“The world of professional bike racing is a total shitshow,” Alex Dowsett suggests in a wry observation, “and I am grateful and privileged to have been a part of it for so many years.” Dowsett raced professionally for a dozen years, winning two stages of the Giro d’Italia and becoming a six‑time national time trial champion before his retirement last October.
Now, in his immensely readable and revealing new book he also explains that road cycling is a business where the suffering rider leaves his chances for glory “in the shaky hands of teams that are both state-of-the-art and shambolic”.
Dowsett, who is the most celebrated of the very few haemophiliacs to have participated in professional sport, embraced every opportunity with determination and resilience. He is intelligent and likable and those attributes seem at odds with a sporting world where “I have been made to feel indispensable and like a piece of dirt by the same bosses in the same week”.
Before Dowsett won a remarkable stage of the Giro in 2020 he says that his team, Israel Start-Up Nation, had ignored pleas to discuss his future. They knew his wife, Chanel, was expecting the couple’s first child but they offered him a deal only after social media piled in after Dowsett’s tearful relief in victory. “I don’t have a contract for next year right now and I have a baby on the way in January,” he said. “So I can’t tell you how much I’ve been worrying.”
Dowsett’s win came despite his team – he says he made essential modifications to their bike and “was proud to not have a single piece of team kit on my body”, adding: “The socks and skin suit I had paid for myself having first researched them for aerodynamic gains, in a way my team were simply not doing.”
A lack of emotional intelligence was evident in some of Dowsett’s earlier teams and he claims Team Sky’s Dave Brailsford replicated the blanking technique. “With Sky and Sir Dave that was contract negotiation tactics. They knew young British riders wanted to ride for Team Sky so they didn’t answer the phone, knowing that I’d be holding out. I know another rider who this also happened to. You hold out long enough that Team Sky is your last option and then they name their price.”
Dowsett shocked many people when he left Sky for Movistar in 2013 – at a time when the British team dominated cycling. He explains that “the only communications from Dave were negative ones – there was never a single message or conversation when he said ‘Good job’ or ‘Well done’”.
The young cyclist had been in awe of Brailsford and Bradley Wiggins, who won Team Sky’s first Tour de France in 2012, but confronted his boss about his negativity. According to Dowsett, Brailsford told him that “it’s something I’m working on”.
Dowsett says: “I almost started feeling sorry for the guy. Maybe he can’t feel the emotion and it’s just numbers and like playing a game.” He and Brailsford are now “friendly enough – if I see him in the street there’d be a brief catch-up.
“Sometimes, there’re people you can talk to and people that you feel like you’re being talked at. A lot of guys in these very high-up positions are the latter. Maybe that’s why they’re good at what they do.”
In his book, Dowsett implies gently that many of the top dogs in cycling are “arseholes”. He grins at his home in Essex. “There’s a common trait in sport with world champions being quite dislikable characters.”
Dowsett laughs, as much at himself as the insufferable gods of sport. “That’s a nice one I can use as an excuse. I would have been world champ but I wasn’t enough of an arsehole.”
When Dowsett joined Sky in 2011, he writes: “I roomed with Bradley Wiggins at the first training camp and unless I spoke, we would sit in silence. Nothing. Zilch. He simply would not speak. He didn’t even grunt.”
What does he think of Wiggins now? “I don’t think I know him well. But he is sometimes quite lovely and he sent me an amazing message before my Hour record [attempt] was rescheduled during Covid. He’s a very interesting personality.”
Wiggins’s achievements with Team Sky have been clouded by controversy sparked by Dr Richard Freeman , the former chief doctor for Team Sky and British Cycling, who was found by a medical tribunal to have ordered testosterone in 2011. Freeman was permanently struck off the medical register as it was decided he had ordered the drug while “knowing or believing” it would help dope a cyclist.
Freeman also arranged a therapeutic use exemption for Wiggins to take triamcinolone in June 2011. Wiggins denies any wrongdoing. Freeman explained his failure to produce proper medical records at the tribunal by saying his laptop had been stolen.
“He wasn’t very diligent,” Dowsett says of Freeman. “I’d have to remind him of my haemophilia and medication. Every time I joined a new team I’d be like: ‘Please tell them about my haemophilia because I need them to know I’m going to stick a needle in my arm [to inject the vital medication to compensate for the absence in his system of Factor VIII, which allows blood to clot]. Sky was the only team to not tell their riders about me. So the lost laptop thing was not such a surprise. I could see that happening to the Richard Freeman I knew.”
