Triumphs and Turbulence

by Chris Boardman

  Monty’s session had been the last one of the week. I was only a 40-minute drive from home – and an evening of ceilidh dancing that Sally had committed us to attending with friends. I hated those things. When I couldn’t avoid them altogether my usual strategy was to bitch, moan, make sarcastic jokes and then get out of the door as quickly as possible. Not tonight. This time I was going to have fun.

  When I arrived home Sally was getting ready. I informed her of my decision to have a good time that night. ‘That’s nice,’ she replied looking at me in the dressing table mirror with a raised eyebrow. I think she might have misunderstood what I was referring to. En route to the evening’s venue, Caldy Rugby Club, I controlled my nerves and reminded myself of my mission. What did I hate the most? Easy – the dancing. I decided that I’d be the very first person on the dance floor. And I was. Sandwiched between two women I’d never met before, I proceeded to Strip The Willow, which would have been impressive had the dance not been a Britannia Two-Step. For the next half an hour I proceeded to mangle every instruction given by the dance master. And I was enjoying it: it was liberating and daft.

  Inspired by the progress of the experiment, I considered what else I usually avoided. Talking to people I didn’t know. Challenge number two was to find a stranger, have a conversation, find them interesting and discover something new. I accosted people at the bar and discussed philosophy with individuals I’d never met before in my life. It was fantastic, another revelation. And other people noticed too, because a couple of them asked Sally if I was high.

  Attitude is a choice. For years I’d shared a hotel room with the walking, non-stop-talking embodiment of the idea in the form of Jens Voigt, who’d chosen to be positive about everything and everyone he encountered. But it hadn’t really registered then as a choice that might be available to me. A five-minute story had finally encouraged me to try it out for myself.

  During my time on the Elite Coach Programme, Monty Halls was just one of 46 deliverers of valuable lessons: leaders of armies, musicians, comedians, polar explorers, psychologists, psychiatrists, body language specialists, even hostage negotiators. Dave Brailsford’s suggestion over coffee led to three years that taught me twice as much about myself as I had learned in the previous 39.

  From then on, my mission with the BC coaches and every other team I worked with changed: from having to come up with all the answers to coming up with the right questions; from striving to be the best to getting the best out of others.

  The original idea had been for me to filter the contents of the Elite Coach Programme and bring back the most useful elements so that we could replicate them with our own coaches. Sadly, this plan was never implemented. I desperately wanted our coaching team – and even more so the senior managers – to have the same experiences I’d had. But in a system that had no job descriptions, let alone appraisals, a formal education process was just too big a cultural leap. My proposals for personal development were met by the management team with what I’ll describe as benign indifference, an outward enthusiasm for the concept but a reluctance to actually do anything. The lack of appetite for significant exploration outside what we already knew was further dampened by the biggest of all enemies of change: success.

  British Cycling had made significant strides, going from a single gold in Sydney to two in Athens and five at the 2005 track world championships in LA. Everyone had moved from a state of open-minded desperation to improve, to one of growing confidence in their own methods. From Dave’s perspective things were going well, so he was understandably reluctant to support wholesale change, especially since he was ambivalent about the kind of change I was suggesting. Without his continuous, full and visible backing, the other key opinion leaders at British Cycling remained passively resistant to doing anything differently and the coach development programme withered on the vine.

  To escape my frustration at having failed in this area that I believed to be so important, I scaled the scheme down to a few mentoring sessions and ploughed my energies into my other role, as head of research and development. This was my natural habitat and I was free to explore it however I saw fit. As it turned out, the work of the R&D team would make more measurable contributions to Olympic success than any other department.

  CHAPTER 16

  Secret Squirrels

  I’m not sure how many business decisions around the world are made in coffee shops, but the proportion was pretty high at British Cycling. In late summer 2004, Dave Brailsford and I had sat down with a couple of cappuccinos to discuss the squad’s performance at the recently finished Athens Olympics.

