My name is Lionel Bernie and this is a series of articles I've written called Covering Team Sky.

The first three parts were first published on my own website in 2018.

I've now added a fourth part which will be released here for Friends of the Podcast.

It's a series of partly personal memories of covering the first British cycling team to ride the Tour de France since the 80s and the first British cycling team to win it.

Over the years the team has divided people.

Team Sky was launched in 2010 after the Tour de France had gone through a series of damaging doping scandals and following Lance Armstrong's comeback which was accompanied by ever-loud aromas about his doping.

Team Sky was going to be different. With great fanfare the team was going to take a zero tolerance approach to doping.

Dave Browseford who had masterminded great Britain's rise to dominance in track cycling netting fistfuls of Olympic medals at Beijing in 2008 wanted to do the same on the road.

He wanted to crown the first British Tour de France winner.

And of course that's what happened. With Bradley Wiggins in 2012 then with Chris Froome four times and Gammart Thomas and with a Colombian rider too, Egan Bernal in the team's new guys team Ineos.

Seven wins in nine years. In cycling though with success comes suspicion especially following Armstrong downfall in late 2012 and his eventual confession at the start of the following year.

Team Sky's dominance was too good for some and over the years their doubters have been given cause to be suspicious.

The fancy bears hack revealed Wiggins had applied for a therapeutic use exemption to use an otherwise banned corticosteroid before big races including the 2012 Tour he won.

The hiring of Dr. Gertleinders who had been involved with doping at Rapperbank losing key members of staff in the wake of the US anti-doping agency's investigation into Armstrong.

The delivery of a mysterious package to the Dofein A in 2011 and a subsequent investigation into Dr. Richard Freeman which has not yet reached a full conclusion.

Chris Froome's adverse analytical finding for Sal butamol at the 2017 Vuelta and the exhaustive attempt to demonstrate the Sal butamol threshold was somewhat arbitrary.

Anomalies in Sergio Enel's blood values.

After every controversy Braille's for his insisted he's been running a clean team and has nothing to hide.

But let's go right back to the beginning to October 2009.

That summer Bradley Wiggins had finished fourth in the Tour de France for the American Garmin slipstream team, equalling the best ever result by a British rider Robert Miller's fourth in 1984.

Mark Camindish had won an astonishing six stages for another American team HTC Columbia.

And yet although both these riders had come through the British cycling system to different degrees, neither was at this point joining the new Team Sky which had the backing of a global media company and tens of millions of pounds.

...