clean British rider? Never mind Britain’s record in the race – three top 10 finishes in 105 years – there is the ‘clean’ part of the equation. Given cycling’s tarnished image, is that possible? ‘The perception of cycling is changing,’ says Brailsford. ‘We need to be agents of change. Our job is to prove beyond doubt that it can be done clean. The legacy of that would be phenomenal.’
Brailsford’s mention of Moneyball is interesting. Moneyball is the 2003 book by Michael Lewis – subtitled The Art of Winning an Unfair Game – in which the author spends a season following the Oakland Athletics (A’s) baseball team, which consistently punches above its weight, outperforming teams with far bigger budgets. What Lewis discovers, while shadowing the coach Billy Beane and his backroom team, is that the A’s have developed a system of recruiting and assessing players that flies in the face of received baseballing wisdom, but which works – and works spectacularly.
The intricacies of Beane’s system are too complicated to go into here. One of the central points, though, is that Beane, despite having been a player himself, has done what most insiders in most sports are unable to do; he sees his sport in a fresh, objective way, de-cluttering himself of the experience, prejudices, conventional wisdom and knowledge that tend to be accumulated from years of involvement. He is an insider with an outsider’s perspective. Lewis notes that one of Beane’s key appointments is a Harvard graduate, someone who has never played professional baseball. Which is a point in his favour, according to Lewis: ‘At least he hasn’t learned the wrong lessons. Billy had played pro ball, and regarded it as an experience he needed to overcome if he wanted to do his job well.’
This is interesting in the context of British Cycling, and it’s easy to see where Brailsford is coming from. For he, too, is an ‘outsider’ in the world of professional road racing. But it also chimes with something Chris Boardman had told me. For some time now the former professional’s job at British Cycling had been to head up the research and development department, the so-called ‘Secret Squirrel Club’. It was Boardman’s department, or the team of people he oversees, that developed the bikes and equipment used by the British team at the Beijing Olympics, including the rubberised skinsuits which, as soon as the Games were over – and in an example of Brailsford’s attention to detail – were recalled and shredded, in case a rival nation got their hands on one and managed to copy them.
In selecting his team of people, Boardman had said his priority was to select those who knew nothing about cycling or bikes. ‘There is no one with anything to do with cycling involved in equipment research and development.’ And so they were drawn from Formula One and the world of engineering. Boardman’s premise was simple: ‘Preconceived ideas kill genuine innovation.’ He encouraged his team to ask questions which would seem, to anyone involved in the sport of cycling, obvious or even stupid. ‘It takes a bit of self-discipline on my part,’ Boardman said, ‘to work out whether we’ve reached a dead end with someone, or if I’m stopping [innovation] with my preconceived ideas.’ Clearly Boardman regarded his own background, as Olympic and world champion, and Tour de France yellow jersey wearer, as ‘experience he needed to overcome if he wanted to do his job well’.
Another thing about Moneyball, though, is its emphasis on statistics. This is perhaps what Brailsford was more particularly alluding to in the Lanesborough, especially when he mentioned his ‘monster database’. In assessing players, Beane used ‘sabermetrics’; that is, the analysis of baseball through objective, statistical evidence.
Brailsford appears to want to do a similar thing in road cycling, using statistics and science – as he has done so successfully in track cycling. This would be a new approach, with professional road cycling as traditional as they come, its teams run by former professional riders, who then hand over to other former professional riders, who then … etc. The pool of people is small; almost, you could say, incestuous.
Brailsford, as he hinted in Bourg-en-Bresse when lamenting the way many teams seemed to be organised and run (‘they don’t even know where their riders are between races – that’s bonkers!’), has perhaps identified this as a weakness; or a ‘market inefficiency’, to use the language of Michael Lewis in Moneyball. Weaknesses and market inefficiencies create opportunities. If a scientific approach doesn’t seem to be adopted by other teams, it could be for two reasons: because it doesn’t work; or because it hasn’t been tried.
There are good reasons for suspecting it might not work. Unlike track racing, which takes place in a relatively controlled and predictable environment, road racing is multi-dimensional and unpredictable. The variables – in weather conditions, the nature of the course, the presence of up to 200 other riders and 20-odd teams – are numerous, even before we begin to decipher some of the unwritten rules and etiquette of the peloton, or the unofficial alliances and ‘deals’ between riders and teams, which are rumoured to be commonplace.
From a performance point of view, how you evaluate and assess road cyclists seems, in some respects, as complicated as the Enigma code. No analysis can be based simply on finishing positions, for example, since that tells only a fraction of the story. In fact, it might tell nothing of the story. Good teams need good domestiques, for example. But how do you evaluate a rider whose job it is to look after his team leader? By the number of water bottles he has distributed? By the length, and quality, of the shelter he has provided? What