- Today, the future of Team Sky was cast in doubt.
Broadcaster Sky, the team's main sponsor since its inception
in 2010, will end their sponsorship by the end of 2019.
Is this the end of an era?
We're gonna look back at the story of the team so far.
Team Sky became a reality in 2009,
ready to launch the following year.
At the helm, British cycling performance director,
Dave Brailsford, the man behind Great Britain's rise
to the top of the track cycling world.
Their goal? To win the Tour de France
with a British rider within five years.
A lofty ambition, one that few thought was achievable,
and with good reason.
The best British finisher in the Tour
had been Robert Miller in 1984.
But then, the very same year that the sponsor
were put in place, Bradley Wiggins emulated
that result, later promoted to third
after disqualification of Lance Armstrong.
Wiggins was top of Brailsford's hit list.
The problem?
He was still under contract with Team Garmin Slipstream.
Lengthy and sometimes messy negotiations ensued,
but by December, Sky Pro Cycling had their man.
On the fifth of January, the team was presented
to the world at the Millbank Tower in London.
At that launch, Wiggins, Edvald Boasson Hagen,
Thomas Lovkvist, Simon Gerrans,
and the relatively unknown Chris Froome,
were presented to the media,
and so too was the concept of marginal gains.
The thin blue line tracing down the team's jersey
representing the small margins between winning and losing.
Part of those marginal gains, and also presented
at the launch, was their team bus,
like nothing that previously been seen
in the world of professional cycling.
It was state-of-the-art,
aimed at improving the comfort and recovery of the riders,
later dubbed the Death Star by Dave Miller.
The picture that was painted was very clear.
Sky Pro Cycling would not be constrained
by the traditions of cycling.
They were here to do things better and differently.
And that didn't go down too well with traditionalists
within the sport who felt that the insinuation
was that tried and tested methods were wrong.
And to be fair, initially, it didn't look
as though Sky's theories were any better.
The core principles that brought enormous success
in the verge row didn't appear to be transferring too well
to the less quantifiable world of road racing.
I mean, it wasn't a bad start by any means.
They had an early stage winner
in the Tour Down Under with Chris Sutton, followed up by
with Juan Antonio Fletcher, plus a stint
in the pink jersey after winning the opening time trial
for Bradley Wiggins at the Giro d'Italia.
By the Tour de France, which was basically their raise on
Detra, was a disaster.
Wiggins struggled, clearly not in the shape
that he had been in the previous year
and it caused tensions within the team.
I remember one of the stage in the last week,
I asked Serge Pahwels how it was in Team Sky
and I will never forget his reply.
'If they could reinvent water, they would,' is what he said.
2011 did look better.
Wiggins convincingly won the Criterium du Dauphine
and the national championships, but then disaster struck
in the first week of the tour where he crashed,
a broken collarbone forcing him to abandon.
Questions were being asked then as to whether
or not they'd win the Tour at all,
let alone within five years with a British rider.
But in 2012, everything seemed to click.
Tim Kerrison, who has got a background
in coaching world class swimmers,
has spent a year following the team simply
to learn about the nuances of cycling,
what training methods were right and what were wrong.
With Kerrison calling the training shots,
it seemed as though Wiggins couldn't put a foot wrong.
He won Pyranees, the Tour of Romandie,
and the Criterum du Dauphine just before the Tour.
The script effectively had been written
and not even a controversial tie
by Chris Froome could get in the way of Wiggins
becoming the first Brit to winning the Tour de France
over three minutes ahead of his teammates.
Then, just days later, he'd win an Olympic gold medal
in the time trial in London.
That summer of 2012 was peak euphoria for Sky Pro Cycling.
They achieved their goal and as a result,
cycling in Britain was booming.
They put cycling on the map in a way
that had never been seen before.
That could easily have been as good as it got for Sky,
especially with Wiggins unable
to reach those heady heights again the following year.
But with the emergence of Chris Froome
as a Grand Tour contender,
Brailsford has his team switch their focus to him,
and the rest is history.
2013 was the start of the Froome era.
