Project Rainbow

by Rod Ellingworth

  Then there was one night when I woke up going, ‘What the heck is that?’ Something had run over me, just below my neck, something a bit furry. And Rob just said, cool as mustard, ‘That’s Ratty.’ ‘Oh my God, are you joking?’ But he wasn’t.

  This was in 1995, about a month before the world championships, which were in late August. They were in Colombia that year, and most of the better pros in Europe weren’t going because the course was too hard, so they were all riding the kermis races – the little events they have in conjunction with village fairs over there – that we were riding to prepare for the Commonwealth Bank Classic in Australia. One of the guys in the team was Glenn Holmes, who I knew well from back in England, and we would both get completely and utterly smashed to pieces in the races. Basically, we couldn’t keep up. Sometimes I would make it into the front group. You’d be in there with riders who had won the Tour of Flanders, riders like Steven Rooks, Johan Museeuw and Jelle Nijdam; I’d get in because I could ride my bike well in the crosswinds, but I’d then get dropped because they were going so fast. I was thinking, ‘Oh my God, what is going on?’

  Glenn and I got back to Tim’s house one night, just shattered. He looked at us and said, ‘Not as glossy as it looks in the mags, is it, lads?’ We were getting our heads kicked in week in, week out. I rode the Tour de l’Avenir that year, and there were riders there who’d ridden the Tour de France a few weeks earlier. I was going in with Boots multivitamins and couldn’t work out what the hell was going on. I remember Glenn saying to me on that trip, ‘I thought the goalposts were here, and now I can’t even see them.’ He was a good bike racer back in the UK, and it was a massive blow to him. I don’t put it down to him not being good enough; it was a matter of not having the right structure going into the racing. And there was the doping culture out there: we had no idea what the hell we were up against. Back then, you were in the UK, on your island, and you had no clue what the rest of the world was doing. You could earn a reasonable wage in the UK without going through the hard times that Tim and his lads went through. People would knock them, but I’d tell those people they should be out there.

  So I thought, ‘Sod it, I’ll go and race in France.’ There was a guy from Newark called David Miller, who’d been national criterium champion in the 1980s; I knew him well, and knew he raced for a team called UV Aube in the town of Troyes, in eastern France. I got in touch and said I’d had enough and needed to go out there. I had a routine to my year: race the Australian season over the winter; then work at a training camp in Spain with Graham Baxter, who ran holidays for club cyclists and liked to have pros along to lead the rides and give advice; and finally the British season. I felt I needed to go and race in

  France just for the experience. Perhaps I had realised that I was never going to make it at the highest level. France was fantastic. I loved every minute of it, even though it was hard: there was no phone to call home, I didn’t speak the language to start with, and there was no coaching. It was simply a matter of ‘Just be there at this time. We’ll pick you up and go to the race, then we’ll drop you off.’ But my attitude was that I was going there and I wanted to live the life. I couldn’t afford to go home anyway. I was working in the winter doing little bits here and there, but I wasn’t getting paid to race in France. After three months I was doing OK: I wanted to learn the language and I managed that, and I started making some prize money. Then the club started to pay me £20 a week, which meant I could afford some food. In 1998 I met Jacques André, who was the real force behind cycling in Troyes and ran the rival club to UV Aube, UVC Aube. He’d run UVCA since the 1960s, and had had some very good British riders who had gone on and done well as pros: Vin Denson, Alan Ramsbottom, Derek Harrison.

  Jacques was a barber who had his own shop in a suburb of Troyes. He loved the Brits. He told me one day that he thought we were fighters, that we never gave in, but on the other hand, when it came to cycling, we had no idea how to train and race. He was a strong character. He would send me home in the winter with a handwritten training plan of what to do every day until I came back to Troyes. We had a fair few arguments because we’re both very opinionated people – for example, he didn’t approve of me going to Australia in the winter – but it always felt as if we respected each other. He’d drop in most days to the flat above a newsagent’s where I lived – he’d come to buy his paper, pop in and open the fridge to see what I was eating. In that part of France the roads are made for motor pacing – rolling roads, very straight, lots of steady climbs – so he’d take me out for hours and hours and hours behind the car.

