How close did Jonny Brownlee – and brother Alistair for that matter – come to joining pro cycling outfit Team Sky?
That’s a question posed by Joe Skipper in his in-depth chat with Jonny on his ‘Junkyard Dogs’ podcast which is embedded below.
Team Sky became pro cycling’s dominant team for many years after winning their first Tour de France in 2012 with Bradley Wiggins.
And it was the year after that the Brownlees, with Alistair having won triathlon gold and Jonny bronze at the London 2012 Olympics, joined them at their winter training camp in Mallorca, having been invited the previous year by the British-based outfit.
Just last year there were echoes of a similar move when Norway’s Kristian Blummenfelt, who had succeeded Alistair Brownlee as Olympic champion, was exploring the option of switching to pro cycling.
‘You felt like a bit of a robot’
Asked by long-course triathlon star Skipper whether he was potentially thinking at that time of going into pro cycling, Jonny replied: “Yeah, we thought about it. They contacted us after London 2012 and said ‘lads, you look like you’ve got a great engine. Do you fancy it?’
“But then the next year we were just too busy, we were just rushing all over the world and racing. So it would have been December 2013.
“We went to Mallorca on their camp – Rod Ellingworth [who was Team Sky’s performance manager at the time] was the one who kind of contacted us and was like, you still fancy coming? I’m like yeah, definitely. So we went out to Mallorca and we just did a bit of training with those guys.”
Team Sky were famed for their ‘marginal gains’ philosophy and one of Jonny’s abiding memories was just how well the riders were looked after.
He explained: “I turned up to the Team Sky training camp with my bike box and was thinking I’ll start building my bike now, and the mechanic was like, ‘what are you doing? That doesn’t happen here, that’s all done for you’.
“I’d get my bottles ready in the morning and someone else would say, ‘what are you doing – just go and get a bottle from the table, it’s all ready for you’. I remember everything being done for you, it was so easy.
“It was the same with the training. We’d normally just go on Strava, you find the loops and work out where you’re going but it’s all just done for you. You just follow a car and basically got told [what to do] – you felt like a bit of a robot! We got really well looked after and I really enjoyed it.”
‘It kind of fizzled out’
Team Sky’s classic testing reference point for their riders at that time of year – which was effectively the start of their pre-season training – was the climb up Sa Calobra.
And the Brownlees were part of that, with Jonny adding: “I dropped Alistair that day. He wasn’t very fit but I well and truly dropped him and rode past loads of the other guys and I think they were pretty impressed.
“They just said to us at that point if you really want to do it we’ll come back and do some good testing and see what kind of level you could be. Because if you’re going to be good, you basically need to do an effort at the start of a ride, do a long four hour ride and do an effort at the end of the ride and see if you can back it up.
“But at that point, we were really committed to triathlon and wanted to carry on to 2016 and never really explored it. So it kind of fizzled out after that.”
To this day the Brownlees still go on ‘chain gang’ rides with plenty of World Tour riders, including the likes of double Olympic champion Tom Pidcock.
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