It hadn’t been a bad year for Boardman Bikes either. Barely 18 months in, and we had seen national, world and Olympic titles all won on our bikes. Frames out of the same mould as Nicole’s Olympic machine were sold in Halfords stores for a shade under £1000, a price almost unheard of for carbon fibre. Sales soared and we became the fastest growing bike brand in British history.
With so much going on in my life outside, I was intending to resign my role with British Cycling. But Dave, charming and loyal as ever, convinced me over another direction-defining coffee to stay. We struck a deal: I would do another four-year term on the Senior Management Team and he would make some of the changes we’d discussed to the BC staff structure. In the end, neither of us would keep our word.
CHAPTER 18
Secret Squirrels Part Two
The rep in the Thomson Holidays advert scampers around, waving clouds away, smoothing the waves and tweaking the thermostat to make the temperature for their clients just right. Lying beneath the palm trees, with the cool breeze blowing and a turquoise sea in front of me, I could believe that was exactly what had happened here. It was September 2009 and Sally and I had come to the Maldives to celebrate our 21st wedding anniversary. Sally wandered over to show me the picture she’d just taken on her phone. It was of me, frowning and staring at a computer screen. Laptop on my knee, I was spending my time in this beautiful place ploughing through British Cycling emails, trying to stay on top of things while I was away.
The last 12 months had been like a fantastic party, but every party has its morning after, when the spilled food needs to be scraped off the carpet and the beer bottles collected from under the sofa. The scale of the aftermath is usually in proportion to the success of the night before and the 2008 Olympics had been a doozy.
I don’t think I had really sobered up from the experience when I’d sat in the coffee shop with Dave Brailsford and signed on for another four-year stint on the Senior Management Team. Now, the realities of that commitment, and the more problematic effects of success, were making themselves felt. Fellow SMT member Steve Peters was in high demand away from cycling, giving lectures and advising businesses on the psychology of winning. Dave was also taking a well-earned break away from the front line, doing some corporate speaking and accepting invitations from high-profile entrepreneurs to critique their organisations. One of them, James Murdoch, son of media mogul Rupert, was a big cycling fan and they were hatching a plan to create a new professional team.
I was happy for them. They deserved their rewards and, in any case, I’d been doing plenty of outside work myself. Boardman Bikes Limited was booming. I’d undertaken several lucrative speaking engagements and TV work was now taking up more than two months a year. As well as these expanding external interests, my in-house responsibilities had increased too. As well as running the Secret Squirrels Club I’d revived the coaching development programme by organising a series of workshops and I seemed to be taking on ever more administrative work. It might all have been manageable had the other SMT members not frequently been AWOL.
No one wanted to stay home and mind the shop, never mind dedicate every waking moment to the task of trying to outdo ourselves at the next Olympics. It was also clear that the management restructure Dave and I had discussed over coffee a year earlier was not going to come about. As a consequence, much of the unglamorous everyday work of counselling disgruntled coaches and mediating staff disputes had fallen to me. I’d got on with it, stuck my finger in the proverbial dam, because I had seen there was a hole that had to be plugged and there was no one else around. But I didn’t want to be the permanent solution.
The week before our holiday, Sally and I had even started discussing my taking on a personal assistant to cope with the saturation workload. But her photograph on the sunlit beach had made me take stock. Did I want to adapt my personal circumstances so I could cope with even more work? On 28 September 2009, sitting in Dubai airport waiting for our flight home, I made the decision to resign as a member of British Cycling’s Senior Management Team and sent the email from the departure lounge. It was a bit of a cowardly way to do it, but I wanted to be able to set out my reasons clearly without getting flustered – and to give Dave a bit of time to absorb it. There was an instant sense of relief, mixed with a feeling of guilt. Dave had always been good to me, supportive and flexible, and I’d gone back on my word. But I could see no other way to deal with the overload.
The one thing I had been enjoying was leading the small R&D team, so I offered to continue managing this department, fully expecting to be told that a clean break was preferable. But Dave agreed and so I kept my title as Head Squirrel for the next three years.
In that first phase, 2004 to 2008, we had been pioneers, breaking new ground and finding rich seams of success almost everywhere we looked. After Beijing, the landscape was very different. Instead of hunting for nuggets, we were reduced to panning for dust, a tedious activity that required a different, more refined approach.
For the first 12 months back at the Southampton University wind tunnel, the team again experimented with the weird and wonderful: strategically placed sequins and patches of fake fur to create local roughness; devices to channel high-pressure air from one place and deposit it somewhere else. Athletes tried riding side-saddle to alter the shape of their wake and pedalled backwards to see if it offered any advantages. We even spent three months exploring naturally inflating clothing that would subtly change its shape as air speed increased.
As in the previous Olympic cycle, most of these bizarre experiments had been spawned by tantalising CFD imagery that showed how the air might be flowing over the riders and their bikes. But the computer models had shown that most of these avenues offered only tiny gains. The benefits, assuming they were even there, often proved too small for the wind tunnel’s sensory equipment to pick up. In the build-up to Beijing, potential improvements had been easy to identify and we’d been able to test ideas quickly, proving or disproving their benefits and moving on. Now, the results were often ambiguous, with choices about what was worth pursuing necessarily driven as much by personal belief as by science. Naturally, opinions often differed and arguments became frequent.
