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Former Team Sky pair Sean Yates and Bobby Julich join Tinkoff-Saxo

Bjarne Riis's teams also adds Daniel Healey and Patxi Vila to support staff...

Two former members of staff with Team Sky, Sean Yates and Bobby Julich, have signed up to work for Oleg Tinkov's Tinkoff-Saxo team, run by Bjarne Riis.

Julich will serve as Tinkoff-Saxo's head coach, while Yates will be one of the team's sport directors, the same roles they performed in 2012 at Sky when that team propelled Bradley Wiggins to victory in the Tour de France.

Yates and Julich left Sky within days of each other at the end of 2012. Julich's departure came after he admitted doping during his career as a racer in the late 1990s, while Yates said he was retiring from cycling for personal and health reasons.

The former Sky pair will be joined at Tinkoff-Saxo by Daniel Healey, in the new position of head of sports science, and sport director Patxi Vila. Vila served an 18-month ban from 2008 after testing positive for testosterone.

The four new appointments will "work towards improving the way Tinkoff-Saxo’s riders train, recover and race," the team said in a statement.

Team manager Bjarne Riis said he was “happy to have Julich, Healey, Yates and Vila in the team. They are incredibly capable professionals and I consider them an asset for any team as they come with tremendous motivation and great experience.

"They will play an important role in our new and ambitious setup going into the next season and this reflects our clear ambition to deliver results in 2015. They all have big theoretical and professional capacity and will be able to lift the level of our coaching and training.”

Julich worked with Riis as race coach for Team Saxo Bank in 2009 and said he was thrilled to renew the partnership.

He said that he intends for the role to involved more than just supervising the riders' training and racing programs. “My intention is to get involved deep in the life of the riders, not just with the training but with the life-skills advice, the tactical advice, recovery and nutrition. In this new system, I would like to be the person that looks after all the details,” said Julich.

Sean Yates said it was “an honor to be asked by Bjarne to join Tinkoff-Saxo." Joining Riis' squad means he will once again work alongside Steven de Jongh, another former Sky sport director. De Jongh left Sky at the end of 2012 after admitting to doping earlier in his career.

Yates said: "It is probably the only team I would work with right now and when the opportunity came along, it was too good to turn down.

“Nevertheless, becoming the world’s best team will not be an easy task. It will require a lot of hard work, a lot of planning and a lot of communication by everybody involved. It’s going to be challenging but I like challenges.”

Daniel Healey joins Tinkoff-Saxo from BMC Racing, where he headed up the team's sport science division.

Tonkiff-Saxo said that he brings to the team "a wealth of experience having built a cycling specific, multidisciplinary skill set that covers exercise physiology, sports nutrition and hands-on coaching of professional road and track cyclists."

Healey said the team has “a world-class roster and all we have to do, the coaches and science staff, is to make each member in that roster a little bit better than what they were before they came to this team.”

He was previously head of a supplement programme at the New Zealand Academy of Sport, but stood down when it was revealed athletes were ordering products with the potential to trigger positive doping tests, and using the program to obtain supplements and vanity products for their partners.

Patxi Vila was previously performance specialist at Specialized Bicycles. His role was to help teams and riders optimize all aspects of racing, from the position of the riders on the bike to the strategies used.

“I like the future goals the team has,” said Vila. “I think it’s good to be demanding with oneself because we are all competitive and we want to win. We have to set ambitious, but feasible, goals and given the background of this team, I’m convinced they are feasible. Such challenges not only put me under pressure, they motivate me.”

John has been writing about bikes and cycling for over 30 years since discovering that people were mug enough to pay him for it rather than expecting him to do an honest day's work.

He was heavily involved in the mountain bike boom of the late 1980s as a racer, team manager and race promoter, and that led to writing for Mountain Biking UK magazine shortly after its inception. He got the gig by phoning up the editor and telling him the magazine was rubbish and he could do better. Rather than telling him to get lost, MBUK editor Tym Manley called John’s bluff and the rest is history.