  The club had a minibus, and we’d all cram in to go to the races. I had my own seat, right behind Jacques in the second row. Over the years Jacques had learnt a few words of English, and he thought he was really good at it – but he talked too fast, so it was hard to understand. The way it worked was that each generation of foreign riders at the club would introduce the next, so after me came Dan Lloyd, who went on to ride the Tour with Cervélo, Yanto Barker, who is still racing, and Jon Tiernan-Locke, who is now at Sky.

  I was winning ten or twelve races a year, always getting in the group who made the money in the criteriums. But it wasn’t about the money; it was about going and doing it, about the whole experience. So from 1997 to 1999 I was lost to the GB system. I’d missed the boat earlier because of the pro thing with Ambrosia, and I knew I wouldn’t be a pro with a career like Paul Sherwen or Robert Millar, both of whom had gone abroad as young amateurs and ended up with long, successful spells riding the Tour de France.

  I came home in the winter of 1999 because I had heard they were taking on firemen in Grantham. I had thought I would go on cycling until I was about thirty, and then think what to do with the rest of my life. I didn’t have a clue what to do, but I had always wanted to be a fireman, so I won my last race in France and came home. I went into the fire station, with no interview set up, and spoke to the station officer. He turned me down there and then. He said they weren’t going to train up someone who had been swanning around the world for the last ten years. He said, ‘We’ll commit to you, and then you’ll go off again.’ I just thought, ‘This is great.’ I hadn’t been successful and I hadn’t made any money, but that hadn’t meant I wasn’t committed to what I was doing. And it didn’t mean that I wouldn’t be committed to the fire service if they let me join.

  I sat down on the wall outside the fire station in Grantham and wondered what on earth I was going to do.

  2 : First Blood

  It was deadly quiet that morning in January 2003. I was sitting in an apartment in Bendigo, about thirty kilometres north of Melbourne. The Great Britain team had gone out early doors for an easy ride on yet another day of blinding heat, and I was sat in my room at my laptop. I’d been appointed as a GB coach a few months earlier and there was plenty to catch up on. We had a group of about ten riders at a two-month warm-weather training camp, among them the under-23 group that I was looking after.

  Then I heard the clip clop of cleated cycling shoes in the courtyard. One of the riders had come back early – too early, half an hour into what was supposed to be a three-hour ride. I jumped up, a bit concerned, and looked out of the window: Russell Anderson, one of my lads was out there. I couldn’t make out what was wrong; perhaps he would come and knock on the door. I sat back and waited. The knock came soon enough. Standing in the doorway, he was a bit white in the face as he held up his arm to show me his elbow. The cut was a deep one; the blood had dried where it had run down his arm, and I could see the thick red mark on the skin around the gash. He’d taken a nice chunk out of the joint.

  Straight away, the coaching instincts kicked in: ‘Let’s get you cleaned up, into the shower and then off to hospital to be stitched up.’ Russell was quite a tough lad and wasn’t particularly disturbed by the cut. He wasn’t the type who talked much anyway; quite reserved, he tended to grunt in that Scottish way. It wasn’t easy to have a conversation with him at the best of times, let alone talk
about any deep stuff.

  ‘Bloody hell, what happened?’

  ‘Tom White and me were messing about, locked our bars, and we both went down. Tom’s OK, but I thought I’d better get this sorted.’

  He was all apologetic, but I said, ‘It’s not a problem, you’ve not broken anything.’ I always say that if you fall off while racing and break something, that’s part of the game; if you fall off in training and it’s a silly accident and you break something, you’re cursed; but if you fall off and don’t break anything, there’s no harm done. And then, while I was cleaning up the wound, he said it: ‘It didn’t hurt as much as I thought it would do.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It’s the first time I’ve ever fallen off on the road.’