With the team built entirely around him,
he won the 2013 Tour de France seemingly
with ease over four minutes ahead of Nairo Quintana
and he would repeat that success in 2015, 2016, and 2017,
a year in which he also won the Vuelta a Espana
and then a few months later, the Giro d'Italia.
So by the end of May this year, Chris Froome
and Team Sky won all three Grand Tours in a row.
Well, that wasn't without its controversy.
More coming off from that later on.
The icing on the cake, though,
for the team had to have been this year's Tour de France win
for Geraint Thomas.
His win there marked their sixth and seventh years
at the Tour de France and their eighth Grand Tour.
Thomas is man who carved out his cycling career
through the British Cycling Track Program
under the watchful eye of coach Rod Ellingworth.
Thomas is the poster boy for British cycling
and his success a testament
to the effectiveness of their methods.
So what are their methods?
Well it's easy to forget now, but many of the things
that we currently take for granted
as being normal for professional cyclers
were most certainly not the norm before Team Sky.
They call it marginal gains, all those little actions
that could add up to bridge the gap from the capabilities
of clean bike riders to a level previously only seen
by riders that had admitted to doping.
At least that was the way it was originally described.
Team Sky left no stone unturned
in their quest to create the perfect athlete
and the perfect environment for them.
Their training camps, for example, were on another level.
In their second year and ever since then,
they rented out an entire hotel in Mallorca
for the winter and allowed riders to drop in as
and when it suited their individual
and bespoke training programs.
There, the riders would have absolutely everything
they could possibly need from a team chef
that took over the hotel kitchen to physios, coaches,
doctors, nutritionists, mechanics, and even psychologists.
But it would even be a place
for planning the following season
with Brailsford notoriously sharing
stock performance meetings could last
until the early hours of the morning.
Then, there was the aforementioned state-of-the-art team bus
with a designated seat for each rider, storage,
USB charging ports, reclining chairs.
I mean, the thing even had a magic glass door.
It was outside of this incredible vehicle, also,
that turbo trainers first became a common sight
at pro bike races outside of time trials
as Sky introduces strict warm up
and cool down protocols for all races.
Just another marginal gain introduced by Tim Kerrison.
When people first saw that, they scoffed, but there is not
a team out there now that hasn't copied Sky in this regard.
In fact, you will see it even replicated
at the lower levels of the sport.
They even carried nine mattresses to races for the riders,
ensuring every team member would get a good night's sleep
at the races, also helped by custom pillows
and air conditioning units brought
to their French hotel rooms each July.
They then took rider accommodation to another level
by introducing RVs for their star riders,
although the UCI did put a stop to that one pretty quickly.
Brailsford still does have his own though.
Their style of racing, while that hasn't been
to everyone's taste, but there's no doubt
that it has been effective.
They put a stranglehold on the mountains
by signaling a high tempo to discourage attacks.
And if there is one, they don't often react,
knowing that the likelihood
is that it will be unsustainable.
They have focused on efficiency and control racing.
It's not always pretty or romantic,
but it brings the results in.
Sky have made the seemingly unpredictable world
of stage racing quantifiable
just as British cycling did on the track.
That said, you need the best riders in the world
to produce that sustainable power,
and for that, you need a big budget.
In 2010, the team made headlines
for its apparently huge budget
which subsequent accounts have revealed
to be 14.6 million pounds, which was huge,
possibly only rivaled by the likes of Team Coticchia.
The budgets were likely due to the way
in which the team behind the team personalized
and revolutionized the world of cycling teams
to the public eye as well as glamorizing cycling
to sponsorship partners.
Although not without literally blocking
a few fans along the way with shields
around the team bus, for instance.
Besides that oversight, though,
as the team's results improved,
the sponsorship money increased and so did the signings.
This correlates to the first notably large jump
in budget for the team.
The 2012 season saw an increase of 28%
from the previous year, up from 16.6 million pounds to 21.4.
The budget did take a slight dip from 2014 into 2015,
but according to the inner ring site,
this didn't affect the operation of the team,
because the economical climate at the time
and contracts in euros instead of pounds
would make the budget stretch further.
That outward trajectory of budgets, though,
return in 2016 when the increase was 27%,
taking the team to over 31 million pounds
which is also 42 million dollars.
