The Nimrod flight was one of many bizarre money-couldn’t-buy experiences I’ve been privileged to have as a result of simply being able to ride a bicycle round in circles faster than other people. In late 2001 came an invitation from the UK’s leading scuba publication, Diver: would I like to go on an all expenses paid trip to the Abaco Islands in the northern Bahamas for one of their celebrity features? As a member of the Jesters Sub Aqua Club based in Chester, and used to dives that qualified as exciting if you could see your own fingers, I accepted.
My host for the trip and the man who would be writing about me was the slightly eccentric John Bantin, a bearded 30-year veteran of the industry, who had a talent for spinning yarns and seemed to be as interested in photographing women in bikinis as he was the various species of exotic fish. He was great company. We stayed at the luxurious Bluff House in Green Turtle Cay and dived with another veteran of the underwater fraternity, Brendal. A native of the island in his fifties, he had a 20-year-old’s passion for life. His priorities were clear for all to see: rum, partying, women and rum all linked together by his love for the sea.
This was my first proper diving boat trip and it was to set a very high standard. After 20 minutes of bouncing lightly across the swell in Brendal’s little boat, he killed the engine and with a big grin simply jumped over the stern leaving his deckhand in charge. After a couple of minutes had gone by I began to wonder if it was an elaborate suicide attempt. Then Brendal resurfaced, holding two large conchs. He leapt back onto the boat, quickly extracted the molluscs from their shells and turned them into fresh conch salad for lunch.
No sooner were we underway again than we took another detour. Brendal hauled the boat hard to starboard and cut the engine once more, this time so we could spend a few minutes watching a humpback whale feeding at the surface. I hadn’t even been in the water yet and I was already struggling for appropriately gushing adjectives. Once I did go over the side there was no avoiding full immersion in Caribbean cliché: the warm clear water, the huge curious fish, the seabed below a profusion of colourful soft corals swaying majestically in the light current.
Near the end of the dive a Giant Barracuda appeared, about the same length as myself and almost the same girth. It was an intimidating sight and an increasingly detailed one as it headed towards me at speed. When it was within two metres I could see the finger-length teeth in its half-open mouth. It suddenly exploded into action, flashing past my ear to catch the fish it had been stalking behind me.
This was the world I’d read about in Ladybird diving books late at night under the bed covers with a torch, the place I’d fantasised about since I could barely walk. With my Lego I’d made replica models of the underwater habitat Jacques Cousteau built to study places just like this.
At the end of that incredible morning Brendal went over the side once more, armed with a metre-long steel rod, which he used to spear half a dozen lobsters. A few minutes later we were dropping anchor at Manjack Cay, a picture-postcard desert island fringed with palm trees. We fed the tame whip rays in the shallow water with left over pieces of conch while our host barbecued the lobster and served it up with the salad he’d made earlier.
Like many holidaymakers before me, I was determined to see if I could find a way to stay in this new world, or at least have regular access to it. I decided to invent a new job writing about diver training from a participant’s perspective. I presented the idea to Diver magazine’s editor, Steve Weinman, leaving out the fact that I’d never written anything for publication before and had left school without an English qualification. He liked it, and I began travelling all over the world with friend and photographer Craig Nelson, indulging my passion and writing articles on more than 20 different courses. I did everything from exploring the caves of Mexico to mastering re-breathers in Devon, learning to drive power boats on the Mersey to navigating wrecks in Southern Egypt. It was an amazing experience and a wonderful lifestyle. For a single man.
I was doing it again: I’d retired from one all-consuming activity only for my obsessive nature to latch straight on to another. While I’d been fixated on cycling my fanaticism had at least been feeding the family. Diving took up inordinate amounts of time and paid just enough to cover the parking at the airport. Sally had always been incredibly patient. It’s a rare woman who will get up at 5.30 the morning after her wedding so that her husband can ride a hill climb in Lancashire. Now that I was retired there was supposed to be a fairer balance in our marriage, but I was still behaving in the same self-centred way.
Of all the adjustments to life as a former professional athlete, this was the one I hadn’t seen coming. When people came round for dinner and I’d got up from the table and gone to bed when I’d had enough, it had always been accepted because ‘Chris is training in the morning’ or ‘Chris has a big event at the weekend’. From my mid teens until I was 32, my career had encouraged me to put my well-being ahead of all else. This performance-first attitude was tolerated, even admired in an athlete, but I’d managed to stretch it to incorporate just about every aspect of my life.
I knew I’d never cure myself completely. I would always be the person who’d once popped into the garage to make a work surface and ended up spending three months fitting out an entire workshop complete with fully integrated dust extraction system. But it was clear I couldn’t just keep doing what I wanted when I wanted. Sally had just given birth to our fifth child, Sonny, and my behaviour was driving her up the wall. I had to reintroduce some proper structure into my life – and earn some money.
Apart from a few guest appearances on TV and some ad-hoc commentary for the BBC, I’d had no meaningful contact with the cycling world since climbing off my bike at Manchester Velodrome. I was determined that my life would never again revolve solely around cycling but I couldn’t deny that it was the sphere in which all my experience and expertise lay. And whatever my personal preferences, I couldn’t continue to ignore the fact that this was the quarter most of the offers were coming from.
