The Beginning
We’re a clean team, and we’re going to run it the same as we run the track squad. If there’s any suggestion we’ve appointed someone who is doing or isn’t working the way we want them to, yeah, that’s when you’ll see me walk the walk.’ At the same launch, on the same day, Brailsford significantly said, ‘we won’t employ foreign doctors. We’ve only appointed British doctors who have not worked in pro cycling before. There are clear indications when doctors become very familiar with riders and try to support and help their riders the lines get blurred. A lot of these doctors get institutionalised. We’ve got a doctor who’s spent seven years at Bolton Wanderers, he’s a brilliant guy. He’s a top professional’ (who couldn’t work drop box apparently but that’s another matter).
Within twelve months he had reneged on the part about hiring only British doctors. What happened? It’s difficult to discuss the evolution of Sky unless we first dissect the 2010 season. Thomas Lofkvist was their highest placed rider in the 2010 Tour de France, coming in 17th overall. Wiggins, the team leader with a salary of £3million basic, finished 24th overall. In total Team Sky finished the season with 22 wins. For a team of a budget well over £10m it was seen as a poor season by all concerned. Wiggins had been signed to win, or least podium, in the Tour de France and to be so far off the pace certainly put their marginal gains ideals into perspective.
Rumours about what happened in private in the winter of 2010 have been circling for a while now. One rumour is that Wiggins was brought in by Brailsford, where he was read the riot act about his performances that season, with Wiggins alleged to have said ‘do you realise most of those who beat me in the tour are doping?’ One way or another we do now know that riders went to Brailsford in the winter of 2010 and said they were miles behind other teams in terms of recuperative methods. This is where Dr. Fabio Bartalucci comes into the story. Last week there was a report published that alleges Team Sky brought in Bartalucci in late 2010 for his expertise in using intravenous infusions to aid recovery after riders had complained that the team’s attempts to be holier than thou was hampering results.
Bartalucci was with the Bonjour team during the 2001 Giro when police raided hotel rooms during the race. He later went on to work with Phonak where there was a tacit acceptance of doping by management, as confirmed by Floyd Landis. It would seem that Bartalucci is one of these unlucky people who finds himself on teams that dope. It would also seem that Brailsford didn’t use google when he hired Bartalucci’s and notice his terrible luck with teams.
May 2012 the internet started buzzing with news of Geert Leinders being a team doctor at Sky. A google search of his name in May 2012 revealed, on the first page of the search, a translated version of an autobiography from a Dutch rider. In this excerpt it mentions Leinders ensuring this rider’s HCT didn’t exceed the 50% limit. In July 2012, as Wiggins was on his way to the Tour win, Brailsford was ignoring the statements of Theo De Rooy in the Dutch newspaper Vokskrant. De Rooy, formerly of Rabobank, said, ‘doping was a deliberate decision of the medical staff (of whom Leinders was a part of).’ Brailsford replied to this, In July 2012, 18 months into Leinders’ time with Sky, by saying, ‘does that imply Leinders was doping? That’s nothing against him specifically. Call me naïve, call me what you want.’ After the 2012 Tour Brailsford continued with his ‘call me naïve’ line about Leinders. He maintained that Steve Peters had done the interviewing – well known cycling historian Steve ‘Inner Chimp’ Peters that is – before later saying he had looked Leinders in the eye and Leinders had assured him he had done nothing nefarious in his past. What Brailsford has subsequently said to explain Leinders is the usual Brailsford defying rational belief drivel, “hindsight is a brilliant thing and what we have all learnt is pretty horrific. Had we known then what we know now about Leinders, we wouldn’t have touched the guy for sure.” A year later Brailsford was again going down the path of blaming Leinders, “when someone looks you in the eye and lies to you….I’m pretty angry about it.”
