Yet Brailsford feels that something even more significant than the London Grand Départ is brewing. Five British riders are riding – the biggest British participation since the last British team to ride the Tour, the ill-fated ANC-Halfords squad, took part in 1987. And among those five riders are two highly promising youngsters, Mark Cavendish and Geraint Thomas.
This has got Brailsford thinking. Twelve months after watching the then 19-year-old Cavendish win a gold medal at the World Track Championships in Los Angeles, Brailsford and Sutton found themselves at the Commonwealth Games in Melbourne. It being the Commonwealth Games, at which riders compete for the home nations rather than for Great Britain, Brailsford and Sutton were not as occupied, or under as much pressure, as they’d usually be during a major championship. They spent a fair amount of time sitting together in the stands, watching Cavendish win another gold medal on the track, this time for the Isle of Man, and they discussed the future. They cast their minds back to the Manchester Commonwealth Games in 2002, and forward to the Delhi Games in 2010. In between, of course, were the Olympics. But a sense of repetition, of being locked into a cycle of major games, was evident. Because that is the limitation of track cycling: it’s all about the major games and world championships; there is no velodrome-staged equivalent of the Tour de France or Giro d’Italia, or Tour of Flanders or Paris-Roubaix. These road races are the monuments of the sport; where the history, the prestige and the money is. ‘We were thinking,’ Sutton said later, ‘that we can’t keep doing this forever. We’ve got to do something different.’
The conversation went no further. But 10 months later, back in Los Angeles for a track world cup meeting, Brailsford and Sutton once again found themselves with time to kill, and again they began to project beyond Beijing. Ironically, this owed to a stroke of misfortune for one of the latest of the talented young British riders to emerge, Ben Swift. Swift had been due to ride the madison with Rob Hayles, but he crashed and broke his collarbone. ‘Shane and I had a lot of time on our own and a lot of time to chat,’ Brailsford said, ‘and we inevitably got to talking about future plans.’
And so to Bourg-en-Bresse, and the bar in which Brailsford is sipping water as the late afternoon turns to evening. What is always most striking about Brailsford is his enthusiasm; his shoulders hunch, and he cups his hands in front of his face, almost like the rugby player Jonny Wilkinson preparing for a goalkick; then he moulds those hands into constantly shifting shapes as he talks. ‘I was inspired by London,’ says Brailsford, ‘but this is something I’ve been thinking about for a long time, and I feel that the time’s coming for a British pro team.’
‘Here,’ he clarifies. ‘In the Tour de France. From a personal point of view, if someone asked me what I wanted to do next, that would be it. We had a gut feel that Cav [Cavendish] and Geraint would come through at this level, but thinking it and seeing it are two different things. When I saw Geraint leave the start house for the prologue in London it was that moment of realising that it’s not just something we’re thinking about. I see Cav and Geraint now and think: it’s on.’
Brailsford outlines how such a team could work, in particular with regard to funding. Because what he’s talking about would need serious backing, with a sponsor able and willing to pump millions into the project. ‘The type of partner we’d be looking for would be British. It would be a British initiative. We’d be all about innovation and about doing it clean. In the first instance it would be about being competitive: that’d be our aim. But ultimately you’d want to win. You wouldn’t run a pro team if you didn’t want to win. It wouldn’t fit our mentality not to aim to win.
‘The money? It’s difficult to be clinical about it, but there’s a huge amount of money floating around the City, and a very small circle of people managing a huge amount of money. If you’re in that circle … it’s not finding money that’s the obstacle. I don’t think so. I mean, all the teams here are investing between £3m and £8m a year. It’s a shed load of money, and they’re all committed for four years, but if there weren’t decent returns on that, they wouldn’t be doing it, would they?’
But how would Brailsford do it? Would he combine running a Tour de France team with his current job, as British Cycling’s performance director? ‘It’d have to be done as a private enterprise – or as part of the governing body, which would be a first,’ he says. ‘No other governing bodies run a pro team. But not many countries have the kind of funding structure for elite sport that Britain has.’
One of the reasons for Brailsford being here at the Tour, he explains – and apart from riding l’Etape du Tour in a few days’ time – is to negotiate some of the British riders’ contracts. He is almost, it seems, acting as their agent, which is curious. But this too has highlighted a problem – or an opportunity. The problem is that the riders are contracted to, and under the control of, teams that operate independently of British Cycling, and with fundamentally different – even opposed – priorities. They are not, for example, remotely interested in the Olympics. Which is a problem for Brailsford, and a frustration. The riders in question, with Cavendish and Thomas to the fore, have been nurtured and developed by British Cycling. Brailsford wants to bring them back under an umbrella that he is holding.
‘The lads here know I want to do this [set up a pro team] and they’re all absolutely mad for the idea,’ says Brailsford. ‘I’m here negotiating their contracts for them; so I know what’s in their contracts. And I know – or I’m learning – how the teams are structured and how they operate.
‘We’ve got a set philosophy about doing things at British Cycling,’ he continues, ‘with the riders at the centre. But look at a lot of teams here at the Tour – that’s not how they operate. Between races they don’t even see their riders. They don’t know where they are, never mind what they’re doing. It’s bonkers.’
It is also, thinks Brailsford, one reason why a doping culture is so prevalent in professional road cycling; the theory being that expectation/pressure coupled with absence of care/responsibility equals ideal conditions for such a culture to develop. He’d do it differently, he says. ‘If we did 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