Project Rainbow

by Rod Ellingworth

  Right from the outset I wanted to set the bar high. I believed they should be competitive at their age. That was why I was so set on making it an exclusively under-23 programme and why the road Worlds and the European track championships were always two of our big hits: they are age related, so a rider couldn’t say, ‘Oh yeah, that rider who beat me is older and has got more experience.’ We still weren’t competing that well on the road, but I thought to myself, ‘There’s no reason why we can’t make these guys good enough on the track.’ We’d never done anything in the under-23 road Worlds – Yanto Barker was fifteenth in 1998, and that was as good as it got – and so we didn’t set our targets massively high on that side. I certainly did on the track, though, because ultimately our aim was to win Olympic and world championship gold medals. That’s our business. About that time, the track calendar, and the track Worlds, moved to the winter, but the Olympic Games was still a summer event, so the riders would have to get used to coming off the back of stage races to prepare for the Games; that meant that the Europeans, which were also in summer, were really good for their development.

  For the first year we started in January, and the programme was a mix of road and track, all thrown in together. It didn’t work in terms of the riders producing great performances, because they were doing too much of everything. We were doing two or three track sessions every week, even if they’d got a big road-race objective a week or two later; I just wanted to throw them into anything and everything. These guys had to put as many numbers on their backs as they possibly could in a year, so there were seventy-five to eighty-odd days of racing: track, time trials, Premier Calendars, internationals, World Cup stage races.

  In the second year we changed it to a template that we pretty much stuck to from then on. It was in two halves: from October to June it was mainly about the track; between October and February it was totally track, and we always had a track World Cup as an objective – conveniently, at the time the Manchester World Cup was often in February. Then we’d go on the road and prepare as if it was an Olympic year, aiming for the under-23 European track championships, which were in June. After that they’d have a holiday, a week at home – I didn’t want to give them too much – and then it was all about the under-23 road Worlds at the end of September, after which they’d go away again for a couple of weeks. The next year’s academy would then start in late October or early November.

  The racing side had to be about competing as many times as we could, and getting the riders to experience all that comes with racing. In the plan I even explained that you don’t just do sixty days of racing; you’ve got sixty days plus the travel back home talking about the race, buzzing with this and that – ‘I nearly crashed there’, ‘Did you see so-and-so do this or that?’ – so if you only do twenty days, you only get a third of that. That discussion is when the rider naturally reviews their race – talking to their dad, talking to their mate who’s taken them there, talking to the coach who’s driving them rather than sitting with their headphones on. That became a massive thing in the academy – we always talked about the racing afterwards. It was bike race, bike race, bike race, next bike race, next bike race, next bike race. It wasn’t about who was going to be prime minister.

  Simon Lillistone put together the budget – about £110–120,000 to run it for the entire year. Equipment was something I looked at in a different way: I didn’t want them on the top-of-the-range Shimano Dura-Ace bikes used by the seniors, so they started on Ultegra kit, which is one step down in the hierarchy. I wanted the riders to feel the academy was a stepping stone. I even wanted them in different clothing, but we couldn’t do it because when they raced, it had to be in GB kit. I wanted them to have only one road bike; that would mean they would have to learn to look after it and not take it for granted. If they had specific race bikes and a training bike, their training bikes would be treated like shit, left in a right state, whereas if they had only one, they would have to look after it because it might let them down in a race if it wasn’t well maintained. The idea was to make them feel, ‘I’m here, but I’ve got to go up to there. I’ve got to get somewhere, earn my right to be in that top group.’

  Money was an issue. I felt they got too much, and they weren’t having to pay their way. I wanted them to come and live in Manchester instead of living at home, which was a massive shift. That came from watching riders at coach-led racing weekends and the Talent Team weeks. At those training camps a coach could be a massive influence on the group. To get them working in our way, we needed them there all the time. We could have made it happen without using the riders’ money, but I wanted them to feel that they were investing in their future. So I took half their funding off them. They were getting £6,000 a year; I took £3,000 off them towards their accommodation. UK Sport may have had their doubts at first, but once we explained how it worked and what the money went towards, it was fine.

  That left the riders with £58 a week to live on, which I thought was just enough; from that, all they had to do was buy food. Everything else was provided. Taking them away from home was in turn going to create the whole question of how you learn to live as a bike racer: how do you look after yourself? How do you feed yourself? How do you stay healthy? If they wanted to be top professional cyclists, they might well have to live abroad – in that event, what do you cook? How does it fit in with the nutrition side of things? How do you look after your clothes and your cycling equipment?

  To be a pro, you have to learn how to look after yourself and how to be around other people. In a pro team on the road you have to share a room with someone, maybe for three weeks on a Grand Tour. So how do you live in close quarters with people you don’t know? To take three of the riders who shared a house in the first year of the academy, Bruce Edgar, Cav and Ed Clancy, there was plenty of discord between them: Cav was so particular about things, Ed wasn’t so fussy, and Bruce would leave stuff everywhere. They were such different characters, and you had to manage that – the different ways they had been brought up, the different things they thought were acceptable. It was a big life experience for them as well.

