‘I know I’m letting you down, and please don’t not believe in me. I’m so much better than this.’
Those are the moments when you could be a bit sharp: ‘Fucking hell, what is wrong with you? Get on with it.’ But you could sense there was something more going on in there, so I went through it with him. I didn’t care that the other riders had gone off; I just took him through it: ‘That’s fine. What’s going to make you a better bike rider? What do you have to do?’
He sat there looking at me. ‘Well, I’ve got to get fitter.’
‘Yeah, you have. How do you get fitter?’
‘Well, I’ve got to ride my bike more.’
‘Exactly. What are we doing now?’
‘I’m riding my bike.’
‘Perfect. What’s expected of you today is for you to do this five-hour ride. Was there a set speed? Did we ever say you’ve got to do that distance in a certain time? No. Come on, we’ll just get on with it. You’ll get there.’
He just went, ‘Oh my God,’ and I said, ‘Come on, get back on the bike. I’ll get you behind the car, and from there it’s a lot easier to get home.’ He was absolutely fine, but I would think that in the past at times like that he must have always had people shout at him.
There were times when I did raise my voice, though. I used to do a track session called ‘Go Till You Blow’. They were all on the same gear – eighty-eight inches – which is quite a low gear for the track, and I would be on the motorbike. I would tell them, ‘This motorbike is going to go anywhere on the track, and the pace is going to build.’ I’d start at forty kilometres an hour, with the riders in a line behind the bike, and gradually go faster and faster until they were absolutely flat out; at the end it was just a matter of who survived. Every single track session I did would end – in theory – with half an hour of that. Ed Clancy survived every single session and would always be on his own at the end. I don’t think I ever got to half an hour; I’d always hit twenty or twenty-three minutes and stop, by which time the only one left behind the motorbike would be Ed, because he had the pure leg speed needed for it.
The problem with riding behind the motorbike is what we call ‘the damage’. That’s when a rider swings out of the line because he has cracked, and the rider behind him has got to close the gap. It may be only a bike length and a half or two perhaps, but to close even two lengths you’ve got to go several kilometres per hour faster, which isn’t easy if you’re going at sixty or sixty-two kilometres an hour and are close to your physical limit. Everyone thought it was fun. Some of the lads would be on their knees, but they needed to be on the edge. When they were racing – the final kilometres of the world Madison championship, for example – they would have to be in control and know what they were doing, even when they were at their physical limit. So on the motorbike I would try to mimic the moves that happen unexpectedly in the peloton on the track. Sometimes as you’re coming around the banking the back of the string of riders just flicks up, so I used to take them all over the track: up and down, straight up to the top of the banking, ride up there for a couple of laps, then belt down as if it was a points race or a Madison. We ended up with loads of people coming and watching the session – they would all want to know who was going to last the longest.
In the first weeks Cav couldn’t even last ten minutes. The riders always crack when they swing up from behind the bike and try to get on the back of the string; you see them sprinting flat out and all of a sudden they’re gone. The first time Cav got dropped, he ended up sat there in the middle of the track. It was one of the few times I’ve shouted at him, and it was because I was on the motorbike and couldn’t be heard otherwise. I yelled, ‘Get back on your bike, get back on your bike!’ And back on he got. We got the riders off the track, and I spoke to him on his own: ‘Mark, what’s wrong with you? Why couldn’t you hang on?’
‘I’m tired. The others are better than me. They’re fitter than me.’
‘Exactly. Well, how are you going to get better?’
‘I’ve got to keep riding my bike.’
‘Right. Are you going to get better sat on your fat arse down there?’
‘No.’
‘Right. What I want to see, even if you never manage it, whenever that motorbike comes past you try and make it onto the back of the line every single time, because that’s pedalling your bike.’
