Inside Team Sky by Walsh David

Author:Walsh, David [Walsh, David]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781471133343
Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
Published: 2013-11-20T18:30:00+00:00

I sit silently, letting two of the best brains in the business air their thoughts, hopes and nerves without interruption. As I look out upon Auvergne’s hills and pastures, post-stage analysis as my soundtrack, I am acutely aware of the access I am enjoying. Other journalists will now return to their hotels for another round of dinner, sleep and breakfast with only their speculations to cling on to between stages and press events. Instead, I live among the riders, coaches, managers, mechanics and carers that keep this team in the yellow jersey, following the Tour from inside Team Sky.

Julich solved the mystery of Chris Froome like a veteran detective working a complex case. Brailsford’s old adage about a £900,000 rider with a coach would be proved true. Froome says that one of the greatest misapprehensions people have about him is that he is naturally skinny, that he could live on a diet of Big Mac meals and not gain a pound. The truth is that he is obsessive about food, snacks on nothing more fattening than bean sprouts, and has to work at his conditioning.

His tutelage under Julich coincided with the growing influence of Tim Kerrison’s ideas. Bradley Wiggins, somewhat envious himself of Froome’s build, has noted that when he got serious about road racing his weight fell away. He was between 81-82kg at the Beijing Games in 2008 but weighed 73kg the following summer in France. For Froome it was a similar story as he adopted the regime of no breakfast rides. In the spring of 2011 he weighed 73kg. In September he weighed 68kg. Consider that the UCI imposes a minimum weight limit of 6.8kg for bikes used in the Tour. Froome shed almost the weight of a bike from his 6 foot 1 inch body.

Finally he was ready for the road.

The bilharzia persists. Eggs can get trapped in the liver, the lungs, even the brain, and the difficulty with treatment is that they can’t eradicate eggs trapped within tissues and organs during lengthy infection. Sometimes in rare cases the long-term avoidance of organ damage requires chemotherapy, a detail which has occasionally been seized upon to bolster the accusation that Froome has hugely exaggerated the problems associated with bilharzia. He hasn’t. Froome has never had anything but conventional treatment and has never claimed to have suffered anything from treatments beyond the usual week of feeling bad. He had a third dose after the Criterium International in 2012 and in early 2013 tests showed that the condition persisted. He has no Therapeutic Use Exemptions (TUEs) for any drugs concerning bilharzia or anything else.

Head doctor Alan Farrell consults regularly with the doctors in South Africa who deal with Froome’s condition, and the team has no problem with the treatment taking place so far away from Europe because of the greater understanding of bilharzia in Africa. My feeling with this condition is that it’s a case of move along folks, there’s nothing to see here.

So. Imagine if Team Sky signed Chris

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.