Sir Dave Brailsford stood outside his team bus, as he’s done at so many Tour de France stages before, in a pair of dark sunglasses and an Ineos-branded Adidas top, waiting for his riders to return. The black and red Ineos Grenadiers bus was parked well down a winding, tree-lined mountain road from the stage 10 finish at Puy Sancy, below the little ski town of Mont-Dore. Half an hour before, Ineos' Thymen Arensman came as close as anybody on the team to a result at the Tour this July, finishing second behind Simon Yates. Brailsford stood outside the bus like any other team manager, a boss surveying his charges; a familiar scene that could be pulled straight out of most of the last 14 Tours de France.
Behind the utterly normal proceedings bubbled another story, dating back to one of those early Brailsford Tours – 2012, the first one Team Sky would go on to win. Bradley Wiggins’ victory that year checked off a goal Brailsford had set at the team’s launch: to win the world’s biggest bike race with a British rider within five years. He’d done it in three.
At the bus in Mont-Dore in 2025, Chris Marshall-Bell, a freelance reporter with Cycling Weekly, Escape Collective, and others at this Tour, walked up and asked if Brailsford would like to talk. Brailsford had been on the race for 10 days and hadn’t spoken to the press in any significant, on-the-record way in that time, an unusual departure for a man who has been willing to discuss topics, comfortable or uncomfortable, through his team’s often tumultuous history. But on Monday, his response was no, not right now. He was still getting his bearings at the race.
The team buses at the Tour de France are not a place you go to hide. Moments later, other journalists including Escape Collective’s Jonny Long joined the conversation, as did Stephen Farrand from Cycling News. Farrand asked if Brailsford was willing to talk specifically about the story currently hanging over the team, a report from German media outlet ARD in the weeks before the Tour that linked a longtime Ineos staff member to Mark Schmidt, the doctor who served a prison sentence for his role in the Aderlass doping ring.
That story, which did not name the staff member due to a legal statute of limitations (we are not naming them for the same reason), published text messages allegedly sent between the Sky staffer and Schmidt in June, 2012, just ahead of that year’s Tour de France. The texts were reported by ARD to have surfaced during the Aderlass court case, which focused on a sophisticated doping operation Schmidt ran for clients in cycling and wintersports that resulted in the suspension of 22 athletes, including a number of pro cyclists.
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