Last weekend, to mark the fifth anniversary of the launch of Team Sky, team principal, Sir David Brailsford, set out the team’s vision for 2020 and Majorca looks set to continue playing a key role in the team’s development.Sir David, or Dave, as he prefers to be known, has been mounting training camps for British cyclists and TeamSky in Majorca for the past 15 years.
At first it was with Team GB and for the past five years, with Team Sky and the winter training camp here on the island has become “the comer stone of British cycling”, Brailsford said at the Team Sky training camp in Puerto Alcudia on Sunday.
And, to keep Brailsford happy, Majorca must surely be the perfect training camp because the team principal’s standards are higher than most sports managers in the world, and he wants Team Sky to be come famous than Barcelona football team or Formula One’s McLaren by a mix of innovation and clever planning, and much of that planning for the new season, which begins at the end of this month, has been carried out here in Majorca.
Brailsford has an insatiable hunger for success, but he is the first to say that it’s not always about winning. “Last year’s wasn’t great, the performance was not quite there and we had to over come injuries and illnesses and those set you back. But you can either give in to failure or come back fighting and we’re going to come back fighting this year,” he said.
There are new riders and new members on the coaching team and Brailsford loves to mix things up, keep people alert and on their toes and that is why, for a change, the first stage of the winter training camp in Majorca was in C’an Pastilla, not Alcudia as usual.
“I wanted to get the guys out of their comfort zone, into an alien environment and on to new roads,” he said.
Although, chatting to some of the team members, C’an Pastilla did not seem to go down too well. On the whole the riders were not that impressed.
“There seems to be a different attitude to cyclists in the north. Up, in and around Alcudia, we don’t have any problem, but down in C’an Pastilla, we were given a lot of agro from drivers,” I was told.
But the cycling is the same.