Tour de France 2015: Sky tore up script to make headlines for Chris Froome

Brailsford reveals Tour triumph began with frank review of last year’s failure

As the Tour’s last barriers on the Champs Elysées were cleared away and Sky savoured their third outright victory in four years, the images of their latest win carried strong echoes of their previous triumphs.

Chris Froome was champion again, just as he was in 2013, and notwithstanding the absence of a certain Londoner who famously used his victory speech to say, “We’re about to call the raffle now”, there were also reminders of Sir Bradley Wiggins’s breakthrough victory in the 2012 race.

However, images can be deceptive. Team Sky manager Sir Dave Brailsford has revealed how, after a dismal Tour last year, a radical overhaul was needed to guarantee they targeted the 2015 Tour correctly and could, ultimately, push effectively for Froome’s second victory.

That process started this time 12 months ago when a Team Sky car containing Brailsford, coaches Tim Kerrison, Rod Ellingworth and head of operations Carsten Jeppeson, sped north on the Tour’s last transfer from Bordeaux to Paris and reflected on what had been Sky’s worst Tour since 2010.

“We were sitting there, the core guys, and we drove for six hours, phones off and I grilled them all the way,” Brailsford recalled.

The question inside the car was simple: “What are we going to do to turn this round. This isn’t good enough, this isn’t excellent. And excellence is what we are supposed to be all about.”

Brailsford argues that even before Froome crashed out of last year’s Tour with a fractured hand, there were problems. “From a personal point of view, there was something amiss,” he said. “Even then it wasn’t a Sky team.”

It reached the point where in the UCI WorldTour teams ranking, Sky slumped from a narrowly beaten second overall in 2013 to being ranked ninth last year. As Brailsford said: “The challenge was how to go from that to coming back and performing the next season.” Intriguingly, whereas most teams would argue that a single group purpose and methodology were beneficial, Brailsford felt Sky’s top management had been singing from the same sheet for too long. Change was needed.

“We all looked at it very hard and we’d become pretty much too aligned from the last six years working together,” he said. “If you gave us a problem we’d come back with the same answers. The cognitive diversity we’d had as a group [had faded away].

“Before, when I would say something, they would say ‘bollocks’, we’d argue a lot, there would be tension but we’d come up with some good ideas, constantly pushing forward.

“So we said if we wanted to change this we’re going to have to rock this boat. It’s a pain in the arse to do it. It’s going to be stressful, but ultimately you have to rock it from side to side to take us forward.”

What changed for Sky was what Brailsford calls “a redefinition of what excellence means. You articulate what is expected in Team Sky and if people can’t get there, then you make it very clear they are not there, and if they still can’t get there, you let them go”

Brailsford’s insistence on thinking outside the box and hiring people with non-cycling roots is not new. Kerrison, for example, was a sports scientist brought in five years ago, who had mainly worked in tennis and rowing.

But over last winter the review process, or spring cleaning, of Sky’s race strategies, simultaneously getting rid of any complacency, went from bottom to top within the team.

“This isn’t a criticism but in 2014 Dave probably took his eye off the ball a little and this season he’s really applied himself,” said Shane Sutton, now in charge of Great Britain Cycling’s track programme, and formerly with Sky.

“He’ll have had everybody sit up, revise their responsibilities, and take notice. He’s an enforcer, even if it’s in a very nice way.”

As one of the founder members of Sky, although now working full-time with GB Cycling, Sutton added: “We took that track model [the foundations for the 2008 gold rush in the Beijing Olympics and subsequent World Championships] straight into the road model [for Sky] and we took all the detail – everything, pretty much, we did the same thing.”

Sutton even went so far as to say the Sky re-evaluation last winter showed how the GB Olympic track team had to re-focus after huge success in 2008 and 2012.

“I’ve had my own head banged a few times [by Brailsford] when it comes to putting the track programme together. There was a lean period between some Olympics but those lean periods are when you have a thought process that Dave will go through and get it right when it matters.

“He hates losing so much, that’s what defines him from everyone else. He’s one of the greatest leaders of British sport, and that doesn’t come by being a nice guy, either.”

Sutton does not feel Sky have necessarily improved on their pre-2014 stature, rather that in the Tour they have returned to their previous high level of 2012 and 2013.

But either way, the effect of the overhauling has been very much the same –another Tour de France victory – and it’s surely no coincidence that as of Sunday, Sky are now leading the WorldTour teams ranking as well.