Since then he has worked on MTB Pro magazine and was editor of Maximum Mountain Bike and Australian Mountain Bike magazines, before switching to the web in 2000 to work for CyclingNews.com. Along with road.cc founder Tony Farrelly, John was on the launch team for BikeRadar.com and subsequently became editor in chief of Future Publishing’s group of cycling magazines and websites, including Cycling Plus, MBUK, What Mountain Bike and Procycling.

John has also written for Cyclist magazine, edited the BikeMagic website and was founding editor of TotalWomensCycling.com before handing over to someone far more representative of the site's main audience.

He joined road.cc in 2013. He lives in Cambridge where the lack of hills is more than made up for by the headwinds.

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12 comments

Avatar
seanieh66 | 10 years ago
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Tonkiff-Saxo

 3 ?  24

Avatar
dubtap | 10 years ago
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L'Equipe reported this on Sep 10th, congrats on your ability to recycle a press release 25 days later.

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Gkam84 replied to dubtap | 10 years ago
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dubtap wrote:

L'Equipe reported this on Sep 10th, congrats on your ability to recycle a press release 25 days later.

Yeah, because everyone on this site reads L'Equipe....go troll somewhere else, 4 years on the site and a whole 12 posts.......  24  24

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Colin Peyresourde | 10 years ago
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Did some one think that cycling had changed? You'd think by some of the comments here. The only way you modify the behaviour is through tougher testing and the testing programs are far from comprehensive.

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Gkam84 | 10 years ago
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This is Yates that retired for health reasons, then went straight to work at NFTO Pro Cycling and now goes to Tinkoff Saxo.....yeah Sky, we really believed you at the time for his reason of leaving....  21  21

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WDG | 10 years ago
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I think it's fair to say they don't have an ethical policy....

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Some Fella | 10 years ago
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"Yates said he was retiring from cycling for personal and health reasons."

Hows that retirement going Sean?

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Pinstriper | 10 years ago
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its strange that Millar, Riis, Jullich, Yates, Contador..etc all allowed to continue in the sport...all is forgiven...don,t do it again lads....why the hypocrisy with Lance Armstrong.

is it a case of he was more successful so deserves more punishment?

Its either zero tolerance like with Brailsford...or everyone gets a clean slate...times are changing in the sport lets move on

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giobox replied to Pinstriper | 10 years ago
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Pinstriper wrote:

its strange that Millar, Riis, Jullich, Yates, Contador..etc all allowed to continue in the sport...all is forgiven...don,t do it again lads....why the hypocrisy with Lance Armstrong.

is it a case of he was more successful so deserves more punishment?

I hate retreading this argument again and again, feels like it constantly has to be rolled out. It isn't just about doping, which is why there is no hypocrisy. With regards to Lance I would argue few familiar with the facts wanted Lance punished because of his involvement with doping. For me personally I couldn't care less; like you suggest times change and people need to move on. For me it was everything else Lance did that makes him deserving of more punishment.

Lance is vilified more, and rightly so, not solely because he is a doper. He is vilified also because of the careers he destroyed, people he bullied, lives he ruined, all to propagate his own lie. Lance at the height of his fame had substantial 'political' (I use the word in a generic sense) power, and he abused this enormously. The others you list aren't nearly as evil in this regard, and this is why he is treated very differently from other dopers.

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daddyELVIS replied to Pinstriper | 10 years ago
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Pinstriper wrote:

Its either zero tolerance like with Brailsford.....

That's right, Servais Knaven never doped!

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cat1commuter | 10 years ago
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Yates leaving Sky really was nothing to do with Lance Armstrong and doping then...

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Stumps | 10 years ago
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You just couldn't make this up. What a complete and utter farce when cycling is trying its best to clean up its image you get the 3 wise monkeys coming back. Pathetic  14

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