  ‘We’re good at timed events, good at the physiological stuff, but it gets patchy when tactics are involved,’ Dave said. It was true, people referred to us as the kings of qualifying. ‘We’ve got a couple of people working on that aspect but what about everything else?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

  ‘Well,’ he mused, pausing to sip his coffee. ‘This is a technical sport, there is a lot of other … stuff. Bikes, wheels, helmets, clothing, all that stuff. Is there anything we can do to improve that?’

  And so, at a corner table in the Manchester Piccadilly station branch of Starbucks, I became Head of Stuff and the ‘aggregation of marginal gains’ philosophy was conceived.

  I’d already started to take a lead on equipment, overseeing the race clothing design for Athens and a new carbon handlebar to match the frame Peter Keen had commissioned back in 2002 before his departure. Perhaps because Pete had now joined UK Sport as Director of Performance, they too had decided to invest in R&D. Whatever their motivations, the announcement of their Research and Innovation programme was music to my ears.

  In early autumn 2004, I officially took on the role of British Cycling’s Director of R&D for the GB Olympic programme. It was a long title with one key word, Olympic. The criteria for spending Lottery funds were very strict; they couldn’t be used to simply improve performance, increase participation or even to win world titles, they could only be used to improve the chances of winning Olympic gold medals.

  It was a few weeks later at Loughborough University that I first met Scott Drawer, the new head of UK Sport’s Research and Innovation department. Resplendent in his pristine business suit, he bounded over to greet me and Simon Jones. Bursting with enthusiasm, a big grin plastered across his face, he talked on fast-forward, leaping from topic to topic. I was out of breath just listening to him. Despite his apparent youth – late twenties I guessed – he would be the person deciding who would get access to hundreds of thousands in funding. And who wouldn’t. But his biggest contribution to our cause wasn’t financial; it was his insatiable curiosity.

  We’d come to the university to attend an event Scott referred to as ‘Boffins Day’, to meet people he thought could be helpful in our search for speed. Scott ushered us into a large room set with several round tables, each festooned with paper, flip-charts and pens. Around them sat experts in the fields of aerodynamics, mathematics, composites, computer modelling, data analysis, textiles and more. All had been sought out and persuaded to come along by Scott. He was like Face, the fixer in The A-Team: ‘You want experts? How many?’ And here they were. These were some of the UK’s best and brightest minds, most of whom knew nothing at all about the sport of cycling.

  The format decided on for the day was deliberately simple. We would show them videos of the various cycling events and ask a single question: how would you make the riders go faster? The room’s occupants attacked the challenge with gusto and over the course of the next three hours I was able to observe how they worked with each other, who wanted to lead, who wanted to listen and, ultimately, what their imaginations could come up with.

  Their requests for basic information inadvertently revealed our own Achilles’ Heel: we knew how bike races worked. ‘How wide are handlebars?’ was a typically naive question. Everyone in the cycling world knows the universal standard for bar width is 42 cm, a convention so old it’s probably w
hat Douglas Adams based his famous number on. But the follow-up question stopped us in our tracks: ‘Why?’ ‘Because … well, because it is.’ Even to our own ears this sounded ridiculous. Under external scrutiny, many of our long-held beliefs were exposed as little more than opinions, repeated so often down the years they’d become accepted as fact.

  Some of the ideas generated that day were fantastic in the true sense of the word: fans inside frames to suck air through microscopic holes to reduce the ‘boundary layer’; kinetic devices that stored the rider’s energy at low speeds and returned it at critical moments in a burst; pedal axles that locked on a particular part of the stroke to provide extra leverage. Over the course of those three hours I learned two important things. The first was that ignorance is an essential ingredient in innovation; these people didn’t know what you couldn’t do. They looked at cycling not as a sport but as a collection of technical challenges to be identified, examined individually and prioritised. It was the approach I’d first encountered in the figure of Richard Hill at Lotus more than a decade earlier. Now I really began to grasp the power and potential of it.

