Flèche Wallonne and Why Team Sky Can’t Win a Classic

Could Team Sky’s conspicuous lack of success in this season’s one-day Classics be down to the appliance of too much science? Are riders such as Jonathan Tiernan-Locke being worn out by relentless, hard riding up and down the slopes of Mount Teide, the notorious volcano in Tenerife where Team Sky sends its riders for intensive training camps? This was the intriguing theory offered by former professional rider-turned-pundit Brian Smith during today’s Fleche Wallonne, the latest one-day race to see the men in black and blue fail to record a win. Smith, who is now involved in the management of the NetApp-Endura and Endura Racing teams, laid the blame squarely on the shoulders of Sky’s training methods and the workload being placed on riders such as Geraint Thomas and Ian Stannard by Sky’s Head of Performance, sports scientist Tim Kerrison. “There’s only five per cent of riders in the world – maybe of humans – who, like Bradley Wiggins, can take up the amount of work that Kerrison is giving them,” said Smith.

"Training too hard"

He claimed that one senior rider on Sky’s Classics team had brought an abrupt halt to a training ride on Tenerife because it was “too hard”, and said that Tiernan-Locke had already decided Kerrison’s methods weren’t  “doing him any good” and had switched to another coach. Smith also hinted that Team Sky paymaster James Murdoch had waved an open chequebook at Classics specialist Fabian Cancellara, but that the Swiss rider had turned him down because he couldn’t be sure Sky would allow him to carry on with his own system of training. (Cancellara has put his success so far this season – the Tour of Flanders/Paris-Roubaix double – down to being allowed to go away with his family to Majorca and train on his own). Smith’s comments, made during today’s TV coverage of Fleche-Wallonne on Eurosport, will probably raise eyebrows on board the “Death Star”, David Millar’s nickname for the Team Sky bus. Here is a transcript of his comments in full: "Taking the Classics teams to Tenerife and training over there hasn’t worked. Dave Brailsford has taken a chance, he’s taken them over there because it’s something that’s worked for the stage race riders, but it hasn’t worked.  He has to put his hands up and say they got it wrong. “I believe that one of the most experienced riders they’ve got in the Classics team pulled, stopped the whole team from training one day and said, ‘This is too hard, we cannot do this.’

"They didn't seem happy"

“A lot of the riders have gone into these races feeling jaded.  I was in Maastricht at the start of the Amstel Gold, and just looking at their faces, it’s as if they didn’t seem happy, they had a bit of pressure on themselves, because every Classic that goes by there’s more and more pressure on them. “I had a word with Jonathan Tiernan Locke and he obviously has been learning from a lot of these Classics, getting bottles and looking after a lot of good riders. He was getting trained by Kerrison, but it wasn’t doing him any good, and over the last few weeks he’s decided to change his coach and go to another person and go back to what was working last year.  He believes the form he had with Endura Racing last year was better than what he has at the moment. “Not everyone is like Bradley Wiggins and can cope with the training methods [at Sky]. “When I was a pro, 75 per cent of the work was on feel and 25 per cent science. I think now it’s generally 50-50, but Sky have gone 75 per cent science and 25 per cent on feel.

Have Sky lost that loving feeling?

“For me they have to go back to the feel of the riders and maybe talk to the riders and get them back to enjoying themselves a wee bit more. “I know that James Murdoch is really interested in the cobbled Classics, that it’s more of his passion than maybe the Grand Tours.  I know that last year they really wanted to try to sign Cancellera and an open cheque book was given to enable them to do that.  But someone like Cancellera has got his ways and maybe doesn’t want to go [just] because of the money – I believe Sky was offering twice what anyone else was getting in the pro peloton – he wants a team that’s going to support him and let him do what he wants to do. “Certain riders Sky have got are well suited for the hillier classics.  For me , Jonathan Tiernan-Locke last year was as good as Rodriguez on these kind of finishes, one of the best in the world.  This year, to me he [seems] a bit tired, a bit jaded, just because of the workload and the training he’s been doing, he wants to go back to what he was doing last year.”