In mid-2002 I was contacted by Jeremy Whittle, the editor of Procycling magazine, who asked if I’d be interested in writing some bike reviews for them. I liked writing, or to be more precise, I liked anything that started with a blank piece of paper – figurative or literal – that required me to ‘make’ something, and so I agreed.
I was conscious of the impact reviews had on cycle sales and took the responsibility very seriously. I never wrote anything that I couldn’t verify or expressed an opinion that wasn’t backed up with a solid rationale that I’d be prepared to stand up for if challenged. Although cautious, I was also prepared to call a spade a spade. If something wasn’t good I’d say so and if a claimed advantage was little more than marketing speak, I’d be happy to expose that too. In fact, it was a condition of my writing for the magazine that I be allowed to write responsibly but also truthfully.
One of the manufacturers I wrote about – I won’t name them – churned out new bikes like a fashion house, with minimal development to justify devaluing the previous year’s model. Their claim for the particular machine I was testing on the roads around Frejus in the south of France was that it was lighter than its predecessor. On investigation, I found the only difference between the two models was 60 grams and a £300 price hike. I advised readers to ‘keep the previous frame, leave your 150 gram watch at home and go on a training camp with the money you’ve saved’. The manufacturer in question pulled their ads from the magazine.
Despite being under fire from the advertising department, who had got an ear bashing and lost revenue, Jeremy stuck to his guns. Sure enough, people enjoyed the candid articles, magazine sales were strong and the brand eventually came back.
While I was busy re-engaging with my former sport, at least in a peripheral way, I received a phone call from my former coach. In his role as Director of Performance at British Cycling, Pete Keen was now immersed in creating the World Class Performance Programme. We didn’t know it then, but he was laying the foundations for what wo
uld become known as the medal factory.
Since taking up the post in late 1997 he’d been battling to transform what was an amateur organisation, staffed by people sometimes qualified by little more than passion and plenty of free time, into a professional, results-driven machine. It certainly wasn’t that yet, but British Cycling had made great progress under Pete. At the 2000 Olympics in Sydney the GB track team had won two bronze medals, a silver and Jason Queally’s gold.
The velodrome was where all of the success was coming from. The problem lay in the prevailing definition of success. Team GB were happy to win medals – any colour – which meant they weren’t targeting golds. Apart from Jason Queally’s, they weren’t winning them either. They had become known as the plucky Brits who would give the opposition a good run for their money before padding out the podium while someone else’s national anthem played. They just didn’t seem to be able to find the formula to climb onto the top step in numbers.
Pete had called me because they had one particularly promising young athlete who had become disillusioned with his string of second places and was contemplating an abrupt change in direction. He’d already signed with a French professional team and now he was talking about breaking with British Cycling completely. Pete and his team were concerned that he seemed to have no coherent plan, and frustrated at having seen him get so close with the BC set-up only to contemplate ditching it all at the last.
What Bradley Wiggins seemed to want out of life was to do what I had done: carve a professional career for himself winning big time trials. Pete believed my track record might give me the credibility to make him reconsider. So in late 2002 I agreed to meet up with British Cycling Head Endurance Coach Simon Jones and his gangly young charge.
We sat in the canteen at Manchester Velodrome and I started by asking Brad three simple questions. What do you want to achieve? What do you think that requires? Tell me how what you are planning to do will get you those things? That was fundamentally it. His answers were woolly and every other word was ‘y’know’, which in my experience is a sure sign that the speaker doesn’t know. To make sure it was clear and unambiguous, I asked him to write his plan down and email it over, which he agreed to do.
That was a big first step but it wasn’t when Brad eventually responded a week later that I knew he was going to be OK: it was when he didn’t shy away from the relentless and sometimes brutal follow up questions I asked. He’d clearly worked really hard to try and map out how it was he believed he was going to achieve his goals by abandoning everything he’d believed in until now. I wasn’t directly critical, never said what was right or wrong, but I did drill down into his reasoning, asking him to explain what made him believe each particular step of his plan would work. What were his beliefs based on? How would he measure progress? Where he waffled and evaded I demanded evidence and clarity.
Brad courageously battled on but in just a couple of exchanges his plan collapsed under its own weight: he’d shown himself that he was unlikely to realise his ambitions by breaking with British Cycling. From that point the conversation turned towards what he and Simon Jones had to do as coach and athlete to make it work. I’m sure both Simon and Pete had been asking him the same kind of questions, but I had a dual advantage: not only had I been where Brad ultimately wanted to go, I had no vested interest in the outcome. The fact that British Cycling had so much riding on Brad’s future was preventing the pair of them from taking what were necessary risks.
On one occasion we arranged to meet as a team and Brad was late. ‘It’s just Brad, it’s normal behaviour for him,’ said Simon. I left. Simon couldn’t believe it and was clearly uncomfortable with my blunt approach. But for me it wasn’t about ten minutes. I interpreted Brad’s tardiness, possibly wrongly, as a clear indication of how important winning was to him, of how much he valued my time and Simon’s. I would invest in ‘Project Brad’, as he later referred to it in his autobiography, as much or as little as he did himself.
