Toby Atkins sipped his morning coffee outside a large countryside villa overlooking the mountains in Sicily. “It was at the end of a gravel track, completely off-grid, no Wi-Fi, poor phone coverage. If you didn’t know where to go, you’d never find it,” he recalls. It was a fine winter’s day in 2015, and having agreed to race for Italian amateur team T-Vb, the Briton had been driven to their training camp eight days earlier in a soigneur’s two door Alfa Romeo. “He turned up an hour late,” says Atkins, “and I had to empty my two suitcases into this tiny sports car, ditch the cases at the airport, and wedge my bike in.”
Those eight days of training went well, and now he was taking a well-earned break. “The team were impressed and said they wanted me as a leader for the season.” But during an informal chat with T-Vb’s manager Mattia Vairoli, Atkins was handed some unidentified pills accompanied by a terse instruction: he would have to take them if he wanted to further improve.