Project Rainbow

by Rod Ellingworth

  Next thing, Ian Drake actually rang me himself. Although I didn’t know him, he clearly knew me. It turned out he was from round Nottingham way, so there was an East Midlands connection there. He explained that I had no qualifications, no experience in coaching, while the other people had been to university or had been coaching in part-time jobs. I asked him what I had to do. He said I needed a coaching certificate and some experience. He also told me there was a pot of money available for coaching within the East Midlands region, so I went to them and they paid me to do a course. Funnily enough, Simon Jones was doing the course with me – he was the head coach but he had to do his level-two coaching as well, for insurance reasons.

  I’d done nothing like this since I left school twelve years earlier and I felt the course was too scientific, but one of the last sessions was a practical day, when you had to run a session of your own. My subject was mounting and dismounting the bike. When you look at it, there all sorts of different ways you do that, depending on the discipline: cyclo-cross, track, road. (In cyclo-cross you are constantly getting on and off the bike; in a criterium you need to get away from a standing start at high speed; while on the track you have to be able to come down on your fixed-wheel bike, slow down and stop without falling off.) You had to go away for the evening, think about it and put your session together. ‘Brilliant,’ I thought, and I went into all the different ways of doing it. Ian Drake was one of the supervisors, and he said it was one of the best sessions he’d ever seen and I’d gone into areas he had never even thought about. I didn’t pass all my theory, but because I’d done so well on the practical side I got the coaching badge no problem.

  With that behind me, I started practical sessions to build up experience. Just then, after the Sydney Games, British Cycling was starting to bring in a series of tests aimed at filtering talented kids into the system. To give just one example, the coaches would spend a whole day at a school in Nottingham, a kind of open day for cycling in which different groups of kids could come in and do the tests. So I started helping them out, and a couple of other regions as well when they needed people. I threw myself at everything and anything the Talent Team could give me.

  Something else which bridged the gap from being a rider to being a coach was that from the mid-1990s I had been involved over the winters with a cycling-holiday company run from Yorkshire, Graham Baxter Sporting Tours. Graham would always bring out a pro or two to work on his training camps for amateur cyclists, to lead the rides and give advice and lend the whole thing a bit of glamour. The pros at the camps used to do talks in the evening as well, which was all good experience for coaching, but there was more. Over the years I realised there were things that didn’t work. For example, you would take the rides out and there would be riders spread all over the countryside. I said to Graham we could make it much more structured. Most people were coming out for a week at a time, so why not have seven set routes, seven main climbs for them to go over during the seven days? You could have all the groups setting off at once, splitting them up by ability when it got hard, and have them all followed by cars, so that if people had a problem they would know there was someone behind them. You could have a big map on the wall with the route for each day. I got totally into it and felt I really took responsibility. I didn’t realise it at the time, but all this was helping me learn to manage people out on the road.

  Gradually I was being drawn into the Great Britain set-up. Leading into 2001, Simon Jones asked if I would be interested in riding some stage races with the younger lads, guiding them a bit in the role of road captain, which meant giving orders to the team from inside the peloton as they raced. It’s a role often given to an older rider, as there are many times when a team can’t be in touch with the manager in the following car. Jonesy was looking ahead to the Commonwealth Games in 2002; he had a big group which he’d widened out after Sydney, and he was trying to whittle them down a bit. There were riders like me, Tim Buckle, who is now a coach at British Cycling himself, Phil West, who is still working in the sport on the promotion side, and Steve Cummings, who went on to ride for Team Sky and BMC.

  I was very much one of the guys on the periphery, but already I was beginning to ask questions about how they did certain things. For example, to qualify for Great Britain in those days you had to do a standing-start three-kilometre time trial and a flying kilometre on the track, and be within a certain time. That’s all it was, that was the standard – and that was all we would do at a track session, those bastard tests. It was horrible. It was demoralising, and limiting. If you had the talent, you could do it, but I never made it. I never really had the heart for it – it would just crack me – while others would waltz through it because they were so talented. The coaches would relate your time to your age, and also to the temperature at the track – the warmer the air is, the faster you go – and would deduct a certain amount. The development riders – an eighteen-year-old lad, for example – could go a few seconds slower and still get funding, whereas my attitude was that even at eighteen or nineteen you should be trying to be the best in the world. They should be trying to win world championships, because this was track racing, not road racing, where endurance matters so much. All you need on the track is sheer guts and speed.

