Another example was in the Girvan Three-Day in south-west Scotland, one of the first stage races they did with me. Cav won the first stage, and he won it really well. He was at the back of the lead group going up the last climb and he didn’t get any help to come back up because we’d got some riders in the break who didn’t wait for him; he came back through the cars and absolutely blasted it in the sprint. We had a GB senior team and a Persil team – they were the under-23s’ sponsor – in the race, and I was looking after both. On the radio, Tony Gibb, a GB rider who had a good sprint on him, was saying, ‘I want the lads to lead me out,’ but Cav was saying he was going to sprint for himself, so I left them to it. Cav absolutely floored all of them by lengths. The plan was that we were working for Gibby, but Mark said, ‘I want to win this race’ – and he knew he could, so fair play to him. If we hadn’t won, I’d have gone mental with him, but he pulled it off and it was one of his first big wins. At that stage, we didn’t know what the lads were capable of, so that was one of the first big moments.
The next day Mark was in the yellow jersey, and the question then was: what are we trying to work on? I wasn’t expecting these young lads to win the race overall, but I was expecting them to work on their race tactics. So one of the plans for the next day was that we couldn’t afford to let a big break go – if there were any more than six or seven riders off the front of the bunch, we would have to close it down straight away. Well, flipping heck, twenty-five or so kilometres into the race there were twenty riders up the road and they’d gone. All the academy lads were sat there, and I was thinking, ‘What on earth are you doing?’ I said, ‘Right, guys, get on the front and ride’ – and that was including Mark, who was the race leader. They rode at the front of the bunch for the whole stage, until Cav went out the back and they all got dropped. Afterwards I made the point: ‘Guys, I don’t really care about the result at this stage. What I do care about is that you didn’t stick to the plan.’ They knew what happened if they didn’t close down a race at once: they were going to have to work a little bit harder, and a little bit longer.
There was another moment like this on a trip to Belgium, when Simon Jones was with us. We did two or three trips to Belgium for the kermis racing, blocks of about ten days at a time, racing every other day. We used to stay at Tim Harris’s house – the same Tim Harris I’d stayed with during the ‘Ratty’ episode in my racing days. Tim loved the idea of what we were doing, and his partner Joscelyn would look after all the lads. Tim and Jos’s house was in Tielt-Winge, not far from where Eddy Merckx was born, which was a good story to tell the lads. It was an early stage of getting the lads to spend time abroad, and the Merckx connection was part of getting them into the culture of the sport.
The riders had a recovery day, during which they rode for three hours. It was all about them getting as many kilometres in the bank as they could. They asked if they could have a cafe stop. I used to put in the programme whether they could have one or not, and if I heard about them having one when they weren’t supposed to, there’d be trouble. There were at least two hours of riding before the stop. In the great scheme of things it doesn’t make a big difference, but for me it was about listening to what was set out, obeying what you were meant to do. I didn’t give a monkey’s about anything else: if someone says, ‘Do this,’ you do it rather than whatever you want to do. A lot of people get it wrong: it’s not dictatorial, there’s a reason for it. If you stick to one thing you have agreed on, and you all believe in it, you will achieve more. If you’re thinking, ‘Oh, I’ll have a cafe stop after one hour, not two,’ and someone else thinks differently, your group is split.
It was a rest day, so I hadn’t gone out with them, and what happened was that there were these other British lads who lived locally – three or four of the guys who were racing full-time in Belgium. They all met at Tim’s house and went out together. I thought it was good for the lads to be mixing with them, because I remember what it was like being out there on your own. Off they went, and when they came back, they were having dinner, and I came in and they were showing Joscelyn photographs of their cafe stop. I think it was on Cav’s camera. I walked behind them and saw the screen and said, ‘Hey, give us that camera.’ Cav looked at me, and I just saw on his face that something was not right. I asked them, ‘How was the ride, lads?’
‘Oh yeah, good.’
‘Where did you stop?’
‘Oh, we stopped after about two and a half hours.’
