This feature first appeared in Procycling magazine. To subscribe, click here.
They’re probably the strongest cycling team in the world, with three Tour de France yellow jerseys in the last four years and multiple stage race wins, along with well over a hundred stage victories. But their record in one-day races and the Monuments is far less impressive. Procycling asks why.
The first thing to point out is that the headline for this piece is deliberately hyperbolic. Sky can win one-day races. Last year, Ian Stannard, outnumbered in a four-man break at Het Nieuwsblad which was three-quarters full of Etixx riders (with five Paris-Roubaix wins between them), still came out on top. Geraint Thomas was the strongest rider in E3, and won. (He was also the strongest rider in Gent-Wevelgem and didn’t win but that’s cycling.)
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However, over the course of their six-year history, Sky have underperformed in one-day races compared to their glittering stage race record. Discount time trials and National Championships (which operate under different tactical conditions from regular international races) and Sky have taken just 13 international one-day races in total. In 2013, they didn’t win a single one. 2014 was barely better – a solitary one-day win from the whole season. It’s no stretch to describe Sky as the strongest cycling team in the world, yet in the last three seasons, they’ve totalled only three international one-day road race wins. [Now four, after Peter Kennaugh won the Cadel Evans road race – Ed.]
To put those numbers into context, Etixx-Quick Step won 12 one-day events in 2015 alone. (It’s also true that Etixx, in their 13-year history, have never once put a rider into the top 10 of the Tour de France.) Some more numbers: Sky have won 37 stage races and 138 stages along the way. But they’ve never won a Monument, peaking in those races with three third places.
The morning that Bradley Wiggins won the Tour de France, Team Sky principal Dave Brailsford sat in a hotel with a group of British journalists. Before his rider had even pulled on the winner’s yellow jersey, Brailsford was thinking out loud about where Sky could improve. “We were sh*t in the Classics,” he said. Three years on, they have won semi-Classics like Het Nieuwsblad and E3 but the Monument duck stands.
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