It was seen as a risky, even reckless way to deal with a talented athlete British Cycling didn’t want to lose. What Simon and Pete were too close to the situation to see was that there was no risk involved: the relationship was already broken and their star prospect was leaving. If it was going to work for them and for Brad then the philosophy, ground rules and relationships had to change. It was his career and he had to take responsibility for it. Which he duly did.
Contrary to popular belief, I spent very little time with Brad. He and Simon Jones did all the graft. I played the role of team mentor, proofreading their plans and asking them questions. I got involved in debriefs and attended races, mostly for moral support because they actually knew more about the topic of pursuiting than I did, they just didn’t believe it yet. I travelled to several competitions with them in this capacity and eventually found myself in the Hanns-Martin-Schleyer-Halle in Stuttgart watching Bradley beat Luke Roberts of Australia to become the 2003 world pursuit champion. It was a deeply satisfying moment to see Brad and Simon celebrating, the culmination of what for them had been a long slog. I don’t think any of us could have dreamt just how far he’d go from there.
As well as Brad’s breakthrough, 2003 was also the year Peter Keen decided to move away from front-line sport and accept an offer to set up GlaxoSmithKline’s Lucozade Sport Science Academy. I never actually worked out what that was and I’m not entirely sure he did either. Behind him, he left a terrified Dave Brailsford in charge.
Dave had been on board with Pete almost from the outset, first in an advisory role, then as Programmes Director. Although he’d worked very closely with Pete and had a business degree, to this point he’d always had a boss, someone to make the ultimate call. Suddenly he was holding the reins, a position he was not at all comfortable with, at least at first.
Right from the start, Dave began organising things – or disorganising things – in a way that would eventually become his signature modus operandi: lots of good people with vague titles, no job descriptions, no formal training and no appraisals. His style and character were hugely different from mine in nearly every regard. I enjoyed structure, a framework inside which my imagination could work and explore. Dave saw structure as constraining. One of his favourite phrases was ‘We are comfortable being uncomfortable’. What he actually meant was ‘I’m comfortable with you being uncomfortable’. It was emotionally tough for people around him; there was no yardstick for them to measure themselves against, no way for them to be recognised as having done their part well. However, it also meant that there were no false goals for people to be distracted by, no ‘I’ve done my bit, it’s not my fault’. There was just one goal for everyone no matter what their position in the organisation: winning gold medals.
Perhaps Dave’s greatest strength was to know his own weaknesses. From the beginning, he surrounded himself with people who didn’t see the world the same way he did, even if that made his life difficult. I think this courageous tactic was the single most overlooked aspect of his success as a leader.
It was over a coffee outside our team hotel towards the end of those Stuttgart World Championships that Dave asked if I’d stay on and continue working with the team up to the Athens Olympics. True to form, there was no clear job description, just a flattering approach backed up by a winning smile. And that was how I got sucked fully back into the world of cycling.
I started out with the title of Technical Advisor, a moniker that fitted with my desire to remain independent. I was able to have high-level input at BC but also continue my outside interests. Now I had another fascinating challenge, another blank piece of paper. Meetings with Dave and a small steering group followed to plot how the organisation could move forward. The set-up, like all Dave’s set-ups, was fluid. It wasn’t uncommon to agree a plan, be away for a week and return to find that it had been changed beyond recognition. The business of the World Class Performance Programme waited for no one: you were either all-in, all the time, or you were left behind.
In Dec
ember 2003, a staff conference was organised at the Ruthin Castle Hotel in Wales. I remember walking in through the crowd gathered in reception and over to Dave who was chatting to someone I’d never seen before.
At this point in my life, I was not very good with people and wary of conversations with anyone I didn’t know unless I was sure of the context: either it was social or it was work and I was meeting someone to do X or Y. I certainly didn’t know this almost furtive-looking middle-aged man so I said hello, politely shook hands and then got on with what I wanted to talk to Dave about.
A few minutes later we filed into the conference room, which unusually had chairs placed around the edge of the space rather than in rows facing the front. To start the day, we took it in turns to say who we were and what our role was. When we got to Dave’s guest, he introduced himself as ‘Doctor Steve Peters, I work with mass murderers and psychopaths’. He now had the room’s rapt attention, which of course is why he’d said it.
Steve is a great showman and he knew the importance of first impressions. Now he needed to do something with the opportunity he’d created. Standing confidently in the centre of the floor he described the start of the day from his perspective. He recounted what he’d seen people doing back in the lobby and what their body language had told him about what they were thinking. People laughed as they realised he’d correctly identified motivations, feelings and actions that they hadn’t even consciously perceived themselves. Steve’s point was that the unconscious mind has more of an impact on our actions than we’d like to believe. He was there to show us that it was possible to control some of its more unhelpful elements to aid performance.
The Steve Peters show was just getting started. His account of people-watching on the way in was an entertaining party piece, but to convince his audience he really knew what he was talking about he needed a subject with whom he could go into more detail, preferably someone known to everybody present and who had a bit of status within the assembled group. Steve asked me to join him in the middle to re-enact our brief exchange that morning.
Triumphs and Turbulence Page 19