  In 2001 I started doing the training camps in Majorca with Great Britain, then the stage races which were used to build up the track riders’ foundation of fitness for their specific speed training: the Flèche du Sud in Luxembourg, the Cinturón in Majorca, the Route du Sud in France and the Tour of Rhodes. I roomed with Bradley Wiggins sometimes; out of the four stage races I did with GB that year, he won three of them, and was second in Rhodes to Fabian Cancellara, who was a prospect then but has now turned into the best Classics rider in the world. For a young lad Brad was already quite striking: he would be first up the hills, and first in the bunch sprints as well. He was just so talented, and he led off the bike too: he’d come round the team’s rooms in the evening and he’d be really behind us all, always saying, ‘Thanks for all the work you did today,’ and so on. Road captain was a role I really enjoyed, seeing all the young lads race and watching them progress. On one race, along with me, Tim and Brad, we had the mountain-bike team for company: they knew nothing about racing on the road, didn’t know about the tactics, so showing them the ropes was really good fun.

  As 2001 progressed I realised I was getting closer to Simon Jones in terms of how it was all running. I was constantly challenging him, continually saying, ‘You’re too training focused; these lads don’t race very well.’ I could understand lads like Brian Steel and the other top team pursuiters riding the road races, because it was preparation for the track – but why not just try to win rather than merely getting in the miles? Surely they would prepare better if they raced? It did my head in. I remember going to Jonesy and pointing out that it was pretty limiting for the lads who did the team pursuit because there weren’t many racing opportunities. Why didn’t I get a few lads in a team with me? I would help them out and we would ride the team-pursuit national championship together. I knew I wasn’t going to go anywhere, but for my teammates, Tim Buckle, Steve Cummings and Phil West, it was worth a go, and it was another opportunity for the lads to get on the start line, which didn’t happen very often. I called the four of us Team McEll. They weren’t a sponsor as such but my brother’s company. I was trying to sell every bit of the jersey to various companies, but I couldn’t sell the main part, so that was the name on the front, and the name of the team.

  *

  I think of one week in August 2001 as the week, because so many significant things happened. The four of us won the team pursuit national championship; it was quite a big thing because we’d been through a long period of time together and we’d had good fun. It was also the first time I took Jane out – we’ve been together ever since – and I applied for a job as the north-east Talent Team coach. I handwrote the entire application because I had no computer. It was massive: I put down everything I’d don
e, every little bit, and went on and on and on. As well as the interview, I had to do a fifteen-minute presentation on how British Cycling should develop youngsters in the sport – and that made me as nervous as anything. With my brother’s help, it took a week to get the presentation ready. I’d never done anything of the kind before, so I dropped everything, even riding my bike. I literally stopped cycling there and then.

  Ian Drake and Dave Brailsford were on the interview panel, along with the head of HR at British Cycling. Dave had been part of the Olympic set-up from almost the very start in 1997, and had known me through those years of being on the team. There was one key question he asked me: ‘Are you prepared to put your all into this job?’ I think he was a bit concerned about how some former bike riders simply can’t leave the sport behind and end up compromising by keeping on riding just enough for it to be a distraction. I remember that I told him I would do it 100 per cent, and I’ve always stuck to that; that’s why I haven’t raced my bike since. I got the call from British Cycling a week later. I was as nervous as anything leaving Jane’s house in the morning on my way to see them. Dave said, ‘We want to offer you a job’ – at which I thought, ‘Oh my God, you’re joking’ – and then added, ‘But the problem is … you have to choose between three jobs.’ They needed Talent Team coaches in the north-east or East Midlands, or a Talent Team manager in the south-east, where the whole set-up would have to be built from scratch.