  The academy weeded out people who weren’t going to fit in with the group. The riders only had four to six weeks away from each other in the whole year. It was intense. That was where it was slightly flawed. I think Ed Clancy suffered early on; Alex Dowsett suffered later. Ed did get through OK, though, and went on to win gold medals at the Beijing and London Olympic Games. I’m confident it made him into a better bike rider. He wasn’t massively sociable at the beginning, but he learnt to be because he is such a good guy. I think it helped him develop and taught him how to work within a team, how to accept people. But it wasn’t perfect, because you might have a talented individual who struggles in that team environment twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

  The whole thing was about setting the riders up to fend for themselves. Take race entries. I had had that initial exchange with Kieran Page, when he said, ‘If you don’t enter me for a race, I don’t do it.’ I had asked what he meant: ‘Who does enter you guys for races?’ It was somebody in the office at British Cycling, but we changed that. We used to do it on a monthly rota: one of the riders would have the responsibility of entering the entire team into all the races for the next month; they would have to come into the velodrome, get the cheque from the administrator in the office, print off the entry forms, write all the forms out for the month and send them off.

  I wanted them to be able to organise themselves. If we were going off somewhere on a Sunday morning, I’d say to one of them on the Friday night, ‘Right, it’s your turn to organise the race. Ring me on Saturday. I want to know what time I am coming to pick you up, and I want to know how long it’s going to take us to get to the start. You need to have all the start sheets and the maps to get there.’ Some of them couldn’t read a map at first. I used to make them sit next to me in the front of the car, and they’d run the day – tell me where we were going, left here or right here, he
re’s the HQ. All I did was drive. They would clean the bikes at some stage races, particularly the British ones. We wouldn’t take a soigneur, so they’d have to make their own drinks, get their own food, and if stuff didn’t get put in the car, I didn’t put it in. I had to keep an eye on the staff to make sure they kept their hands off; instead, they would work with the riders, teach these kids how to make their race food. The idea was partly to make them self-reliant, but also to ensure they would appreciate the work the staff did.

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  I also wanted to join up the development programmes – Talent Team, juniors, under-23s. I started thinking about the junior programme, the classroom stuff we had had to do for the under-16 Talent Team, which I had just come from working on. The Talent Team was pretty structured; you couldn’t put much of an individual touch on it. I had nothing against Marshall Thomas, the junior coach at the time, or Simon Jones, but their way of coaching was all training programmes: Marshall would have the juniors on the track, but there was no oomph, no discipline, no hard work; it was all disc wheels and fancy stuff, no spokes, just go as fast as you can.

  That was when I came up with the concept of coach-led racing. That started from the question of how do you teach riders about bunch racing? You either do it through training sessions or you just race and give feedback afterwards. I was massively into the latter. But there wasn’t enough racing on the calendar, so we had to produce our own races. Having worked for the Talent Team, I knew it would link in well with that, because the riders need to see a pathway ahead of them. I knew that the regional Talent Teams could feed into a national structure, taking the two best riders from each area. We had a small budget with which to house twenty-five riders on a Saturday night in Manchester, bring them in early on Saturday, send them home late on Sunday. We needed someone to film every race, someone to drive the motorbike, someone to do the lap board – and there the idea was to use the national junior and Talent Team coaches so that they would learn from the weekend as well. I even put together a plan where you could have local coaches sitting up in the stands watching, then do questions and answers with them at the end. That’s the great coaching question: how do you put on a session for twenty-five kids? The point is, you need lots of coaches to cover the bottom level, and if you can educate them while running the sessions, you kill two birds with one stone. I did these about once a month, and kept them going when the academy started.

  At the same time there was some discussion about the Revolutions – Saturday-evening track meets, very glitzy, at the Manchester velodrome through the winter. These were just getting going, and Face Partnership, the organisers, wanted to include youth racing, so we met them and said that what we wanted from the Revolutions was just kids’ racing. My idea was that they could ride a Revolution every month, then two weeks later they would be back on the track doing coach-led racing at the weekend. That in turn meant that through the winter they weren’t going ages without racing. Every month there would be kids doing track league on a Tuesday, riding a Revolution, track league again, then coach-led racing.

  I pulled together the under-23 squad, the national junior squad and two from each of the regions around the UK – about twenty-five riders – and put together a basic timetable: points race, scratch, team pursuit, Madison. Nothing else. Short sharp races over the two days. To make it a proper camp I got lots of different jerseys and split the riders into four- or five-man teams. The idea was that you would give them a little job to do: here’s a task, how do they deliver that as a team? Because what you are looking for in a team is people who will follow instructions rather than go off and follow their own agenda. If you’re riding the Tour de France, it’s stage fifteen and you’ve got to do a job for the team, that’s what you have to do.

  You want people sticking to the plan, not thinking they can just drift off and do something else. For every single race I had a slip of paper for each team: ‘You nominate one leader, you keep the race together and lead it out’; ‘It doesn’t matter how, but you have to split this field up, so keep attacking’; another team would be told, ‘You have to counter-attack when the bunch comes up to any breaks.’ These kids were all guns blazing. I’d film everything, and we’d sit down after every race – it was all timetabled – and do feedback. I’d pick each team and we’d rewind it – ‘Tell me, Joe, what were you thinking here?’ – and go over little technical parts – a Madison change, an attack. So I got the kids talking, saying what they were thinking, and so on.