Was intensified suspicion around Team Sky, after the Freeman revelations, justified? “100%, yes. It wasn’t good.”
Dowsett pauses when I ask if he now doubts Wiggins? “I’ve not really thought about it but, yes, maybe. For my own peace of mind I try not to think too hard about it.”
His haemophilia has made Dowsett think carefully about doping. He argues that anyone who cheats should be banned for life. “If it’s a case of black-and-white cheating you don’t deserve to be allowed back. It’s a privilege to be any kind of sportsman. I don’t buy the argument that people should be allowed redemption. No. You’ve abused your position and taken away results from others who have tried to do this the right way.”
Dowsett believes the current best cyclists in the world are clean. “I’m confident in the three super-talents [Jonas Vingegaard, who won the past two Tours de France, Tadej Pogacar, the winner of the race in 2020 and 2021, and Remco Evenepoel, who last year won the Vuelta a España and the World Road Race Championship]. Remco was talented from the moment he stepped on a bike, so there’ve been no surprises in his trajectory. With Jonas and Pogacar, it annoys me that the minute some riders go up a climb faster than [Marco] Pantani did – well, they must be taking drugs. It’s so lazy.
“At what point does all of the monk-like living, which back then they didn’t do, change things? These guys are running 28mm tyres with 70 psi rather than 19mm tyres at 120 psi, because it is known to be faster rolling resistance. That’s important. So is the nutritional wizardry.
“Back in the day [Alberto] Contador said: ‘If you’re not hungry all the time, you’re not trying enough.’ Now you need to be almost unpleasantly full for the energy you need. All those marginal gains at some point overtake the one maximal gain [doping] they had years ago.”
Dowsett stresses that random testing is relentless and dismisses the scepticism some express towards Vingegaard – especially in France. “They didn’t like [Chris] Froome until he started losing, did they?” Dowsett says before laughing. “The worst thing with these young superstars is they’re all really nice. You can’t even hate ’em. But see Vingegaard in that TT [time trial] in the Tour de France. You can see what’s going through his head. I’ve had the same at a lower level where you know you’re on a good day and you’re like: ‘Right, let’s win by minutes.’ But they’re all really nice.”
Ineos (as Team Sky became in 2019 with Brailsford remaining in charge) now trail Vingegaard’s team, Jumbo-Visma. “I don’t think Ineos have declined,” Dowsett says. “They’ve plateaued. Jumbo and UAE [for whom Pogacar rides] have done what Ineos did 10 years ago. Sky ripped up the rulebook, rethought everything, achieved success, and then fell into a little trap of thinking that’s how we’ll always do things. Jumbo have gone: ‘We need to rip up the rulebook of everything Sky did so well. We need to improve on it.’ They have. But in five years will we look at Jumbo in the same way we’re looking at Ineos now and ask: ‘Why are they struggling? They were a super-team five years ago.’”
Dowsett thinks Ineos can win grand tours again but “perhaps they need a bigger crisis point than what they’ve had – Tom Pidcock and Josh Tarling have saved them this year”.
Amid rumours that Jumbo are struggling financially, there was speculation that they might even merge with Soudal-QuickStep. Those plans have since been set aside but cycling still seems to be struggling. “The fundamental business model isn’t great,” Dowsett says. “A lot of it relies on cycling being a hobby for multimillionaires and billionaires.
“But it could be worse. There are sports far less funded and you can craft a good career and never win a bike race. But professional cycling is fragile. We’ve seen multibillionaires come in, invest heavily and then be blown away by how difficult it is to create something that makes financial sense. They get burned and get out.
“But what we do is a privilege. Of course it’s really tough. My dad said: ‘You guys get paid well but sometimes I think no amount is enough for what you go through.’ But I struggle to complain when you see junior doctors striking. They’re saving lives and are paid £14 an hour.”
Dowsett has told me before how, with his parents’ help, he overcame all the obstacles he faced with haemophilia. He always rode without fear and that faith remains in retirement. Dowsett loves cycling so much that he still rides time trials competitively, as an amateur, while running a coaching company and working with a firm designing skin suits. The shitshow staggers on without him and Dowsett is happy: “I’m still racing, still involved in cycling. Some days I want to do something completely different but, like lots of people in my position, I know too much. It would be silly to not lean into that, and I do enjoy it. I’m finding love for the sport in a different way now.”
Alex Dowsett’s Bloody Minded: My Life in Cycling is published by Bloomsbury Sport
