Just inside the wide-open door of the Team Sky doctor's hotel room sits the ice bath. It is not much to look at: a paddling pool with a pipe to bring in water at 10 degrees and another to pump it out.
Something small and yellow is sitting in the water. It is not a climber who has caught jaundice. It is final confirmation that here is a team that covers every detail: it is a rubber duck. "You've seen all our secrets now," jokes Dave Brailsford, the team principal.
On which note, let us backtrack for a moment and make a more serious point. Team doctor. Hotel room door. Wide open. Doctor absent. "He's very trusting," says one staff member, but that's only part of the point. There is nothing to stop me – or a Wada patrol, or one of the French television crews who like to do this kind of thing – popping in and rootling around in search of incriminating performance-enhancing stuff.
Open doors are not the norm in professional cycling. Trust has been a rare commodity since well before the Festina scandal of 1998, and if you believe only half the stories of the stuff that has gone on behind locked hotel room doors you can see why. But back in February 2009 when Sky's sponsorship of a British-centred professional team was announced, Brailsford said he would have an open-doors policy: come and see what we do. The team doctor has clearly taken Brailsford at his word. So here we are.
The doctor's room is not empty for long. The sports scientist Matt Parker – the trainer who guided Britain's pursuiters to a world record and a gold medal in Beijing – brings along the team's Norwegian starlet, Edvald Boasson Hagen. Haagen-Dazs, as he is inevitably known, sits on the bed and Parker wraps his legs in two contraptions that resemble outsize moon boots.
NormaTec space boots are used for treating circulatory conditions, putting pressure on the legs to pulse upwards; the team are using them to speed up recovery. The ice bath performs the same function – as used by rugby players – but has a more important role: with the temperatures on the Tour, 35 to 40 degrees by day, 20-plus at night, the riders take a quick dip before bed, to drop their core body temperature, so that they sleep without sweating.
These are all part of a panoply of ways in which Sky are trying to improve their riders' performance: recovery is key in the Tour and sleep is a vital part of that. To that end, Sky have brought their own mattresses, duvets and pillows on the race. They are all hypoallergenic, so that the riders do not wake up with the sniffles hotel beds often produce. They are new, so they contain less dust. And some of the pillows contain built-in iPod speakers so that as the riders go to sleep, they can listen to what they want without disturbing their room-mate, who may well be in a bed just inches away, dying for peace and quiet.
"Eighty to 90% of what we do is the same as other teams, but the aim here is to try harder to help the riders in areas such as nutrition, recovery, what goes in their bottles," says the most senior directeur sportif, Sean Yates, a British icon as a cyclist and as a manager a veteran of major teams such as CSC and Lance Armstrong's Astana. "They are going into everything."
Enhancing every area that can be controlled means two things: the riders' performance should improve, over time, and they should have no reason to use doping as a psychological crutch. But it all takes more time and application. That morning, the team helper designated to move the bedding explained it takes him an hour on his own to get duvets, sheets and mattresses into vast bags, and load them into the big black van.
Not far away, Parker and another helper were filling the day's 40 ice bags. These are women's stockings filled with handfuls of ice (the hotels have to supply Tour teams with a designated amount; Sky, naturally, have their own back-up ice-maker); Yates hands them up from the team car to cool the riders down during the stage. Cooling being critical, the team have ice bowls on the bus for after the stage, when the riders wear silicone neck scarves, as used by the military.
The morning briefing has been transformed, with the use of military terms (wingman, tailguard). "In a lot of team meetings there isn't much clarity about what the roles are," Bradley Wiggins says. "It needs to be very clear, so that I won't be complaining to someone that he isn't getting bottles when it isn't his job. A lot of guys are shocked by how advanced it is, others have said their teams were just appalling for communication."
At the briefings, the riders seem to do as much of the talking as the management, with Wiggins and the Canadian Michael Barry in a lead role. "Most teams do what they do because they are run by ex-cyclists and that's what they've always done," Barry says. "Here, no one individual thinks he has an answer to anything. If issues arise, we get them off our chests. From day one, they opened up lines of communication, we were made aware our opinions mattered and that if we expressed them things might change."
Sitting alongside Yates on a very hot day on the Tour, you become aware of the "80 to 90%" that Sky have not changed: the directeur sportif constantly handing up bottle after bottle, warning his riders of road conditions through the helmet radios, juggling supplies of ice and bottles. You note also that some of the riders – Steve Cummings, Boasson Hagen – have their own bottles, with different electrolyte mixes, because they sweat in a different way.
Watching the group of 180 cyclists deal with 40-degree temperatures, a vicious dry headwind and climb after climb, a bigger point rams itself home: the Tour is light years away from the track racing that Brailsford and his team dominated in Beijing less than two years ago.
The variables of terrain, weather, inter-team tactics and the agendas of the rest of the bunch have almost infinite variety. Comparing track and Tour is like setting martial arts against pure war. That military terminology is not misplaced.
Among the bustle of the 13 Sky-badged vehicles and the 32 staff and riders, it is easy to forget that this is a project in its infancy. So much has been written and said about Brailsford's new brainchild that two points have been overlooked: this is year one of a five-year project to win the Tour, and Wiggins and company in the Tour is just part of a larger picture for Sky and its partner, British Cycling.
Team Sky at the Tour de France is just the tip of the Sky iceberg: down below are mass-participation rides, taking cycling into schools, and putting 125 Sky employees into today's Etape du Tour, the chance for amateurs to face the kind of challenge the pros must deal with. Sky have a director of cycling, Corin Dimopoulos, who has between seven and 70 employees working for him. In the nation's bike shops, opinions have been divided about the project, but the Tour's roadsides tell another story: on the evidence of a week driving, the route, the black, white and blue strip is more popular than any other pro-team jersey.
What of the future? In terms of signings, speculation is naturally centred on the fact that Mark Cavendish has an opt-out in his contract at the end of the season. But on the bigger picture, race coach Rod Ellingworth, for one, notes that Sky are only at the base of a long learning curve: senior Tour teams can have up to 20 years behind them.
"If you look at the majority of us on the Tour, apart from the riders, we haven't done it before," he says. "It is a big enough challenge for many teams, for us there's the moulding-together process, Sean [Yates] has never been a lead directeur sportif at the Tour and that needs developing, we are trying out different techniques, trying to find out what works best, whether it's equipment, bikes, clothing, trying to build a coaching model. In a business, the building period is 18 months from when you start, so that means two Tours. By the third, we should be bang on."
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