  Dave gave me the bit of paper: the Talent Team coach’s salary was £15–22,000 and the manager’s was £23–30,000. I was twenty-nine and I thought, ‘Fucking hell, I’ve never had this much money in my life.’ I said I would come back to them in the next hour, sat in the car park, rang my brother and thought it through. If I took the coach’s job, I could stay in the East Midlands or go and work in the north-east with Jonny Clay – another former bike rider who I knew really well – but then I thought, ‘Let’s say the British Cycling thing folds. If you’ve been a coach in cycling, that’s one thing, but if you’ve been a manager, that’s more recognisable, and you’re more likely to get a job somewhere else.’ I didn’t have a clue what I was meant to be doing because I had to start the entire set-up from scratch, but I said I would do it. I rang Jane and told her to meet me in a restaurant in Manchester to celebrate.

  *

  So my career as a coach with the Great Britain Olympic team began in March 2002. I spent the first part of the year living in Vicky Pendleton’s father’s house in Stotfold, up on the Hertfordshire–Bedfordshire border. During the week I was getting up at 5 a.m., driving down to the lock-up at Welwyn Garden City, getting all the kit together and driving on to one school or other in central London, where I would run filtering sessions from nine in the morning to three in the afternoon. These sessions were the core of the Talent Team programme. You had an endurance track marked out around the outside of the playing field and a sprint track marked across it; you had to put so many youngsters through. They were all timed and they would all compare their times online, so there was a national table. It was a system that Ian Drake had come up with, when Peter Keen, who had founded the Olympic team, began to get concerned about where the next generation of Olympic cyclists would be found. Pete was aware that they wouldn’t just come out of the British club system, and the idea was that the times would enable regional coaches to figure out who were the best, and they could then get them into the system and work with them.

  You tested the riders out on the playing field and then invited the better ones in for a day of testing on the rigs. There you did more quality testing and interviewed them so you could get to know them. The next stage was a training camp, when you got to know their characters a little bit better, and then you selected them onto the Talent Team, so many riders per year from each region. As a talent-identification system, it worked: Lizzie Armitstead, who won the silver medal in the road race at the Olympics in London, was one who was spotted through that filtering process; Ed Clancy and Jason Kenny, both gold medallists in London and Beijing, were others who began there. Ian Stannard was one from back then – and I’m still coaching him now – Alex Dowsett, who is currently riding for Movistar, was another, and so was Russell Hampton, who went on to be part of the academy.

  I got into the job. I really enjoyed it, even though for the first few weeks I was sitting in an office in the Gosling Sports Park next to the outdoor velodrome at Welwyn Garden City trying to figure it out. I’d never done anything with budgets or finance – I’m still not the best at that side of it – and I didn’t have a clue. I was told, ‘Get a desk, get computers, get everything you need,’ but I’d never done anything like that before and I was on my own. Then we employed Helen Mortimer, who’d been a mountain-bike racer, as a coach, and that helped. I was really excited about the idea of talent ID – I thought, ‘Bloody hell, it really works’ – but what I hated about the system was that it was very rigid.

  The programme Ian Drake had come up with was a fantastic concept, but I remember thinking there was more we could do with rider development. So what particularly appealed to me were the training camps we ran in the school holidays; that was where I had a bit of freedom. We did four or five days down at Calshot in Hampshire, where they have an old indoor track from the six-days, and one day I did track, the next day grass track or road or cyclo-cross or mountain biking. So over two or three days the kids had a morning of each discipline. I was running the grass-track sessions, and I had the kids on the grass doing Madisons – a relay event for teams of two, who change over when one rider ‘throws’ the other into the action. It was an Olympic discipline, but we taught it to improve the riders’ skills, teaching them the basics of how to come in for the change, how to avoid overlapping the wheels, how to get into position for the sprint. It wasn’t actually my job to coach, but I was getting into the idea of it all.

