Dave Brailsford wants to give Team Sky a home as he eyes yet more British cycling success These days he is dreaming bigger. It is the question that many will have pondered for him over the last few weeks: after masterminding the most successful national track team that the world has ever seen, after building Team Sky from scratch and winning the Tour de France within three years, what next? The Classics? A clean sweep of the grand tours? These are no longer goals Brailsford recognises. "If you wanted to be the world's best sports team, what criteria would you use?" he asks. Results? Style? Flair? Fair play? Why would Barcelona be up there? Are they better than the All Blacks? We're thinking along those lines now. The danger with making everything results-based is that once you get the result, where do you go? That's when you can go into decline rapidly. You've got to have something bigger. That Brailsford mentions fair play may not be entirely incidental. In the current climate, and given cycling's recent past, any success Team Sky enjoy on the road will continue to have aspersions cast on it. The new allegations against Lance Armstrong by former team-mate Tyler Hamilton are still fresh in the memory, and Brailsford admits that winning brings with it a fog of implied suspicion. "In those days," he says, "the way to get a competitive advantage was to know a lot about pharmacology, be brilliant with logistics - how to move it around. Once you take that out, what do you do now? Fortunately, at around that time, we came along, and our background was in sports science and coaching. But the difficulty is that because it's all coming out now, people say "you're doping." That's hard. For Brailsford, the roots of doping lie in psychology. You start off having a cigarette, next thing you're having a joint, you move on to harder drugs, and the next thing you're on crack cocaine. That's how it started. It got beyond itself. Now, most people are in survival mode. Some of them will think they can survive by telling the truth. Write a book about it, as well. Other people say they can tell a bit of the truth. And other people think the only way they can survive is to deny everything. Brailsford will have no truck with those who attempt to impugn his team. He is already thinking of creating a permanent base for Team Sky that will throw its doors open to the public. Fundamental to all great sports teams, he reasons, is its home. "You can go to Chelsea, and see their shop, and see their stadium," he says. You can't go and see Team Sky, or Rabobank - not that you'd want to see Rabobank. It's time that we came together and had a coaching base, similar to what we've had in British cycling, where you pull together expertise in a single location. We're trying to create a home where people can come and see Team Sky. By the time that comes to fruition, there may well be two teams to visit. One of the sport's inequalities is the lack of support given to women's road racing. Teams fold regularly. TV coverage is almost non-existent. Olympic heroes such as Lizzie Armitstead, Nicole Cooke and Emma Pooley rarely race for the same team two years running. But Brailsford indicates that a British women's road team may well be in the pipeline. "As it currently exists," he explains, "you've got Laura Trott, Jo Rowsell and Dani King, then you've got three or four very good Welsh riders, including Lucy Garner, and that's where there is something to be done.There's a development model, and we've identified it as potentially an area where we could do something." Though cycling is still Brailsford's abiding passion, you sense he believes it is just one part of a larger picture. No longer is his ambition to create merely the world's greatest bike team, but the world's greatest sports team. What that would make him, of course, is anybody's guess.