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Brailsford plotting new 2020 vision for Team Sky

Sir Dave Brailsford endured a tough year as Team Sky principal and believes the time is right for a change © Getty Images

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Sir Dave Brailsford is planning a major overhaul of his long-term vision for Team Sky after failing to win a Grand Tour stage in 2014.

Brailsford, who led Sky to back-to-back Tour de France victories for Sir Bradley Wiggins and Chris Froome in 2012 and 2013, admitted that the team's sustained success may have affected their desire in 2014.

Sky have dropped from second to ninth in the UCI World Tour team rankings in the past year, prompting Brailsford, who quit his role with British Cycling to devote himself to the team, to declare the end of an era and consider plans to "rip it up and start again".

"I think you're in danger of having Groundhog Day, where you stick to the same solutions to the same problems," he told The Times. "I think there's another chapter now, because I don't think we're in the same place as we were when we started Team Sky.

"For me, it's all about what the best team in the world looks like in 2020: work back from there and start again."

Part of that vision is an increasingly cosmopolitan stable of riders for a team that has had strong British roots since its inception in 2009.

Norway's Lars Petter Nordhaug will return in 2015, while Scotland's Andrew Fenn and Nicolas Roche of Ireland have joined the team along with Czech Leopold Konig, Wout Poels of the Netherlands and Italian Elia Viviani.

While Froome is expected to lead the team at the Tour de France in 2015 after initially eyeing a twin assault at the Giro d'Italia and Vuelta a Espana, where he finished second in 2014, question marks remain about the future of Wiggins. The reigning time trial world champion is still in contract negotiations as he considers a return to the track ahead of the 2016 Games in Rio and potentially establishing his own team.

"If you're going to be involved in sport then you've got to aim for the biggest prize and the biggest prize in our sport is the Tour de France," Brailsford said.

On Wiggins' future, he added: "We're very stuck in how we see solutions."

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