What we can now say for certain is that Leinders ‘possessed, trafficked, and administered banned performance enhancing substances without any legitimate medical need, including EPO, blood transfusion paraphernalia, testosterone, insulin, DHEA, LH and corticosteroids to athletes under care, and was complicit in other anti-doping rule violations’ while he was a doctor with Rabobank.’ Michael Rasmussen testified that Leinders assisted him with blood transfusions during the 2004 and 2005 Tour and at the 2007 Giro. Rasmussen said that Leinders wrote false medical certificated to enable him to use cortisone. Sound familiar to Bradley Wiggins? Levi Leipheimer also said that Leinders helped him dope with EPO at the 2002 and 2003 Tour. Leinders’ story with Rabobank becomes even more toxic and bizarre when we consider the statements of Michael Rasmussen, who testified, that in either 2004 or 2005, Leinders told him Doctor Mario Zorzoli, then UCI medical chief, had recommended that Leinders should give Rabobank riders the banned hormone DHEA because “all the other teams are doing it as well.” The ridiculousness of this is that Mario Zorzoli was the one man ‘committee’ that rushed through Froome’s TUE for prednisone at the 2014 Tour de Romandie. Small world it seems. It’s an even smaller world when you look at Sky’s staff roster from winter 2010, the time Leinders was hired. Juan Antonio Flecha, Mathew Hayman and Steven de Jongh were all former Rabobank riders and employees. It’s incredibly hard to imagine those three weren’t asked by Brailsford about Leinders. As someone who has seen De Jongh’s statements on doping over the years, and found him to be genuine and honest, I also find it difficult to believe De Jongh didn’t tell Brailsford the full story about Leinders. Ultimately it takes one hell of a leap of faith to believe Brailsford on this one. Again you need to reconcile a man with attention to detail, unparalleled in cycling, with a bumbling, incompetent fool. Remember Kimmage’s words to Brailsford in 2013, ‘Dave you’re many things but you’re not naïve.’ I would echo that by saying Brailsford is a lot of negative things, but he’s no fool.
Brailsford, having played the he looked me in the eyes card, went on to explain why they did hire Leinders and Bartalucci. Disgustingly he used the death of Txema Gonzalez, one of the team’s carers, who contracted a bacterial infection during the 2010 Vuelta and died days later, as a pretext to hiring Leinders. Brailsford said after Gonzalez died, ‘we sat down and realised that as a group of people we did not know enough about looking after people in extreme heat, with extreme fatigue. We were making calls like ‘no, on you go mate.’ Brailsford went on to say ‘saddle sore, some of the sores the guys get are horrendous. Only a guy who has seen an awful lot of saddle sores can assess that and answer that question.’ Three issues here. 1. Pete Kennaugh tweeted that Leinders was only used to weigh riders in the morning. 2 No one seems to have worked with Leinders when he was with Sky. Ask any rider and they all say he was at a different race to them. Were there races on the moon? 3. Who took over the treatment of ‘saddle sores’ when Leinders left because clearly it was at epidemic like proportions with Team Sky in 2011 and 2012? Seemingly no other doctor was able to treat saddle sores like Leinders. Such a basic requirement of any cycling doctor, yet Leinders, the doping doctor of Rabobank, was the only one who could do it. An amazing guy.
On the point of Txema being used as a pretext to hiring Leinders, joint head Sky cheerleader David Walsh wasn’t for one second entertaining this awful thought. Barry Ryan of Cyclingnews interviewed Walsh in December 2013 and mentioned Brailsford using Gonzalez’s death as a pretext to hiring Leinders. Walsh got very defensive and said, ‘what evidence do you have that they used Gonzalez’s death as a pretext?’ What evidence David? Brailsford’s own words sufficient for you?