  It was at one of these sessions that I first became aware of Mark Cavendish. He was invited with the junior team at the back end of 2003; what I remember is that he had a sprinter’s bike – steep angles, round steel handlebars – and it was hard to figure out whether he was a sprinter or an endurance rider. He didn’t stand out particularly from a physical point of view. He wasn’t chopsy; I didn’t have to tell him to quieten down. What I do remember was that I was packing up afterwards in the car park, and he came out and said, ‘Please can you invite me to the next one? That’s the best thing I’ve ever done. Thank you very much.’ I thought that was pretty interesting, for someone that age to appreciate what was going on around him.

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  I had been constantly running ideas past fellow coaches like John Herety, Simon Jones, Dave Brailsford and Peter Keen, as well as Simon Lillistone. David Millar also played a part. Throughout 2003 he was around Manchester, and in and out of the velodrome. Millar is pretty much the last of the old-school British pros in Europe, the ones who’d gone out there and done it on their own. He was part of the decision to put the academy riders in two houses in Fallowfield, right in the middle of Manchester’s university district. The area was full of young girls floating around, and heaved with students out on the piss, down the nightclubs, with everything open all hours. It’s all going on; it’s exciting for a young kid, and these lads were moving out of home for the first time. They were like any other student. Dave said, ‘Bloody hell, the worst thing you can do is stop these kids from going out. When it’s really time to press on the pedals later in their careers, they need to have worked through all that young-lad stuff.’ We took that on board and thought we would bung them in there, then if they wanted to go out, they could. If people are good enough, they’ll go training because they love cycling more than going out. And if they’ve trained hard enough, they’ll be too knackered to go out anyway. We weren’t scared, but it was quite a brave move.

  I always had four British professional bike riders in the back of my mind: Roger Hammond, Dave Millar, Jeremy Hunt and Charly Wegelius. Those guys had done it the old-school way, going out to race in Europe and earning their pro contracts without much help. That’s how I had tried to do it. So I spoke to all of them at some stage. I was quite good friends with Charly, who had been our best under-23 in the late 1990s before going on to a long pro career. I talked to him about the system at Mapei, where he started his pro career, and I took some ideas from that. Even Chris Boardman had a look at the academy plan, as he was quite involved with British Cycling at the time. His view was that he didn’t know whether this would work for him; he didn’t think he could have handled it but he liked the idea. Then there was the Australian Institute of Sport: I had spent a load of winters out there and looked at how they had done it with Charlie Walsh. Shane Sutton had shown me the discipline side when I was racing with him for GB, while John Herety was a guy who had been through it all and had never forgotten about the dream of being a road pro and what that can offer riders. While I can take responsibility for driving the programme, the academy and the wider junior programme was a mixture of everybody’s input. That was the heart of it all.

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  In August or September 2003 I presented the academy idea formally to Doug Dailey, John Herety, Dave Brailsford and Peter Keen. Simon Lillistone helped me with the presentation, putting it together and making some of the ideas more clear. John was totally behind it from the start. He’d already added to it: for example, he’d shown me whi
ch were the good under-23 stage races so that we could give them more days of racing. Doug thought it was a fantastic idea. I talked Pete through the feel of it, the technical side, and he was quite amazed at how it was all put together. But he said, ‘You can’t start this in 2004 because it’s Olympic year. It would take too much time. Great idea, but the timing isn’t good.’ He wasn’t against it, but he was worried about the timing. Dave said we should definitely do it. If it hadn’t been for him, it wouldn’t have got off the ground.

  Pete and Dave were very different in their approaches, although they were working together. Pete wanted to do everything by the book, so if the funding was there, it was there; if it wasn’t, it wasn’t. Dave was more of a risk-taker – and he was taking a risk with this, because what experience did I have? He was acting on a hunch, thinking perhaps I was the right person to do this. The classic Dave way is not to go, ‘Here’s a programme, go and do it’; you go to Dave with an idea, and he will look at it, get involved, and then say, ‘Right, let’s go and make this happen.’ He likes people coming to him with ideas. He really gets behind you and supports you. So Dave said, ‘Go and put this together, let’s see what it looks like.’

  For the very first academy intake we advertised the places, and we selected a group of people for a full day of interviewing. I wanted it to feel as if they were coming in for a job interview, so on their applications they had to say why they were doing everything. We ranked them according to where they were and invited the top ones in. I did a presentation for them and their parents so they knew what we were trying to do. The interview panel consisted of me, John Herety and Simon Lillistone. The questions were all about the riders’ goals, why they thought they could make it, what their current situation was. One of the questions I asked was, ‘How did you get here?’ Questions like that give you a general awareness of how the riders are – are they on the ball? Can they get their bikes ready for a race? In the years after that we didn’t bother with the interviewing process; we didn’t need to. I became a lot closer to the junior programme, which meant that we could pre-select the riders beforehand – we would advertise, they would apply, and we could select them from the information we already had. But that first year we didn’t know anyone.