  He had had a crash on the track, but I remember thinking, ‘How can you not have fallen off on the road?’ I asked him, ‘Have you never flown into a corner, busting a gut to get into it first, so that your wheels go from under you?’ It’s all about learning your limits, all about finding things out – ‘God these are crap tyres, but those work fine,’ that kind of thing.

  The thought passed quickly. He got cleaned up, they put some stitches in, and that was the day over. The lads were taking the piss out of him, as riders always do. But this was a moment when it suddenly came home to me that something wasn’t right. How can you get to nineteen, be wearing the Great Britain cycling jersey, getting paid full-time to ride your bike, when you’ve never experienced crashing onto tarmac?

  It made me think, ‘We’ve got to toughen these guys up.’ Cycling is a hard world, a sport where you get hurt regularly. It wasn’t that you had to make the young riders crash, but you needed to put them into situations in training which would challenge them. I cast my mind back to club runs in the winter in the old days, when you’re going round a corner and the first few riders hit a patch of ice. Boom! Down they go, the guys behind hit their brakes, and in a second everyone is in a pile on the deck. Someone bends their bike (you hope there’s a bike shop in the nearest town where you can straighten it out with a hammer), and you hobble home and get in the bath to clean the raw burgers on your elbows and knees. These are all things you go through as a young lad. You’re constantly pushing yourself. Or you should be. But I didn’t see that in the lads I was looking after. They were so into their training efforts, so into doing things in such a structured way. Russell was symptomatic of the problem: he had a lot of talent, but wasn’t being taught right.

  There was another constant moan I had: the lack of discipline among the young guys. There was an incident that summed it up for me with Paul Manning. He is now a successful coach at British Cycling, but even then, as a medallist in the Sydney Olympic Games in the team pursuit, he was a leader, an elder statesman. He didn’t earn that status by shouting at the top of his voice but because he was well organised, always clean and tidy, and rode his bike so well. And critically, he was always on time. The riders would go out training early in the morning because of the heat, and Paul would be there at ten to six if they were going out at six. I’d be there early too, and there was one morning – it would be at one or two minutes past six – when Paul said to me in that dry Black Country drawl of his, ‘Rod, I don’t think it’s fair that I have to wait for these young lads.’

  ‘Paul, you’re right. What’s going on?’

  That was another moment that took me to the core of the problem. These lads were swanning around on ten grand a year, couldn’t even ride their bikes, couldn’t position themselves correctly in a race, and they couldn’t even come down on time for training. What the hell was going on?

  I thought, ‘Something has to change here.’ But ironically, Paul was the opposite of what I was aiming for. He was a fantastic athlete, but he was an athlete rather than an all-round bike rider. In a team pursuit – and this was the key discipline as far as we were concerned – he was always sitting a wheel’s length off the back of the other riders and looking round the rider in front. His success came out of a structured approach and from his physical qualities as an athlete. I always wondered how much better he might be if he could sit closer to a wheel, if he was a more complete bike racer.

  I believed you had to have a passion for cycling above all else. The young lads I had to coach didn’t really seem to enjoy it, but I’d loved cycling as a teenager, really loved it. You had to know about the sport, and you had to have a thirst for every bit of information you could get. To take another example, none of the young lads we had knew how to stick on a tubular tyre. I said, ‘How can you not know that? Did no one ever teach you?’ I knew that John Herety, the former top professional who was the road team manager, was just as frustrated, but he had to spend so much time with the older riders that he never really had the chance to think about how to turn the younger ones into better cyclists. Not that anyone had said I had to do it. My brief was to coach them and to learn from our head coach, Simon Jones. The objective was to turn the riders into Olympic medallists. My idea was to go back to basics: develop the lads into good bike riders first and then turn them into athletes. And there was something else you could do: develop them as young people at the same time.