I looked at the phone and I looked at them and said, ‘Right, guys, where within half an hour of Tielt-Winge is a fucking nice big square like that?’ And they all just looked at me. ‘You lying bastards. Right, in one hour I want you with your kit on. Meet me out the front.’
I just did it off the top of my head. I didn’t know what I was going to do as it was about two o’clock. I was cursing. I couldn’t believe they had lied to me. All the effort and time you put into them, and they can’t tell you the truth. Jonesy was saying, ‘You can’t get them to go out,’ and I said, ‘You flipping well watch me.’ So we went out, and they did another three hours, and as I did after the race in Cornwall I made them do blocks of through and off. The next day, however, Cav won an under-23 kermis in absolutely fantastic style – he got across to a break and took the sprint. Jonesy, who was the head coach, of course, was saying, ‘Really, I’m not sure you should be doing this; this is too much work.’ My answer was: ‘They had so much time sat on their backsides in that cafe, I think they’ve got plenty of energy.’ The point wasn’t that they hadn’t done the ride; it was the fact that they’d lied to me. If they had said, ‘Rod, we stopped after an hour and a half because the other British lads wanted to,’ I would have been annoyed, but I wouldn’t have made them ride again.
Another classic one came as we were driving home from a Premier Calendar: the Peter Longbottom memorial in late spring of 2004. The lads had done quite well – they didn’t get a result, but I thought they rode well together – and we were talking about the race when I took a phone call from Simon Lillistone: ‘We’ve got a problem. The owner of the house has had a complaint from the church opposite that there’s some kind of obscene drawing in the window.’ It was in the house where Matt Brammeier lived. With the lads listening in the back, I said, ‘You’re joking, Simon, you’re having a laugh,’ and I saw the lads going a bit quiet. I said, ‘What, a drawing?’ and all of a sudden I saw them snigger. I thought, ‘You little bastards.’ We pulled up outside the house, and they were all laughing.
My first reaction was, ‘Whoever’s done this, bloody hell, you’ve got a talent for drawing.’ There were two pictures: one was of a donkey with a great big knob, but the other one was horrendous – a big fat woman with her legs wide open and everything showing. I stopped myself from laughing and told them: ‘That’s horrendous. A house in a residential street, and you draw that. Who the hell did it, and why? You’ve got too much time on your hands.’ There was a disciplinary hearing with Simon and Dave Brailsford, because we’d also had a complaint from the guy who owns the house. Dave gave them an earful. What I did was make them ride for a whole session – a full three hours – round the top of the velodrome.
That might not sound so bad, but riding round the top of the track rather than on the black line at the bottom means you’ve really got to concentrate. On a really good track like Beijing you don’t have abrupt transitions between the straights and the bankings, but in Manchester it’s not quite as seamless, so you go a little higher in the straight and lower in the bankings to keep a nice even pace. The higher up you get, obviously you can’t do that transition because you’re stuck against the barrier; you can’t even it out. Physically, it’s much harder than riding lower down the track, and if the guy at the front doesn’t ride nice and fluidly in and out of the turns, the guy at the back will constantly run up on the wheel ahead; he’ll always be back-pedalling to slow down, then accelerating again.
At first I had them riding with a bottle in their
back pockets, but the track manager came over and said, ‘You can’t have them drinking on the track.’ So I made them drop down and put their bottle on top of the drinks fridge. I wouldn’t let them stop, so every fifteen or twenty minutes I’d shout, ‘Drink,’ and they’d come down off the track, grab the bottles as they were going around, then put them back and go back up to the top. I stood there for three hours on the side of the track, shouting, ‘Closer, closer, get closer …’ They were in pieces by the time they finished. Cav got off and said, ‘I’m sorry, Rod, I’m never, never going to do this again. My balls are killing me.’
