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regarded as the place teams supposedly go for doping. Come with us and see what we do there. Then come on the Giro and by the time the Tour comes
round, you will know everyone and people will hopefully be comfortable with your presence. And don’t wait for us to ask you, you join up with us whenever you want.’
    Leaving Manchester that evening, I knew the offer had to be accepted. How could you be a journalist and not want to travel inside the world number one cycling team?

CHAPTER THREE
    ‘He has drawn back, only in order to have enough room for his leap.’
    Friedrich Nietzsche,
Human, All Too Human
    If you are a Corsican separatist or if you just like a quiet life you had best swallow hard. The Tour de France is coming! The Tour de France is coming! Twelve hundred hotel
rooms have already been annexed by teams and organisers. Half the population of the world are sleeping either in camper vans or on boats.
    The Tour is celebrating its one hundredth edition by staying at home. The French have reclaimed their race – at least in the geographical sense. For the first time in a decade the peloton
won’t be straying outside French territory. It will be sunflowers, chateaux and blue skies all the way.
    So you are Corsican and proud. Instead of swooning and falling in line you make an enormous banner, CORSICA IS NOT FRANCE, to welcome the visitors and you drape it across a bridge overlooking
the route. A message to all who wonder about Corsicans’ view of the motherland. But business is business, tourists are euros and you are out of step.
    This is the moment to offer the world thousands of moving postcards from Corsica. That is what this deal is about: a three-week advertisement in which bike riders fill up the moments between the
landscape portraits. This is the first Tour of the post-Lance era. It will be cleaner and at the beginning, here in Corsica, it will certainly be pretty.
    So step up, Corsica. To make up for never having bothered to come here at any time in the last ninety-nine editions, Corsica is getting Le Grand Départ and two other stages. The island is
rugged and beautiful but the roads are narrower, and when riders talk about the first three stages, the word carnage gets used a lot.
    Team Sky arrive, like most other teams, on Wednesday. This is the start of a month living in each other’s ears, dealing with each other under extreme pressure, a month of everybody being
pushed to their professional limits.
    It’s life in the trenches, but Team Sky at least look like the best turned-out and best equipped army in the war. The bus is fit for the Dark Lord of Mordor, the uniforms and bikes
uniquely in this era not festooned with the logos of dozens of companies. Restraint and good design pervade. The blue stripe, representing the thin line between success and failure, runs down
everything from the back of the chef’s whites to the team-issue iPhones.
    The team are addicted to detail: pineapple juice to make water more drinkable; chemical weapons [alcohol disinfectant] deployed against germs; every bike checked and passed by two mechanics,
working indoors to soft music in an airconditioned truck which keeps the space at precisely 23 degrees. If it snows, rains or freezes, their colleagues on other teams are out in the elements fixing
bikes, cursing the weather.
    In the evening riders eat on their own, their dinner timed to start thirty or forty-five minutes before staff, so that the main men get a little privacy and the sense that though their days are
hard, staff days are longer. Riders will eat food specially bought and prepared by their own chef, Søren Kristiansen. If any of this nutritious food is left over, provided the riders have
left the dining room, Søren will invite the staff to help themselves. Otherwise it is hotel food.
    Over dinner the second
directeur sportif
, Servais Knaven, will hand out the following day’s plan. Sky’s daily plan is produced by the performance manager Rod