Next man up

by Richard Williams

The news wasn’t unexpected, but it was still striking to see it confirmed in black and white.

After years in familiar colours, the biggest star in the sport was leaving its most discussed team and its most enigmatic coach for a guaranteed payday and an uncertain future. 

Like NFL star Tom Brady’s decision to leave Bill Belichick’s New England Patriots for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers earlier this year, Chris Froome’s break with Dave Brailsford and departure from Team Ineos to Israel Start-Up Nation had been in the air for some time. But, as with Belichick and Brady, it was a sporting marriage that had long proved resilient to the frost that had cooled the relationship. The ending was inevitable yet still somehow surprising.

Like Froome, Brady was largely unheralded when he turned professional, entering the NFL as the lowly 199th pick in the 2000 draft, but he was suddenly thrust into a starting role the following year when regular quarterback Drew Bledsoe went down with injury. And, much like Froome’s unexpected emergence as a Grand Tour rider on the 2011 Vuelta a España, Brady’s metamorphosis was immediate. The season ended with Brady delivering the Patriots’ first-ever Super Bowl and the team made the decision to dispense with Bledsoe, just as Team Sky would – eventually – ease Bradley Wiggins aside in favour of Froome.

Together, Brady and Belichick would win six Super Bowls and each man became the embodiment of what their organisation liked to call ‘The Patriot Way,’ a nebulously defined philosophy that came to be hailed and derided by outsiders in equal measure. The Patriots’ success, like Team Sky’s, was not without controversy. They were accused of cheating by video-taping rival team practices and Brady himself served a four-game ban for his part in allegedly ordering the deflation of footballs below regulation pressure before a championship game. Adored in the greater Boston area, the Patriots became the team the rest of America loved to hate, but Brady and Belichick, always in synch, ground on remorselessly.

Brady’s critics complained that he lacked the natural gifts of some contemporaries, but he outlasted them all and won more than them too. Belichick was lauded as a guru by many but chastised by others for his abrasive demeanour. For years, his responses at league-mandated press conferences have consisted of little other than withering stares and almost inaudible monosyllables. 

Yet despite the near-constant success, rumours developed of a dampening of the Belichick-Brady rapport, due in part, it seems, to the coach’s desire to line up an eventual replacement for his aging protégé. At various points in recent seasons, the apparent feud looked set to end their working relationship, but the Patriots kept winning and Brady kept signing new deals – until this spring, when the 42-year-old opted not to renew his contract and accepted a far more lucrative offer from the middling Buccaneers, who haven’t made it to the playoffs in 13 years.

Brailsford and Froome have enjoyed success working together for the past decade but, like Belichick and Brady, it is hard to tell how close they really were. In his 2014 autobiography, for instance, Froome depicted Brailsford’s pledge of a shot at team leadership ahead of the 2012 Tour in a pointedly unflattering light. “Dave’s approach was rather like a character in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass: ‘When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less,’” Froome wrote. “Dave’s words would mean just what he chose them to mean.”

In the Sunday Times last month, Froome’s ghostwriter David Walsh claimed that the rider called Sky chief executive Jeremy Darroch in the autumn of 2016 amid outcry over the team’s use of TUEs and intimated that he wouldn’t object if Brailsford were removed from his post. Yet despite those supposed reservations, Froome proceeded to sign a three-year contract extension with Brailsford ahead of the 2017 Tour. Be it out of convenience or necessity, the relationship continued.

The bond tightened again later that year, when Froome returned an elevated level of salbutamol in a doping control at the Vuelta and risked a sanction that would surely have signalled the demise of the team. Brailsford and Sky were wholehearted in their support of Froome, refusing to pull him from competition, and, after costly legal counsel was engaged, the case was abruptly dropped on the eve of the 2018 Tour.

By then, Froome held all three Grand Tour titles at once, but the strain finally told that July. He had to settle for third overall in Paris in a race won by his Sky teammate Geraint Thomas. An aberration, Froome felt, and he built his 2019 campaign exclusively around the Tour, only to miss the race after sustaining serious injury in a crash at the Critérium du Dauphiné. In his absence, his team still assimilated its seventh Tour in eight years through Egan Bernal, while Thomas placed second. Riders come and go. Sponsors too. Somehow, the beat goes on.

Indeed, this is where the Ineos-Patriots analogy reaches its limits. Belichick, for all his gifts, has never won a Super Bowl as a head coach without Brady, and there is a sense that each man now wants to prove that he can win without the other. Brailsford’s team, by contrast, have had three Tour winners other than Froome. The Patriots let Brady go without an obvious replacement lined up (a problem since remedied), whereas Ineos already had a surfeit of leaders in their roster.

Long the team’s quarterback, Froome risked being relegated to the side-lines. At 35 years of age and with just one race in his legs since June 2019, he slipped to second or perhaps third on the Ineos depth chart behind Bernal and Thomas. Behind him, men like new arrival Richard Carapaz and youngster Pavel Sivakov are pushing firmly.

It is unclear whether Froome will even be given a spot on Ineos’ Tour team this September, but it is certain that he has been deemed surplus to their requirements for 2021. Like Brady – once the subject of a hagiographic documentary called ‘Tom vs Time’ – Froome will doubtless fill deep reservoirs of motivation with the words of those who believe he is past his best.

The old joke says that the letters NFL stand for ‘Not For Long.’ The average career lasts around three years, which puts Brady’s two decades at the top in perspective. Froome’s longevity is notable, too, but Ineos and the Patriots are prepared to move on.

Professional sport attracts fans because it inspires powerful emotions, but for the athletes themselves, it can be a more dispassionate endeavour. It’s a job, after all. Froome’s relationship with Sky/Ineos endured as long as it did largely because it was good business for both parties. So is his departure. It may have played out like a soap opera, but it was nothing personal, just business. Or, as they say in the NFL: next man up.

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