*
In year one a lot of my consequences were physical things, which over the years I learnt I had to be a bit careful with. Steve Peters provided a few guidelines, but my idea was to punish the riders when they broke the rules, but also to make it hard work. I needed to build the programme’s reputation. I wanted them to feel, ‘Oh my God, this is so hard,’ because I wanted those lads to tell all the young kids below them that this was really difficult. My bottom line was always that if they were not prepared to work this hard, they were not going to make it. I wanted this principle to flow year after year, and the only way of doing it was through hard work.
I’m sure the lads tried to wind me up. And I don’t think they liked me. I really don’t think they liked me but I didn’t care. I was just doing what I knew I wanted and I was going to get what I wanted with this programme. My goal was to produce a crack squadron of bike riders, mentally drilled, trained like the SAS. In cycling terms, they could go in and kill anybody at any moment. I wanted a driven team. But over the year what also happened was that I developed into someone who was better able to lead them.
I was working out a lot of this stuff for myself, but crucially I never felt isolated. Dave Brailsford was always behind me, and Steve Peters was continually supportive. I would take problems to Steve on a regular basis. For example, I would get quite wound up sometimes when we were in a restaurant, sitting around the dinner table; on occasion they would behave in a way that I didn’t think was acceptable – just being lads. I’d have a go at them, and they’d make a bit of a snide remark at me: ‘Bloody hell, who are you?’ – that kind of attitude. I brought this to Steve one day, and he said to me, ‘Rod, you aren’t their father. This is parenting. Actually, if they are like that now at eighteen, you will never change them. Don’t try and change what you can’t change. You’ve got to recognise what is changeable and what isn’t, where you can be an influence and where you can’t.’ He said I was at fault there – I was trying to make a point but I was over the top. I had to recognise that not everybody could be like I wanted them to be and that sometimes I would be wrong.
The most striking example of the timekeeping rule and the cleaning-the-bikes consequence came when we did the Triptyque des Monts et Châteaux, an under-23 race in Belgium. It was our first proper international stage race as a team – I went as manager, because John Herety fell ill – and we got our heads totally kicked in. Thomas Dekker of Holland, who would go on to be a pro with Rabobank and Garmin, won the race. He absolutely floored us. We had a seven-man team, and six out of the seven had crashed by the end of the second day. Bruce Edgar had completely torn himself up; he went down a barbed-wire fence, and it was as if someone had slashed a razor blade over his arms and legs, like when Johnny Hoogerland hit a fence during the 2011 Tour de France. I’d had a busy time with running riders to the hospital and so on, but again it was one of those occasions when I said, ‘Right, guys, we are leaving at nine o’clock in the morning.’ It was a miserable, miserable day, and Mark Cavendish and Christian Varley rolled up at five minutes past nine. Everybody else was sat in the vehicles ready to go, and they just came into the car, saying, ‘Sorry we’re late.’ I said, ‘No worries,’ but I was seething.
We went off and did the race, got back in the cars and pulled up at the hotel; there had been crashes and they were all nearly in tears because they had been raced so hard. I said, ‘Right, before you get out of the car, Mark, Christian, go get your tracksuits on, you’re washing the bikes.’
‘Hey?’
‘Go and get your tracksuits on, be down in ten or fifteen minutes. You’re washing the bikes.’ They got up and went chuntering off. I told the mechanic, Mark Ingham, ‘Get everything out, your hosepipes, buckets, everything, but don’t touch the bikes.’
‘Yeah but …’
‘Mark, don’t touch the bikes.’
I stood there, arms crossed, while they washed every single bike, including all the spare ones. There were people coming over saying, ‘Bloody hell, what are you doing?’ I remember the American team in particular kept coming over and asking what I was up to making the lads wash the bikes. I said, ‘Well, they were late.’ The whole point was: show up on time. The same thing happened at the Tour de Lorraine with Ian Stannard and
Daniel Martin, which was a junior race where I was covering for their usual coach, Darren Tudor. They were late down for the start, so I made them clean all the bikes. Dan wasn’t particularly happy, but I didn’t give a monkey’s what people thought. It was all about the riders sticking to the rules we had drawn up.
