The 1% Lie? Inside Team Sky’s Rise

Anthony Walsh (0:00)

In 2010, Dave Brailsford launched Team Sky and made a promise that no one in professional cycling had ever dared to make. He said, we'll win the Tour de France within five years with a clean British rider. His method? 1% improvements in everything Team Sky touched. I'm talking the mattresses, the hand sanitizer, what he called the post-race hydration solution, white painted truck floors. Team Sky called this marginal gains. And the world, we bought it. Within three years, they won the Tour de France, within 10 years, they'd won seven Tour de France's. They were the most dominant team that the sport of cycling had ever seen. But I've got one question. If this was really just about mattresses and small, innocent marginal gains, why did their own team doctor order testosterone to the team headquarters and then destroy his laptop with a screwdriver? There's something deeper going on here. Let me take you back to 2010 Dave Brailsford had just transformed British cycling from a national embarrassment, one Olympic medal on the track in 76 years, into the most dominant force in Olympic sport. They dominated track events in Beijing and London, winning the majority of available gold medals. The man was a genius. And his philosophy, it was deceptively simple. Break everything down, every single element that goes into riding a bike, then improve each one by just 1%.

Stack enough of these tiny 1% gains together and the compounding effect is absolutely enormous. They call it the aggregation of marginal gains. So Brailsford launches Team Sky with a mission statement that most felt was naïve and a sport that was still bleeding and reeling a little bit from the post-Lance Armstrong era. He publicly promised that Sky would never operate in grey areas. He drew a line, his words, a clear ethical line between right and wrong. And it worked. Or at least it looked like it worked. Bradley Wiggins won the 2012 Tour de France, the first British rider in history to do so. Chris Froome won it the next year. Then again, then again, then again, four Tour de France victories for Froome. Then came Thomas and Bernal. The cycling world was told this was innovation. This is what happens when you apply the marginal gains philosophy to every pillow, to every food choice, to every warm down protocol. Business schools around the world wrote case studies about this. Matthew Said even wrote best selling books about this. Corporate keynote speakers charged tens of thousands of pounds to present the Brailsford model. And if you questioned it, you were a cynic, you were a dinosaur, someone who belonged back in that Lance Armstrong era, someone who couldn't accept that British sport had simply gotten better than everybody else in the world. But beneath the white painted floors of the team trucks, those pristine team trucks, things were not what they seemed. On September 15th, 2016, the Russian hacking group Fancy Bears published stolen medical files from the World Anti-Doping Agency. Among the names, Bradley Wiggins. The files revealed that Wiggins had been granted a therapeutic use exemption, a TUE, to use a cortosteroid trim and sinulone ahead of three major races, to 2011 Tour de France, which he crashed out of, to 2012 Tour de France, the one he won, and to 2013 Tour d'Italia. Now, I must state, TUEs, they are legal. Athletes with genuine medical conditions can apply for permission to use otherwise banned substances. Wiggins has always maintained, and this is really important, that he used trim and sinulone to treat legitimate asthma and allergy conditions. He told the BBC he 100% did not cheat. But here's where the story gets a little bit complicated. Three weeks after Fancy Bears, that incident, journalist Matt Lawton at the Daily Mail broke a story that would haunt Team Sky for years. On June 12th, 2011, the final day of the Criterium de Dauphiné, which Wiggins had actually just won, a padded envelope was hand-delivered from British Cycling's headquarters in Manchester to the Team Sky bus at La Toisiée in the French Alps. A British cycling coach named Shane Cope flew from Manchester to Geneva drove across the border into France and handed the sealed jiffy bag to the team doctor, Dr. Richard Freeman. What was in this bag? It seems like a crazy journey. What was in this bag? It must have been important. Well, Team Sky's answer when it finally came weeks later after initially claiming Cope had been visiting cyclist Emma Pooley, a story which was quickly debunked when Pooley confirmed she was in Spain, not even the same country. In the bag, it was reported was, Fleu im Eucille. This is a legal decongestant, available over the counter in any French pharmacy for about 8 euro. Not difficult to get your hands on. They're in France, it's in French pharmacies. Seems like a lot of trouble to go to to save them a trip to the pharmacy. They literally flew a decongestant from Manchester into the French Alps. UK anti-doping investigated for 14 months. Their conclusion, they could not confirm or refute that the package contained flew in the sewer. Because there were no medical records. None. Dr. Friedman kept his records on a laptop that later said it was lost, which according to subsequent tribunal findings, he damaged with a screwdriver or another blunt instrument before handing it over to forensic investigators. The UK Parliament's Digital Culture, Media and Sports Select Committee conducted their own investigation into all this. Their report published in March 2018 It didn't hold back. It's actually worth reading. The committee concluded, and I'm paraphrasing a little here, in their findings, that they found the explanation about the package implausible and the drugs had been used by Sky to enhance rider performance, not just to treat a medical need. But Wiggins and Brailsford had consistently disputed those findings. But the Jiffy bag was just the beginning, because while UK anti-doping were investigating, the package, they discovered something else entirely. In May 2011, one month before the Jiffy bag was delivered, 30 sachets of Testogel had been ordered to British Cycling's headquarters at the Manchester Velodrome. Like seriously, lads, send it somewhere else. You're sending it straight to your headquarters. Testogel is a prescription testosterone. It's a banned substance under WADA rules, prohibited at all times. And in the words of medical practitioner tribunal that would eventually rule on this case, Testosterone is the doping drug of choice for many in cycling. The man that ordered this Testogel, it was Dr. Richard Freeman. Now, before I dive into what happened with Dr. Richard Freeman, because this is a really interesting part of the story, let me just say that some of what happened with Team Sky, it genuinely was revolutionary. I was coming up in cycling through this time and there's like pre-Sky and after Sky. One of the amazing innovations in this was one of our coaches, Tim Kerrison. He wrote and prescribed some truly amazing training sessions, and they were a total step change in how coaches trained athletes. These sessions are still getting used by a lot of top riders today. In fact, I've built out three 16 week training plans, one for gravel, one for road and the other for sportifes. Some of the sessions that he wrote back then, they're incorporated into these or the sessions in there have taken inspiration from them. These plans are totally free. I just want to get something into your hands to get you guys doing a little bit of structure heading towards your goal. So the plans are free to download. You can check them out. They're in our free Roadman Community. To go there and get the free plans, you just go to www.skool.com/roadman.