INTRODUCTION BY DAVE BRAILSFORD

In 2010 we launched Team Sky as a professional road-racing outfit with the aim of a clean British rider winning the Tour de France within five years. The greatest prize in cycling had never been won by a Briton, so it was time to set the record straight. On Sunday 22 July 2012 we achieved this aim, and it was a proud moment. The sight of Mark Cavendish winning on the Champs-Elysées led out by Bradley Wiggins in the yellow jersey in front of phenomenal British support waving Union flags – well, you couldn’t script a more perfect way of realising an ambition.

We had set ourselves five years, but the win came together in just three. Our first season, 2010, was a baptism of fire. We had 64 new people, 14 nationalities, a brand-new team operating with a new philosophy, run by people who had never managed a professional road-cycling team before. I’d been Performance Director at British Cycling for 11 years by then and it seemed normal to take the business-as-usual stuff from there and start somewhere else, but I didn’t recognise how refined the Tour demands are. It was a difficult year. We were all out of our comfort zones. There’s a point where if you want to fundamentally change behaviour, there has to be a threshold where the suffering is bad enough, or the reward great enough, for people to change. We reached it.

Going into 2011, the second season, we had a more structured approach with a clearer idea about the simple things we wanted to focus on. From a performance perspective, we made progress. For Bradley in particular, it was as if the penny dropped. He was experienced, he was mature, he believed in his coaching team and he started to ‘get it’ in terms of the amount of work he was putting in. We started to see signs of Tour-winning potential. Going into the Tour we had high ambitions, but ultimately he crashed, broke his collar bone and that was that. He bounced back and collectively we went into our second off season as a highly motivated, highly driven team. Bradley had won the Dauphiné, the big race before the Tour de France, and that was a big, big step forward. In the Tour of Spain we finished second and third – our first podium in a Grand Tour. We were moving in the right direction. We had a clear model of how to mount a challenge to win the Tour.

A lot of the riders had been on two-year contracts, so for 2012 we had an opportunity to bring in riders for a specific purpose, which had a huge impact. To pursue our goal of winning the General Classification, we had identified the need for highly talented climbers. We signed Richie Porte, Kanstantsin Siutsou and Christian Knees. With world champion Mark Cavendish and his helper Bernie Eisel, that made five new riders in the Tour team of nine, selected from our squad of 28. We then got these super-talented cyclists to train and race together as much as possible so that when they went into the Tour it was business as usual, rather than a brand new challenge.

As a team we had moved from the conceptual phase into a more tightly refined operation bound by our philosophy. Everyone was aligned, pulling in the same direction. Bradley was in great shape, in great form. For the entire team, the Tour would be 21 days of protecting Bradley’s focus – on the road, against illness or injury, against feeling unsettled – to allow him to deliver victory in Paris. But for those 21 days you don’t think about the outcome, you don’t think about the ‘what ifs’; you focus instead on the process, and on delivering that on a minute-by-minute, hour-by-hour, day-to-day basis, because focusing on the process increases the chance of getting the outcome you want …