Dan* is one rider from Britain who has gone on to a very successful professional career without going down the academy route, but there is a good reason for that. We were very track focused at the time he came to us, and we didn’t have a completely road-orientated programme at the time; there were really no long-term objectives on the road because the programme was still very young. In 2004, when Dan was a junior and won the national road race championships, he was already a massive talent, but he wanted to specialise in that area without doing the track, which was fair enough. For 2005 we didn’t have a full-time road programme, which led to the question of what he was going to do for the two months in the summer when we were away doing track racing. My position was that if he didn’t want to do the track, he couldn’t join the programme. I think Dan and his dad, who is a former top international himself, were both pretty pissed off, and I agree with them that it must have felt like they weren’t getting the support. The problem was that we couldn’t cater for a sixty-kilogram road rider at the time. A year later, when we went to Italy, it might have been different; that year, 2006, we brought in Ben Greenwood, so Dan would have fitted in. If we had been a year more advanced, it might have worked for him. Unfortunately, we just weren’t ready to cater for a young climber.
*
There was one thing that I never slipped up on, right from the beginning. Every week, with every rider, I did a formal one-on-one session. It was thirty minutes in a room with the door shut, just me with the cyclist. It was a set format: ten minutes on what training or racing we’d just done, ten minutes on what we were about to do and then ten minutes on anything else they wanted to talk about. It doesn’t sound a long time to talk about the training and so on, but I was spending so long with them that we’d be constantly reviewing what we did as we went along. Mainly it was a confirmation of what we’d already talked about: ‘Have you had any other thoughts about what we’ve said on this race?’ ‘Actually I think I slipped up there.’ ‘You struggled in that session. Do you have any idea why?’ It was a time when they could go, ‘Listen, this is just too hard, I can’t do this’ – or whatever the problem might be.
It gave them a chance to raise the kind of thing that they might not be up for discussing in front of other people. This had come from Steve. The ten minutes at the end would be, ‘Have you got any other business?’ I always tried to give them the confidence to tell me what was annoying them. The classic one was when Ian Stannard came to me and said, ‘Rod, I know this is small, but Steven Burke is pissing me off. Every morning, every day, he has an egg, and he always leaves the fucking shell on the side in the kitchen. He never cleans it up, or if he does he takes the eggshell but leaves a bit of egg behind. And I always have to clean it up.’
Rather than me having a go at Burkey, saying, ‘Hey, Ian’s told me this …’, w
hat I would do is ask Ian when Steven had eggs. ‘Well, he has eggs every morning, or twice a week for his lunch, always on a Tuesday.’ I’d then make sure to go into the house at two o’clock on a Tuesday. I used to do house visits all the time. I’d make excuses to go round and chat to them, but actually I was checking out the house. So if I was in there, I’d be able to say, ‘Burkey, come here. What’s this rubbish down here? Is this you?’
‘Oh yeah.’
‘Come on, mate, tidy up after yourself.’
So I would invariably go round after them, rather than getting in whichever of the lads it might be and saying, ‘So-and-so said this or that.’ I would make sure I caught them out. So if someone said to me, ‘This guy is out on the piss every single night and he’s keeping me from getting my sleep,’ what I would do is keep going past the house until I caught them. The idea was to make out that I caught them by chance rather than have them think someone had let me know.
I wanted them to be truthful and upfront with me. I would tell them, ‘I’m going to push you guys to the ceiling now. If you crack, there’s no problem; you’re all going to crack at some stage. But the biggest key to it is to tell me when you are cracking, tell me when it’s getting too much. I’m not just going to keep throwing this at you. Our job is to keep making you better, so we’ll perhaps back off, but part of the process is learning about why you have cracked. Did you go to bed early last night? Are you eating OK? Are you sleeping OK?’ You had to teach them how to plan, how to organise themselves for a big performance. It would come down to basic coaching questions, such as: ‘How come you were on your feet all that day when you were meant to be resting?’
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