Things came to a head at a meeting early in 2010. We pooled our problems and boiled them down to one big question: should we sacrifice a large chunk of our budget and remaining research time making more sensitive measuring devices, or keep using the existing set-up but dramatically increase the number of repeat tests to at least produce a believable average? Option two was the one I went for: the accuracy problem would need to be solved on another day and by another boss.
I’d thought that restricting my workload to the R&D programme would be the answer to all of my work-related woes, but it hadn’t brought the contentment I’d been expecting. I’d been kidding myself. The sad fact was that I’d fallen out of love with bike racing, first as a rider, now as a staff member. It was loyalty to great people, not passion for the sport, that had made me agree to stay on, and in a game that demands total commitment that could never be enough.
If I stayed, I was obliged to give my all, which I’d resent – already did resent – otherwise those who still fully believed would start to resent me. Making space to do more away from the gold medal business had allowed me to see clearly that the activities I was enjoying were no longer in the sporting arena. Designing bikes with my company, helping shape strategy to grow the brand and making TV programmes were the things that excited me.
The only solution was to pull out completely, something I should have done after the Beijing Games. Still, I felt bad – it was only a few months since I’d stood down from the SMT. Caught between the need to get out and the realisation that I couldn’t leave people I cared about in the lurch, I made a deal with myself: I’d give it everything up until the next Olympics, then make a clean break. London 2012 would be a fitting and symmetrical place to bring my career in competitive cycling to a close.
I broke the news to
Dave, although it wasn’t exactly news to him – he’d watched me getting ever more emotionally detached. He probably understood my feelings better than anyone, since he was following an almost identical discovery path. His plan to form a brand new professional team had come to fruition and his time at the velodrome was a fraction of what it had been before.
Running parallel with all this soul-searching, was perhaps my biggest challenge of the second Olympic cycle – and it wasn’t one that was susceptible to extra testing or more sensitive equipment.
After Beijing, several fanciful articles had appeared in print, including one which claimed that all of Team GB’s Olympic outfits had been burned to guard their secrets. In fact, the clothing in question was unusable simply because the livery had been specific to that one event, as is always the case with an Olympics, and the garments were still in a cardboard box in the BC storeroom. The facts notwithstanding, and stirred up by the media speculation, comments began to appear from the UCI President Pat McQuaid. He proclaimed his wish to see ‘a level playing field’ at the next Olympics, adding that ‘some teams were using £50,000 prototypes’. He went further: ‘It’s against the Olympic charter, it’s against the UCI rules and against the spirit of fair play.’
Pat McQuaid’s statements, clearly directed at the GB team, were tantamount to accusing us of cheating. His conclusions had been drawn without having had a single conversation with the accused. I decided the best way to deal with the growing raft of inaccuracies was a visit to UCI headquarters in Aigle, Switzerland. I flew out in August 2009, accompanied by Dimitris Katsanis, who was not only the engineer responsible for making the ‘£50,000 bikes’ but also a qualified UCI commissaire. On arriving at the futuristic egg-shaped headquarters we were met by a small party headed by Jean Wauthier, the UCI’s technical chief. As soon as we entered the building he guided me over to a case displaying one of Eddy Merckx’s 1970s machines, pointed at it and proclaimed ‘This is what a bike should look like.’
After the initial skirmish, we said a quick hello to Pat, who was very pleasant but simply refused to believe that the GB bikes cost us less than commercially available products. This was despite my offering to show him invoices to that effect and having their designer standing next to me. He didn’t attend the meeting proper.
In a large conference room with views of the surrounding mountains, I laid the various parts of the GB bike and clothing on the table for Jean Wauthier and his colleagues to examine. I asked that they tell me which ones they felt were infringing the rules in any way. Mumbling followed. There were no actual objections but it was clear that they still weren’t happy. It was as good as I was going to get.
Apart from politely challenging them to justify their public stance, one of the main questions I had come to ask was whether they were intending to change the equipment rules before the next Olympic Games, making any of the components set before them illegal. ‘No’ was the answer.
With so many emotion-based public statements flying about, I wasn’t convinced. But we left having at least established a good line of communication and a solid, if slightly worrying, understanding of the political climate we were operating in. Sure enough, on 15 March 2010, British Cycling received a letter from Pat McQuaid informing us that, despite no rules having been changed, our bikes would now be deemed illegal for competition because they weren’t available to the public. This seemed to be a wilful misinterpretation by the UCI of their own long-standing regulations. The rule in question, Article 1.3.007, stated that:
‘Bicycles and their accessories shall be of a type that is or could be sold for use by anyone practising cycling as a sport. The use of equipment designed especially for the attainment of a particular performance (symmetrical or other) shall be not authorised.’ (Article 1.3.007)
The wording was very clear: ‘of a type that is or could be sold’. It showed that the UCI knew the difference between ‘for sale’ and ‘saleable’. Despite our pointing this out, and the fact that the regulation had been in place for nearly a decade (the same GB bikes had been classed as legal since 2002), the UCI said that the wording now meant strictly for sale.