Winning 39 races that year, though,
including the Tour de France, the Criterium du Dauphine,
Liege-Bastogne-Liege, and Pyranees,
meant yet another increase in title sponsorship for 2017.
The sum? A walking 34 and a half million pounds.
An enormous budget, the biggest ever seen in cycling,
and money that is no doubt going
to be hard to find elsewhere.
The nine year journey so far
has not been completely plain sailing, though.
Far from it.
From their inception and rather bullish recruitment process
back in 2009, right through to winning
this year's Giro d'Italia, Team Sky
have never been too far from some sort of controversy.
Controversy that began before even
a single peddle had been turned in anger.
The way they brashly went about pulling Wiggins
out of his existing contract ruffled some feathers
and he wasn't the only one.
Ben Swift had been in the same situation
with the Russian squad Team Coticchia.
Team Sky says that they're still also,
pretty clearly back in the day,
a zero tolerance policy to doping.
No one who had ever been convicted
of a doping violation would be employed by the team.
Now with a statement like that, you've got to back it up
and it wasn't long before the press's attention turned
to doctor Geert Leinders,
a man with a questionable past
who has since been banned for life from the sport.
Leinders was let go in 2012
and the subsequent fallout saw the exit of Sean Yates,
Bobby Julich, and Steven Duyung amongst others.
And who remembers Jonathan Tiernan-Locke?
Sky couldn't have been quicker in distancing themselves
from him in 2013 as his biological passport data threw out
this new scandal for the British team.
Sergio Henao was briefly sidelined
for similar reasons a couple of years later,
although has since returned to the team.
And then came the Jiffy bag and TUE scandal.
An anonymous tipoff to the Daily Mail about
a suspicious package that was supposedly
for Bradley Wiggins delivered
at the 2011 Criterium du Dauphine
had a TUE exposed by Russian hackers Fancy Bears.
But what was in the bag?
Was it flumizole or marmalade sandwiches?
I don't think we are ever going to really know.
And then, just when you thought any controversial behavior
had run out of puff, Chris Froome returned
an adverse analytical finding for salbutamol
at last year's Vuelte de Espana.
It was a case that rumbled on beyond his win
at the Giro this year and although he was ultimately cleared
by the UCI before the tour,
it was more fuel to the fire for anyone anti-Sky.
So what happens now?
Well, it's pretty simple.
Number one, they find a very wealthy new backer
and continue almost completely as normal.
Number two, they find a backer
but have a much reduced budget.
Or number three, the team doesn't find new backers at all,
and the likes of Chris Froome, Gareth Thomas,
and Egan Bernal will have to find another team
if anybody can afford them.
So although it's too early to tell,
it could well be the end of an era.
An era that has been as precise as the team have been
in their search for marginal gains,
perfectly spanning an entire decade
from the first day of 2010 to the last day of 2019.
In that time, they've won the tour six times.
The Giro once, the Vuelta once, the Liege-Bastogne-Liege,
__, Pyranees, ___, the Dauphine, the list goes on and on.
Have they changed cycling?
Absolutely, the answer to that question is a resounding yes.
They've changed racing, they've changed training,
and above all, they've made cycling here
in the UK mainstream and have put thousands upon thousands
of bums on bikes.
Cycling is now, dare I say it, a cool sport.
It's a popular sport.
It's a common sight seeing not just a rider in Likra,
but groups of cyclists out riding.
People don't do a double take when somebody
is sat in a cafe in Likra.
They've appealed to and inspired a generation of cyclists,
some of whom will reach the pinnacle
of the sport in the not-too-distant future.
So I, for one, think that there are many reasons
to applaud them and we at GCN would actually like
to say thank you to them
for always welcoming us whenever we've made
a request to make a video.
We wish you the best of luck in finding a sponsor
and of course for next season too.
Now, you can, as ever, let us know your thoughts
on today's news and of Team Sky themselves
in the comment section down below.
I've got no doubt there will be some passionate debates.
Now one of the videos we've made with them was
an insight into a day on their Mullican training camp,
so if you'd like to check out that,
you can find it just down here.