British squad wants to be more ambitious throughout the season
Having structured its debut season around the Tour de France and staking everything on making the best push possible to put Bradley Wiggins on the podium, Team Sky has admitted that it is going to completely restructure the way it approaches things next year.
Wiggins didn’t hit top form and was far off the condition that earned him fourth in 2009. He finished 24th in Paris, over 39 minutes behind the winner Alberto Contador (Astana). Even considering his post-race assertions that the course didn’t suit him as much as in 2009, he was nowhere near the same form in the mountains.
Team management and riders met the media in London yesterday and there they accepted that things simply didn’t work out as well as they might have. Staking everything on the Tour was an error, they admitted, and there will be more emphasis on winning other races next season.
“Next season we’ll have more focused teams, better race selection, the right riders for the right race. It must not be about one rider for one race,” said Brailsford, according to the Guardian.
“We set out our stall for the Tour de France and, with hindsight, we needed to be much broader. The Tour is a bit like Wimbledon and tennis – the gaze of the nation falls on Wimbledon for that fortnight. That’s not what we want to do. The guys are racing all season, and I think we need to be a lot more relaxed, and have more fun.”
The team’s year was still a very solid one, with 25 wins and 15th place in the final UCI WorldTour ranking. For a debut, it can be regarded as a success, but the team admits that it didn’t perform as well as it had envisaged. Expectations were raised by the multi-million pound budgets, hi-tech team buses and big-name signings, but so too by the attitude of the management who clearly believed that Britain’s track success would deftly translate across to the road.
Yesterday’s conference gave the impression that the team has reassessed and realised that it is going to take several years to fully settle in and to evolve into being one of the most dominant squads in the sport.
Brailsford also has the responsibility of overseeing Britain’s push towards the 2012 Olympic Games and has said that he is likely to step back a little and let the team’s directors run the day-to-day elements in 2011. Sean Yates is one of these; he too realised that some errors were made in year one.
“You have to have goals and we’re certainly not throwing in the towel,” he explained. “We’re a big team and we have big aspirations. We tried desperately to live up to the expectations this year, and in a way shot ourselves in the foot, but what are you going to do?
“It’s easy to portray the season as all doom and gloom but when you look at the whole picture you see 73 podiums, 25 wins, sixth in the list [of wins by team]. We’re ranked eighth for next year. It was a very successful year but we keep harping back to the same subject, the Tour.”
He said that he felt Wiggins was capable of top ten in the race, possibly higher than that. The team has backed off from talk that he could potentially win the Tour at some point in the future, but still has the goal of trying to win it by 2014 with a British competitor.
In the meantime, the goal is to grow the team, develop the riders, and to chase success whenever and wherever it can. The laser focus on the Tour de France brought to much pressure and is too easily derailed if key riders are not on top form; instead, every win is now seen as a worthwhile one, every race a goal worth chasing.