Project Rainbow

by Rod Ellingworth

  ‘Oh, I had to go out shopping.’

  ‘Why didn’t you do that the other day?’

  To take one example with Cav, one day we were down at the track in Newcastle-under-Lyme, in Staffordshire, doing our European track championships preparation. Cav was absolutely useless. He couldn’t even keep up with the other riders in a team pursuit. From the start, the riders had to keep a diary with a simple scoring system. On the timetable, the date would be at the top, but I’d also have ‘hard day’, ‘moderate day’ or ‘easy day’. They would mark themselves against that day out of five: if I put a hard day and then it was exactly what they expected, it would be a three; if it was easier than they expected, they’d write a two, or very easy they would write a one; if it was harder than they expected they would write a four, and if it was super-hard they would write a five. If I’d put ‘easy day’ because it was a two-hour recovery ride, you’d expect them all to put three, but some days some of them would say it was a one because they could have done a bit more. A surprising pattern started: they’d constantly put fours and fives because their days were harder than they expected.

  I think a lot of people believed I just leathered them, like the Australian system – the stronger ones rise to the top. It wasn’t like that at all. If someone said to me, ‘I’m tired, I can’t do this session,’ I never raised my voice. I never made it an issue. I always went back to the drawing board and asked why. It was a matter of working out with them how they could get better. I was super-hard on them, super-strict on them, disciplined them, but I think I also put my arm around them at the right times. This time, we couldn’t find out why Cav was tired, why he wasn’t performing, so I sat down with him and said, ‘Right, Cav, what we’re going to do is go through every single day for the last month. We’ll look at what you did, and we’re going to talk about how hard that day was.’

  It turned out that out of thirty days he’d done twenty-one days of recovery. He had been sick at the beginning of the period and had hit the training too hard for a while. You could see that his marks were too high for the type of effort he was doing. As a result, he had ended up taking a load of recovery days. He’d made loads of excuses up: ‘I’m tired’, ‘My girlfriend had been over that day, so I didn’t go out properly the next day’ – excuse after excuse. He was completely different once he saw how many days of training he had done simply by going through his diary. So there was no point in me thumping away at him.

  The training diary was key to a problem we had with Ed Clancy: he had been ill, and he looked anaemic. Fortunately, the riders had to write down what they ate every day. Ed had it all on paper, so I went back for a month and we had a good look. I wrote out across the top of a piece of paper all the food I thought he should be eating: milk, cereal, potatoes, carrots, and so on. I put those big bits of paper on the floor and went, ‘Right, cereal,’ and put a mark where he’d eaten cereal; milk, tick, potato, tick, pasta, tick, pasta sauce, tick, beans, tick … I kept a tally.

  It was dead simple: there were no vegetables, no salad, no tomatoes, no tuna, no fish, a little bit of chicken. It was all cereal, milk, pasta with pesto sauce, beans and bread. Ed didn’t know how to eat properly. It was no wonder this guy was sick. Your first thought is, ‘Bloody hell,’ but it’s only like young people going to university. The solution we came up with was to get Nigel Mitchell, the nutritionist at the English Institute of Sport, involved in what they were doing. Nigel would go shopping with them, teach them what to buy, explain why you needed it and how you cooked it, and we developed menus; they would be on the wall in the kitchen. Then we looked at cleaning – different-coloured cloths for this, that and the other – and that also went up on the wall. It was quite well structured in that sense, but it’s only natural that young lads want to take short cuts.

  Later, we moved to a roster which the lads worked out for themselves. You had one cook and one helper, and the next day the helper would be the cook and he’d have a helper. That helped a lot because what they did was have two or three things that they would cook, which Nigel would do with them. He would make sure that these meals included a nice variety of ingredients. They got really good at cooking those particular things, so it made their shopping easy.

  They knew it would take them exactly an hour to prepare, and a lot of times I’d pop around and the atmosphere around the dinner table was bloody good. The lads would be starving after training all day; they’d be hanging around the house, while the two guys were in the kitchen working flat out at getting the food ready. So the other lads would be walking past the kitchen, someone else would be watching a film and looking over his shoulder, and the atmosphere was always bloody good. When they were away on a stage race, I always encouraged that. To me that was a part of the day when you learnt about the history of the sport. They would want to talk about how it was back in those days – ‘What about Bernard Hinault?’ ‘Well, he did so-and-so …’ I used to make a big effort never to be too busy to come down to dinner and make sure I spent that time with them.

  I had all sorts of rules and regulations but my principle was this: ‘Once you clock out of here at night, you go and do whatever you want, but I’ll expect you here at seven thirty in the morning. If you’re pissed or simply can’t do the training session, you’ll go home. If you carry on in that way, you’ll be kicked off the programme.’ It simply boiled down to this: ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I want to be a professional bike rider. I want to win the Olympic Games.’

  ‘Right, let’s get you back down the track.’

  I never, ever got heavy with them over going out; I just used to make it quite clear what was at stake. There was an example once when Geraint Thomas and some others went out for his birthday. The next day I took a call from Mark Cavendish, saying, ‘Rod, I couldn’t sleep last night. They all went out on the piss and came in and woke me up. I don’t mind them coming in late, but I mind them waking me up.’

