The Brailsford legacy
In the mid-1990s a small British pro cycling team, sponsored by a Rotherham nightclub, hired a new soigneur. He was unqualified and untested, but that didn’t really matter.
‘If you had a massage table and a tub of baby oil, you were in,’ said John Herety, the manager of Neilson-Tivoli.
The soigneur was Dave Brailsford. His father, John, was well known in the mountaineering world and inventor of a revolutionary climbing nut (the Acorn, or ‘Brailsford nut’), but Brailsford junior was a cyclist and as a teenager he left Wales and went to France to pursue his dream of turning professional, returning to the UK when that didn’t work out.
Nobody who worked with Brailsford at Neilson-Tivoli could have imagined the impact he would have on cycling, far less that he would become Sir Dave Brailsford – although the part-time soigneur gig would prove crucial as a way into the cycling business.
Team Sky was an extraordinary leap of faith by a sponsor who appeared sold not so much on the riders and the sport as on Brailsford himself
By late 1997, Brailsford was working for Planet X, a Sheffield-based company that imported bikes and components. Herety was now the national road coach and, with
