samhocking said:
I think what is not liked is Sky have clearly broken down the requirements of what is required to win, analysed it and built it back up into a how to win strategy. They've replaced the emotion with numbers, the doomed attacks with continual pressure and have the budget and team stability to keep paying the best Tour rider of the moment. They also clearly came in saying they would win Le Tour in 5 years, got laughed at by everyone and then went and did it in 3 years and that pissed off many fans of more traditional cycling where strong palamares from time as a junior all through the expected path of a real cyclist was basically torn up and they did it with a track rider and largely track staff.
This is largely fair, and is analogous to the Schumacher era of F1. But it's not just the budget and team stability to keep paying the best Tour rider of the moment, but to also give him a steady stream of world class domestiques, and use their financial strength to pay riders who would have greater freedom elsewhere to work as part of that race-strangling machine. Riding to pre-calculated tempos for optimum gain may be smart, and it may require great talent, but it isn't as fun to watch as a less predictable race. Just as Schumacher's Ferrari team's ability to calculate the exact optimum time for him to put in the laps in clean air to overtake people in the pit stop required great strategic thinking and perfect execution from a great driver, but didn't create the same interest as drivers dicing for position mano a mano. And to this day, regardless of Schumacher's statistical records, a substantial portion of the fanbase rate Senna, Prost, Clark, Fangio, Stewart and others who won less but showed more in terms of memorable duels at least at the same level as Schumacher as a result.
As to the 5 years boast, that was scoffed at because at the inception of the team who was there? Wiggins was a one-hit wonder at the time and expected that he would need a very favourable parcours (and when he won, he did get that anyway), Thomas was still a Classics contender and has taken significant time to turn into a real climber - it's only from 2015 that he's been able to climb to the level to be realistically considered - and Kennaugh was the only youngster to have shown sufficient capabilities to be thought of as a GT winner for the future.
So I agree that Sky's adaptation of a race formula (which dates back to Anquetil's day, popularized by Banesto, perfected by USPS) that doesn't produce particularly entertaining racing is a large part of people's antipathy. But I think you also need to consider how unlikable many of the players in the game are. Brailsford comes across as a dishonest, corporate shill, parroting on-message nonsense and avoiding answering the simplest of questions by misdirecting the interviewer through a maze of subordinate clauses, buzzwords and being caught out in the simplest of lies. At many races they've been standoffish with fans at the same time as reaching media saturation point with articles about their race caravan, their lighting and their James Bond presentation. And also, not without reason, they're perceived like a Real Madrid, a Manchester City (actually more so the latter, Real have had this as their modus operandi for years), a moneyed Johnny-Come-Lately that is buying success with little respect for the traditions of the sport (using football-styled tapping up for big ticket purchases at the start of the team). And that, unlike the USPS era, they're taking their template all over the calendar rather than strangling a small number of specifically targeted races, doesn't help, because you can't just skip a couple of races and wonder what all the fuss is about. This happening at the same time as somebody previously involved in the team runs the UCI and coinciding with a fairly widespread downturn in people's trust in professional sport (and - a shame for them - the rise of social media, meaning those off-message are a lot harder to keep quiet than in Armstrong's day) just serves to exacerbate things, keeping the antipathy prominent.
There's really a perfect storm of factors that contribute to the unpopularity of the team. Some of which they don't have a hand in, but many of which they do, and several of which they don't really help themselves with either.