  *

  A couple of years had passed since the afternoon when I had walked out of the fire station in Grantham, sat down on the wall and wondered what I was going to do with my life. I was with my best mate Simon – ‘Bear’, as I called him. He asked me what the next step was, and I remember saying to him, ‘I don’t know. I’ll just keep riding my bike, I guess.’ I was fortunate that Richard, my brother, had his own businesses: a recruitment agency and a track-day company, where you go around racing circuits in fancy cars – a Ferrari and so on. He’s ambitious enough, and he said to me, ‘Why don’t you form a little company, base it around your cycling and set yourself up as a bike rider?’ I thought that was a good idea, so I moved into his house in Harlaxton, just outside Grantham. Richard put in a bit of money, so did I, and we called the company RJ Management, after him – Richard Jeffrey – as I didn’t want it to be named after me. We printed up some brochures, and I went down to the dole office. Again I got lucky. I’d never signed on; I hated it but I knew I was doing it for a reason. I sat down opposite the dole officer, and he said, ‘Are you Rod Ellingworth the cyclist?’ He knew of me because of the involvement I’d had with the council since way back when. So I explained what I was doing, that I didn’t want to go for a job, and he said I could just come in, collect the dole money and get on with what I was doing.

  Richard and I had a whole list of companies to approach – food, health, travel – that I thought might like to be involved in cycling. Unlike today, nobody knew much about the sport. We sent out the brochures, did follow-up calls. What I’d done with the council in the past began to kick in, and so did the work – school visits and so on – that I’d done with Ambrosia when they’d sponsored me. The council were really getting behind pushing cycling; they had a meeting every few weeks about developing it – bike paths and so on. I came up with a plan for school visits, I organised National Bike to Work Day and National Bike Week with them, kids’ routes, stuff like that, and they would get me in and use me to see if this or that would work.

  I wasn’t making a lot of money. I think in a year I’d bring in about eight to ten grand – nothing really, but enough just to get by. I had a car from the council and I used my contacts to get everything I could for free: I was still involved with Raleigh, and they got my bikes and so on; and Impsport – a local company from Lincoln – sponsored me with clothing. And I was still racing at the time, so I’d pick up a few hundred quid in the criteriums. I picked up some work on a couple of television programmes on the Disney Channel and the BBC – there was one BBC kids’ programme about aerodynamics with me talking to a puppet which still gets shown – and I did cycling-proficiency and road-safety videos, that kind of stuff, little bits here and there. I was just getting by, with no idea where it would take me.

  It was about then tha
t Simon Jones, who was the Great Britain head coach, approached me about riding for the national team. It was just before the Sydney Olympics in summer 2000, and they were looking ahead to the next Olympic cycle, trying to bring in all the riders who in the past had ridden in the team pursuit at either senior or junior level, to assess their potential for Athens. That opened the doors again. Jenny Gretton, who was the East Midlands coach for the Talent Team – the Great Britain under-16 cycling programme that aimed to ‘uncover’ the next generation of Olympians – knew I was doing all these little things and was looking for what they called ‘an expert rider’ to come along to team camps at weekends, so I started doing that as well. That was the first time I experienced coaching from the other side – as a coach, not a rider – and I thought, ‘Bloody hell, I actually quite like this.’ I did a few weekends and days with them over that period and really got into it. What appealed was the fact that the kids actually listened and would then go and do something, such as a turbo-trainer session. You’d be explaining to them how to get the best out of themselves, and I enjoyed that.

  I applied for a job as British Cycling’s Talent Team coach for the north-east later on in 2000. I was training on the track under Simon Jones, staying in the top end of the Peak District with Tim Buckle, who was a couple of years younger than me and ended up going to the Commonwealth Games two years later. I didn’t hear a word back about the job and I was pretty pissed off when I learnt who they were taking on. I had nothing against the woman who did land the job, but I didn’t understand why they didn’t call me in to talk to them. Ian Drake was the Talent Team coordinator; he’s the chief executive now, but he was the guy who set it all up at the time. I didn’t know him from Adam, so I called his secretary and asked her to explain why I hadn’t got the interview. I was really pushy – ‘Listen, all I want to know is why I didn’t get it. I’m pretty up for this, so I want to have some idea.’