Alex Dowsett has spoken about his time at Team Sky in 2011 and 2012 - when they won their first Tour de France with Bradley Wiggins - saying every communication with Dave Brailsford was negative, with no positive side whatever, eventually leading him to confront his boss.
Dowsett added, during contract negotiations, Team Sky exploited the desire of the British cyclists to ride for the team and used that against them. He also says the team in its current guise - Ineos Grenadiers - has stopped moving forward and had been "saved" this year by Tom Pidcock and new teenage TT sensation Josh Tarling.
“With Sky and Sir Dave that was contract negotiation tactics," said Dowsett. "They knew young British riders wanted to ride for Team Sky so they didn’t answer the phone, knowing that I’d be holding out. I know another rider who this also happened to. You hold out long enough that Team Sky is your last option and then they name their price.”
Advertisement
Dowsett left Sky at the end of the 2012 season - following two years in the team - and joined Movistar. He said during his two years at Sky “the only communications from Dave were negative ones – there was never a single message or conversation when he said ‘good job’ or ‘well done’”.
When he eventually confronted his then team boss about his negativity, Brailsford told him “it’s something I’m working on”.
“I almost started feeling sorry for the guy. Maybe he can’t feel the emotion and it’s just numbers and like playing a game,” he said of Brailsford, adding he was now "friendly enough" with his former team boss and "if I see him in the street there’d be a brief catch-up".
“Sometimes, there’re people you can talk to and people that you feel like you’re being talked at. A lot of guys in these very high-up positions are the latter. Maybe that’s why they’re good at what they do.”
Dowsett made his remarks in an interview with The Guardian to publicise his new book Alex Dowsett’s Bloody Minded: My Life in Cycling. The title is a reference to his suffering from haemophilia, though he had a successful 12-year career in the World Tour. He did two years with Team Sky, five with Movistar, two with Katusha Alpecin and three with Israel Start Up, before retiring at the end of 2022.
During that time he claimed 15 wins, including two stages of the Giro d'Italia, the European TT title, six British TT titles, Bayern Rundfahrt overall and stages at the Tour of Britain, Tour de Pologne and the Chrono des Nations TT.
He said when he roomed with Bradley Wiggins after he first joined Team Sky - at the very start of the team and in his first year as a pro - Wiggins never spoke.
Related News
“Unless I spoke, we would sit in silence. Nothing. Zilch. He simply would not speak. He didn’t even grunt," he said, though his opinion of Wiggins now has mellowed. "I don’t think I know him well. But he is sometimes quite lovely and he sent me an amazing message before my hour record was rescheduled during Covid. He’s a very interesting personality.”
Dowsett added when he rode for Israel Start Up Nation the team refused to engage with him about a new contract as the 2020 season progressed. However, when he won a stage at the Giro towards the end of the season - when it was delayed due to the pandemic - he gave a tearful interview after the stage.
In that TV interview he explained how relieved he was to win that day because his wife was heavily pregnant and he had no contract for the following season. It was only then he was offered a new one-year deal by the team, after fans poured in on his behalf on social media.
“(I) was proud to not have a single piece of team kit on my body," he explained of winning the 2020 Giro stage with the Israel team, adding he had even modified the team-issue bike. “The socks and skin suit I had paid for myself having first researched them for aerodynamic gains, in a way my team were simply not doing.”
In the interview with journalist Donald McRae, Dowsett also dismissed any suggestion of drug taking among cycling's big three; Jonas Vingegaard, Tadej Pogacar and Remco Evenepoel.
"Remco was talented from the moment he stepped on a bike, so there’ve been no surprises in his trajectory," said Dowsett. "With Jonas and Pogacar, it annoys me that the minute some riders go up a climb faster than Pantani did – well, they must be taking drugs. It’s so lazy.
“At what point does all of the monk-like living, which back then they didn’t do, change things? These (current) guys are running 28mm tyres with 70psi rather than 19mm tyres at 120psi, because it is known to be faster rolling resistance. That’s important. So is the nutritional wizardry.
“Back in the day Contador said: ‘If you’re not hungry all the time, you’re not trying enough.’ Now you need to be almost unpleasantly full for the energy you need. All those marginal gains at some point overtake the one maximal gain (of doping) they had years ago.”
He added he did not think Ineos Grenadiers had "declined". Rather, after previously rethinking training and preparation for racing they "then fell into a little trap of thinking that’s how we’ll always do things".
Now Jumbo Visma had effectively done a Team Sky on Ineos Grenadiers; ripped up the British team's groundbreaking moves from their early years and come up with a better version. But Dowsett said Jumbo Visma would also plateau and in five years people would also be asking "why are they struggling".