  The other big lesson of Boffins Day for someone who’d supposedly spent years studying aerodynamics, was that my understanding was embarrassingly rudimentary. We needed to go to a wind tunnel.

  On a cold morning in late January 2005, our embryonic team drove on to the Highfield Campus of Southampton University. Following directions, we turned into University Crescent, a narrow cul-de-sac lined with careworn terraced houses, and came to what looked like a dead end. A quick phone call confirmed that we hadn’t made a mistake: the facility was accessed via a tiny alleyway at the end of the close. A minute later we arrived at a grey, windowless metal box with the words Wolfson Unit stencilled on the outside. I rang the bell next to a small access door and waited.

  I hadn’t set foot in a wind tunnel since my visits to the MIRA test centre in 1991, an exciting few hours that had changed the way I thought about bike racing. Although that experience had provided some answers, it had also raised many questions that were still unresolved. More than a decade later, I was finally going to get to the bottom of things. Or so I thought.

  We were met by research engineer Sandy Wright and his colleague Martyn Prince. Martyn was mild-mannered and happy to chat, while Sandy seemed to enjoy scowling and swearing at inanimate objects. Both would become valued members of the team. On entering, I discovered that what had looked like a big shed on the outside looked like a big shed on the inside. The corners were crammed with scale model boats and racing cars. Bits of scientific equipment and random tools lay about, all covered with a light coating of dust. The air had a faint smell of oil and epoxy resin. In the centre of the space, looking like a truck-sized belt sander lying on its back, was a rolling road. The top of it disappeared three metres above us into a huge doughnut-shaped structure fashioned from wood and steel: the tunnel.

  Like most people, I associated wind tunnels with the latest technology, so I was astonished to learn that this one had been constructed in 1920. It emphasised just how far behind we were in getting here; 85-year-old technology seemed cutting edge to us. We climbed the steps to the control room, a tiny green Formica-lined box that looked more modern – the 1950s, at least. In it was ‘Big Mike’, the tunnel’s operator.

  Mike didn’t seem keen on talking to outsiders and his conversational repertoire appeared to be restricted to ‘Does anyone want tea?’ Over time, we realised he wasn’t really grumpy, he just took a little while to warm to people – in our case, about six years. In all the time we worked there I only ever saw Mike outside the confines of the tunnel building twice. I wondered whether he’d claimed right of sanctuary. He was a character and I liked him.

  One of the boffins we’d brought with us was composites expert Dimitris Katsanis, although defining him with a single label would be misleading. A former cyclist on the Greek national team, Dimitris was a cross between an artist and an inventor. His endless reserves of energy and curiosity meant that he wasn’t the most relaxing person to be around. But the fruits of his labour – usually delivered just in time rather than on time, and seldom for the budget discussed – were uniformly exquisite, making it more than worth the stress. Over the eight years we would work together, he helped conduct nearly 15,000 tests and experiments, produced more than 200 unique designs and oversaw the creation of bikes used to win 51 gold medals. Dimitris was more than a founder member of the group, he was its lynchpin.

  Jason Queally, gold medallist in the kilometre time trial in Sydney, was our first tunnel test pilot. His primary role was to be the shape of a cyclist. This involved him sitting on a bike in a cold tube for hours on end while we blew air over him. It was not glamorous. Despite not having any evidence, Jason was adamant from the start that the skinsuit he’d used back in 2000 to win gold was special in some way. He eventually brought it along to show the experts who passed the now faded Lycra garment around and confirmed it was indeed ordinary, with nothing to set it apart from lots of other clothing we’d already tried and discarded.

  I was reluctant to use up valuable test time just to prove its averageness, but Jason was determined to back his own gut against the scientists’ knowledge and doggedly championed his cause. Finally, to shut him up more than anything else, I agreed to work it into the schedule. Wearing his old suit, Jason’s drag dropped a full 10 per cent compared with the current best race clothing we had. I had the equipment checked, re-calibrated and ran several repeat trials. The results remained consistent with the first test. The experts were baffled. Over the following sessions the garment was tried on other athletes, and even on those it didn’t fit we still saw big gains.