To comply with this new interpretation, all the BC bikes and equipment were listed on an obscure page of the UK Sport website and are still available today. The words ‘or could be’ were quietly removed from Article 1.3.007 in October that same year.
The bike episode was just one of the curve balls thrown at us by the world governing body. The UCI has a long-standing memorandum of understanding with the IOC on regulations for an Olympics. With 12 months to go, the rules and regulations are handed over and no amendments are made until after the Olympiad. Yet with ten months to go until the teams gathered in London, the UCI announced that the plasticised materials we’d used in the skinsuits in Beijing would now also be deemed illegal. They had broken their own agreement with the International Olympic Committee. It was evidence to me that the sport’s leaders wanted to direct cycle racing like a theatre production, rather than define the sporting arena and judge the outcome impartially.
Fortunately, after the charged meeting in Aigle we had chosen to keep a second strand of research open into more standard materials, so we were able to produce an equally high-performing garment for the team in time for London.
Knowing that I was approaching my second retirement date, I had started to invest more and more energy in my activities outside of British Cycling. One of those commitments was working for ITV on the Tour de France, which would take up the entire month running up to the Olympics. Hardly ideal.
If someone had wanted to call my intention to continue with both roles in this critical period negligent, I don’t think I could have disagreed with them. I was only able to get away with it because of the broad shoulders of Matt Parker. Upbeat, supportive and fun to be around, Matt had come on board with BC in 2006 as a sports scientist, but it was soon clear that his talents went beyond physiological know-how. Because of his methodical approach and easy manner around often tetchy sports people, he rapidly became an integral member of the trackside coach support team.
Less than two years later Matt was made coach of the men’s endurance squad. In that role he stood in the Laoshan Velodrome in Beijing as his charges won gold in both team and individual events. After 2008, he changed roles again and became head of Marginal Gains, using nutrition, biomechanics, and performance analysis to do with the GB riders what the Secret Squirrels were doing with their equipment. Matt too would move on from British Cycling after 2012, taking his skills to the England rugby team as Head of Athletic Performance.
Matt had been involved in much of the Squirrels’ activity as the liaison between athletes, coaches and the science team, so in my absence he was the natural choice to oversee the final delivery of hundreds of pieces of equipment and clothing. With a month to go until the London games got underway, I handed over the reins and hightailed it over to Liège for the start of the 2012 Tour.
CHAPTER 19
The Tour on TV
The alarm went. I opened my eyes and took in my surroundings. Dirty grey carpeted walls, equally grubby lino, and the crowning glory, a cracked toilet half hidden by a stained plastic shower curtain. As hotel rooms go, it had all the charm of a semi-derelict safe house for some criminal hiding out in the Pyrenees and waiting for the police to pass.
It’s always the same when the Tour hits the mountains: tens of thousands of people swarming into sleepy villages looking for shelter. The race organisation secures all the prime real estate for the riders, teams and their own staff before the route is even announced. Wealthy fans take the next tier of desirable accommodation and we, the media, scrabble for what’s left. However, it doesn’t always follow that being the last in line condemns you to the worst quarters.
The Tour hotel list is a bit like those games of chocolate Russian roulette that people buy at Christmas: sometimes you’re rewarded with a hazelnut praline and sometimes you find yourself chomping down on a chilli surprise. Twe
nty-four hours prior to waking up in the Bonnie & Clyde Hilton, we’d stayed in an exquisitely converted farmhouse, nestled in an equally beautiful valley, with rabbits and chickens roaming free beneath the terrace where we ate a home-cooked meal. The only sounds were those of distant cowbells.
It’s not just the hotels: the whole annual road trip is a bit Forrest Gump. In terms of getting something to eat in the evening, the result is usually a ham and cheese sandwich at a motorway service station. But when there’s no autoroute between us and the next day’s stage finish things can get interesting, not to say desperate. Late one night in the middle of the 2010 Tour, starving hungry after a long, twisting journey through the Pyrenees, we saw a flashing neon sign in the distance.
As we drew closer, an American diner appeared mirage-like on the otherwise deserted stretch of valley road. It was past 10 p.m. and we were only heading deeper into the wilds, so we weren’t going to look this strange gift horse in the mouth. As we entered, the strangeness doubled. Random car parts and bits of motorbike sat on the Formica-topped tables and red leatherette benches. It was as though an airborne piece of the American heartland had collided with a mechanics’ workshop over Europe and crashed to earth on the French/Spanish border. It might all have been a bit off-putting if it hadn’t been for the food: I had the best burger I’d ever tasted. And if our car had needed servicing, all the chef would have had to do was shuffle across from the grill to the repair shop counter.
The chef, it turned out, was the owner and when he spotted our Tour accreditation he insisted we follow him out to a storeroom at the side of his establishment, where things got even odder. His real passion, it turned out, was his collection of homemade trick bicycles. Contraptions that required you to pedal backwards to go forwards, that steered the wrong way or had wheels with the hubs off centre. All pointless, all constructed with a mad craftsman’s care.
Triumphs and Turbulence Page 24