Something else happened in the autumn of 2012 which has left many disgusted with the hypocrisy of Sky and Brailsford. After the Lance ‘reasoned USADA decision’ Sky went into PR mode. Again this was about being seen to do the right thing. A point the eagle eyed Kimmage made to Brailsford in 2009, ‘is there a difference between doing the right thing and being seen to do the right thing?’ Director Sportifs of Sky were to be asked whether they had doped previously on other teams. They were going to be let go as part of a ‘zero tolerance policy’ despite being with Sky for three years. Where was this zero tolerance policy for three years? Why was this new found moral outlook only evident when the media was scrutinising them after the Leinders debacle? The Director Sportifs, Knaven, De Jongh, Yates, Cioni, Arvesen and Julich all met in a room and allegedly agreed that ‘if we are all honest they can’t fire us all.’ But in typical cycling fashion some double crossed each other. De Jongh, Julich, Yates all told the truth. Yates claimed to retire, until he later returned with Saxo Tinkoff, while the other two were fired but were made sign iron-clad Non-Disclosure Agreements. (Hard be a whistleblower when you get regular reminders from Sky lawyers of your NDA). The hypocrisy of this was really exemplified when details about Servais Knaven were later released. 2001 files, obtained in 2015, show that EPO was in Knaven’s blood. They also found cortisone and Naftidrofuryl in his urine along with bags of the blood thinner Persantin found in Knaven’s room. Knaven did not contest EPO being in his samples but said there could be another reason for EPO findings in his blood. All this wasn’t sufficient for Sky and Knaven is still a Director Sportif with Sky. Doing the right thing and being seen to do the right thing…
Leinders was employed on an 80 day a year contract by Sky in the two years 2011 and 2012, although it seems every time you hear Brailsford speak on the matter this number keeps getting smaller. By 2025 Leinders won’t have worked with Sky at all, he will be Team Sky’s version of the Dolorean from Back to the Future. What can’t ever be denied though is the transformation in Sky’s results from 2010 to 2011 or the period Leinders and Bartalucci began their employment. In 2010 Sky finished in 15th place in the UCI team rankings with 435 points. Only five teams finished behind them. In 2011 Team Sky came 2nd in the team rankings with 1,069 points. Wiggins himself had two highlights in 2010: Prologue victory in the Giro and a Team Time Trial win in the Tour of Qatar. 2011 was a turnaround. 3rd overall in the Paris Nice, Vuelta Espana, winner of the Dauphine, silver medal in the World Championships at the age of 31. In 2012, the second year of Leinders and Bartalucci helping with ‘recovery’, Wiggins won the Tour, Paris Nice, Dauphine, Romandie and Olympic Games TT. We were told this had nothing to do with Leinders or Bartalucci, that it was instead down to Tim Kerrison revolutionising their training methods. Tim Kerrison the genius who couldn’t spot when one of his riders is producing more power due to Kenacort injections.
A less well known employee of Team Sky is Peter Verbeken. Verbeken was a soigneur with Sky for two years, Sky prefer to call them carers so we’ll call them soigneurs, but now manages the teams service course in Belgium. Last year it was revealed that Verbreken was an employee of US Postal for at least 6 months in 1999 and may have worked with the team for two seasons. How specific was this role as ‘carer’ that Sky headhunted a guy who worked with US Postal? Were his massages that good? Was he giving riders happy endings or something? They can’t have been that good because he’s now in charge of bikes and team kit in Belgium. It’s an odd circumstance where this person ends up on a so called clean team but that’s Sky for you. Everyone finds Jesus on that team.
The Writing this piece two thoughts keep coming into my mind. Kimmage’s line about being seen to do the right thing and cause and effect. Everything Sky have done since their inception has been about winning first, muddying the waters with propaganda second and survival third. Sky doing the right thing is usually by accident, as a result of media pressure forcing them to make decision purely for PR purposes. As for the cause and effect part, as laid out above, there comes a point whereby if you don’t put two and two together you are part of the problem, you are being blinded by your own patriotism. The National Flag is the blindfold of honest analysis when it comes to doping and it has never failed to serve its purpose over the last century. When it comes to their own nation, their own team, people don’t want to know. They want to label the critics as bitter, jealous and wanting to make a name for themselves. They always ignore the most obvious scenario – that Leinders and Bartalucci showed Sky how to dope. But that requires people to suspend their belief in the toothfairy, to suspend their patriotism, to be honest with themselves. So don’t hold your breath. This isn’t a cycling issue, it’s a human issue. Plus ca change….why is it the best clichés are always truisms. Certainly that particular one
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