It’s nine o’clock in the morning on Sunday April 28, 2019, and somewhere in the middle of Liege, Belgium, the familiar black shape of the Team Sky bus stands next to an anonymous bus-stop on one side of a wet, windswept square. The riders are gathered inside, waiting for the rain to stop teeming down before the race starts – or, at least, hoping.
It doesn’t happen. Rather, the rain grows steadily heavier and, finally, the seven, enshrouded in helmets and dark wet weather gear, swing out of the bus a few minutes before 10am, when the 2019 Liège-Bastogne-Liège - and what will be Team Sky’s last race before they become Team Ineos - gets underway.
Sky are bowing out in the first Monument of the two they have won to date but, at Liege at least, the feeling of a curtain falling on an era is only notable by its almost complete absence.
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True, one Sky rider shouts ‘thank you, thank you’ in English to the half dozen or so fans watching proceedings from the other side of the barriers as he pedals away. If he is thanking them for their support over the years, then that’s as far is it goes.
As if to underline the underwhelming nature of it all, it turns out there are no guests or VIPs for Team Sky’s last race. Nor is there more support than the half dozen fans across the barriers and some of Michal Kwiatkowski’s family on the other side of the bus, waving a large, bedraggled Polish flag. Only a handful of journalists approach the bus in the hour before the start. The riders pose for one group selfie to commemorate the occasion, but as it happens inside the bus, the only visible evidence for the public is when a photo appears on the team’s website a couple of hours later.
Then they are gone, off to the waterlogged start 100 metres away, leaving only a mechanic packing away a spare bike and team boss Dave Brailsford adopting his usual posture of walking up and down and talking into his mobile phone.
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