Demonstrations at cycle races are nothing new. In Jørgen Leth’s acclaimed documentary A Sunday in Hell, about the 1976 Paris-Roubaix Classic, greats of the sport such Eddy Merckx and Bernard Thévenet are shown gingerly negotiating piles of newspapers strewn on the course by striking printworkers, who clap stickers on the riders backs, while cheering them on their way.
The very things that make cycle racing appealing to the public – unrestricted access, races going out to communities – also make the sport catnip for protesters. Steelworkers, shipyard fitters and – inevitably – French farmers have all impeded the greatest races at various times. Agriculteurs campaigning against the introduction of wolves are a regular feature at the Tour de France, while Basque separatists have also made more threatening appearances.
Environmental campaigners have tended to be more of a background presence, but that is set to end this week at the Tour de Yorkshire. Anti-fracking campaigners plan to hand out up to 15,000 masks depicting the Ineos chief executive Jim Ratcliffe as the devil, to mark the moment when the giant petrochemicals company, headed by Britain’s richest man, will take over sponsorship of Team Sky, the richest cycling team on the planet.
The move prompted four Doncaster councillors to say that they would have nothing to do with the race when it starts in the town on 2 May – the council has banned fracking on land it owns – and local anti-fracking groups are expected to make their presence felt along the route. There are also plans for land art to be picked up by the helicopter cameras that shoot the race.
Teams managed by Sir Dave Brailsford seem predestined to stress-test moral issues within cycling which fans and media either never thought about or preferred to overlook: Therapeutic Use Exemptions, team budget caps to curb “financial doping”, making power output figures public, big-money transfers, teams bringing their own accommodation buses to races, testing for salbutamol. This week we arrive at anotherone: where to draw the moral line over controversial team sponsors?
The decision to launch Team Ineos at the Yorkshire race seemed bizarre a few weeks ago, given the company’s controversial interest in fracking within the area, where the village of Kirby Misperton near Pickering is the focus for protest. In the wake of the successful Extinction Rebellion protests and the high-profile visit of the campaigner Greta Thunberg to London, which have pushed climate change up the agenda, it looks hopelessly mistimed.
The sport of cycling has never really thought that hard about where its money comes from, or environmental issues. Total, one of the largest oil companies in the world, recently announced its takeover of a homespun and popular French team – to zero comment. The United Arab Emirates and Bahrain are big-money team sponsors, both countries with human rights issues.
Why the should the Ineos deal excite protest? As so often in the past with Team Sky, in Yorkshire it is less about what than how: launching the sponsorship in an epicentre of fracking takes a certain amount of front and seems to be borderline provocative.
The accusations of “greenwashing” have a distinct edge, as Team Sky have been used for high-profile environmental campaigns such as Sky Rainforest Rescue and the Ocean Rescue campaign against plastics. The dolphin jerseys are about to become collectors’ items. In another exquisite irony, the biggest backer of cycling within Britain is probably the relatively small “green” energy company OVO, name sponsor for the bulk of the domestic racing calendar: 21 days, between the Tour Series criteriums, the national Tour and the Women’s Tour.
As to where Team Sky sit on the road, they dominated last week’s Tour of the Alps in northern Italy with two young talents, the Scot Tao Geoghegan-Hart and the Franco-Russian Pavel Sivakov. It was a breakthrough race for both, with the four-times Tour de France winner Chris Froome providing strong support. That did not make up for Sky’s largely anonymous spring Classics campaign, but it implied the team will be as much of a presence as usual when the grand tour season starts with the Giro d’Italia on 11 May.
Another change is looming at Team Sky, which may have more profound implications than the sponsor switch. Rod Ellingworth, one of the founding fathers of the team together with Brailsford, is to leave at the end of the season for Bahrain-Merida, a move brokered by McLaren, who have a 50% stake in the ambitious Italian-managed squad led by Vincenzo Nibali. It may also link the coach back to Mark Cavendish, who has his own connections with McLaren.
Ellingworth’s presence has loomed large over Team Sky throughout their 10 years, and the team’s internal culture has largely been formed by the coach, who founded the Great Britain cycling academy and launched the careers of Cavendish and Geraint Thomas among others. Legally, there is a limit on how many staff and riders he can take with him to Bahrain-Merida, but his impending departure is bound to have an impact on internal politics.
The sponsorship switch from Sky to Ineos brought financial stability, well before contract negotiations reach their height this summer. It should have smoothed the path to July and the Tour de France but with a mainstay of the team departing and the environmental activists on the move, these will be interesting times. In other words, for Brailsford and company, business as usual.