  ‘Cav, I agree with you 100 per cent. We’ll do something about it.’

  Gee was supposed to be riding the Five Valleys road race, but I pulled them all out of it. It was a bit extreme, but I thought I’d have to make the consequence a hard one. It hit Gee because he was responsible, and it was the biggest race in his home area, South Wales.

  They were all young lads wanting to get out and about. There were plenty of issues, and I’m pretty sure there were a lot more than I knew about. We had all sorts. There were times when I walked into the houses by the front door, and girls would go out by the back one. We used to have a rule about this, because both Cav and Matt Brammeier had girlfriends, quite long-standing ones; the rule was they weren’t allowed to stay in the house – at the end of the day the place was paid for with our money, and it wasn’t fair on the other lads. If they wanted to go and spend the night in a hotel, but still be at the track to train the next morning, that was fine. That eventually got quite difficult for them, so we ended up having a rule that they could stay two nights a month or something.

  Policing that wasn’t simple, but I used to go round to the houses all the time. Jane and I would go for an evening out in Manchester, and she would curse at me. It would be midnight or thereabouts, and we’d drive past the houses to have a look. I’d sit outside, get out of the car and listen to see if I could hear any music. If I did, I wouldn’t say anything there and then. I’d just go to work in the morning, see who was there, and in the course of the conversation say, ‘Did you have a good sleep last night?’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, Rod, really good.’

  ‘Oh, what time did you go to bed?’

  ‘Ten o’clock.’

  ‘Lying bastard – no, you didn’t.’

  And they would be saying, ‘How do you know?’ And I’d never tell them.

  Or I’d see some of them walking down the street late at night, and I’d just keep driving. ‘Did you have a good night last night?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘Watche
d a film.’

  ‘What time did you go to bed?’

  ‘Ten o’clock.’

  ‘No, you didn’t, you lying bastard.’

  I think it helped that early on they could feel themselves progressing as bike riders, even if they weren’t doing it on the big stage yet. They were loving it. But I didn’t care whether or not they were OK with it. These were the rules; this was what we were doing.

  About six or seven years after the event, I learnt that Cav’s girlfriend at the time, Melissa, had come over from the Isle of Man once, and I had had absolutely no idea. I came into the house he, Ed and Bruce shared one Sunday.

  ‘Hey, guys, how are you doing?’

  Ed was watching Formula One, and there were about twenty laps to go.

  ‘Brilliant, can I have a look?’

  So I sat down watching the Formula One with the lads, talking to Ed about it. Afterwards it was, ‘All right, lads, see you tomorrow at training. Bye.’ And unknown to me, Melissa had been in the cupboard all that time. I had knocked on the door, and they had gone, ‘Shit, get in the cupboard.’ She was there for maybe an hour, and they didn’t say a thing.

  I’m sure there was plenty else that went on that I still don’t know about.

  * Daniel Martin has a British father and Irish mother, and currently races under an Irish licence.

  5 : The Guinea Pigs Come of Age

  I always say that when Cav joined the academy he had his tracksuit tucked into his socks. I can’t remember whether or not that was actually the case, but that was the kind of character he was back then. He turned up at the Manchester velodrome in his scally car at the start of January 2004, and drove round the car park at high speed. I was thinking, ‘Who the hell is that? What sort of car is that?’ He gets quite embarrassed by it now because I think he really thought it was cool at the time, but it was dropping to pieces: the tyres were bald and it had a sticker saying ‘007 Goldfinger’ across the top of the windscreen. It was fantastic – ‘Cav-tastic’, we called it. I was thinking, ‘Oh my God, who is this?’ and he got out in his tracksuit. You couldn’t make it up.

  I’d seen Mark race at the national track championships in 2003, when he was still a junior but racing with the seniors. Chris Newton knocked James Taylor off in the points race, James went up the track and Cav went down under him and hit him coming out of turn two; he went straight over the handlebars. I thought, ‘He’s going to be in trouble,’ but he got up and tried to carry on racing. My next thought was, ‘Good on him – he could have stopped there.’ He was this fat little barrel on a yellow Dolan bike with sprinter bars. I remember wondering, ‘What is he trying to be – a sprinter or an endurance rider?’ I asked Marshall Thomas, who was the national junior coach at the time, about him; Marshall felt he didn’t have the numbers; in other words, he didn’t show the power readings they liked to see when he did tests on the rig. ‘Yeah, he wins some races at home but he’ll get to international level and it won’t be enough.’

  To select the riders for the academy in the first year we did a matrix: we listed the riders’ qualities, such as their ability to listen, ability to win races, were they fast, were they technically good or not, were they practically good enough, were they organised. Obviously, a lot of it was quite subjective; I did it together with John Herety and Simon Lillistone, and we weighted the scores to reflect the fact that I thought winning bike races was the most important quality. If they can’t win races at the level they can race at, you can’t expect them to win anything else, so that ability should be weighted fairly high. Ed Clancy came out on top, but Cav was only a point or so behind him – the total added up to something like forty points – and their achievements since then would indicate that we got it pretty much right.