  Thanks to Jason’s tenacity, that piece of clothing – christened the pixie suit as we could find no earthly reason for its performance – served as a reminder to us not to be too clever for our own good, not to rule anything out just because we ‘knew’ it wouldn’t work. Months of research by Sally Cowan, our materials specialist, revealed that the factory that had made the suit was no longer in business and no one knew the whereabouts of the machines that had produced the cloth. There would be no short cuts, we would have to try and understand it from first principles.

  The pixie suit never did give up all of its secrets, but its magic properties seemed to have something to do with the roughness of the fabric. The final race clothing it led to looked nothing like it, but without the proof of potential it provided, we – I – would never have believed enough to invest. The research programme it kicked off is still going on at the time of writing.

  Early in our exploration, while we were trying to get to grips with making the human form more slippery, Rob Lewis, our lead aerodynamicist, showed us an old photograph on the Internet. It was a tennis ball in a wind tunnel being hit with smoke as a way to make the turbulent air visible. A second image showed the same ball with a ring of fine fuse wire wrapped around it roughly halfway between its leading edge and its apex. The smoky air hitting the ball ‘tripped’ over the carefully placed wire and stuck to the surface a little longer before breaking away. The barely visible intervention had halved the ball’s drag.

  Rob reasoned that if we could do the equivalent to the riders’ approximately cylinder-shaped legs, then we could get a huge drag reduction. I pointed out that we couldn’t stick wire to riders: that would be illegal. Not willing to give up the idea immediately, Rob assured us that the height differential needn’t be big; a long, well-placed scratch with a nail or a string of nettle stings would do the job. He was a practical if immoral man. I stopped the line of theorising when Rob and Dimitris got into an enthusiastic discussion about just how many nettles they might need and whether a rusty nail might yield a more advantageous ridge.

  Most of these brainstorming sessions took place in the bar at Chilworth Manor, our home-from-home while we worked at the wind tunnel in Southampton, and they often led to important advances. In this case, nettle stings and scratches were replaced by raised
seams on riders’ clothing, a way of joining fabric panels together that dramatically improved performance. All perfectly legal.

  On one occasion we were joined by Ed Clancy, our team pursuit anchorman. Installed in a pair of Chilworth’s leather chairs next to the fire, Dimitris and Rob looked at Ed’s broad frame and speculated that if they broke his collarbones and re-set his shoulders in a more rounded form it would improve his aerodynamics no end. It was another conversation that went on for an uncomfortably long time – with Ed himself even joining in – before it was consigned to the unethical bin. But it was the starting point for a research programme on garments to help the riders train to maintain a more streamlined shape.

  On another evening it was former world champion Rob Hayles, one of our regular test pilots, who sat with the team. Rob, always full of ideas, suggested that we should test a rider (him) naked, in order to get a true baseline measurement against which we could check all aerodynamic improvements. Looking back, most of Rob’s suggestions seemed to involve him with no clothes on. Partly out of interest and partly to call his bluff, we agreed. Our computer image-capturing system was accurate enough to map every inch of his undressed form. Rob asked if all the flopping about would adversely affect his aero performance. Sandy, who was running the test, told him that he doubted the wind tunnel instruments were sensitive enough to pick it up. To be fair to Rob, it was cold.

  The session showed, to our great relief, that bare skin wasn’t the fastest option and made us consider with more urgency just why covering the body with material made it faster. We continued to experiment with controlled roughness and other interventions that I am not able to discuss without the fear of British Cycling operatives breaking into my house under cover of darkness and neutralising me and my family.

  Within a few months of using the wind tunnel and testing some of the less inhumane ideas, we’d begun to gather practical, performance-enhancing knowledge that had never before been used in competition. The thing about that kind of knowledge, though, is that it only has a high value so long as you are the only one holding it.