Sunday 12 June 2011

If the sky's the limit, what's next?

June has seen a deluge of new cycling books in time for the Tour de France. I was going to save some of them for my flight to New Zealand, but that plan has failed. After "Slaying the Badger" and "Racing through the Dark", next through the letterbox was Richard Moore’s sequel to “Heroes, Villains and Velodromes” entitled “Sky’s the Limit”. Both these books offer an historical account of the rapid change in fortunes in British Cycling. So if this is cycling’s golden era, then in 20 years these books may prove an invaluable reminder of that time.




This latest book differs from the first in that in concentrates on the creation of the Sky pro cycling team. There have only been two other British professional cycling teams – ANC Halfords and Linda McCartney – and accounts of those (by Jeff Connor and John Deering) read like a Shakesperean farce. If ANC Halfords was the British Leyland of cycling teams, then Sky truly is the Toyota, driven by managerial logic, continuous improvement and innovation – Kaizen as the Japanese say. This then is a book about British Cycling's Performance Director Dave Brailsford’s appliance of science to road cycling following his success in the velodrome. But this is no Clive Woodwardesque book for business managers seeking ideas to improve themselves. Instead, the book works on a number of levels. Firstly, for those unfamiliar with the Sky story, then this book provides the complete background. Secondly, for those more familiar with it, then Moore provides a range of interesting anecdotes and back stories – from James Murdoch’s encounter with Bernard Hinault at Paris Roubaix, conversations in the team car, and the breakdown in relations with Scott Sunderland. Some of the most interesting parts of the book are when Moore is mixing with the background staff on the team bus with the riders, coaches and support staff. Who would have thought that Wiggin’s coach was a professional footballer? There’s tragedy, jealousy, doping and tactics: enough that hasn’t been published elsewhere to keep the ardent cycling fan happy.

But where the book works most for me is in opening up the question of how can you apply scientific rationality to road cycling: is it possible? This forms part of the narrative running through the book, but Moore leaves it up to you to think about the answer. His voice is silent on this: there is no ramming his opinions down your throat, which is perhaps the best option. As Moore describes Brailsford seems convinced of this, seeking to apply MBA lessons to the world of professional cycling: measuring and quantifying everything. In doing so, Brailsford seems to forget that a key lesson of management guru W.E. Deming is that the most important things cannot be measured. Or as Einstein put it: “Everything that can be counted does not necessarily count; everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted”.

By attempting to measure everything, Brailsford makes failures (of sorts) inevitable. The more complicated you make a system, as Charles Perrow might say, the more likely it is to fail. The real surprise is that Brailsford’s epiphany comes so late. Moore doesn’t take this further to reflect on the real meaning of British Cycling’s mantra of “marginal gains”, but then this is not a book on the philosophy of knowledge. There doesn’t seem to be any definition of what is meant by a marginal gain, but it seems an odd phrase. Surely any gain is a gain and worth pursuing rather than wrapping up in a pseudo scientific discourse? Instead, a marginal gain either seems to be something which makes sense but for which there is no conclusive evidence, or a risk, a gamble – like deciding to send Wiggins off early in the Tour prologue. What the rhetoric of ‘marginal gains’ seems to do then is disguise how unproven knowledge – what we might call intuition or experiential knowledge – can sit easily alongside other scientific approaches. This is interesting, it reflects other sports scientists’ approaches, such as Paul Kochli as featured in Moore’s other recent book, ‘Slaying the Badger’. But in making this accommodation, the discourse of marginal gains privileges and maintains the air of rationalism in which Brailsford surrounds himself. It is interesting to think about how and why the idea of marginal gains survives these failures.

Overall then a good read, but one wonders what Moore's next book might be. Here's an idea: as much as Sky and the National Lottery have contributed to the success of British Cycling, the riders who have come through that system were helped and encouraged by a number of volunteers and enthusiasts. Youth racing in the late 1990s really was amazing. Telling their story probably wouldnt fly with the publishers, but the people that made that happen deserve the upmost credit.

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