  At the time I never thought, ‘Oh yeah, Mark Cavendish has got speed like I’ve never seen before,’ but what caught my attention was what he said. One of the first things he told me was, ‘I never got selected for the world junior championship and I would have pissed it.’ You look back now and you think, ‘God, yes, he probably would have done.’ He wanted to win races, but the main thing he kept saying was, ‘I am not going to let you down. I really want to do this, but if I don’t get selected I’m going to Belgium anyway.’ It wasn’t said arrogantly and it was one of the things that made me think it was worth having this lad on the programme. His enthusiasm has never dropped in all the time I’ve known him. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him lacking in desire. He’s always pretty enthusiastic about his bike racing, and he was as opinionated in 2003 as he is now. He holds himself quite highly in his opinions. He’s not always right, but my feeling was, ‘Bloody hell, this guy is really, really streetwise.’

  I started working with the riders and advising them in November–December 2003, and Cav wasn’t doing anything on his bike at that stage. He’d had his tonsils out and he was in terrible shape. He was still working at the bank on the Isle of Man; that was one thing that made him stand out from the others – you could tell he’d actually had to go to work. It just made him a little bit different, more grown-up perhaps. He knew his way around, knew how to work people, how to keep people on side, but he was constantly fannying around, particularly with Matt Brammeier. I don’t think either of them had as bad an upbringing as they both like to make out. Mark was a pretty bright guy at school. He’s not stupid, and that was quite evident early on. I deliberately split them up when we allocated the houses because there was no way we could have those two living together. I constantly had to keep my eye on them.

  Cav’s parents were divorced. I think that there had been issues with his dad, and perhaps Cav was ready to look for a father figure, someone to lead him quite strongly. Geraint Thomas was completely different – he just wanted a coach, somebody to advise him. Ed Clancy was different in another way: he fought against the discipline. You could see in his face that he didn’t like it. I don’t think Ed enjoyed the academy to start with because socially he wasn’t really in with the group. Matt Brammeier and Cav had such strong personalities that they led everything, and the way they did that was to take the piss out of everybody. Ed was quite a target at first, but fair play to him, over time he let his legs do the talking.

  Early on in the academy timetable I was testing the guys. We would do a regular session out on the road – four or five hours during the week around Manchester. We’d head out southwards towards the Peak District, towards Whaley Bridge, over the climbs round that way and then over to the Leek area. In every hour’s riding, we’d do fifteen to twenty minutes of through and off, when the riders would be constantly rotating in a line, each doing a few seconds at the front before letting the next one past. It wouldn’t matter where they were when they had to start their fifteen minutes of through and off – in the middle of a town, starting a 20 per cent descent or 20 per cent climb. They would start anyway.

  The point was that this wasn’t a physical training day; we were working on skills. One day they might end up in a team which had the yellow jersey in a stage race and they would have to be riding at the front to defend it. That would mean riding through and off going through a town, shouting out when you’re at the front to indicate the dangers – ‘Watch the lights’, ‘Car on the left’. If you’re riding hard on a descent, you’ve got to look after your teammates, and it’s the same if you’re on a climb – in that case the question is how fast do you go to avoid putting them into the red. I used to explore all the muddiest lanes for them because they would need technical riding. I used to find as many little lanes and shitty little roads as I could. During that year Paul Manning came out with the lads. Simon Jones was in the car with me, and we were going down these lanes, with the riders going through and off. Paul came back to the car and said, ‘Rod, we just can’t do it along here.’ I said, ‘No, Paul, you’ve missed the point. This is just about them: if they are slip-sliding round little corners with gravel in the middle that’s fine, because they’ve got to shout those dangers back down the line.’ There i
s no better way of doing it than learning like that.

  One day we’d come out to the south of Manchester. We’d done a loop, then went up Long Hill towards Buxton and turned right down into Goyt Valley. Mark went out of the back of the group on Goyt Valley, which is about a five-and-a-half-kilometre climb. He was in pieces; he hit a stone and both hands came off his handlebars, but he just managed to grab hold before he went down, while the other lads just tootled over the top. This was happening an hour and a half into five hours’ riding, and he was already shot – snot all over his face, cheeks all big and red. I thought, ‘My God, this guy is really going to struggle.’

  So we were near Leek, the roads going constantly up and down, and then we hit Gun Hill, and straight away he was off the back of the group. I drove around him and watched the others, who all split up because the climb is quite steep. They popped over, and I pulled up to wait just over the crest of the hill. I was there for what seemed like ages, and all of a sudden I saw him zigzagging up the hill. When Cav is suffering, he climbs with his head over the front of the bike; he was really labouring. He got to the back of the car, and I thought, ‘What is he doing? He needs to come around the car,’ and the next thing he had disappeared. There he was, his bike on the floor, his head in his hands – he was crying, properly crying.

  ‘Bloody hell, Mark, are you OK?’