Brailsford:
"Have I considered my position? I think anybody who works in this game considers his position. I'm constantly thinking, 'Am I the right person to support the team?' It's not about me, my goal is to try and help these guys, not just to perform but to perform optimally, and there's a difference. I think regardless of DCMS or anything else, there's constantly that piece of self-questioning about am I appropriately placed and have I the skills or whatever else to do that. And I think it's something you ask yourself all the time. Things come and go, things change, and situations change, but I'm here and I'm here because I think I am still in a position to support these guys to be the best they can be."
Brailsford has, in the past, on at least two occasions, admitted that he has given serious consideration to quitting.
The first was after Fiddy-Cent Hayles got busted by the haematocrit police in the Manchester medal factory and the media made a bit of a fuss. Brailsford admitted to Richard Moore, for the
Heroes, Villains and Velodromes book, that he almost did the modern equivalent of retiring to the drawing room with a stiff whisky and his revolver.
Given he'd already admitted to Moore in that book how he had firm suspicions about some British Cycling riders doping and dealt with them by just dropping them from the squad - not talking to their teams, not talking to the UCI, just moving them on like a priest to a new parish - I always found it strange that Hayles's haematocrit fluctuation could almost push Brailsford over the edge. Here's what he said to Moore about those pesky riders he moved on:
"Some people are very quiet on doping, but I've always been open about it. I introduced blood testing a long time ago, and I said to the riders, ‘We're going to take your blood and if there's anything suspicious I‘m not going to send you to the police, or the anti-doping guys. We're going to do it in-house, and if I see anything dodgy, I'm just going to phone you up and say, "Look, we know what you're doing. You can tell me about it if you want. But you ain't riding, that's for sure."' And there have been three or four riders, Great Britain riders, who didn't get selected, where I‘ve had to say: ‘No, you're not riding, because we know what you're doing.' And they just said: ‘Oh, alright then.'"
The other time was after the the toxic cloud from the USADA report engulfed Sky and they realised that, despite their much vaunted ZTP, they had somehow become a home from home for former dopers who were still in the closet about their habits. Fortunately Alastair Campbell was on hand to talk Brailsford down off the ledge that time and instead they threw Steve de Jongh, Bobby Julich, Sean Yates and Michael Rogers on the sacrificial altar in a vain attempt to sate the media's desire for blood and allow Sky to retrench behind the thin blue line and rebuild the ramparts of ZTP.
Given that those were probably the two biggest scandals of their time to catch Brailsford unprepared for the media reaction - other scandals had either drawn no media fire or had been successfully dealt with in-house on the hush-hush - you could possibly understand why the man would admit publicly that he'd considered quitting. And I guess we can probably also understand how, with the cumulative effect of the Fancy Bears and the Jiffy Bag and the puffergate things, he's now reached the stage where he'd like us to believe he thinks about quitting every single day now. Just like a smoker, I guess, who every day thinks to themself that they really should give up the habit. Just not today. Maybe tomorrow.
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