  I never lost contact with Simon Jones, and when the assistant national coach moved on late in 2002, Jonesy said something to me about doing the job. At first I thought, ‘Bloody hell, I’ve only just got into this role here at Welwyn,’ but I did feel that what I was doing could be directed at older riders, not just the kids, and Helen Mortimer was doing really well. She understood what I wanted to do and was ready to step up; I was thinking she could do the job, and I could go and work for Simon. Then one day I was walking through the track centre in Manchester when I met one of the soigneurs, and she said, ‘Congratulations on your new job.’ I didn’t even know I had got it.

  Simon and I had been in contact a lot, and I think he enjoyed the conversations we used to have – he was after a little bit of cycling knowledge, more of the bunch-racing skills that the Great Britain team lacked. Simon was a special character; there are stories of him wrestling Chris Hoy when he’d had a drink or two. I liked his drive, the fact that he knew his own mind. He didn’t care if people didn’t like his decisions; he would just say, ‘This is what we are doing,’ and on they would go. He was the one who changed the team-pursuit squad – their way of training, the structure of it. The trouble was that he couldn’t see beyond the team pursuit. There were other Olympic events on the track – the points race, the Madison – but they were outside his orbit and it used to frustrate me. The lads who rode the team pursuit would be going to road races to build their strength for that four-minute effort and they’d be finishing at the back in bunch sprints – but there was some fantastic talent and finishing speed among them. And I’d be thinking, ‘Why don’t you make them race?’ That was what I had been trying to do when I was road captain at those stage races in 2001: we competed, we took it on, and Brad got his first professional contract with La Française des Jeux because he won those races.

  I hadn’t really known it was coming my way, but I took the job of assistant national endurance coach. In those days Peter Keen was heading the whole Great Britain set-up, and I wouldn’t imagine he was a supporter of me coming on board. I always had that feeling because he was so into the sports-science side. Simon was the coac
h, John Herety – a former professional from the 1980s who still runs the Rapha-Condor-JLT team – was the road manager, and they were both my bosses, although it never felt like that. Simon and John never got on, but I didn’t give a monkey’s about that – it was their problem and the one thing we had in common was that we wanted to be successful. That’s a key thing about British Cycling: the BC way isn’t my way, the Simon Jones way, the Dave Brailsford way or anyone’s way of doing things – it’s just how everything has developed. At the centre of it is one thing: we put the riders first. As for me, I was already thinking, ‘God, we could do so much better at road racing and at bunch racing on the track.’

  *

  The training camp in Australia at the start of 2003 was my first trip away with the lads. I was keen to see them race because I didn’t know them that well. There were a lot of races on the programme, although they weren’t at the highest level. The lads were riding the track leagues at Bendigo and Castlemaine; they went down to the Vodafone stadium in Melbourne for a couple of races; there were handicap races on the road run by the Bendigo club on Sundays; and the Victoria Carnival races over Christmas and New Year. Those races would help me understand the level they were at, and even before Russell Anderson had his crash I didn’t like what I was seeing.

  One evening, Russell was racing in the Bendigo track league. I was filming it – I was recording every race so that we could do feedback sessions with the riders afterwards. It was a beautiful warm evening, with a gorgeous sunset because there had been fires up in Canberra. It was about forty-five degrees. Russell got in the break, went to the front and did his turn; as he swung up the track to let the next rider in line through, this guy was overlapping his back wheel and he fell off. Bendigo is a big track, 500 metres round, so it was about thirty seconds until the next time Russell came round. When he got to the other rider lying on the deck, he back-pedalled, slowed right down and came to a stop to see if he was all right. You can hear me on the video camera shouting, ‘What the fuck are you doing? Don’t you dare stop.’ I was quite short with him. ‘What were you doing?’ He said, ‘It’s only track league. I wanted to see if he was all right.’ He didn’t know if it was his fault or not – and it was another of those things that made me wonder, ‘How much does this guy know about cycling?’ In a race, you don’t worry about what happens behind you – if someone hits you from behind, as long as you weren’t doing something stupid, that’s their problem. You’ve got to get stuck in.