I told them all that, and I’d try to help them when we did ‘Go Till You Blow’. If there was someone who got dropped quite early, I’d see them half a lap ahead and I’d drop right down onto the black line at the bottom of the track and hold my speed, and at least give them every opportunity to get on the back of the string. If they could get another two laps out of it, that was better than nothing. If a rider was going round the top of the track and was absolutely knackered and needed to take five or six laps out, that was fine, but I wanted to see the effort every time. So if Mark was trying to get to the front each time the motorbike came past, I would give him a good pat on the back afterwards: ‘Well done, you bloody trained, you nearly made it that time, nearly got on the back. You stayed in two minutes longer. Well done, brilliant.’ It was something that Simon Jones taught me, something I totally believe in and still preach to this day: never praise the result; praise the effort.
There were little episodes like this early on with Mark, but all of a sudden he started winning bike races in spite of his lack of fitness. When he won that stage in the Girvan Three-Day that was an eye-opener, and the way he won it made it a big moment for the academy: our first win on the road. It’s one of the ways in which he is special: he is a race winner, a rider who can be unfit but still win. When some riders are knackered, they can’t even get out of the saddle. Mark is one of the few who are just naturally fast at the end of races, so even if he is absolutely on his knees, he can bring it home. Some people think that natural-born sprinters don’t have to try too hard and that explains why they’ve got all that speed left at the end of the race, but it’s not that. If you put Mark in a race, it’s a different kettle of fish from training; he’ll always get more out of himself racing. He’s always been like that – maybe 15 per cent better when he competes. It’s partly that he simply enjoys racing. He loves the environment, and if you’re happy doing something, you get more out of yourself. I don’t think he particularly liked training early on, but he doesn’t mind it now, as long as it’s well structured.
Mark is the best athlete I’ve ever seen when it comes to turning things around, when you compare how he trains to how he races. Geraint Thomas is just very consistent – good at training, good at racing. Ed Clancy is pretty similar but he would struggle with a lot of the training we did at the academy. That wasn’t down to him: it could have been because I didn’t have a full understanding of what a sprint athlete was going through. Steven Burke would much rather train than race, and he’d be much better at training than at racing. But one thing that’s common to all of the riders who have gone through the academy and actually made something of their cycling – not just Cav and Ed, but Andy Tennant, Burkie, other guys – is that I’ve never had to push them forward. I’ve only ever had to hold them back to stop them doing too much. If you say, ‘Do four hours,’ they’ll go and do five; if you say, ‘Do three efforts,’ they’ll do four. You never ask them to do five efforts and find they’ve only done two, unless there is something wrong with them. You never have to get them out of bed – they’re all pretty good at getting themselves going.
*
Things really started to move forward for us in late 2004, when Geraint Thomas joined the academy. The first time I’d seen him was at the youth national track championships in Manchester in 2002 or 2003. I was with my old teammate Tim Buckle, who was working as a Talent Team coach at the time. He said to me, ‘Look at this kid, look how aerodynamic he is, look how small he makes himself across the front.’ I remember looking at him and thinking, ‘Bloody hell, he looks good as a pursuiter.’ Through 2004 Geraint began getting invo
lved quite a lot, even though he was still a junior; he was good enough already to race with us at the European championships, he’d won the scratch race at the world junior championships and he was riding above his category in the under-23 races in the UK. We all knew this guy was a real talent. He was the first British rider to win the junior Paris–Roubaix, although Ian Stannard still thinks he could have beaten him. They were together at the end of the race, but Ian went straight on at the point where they had to turn right into the velodrome, where the race finishes; Gee went right and won. They still argue about it to this day. Everyone winds Ian up, saying, ‘Oh, you went the wrong way’; and everyone winds Gee up, saying, ‘You wouldn’t have won if Ian hadn’t taken the wrong turning …’
Gee joined in October 2004 as a junior, the first one of the 2005 intake, and that took the academy up another level because all of a sudden we had added another very high-quality bike rider. Everything seemed to flow better, and that winter it all progressed. We committed to riding a lot of the amateur six-day races in Europe, and the lads learnt so much there. I used to go on my own with Cav and Gee and stand in the centre of the track with a spanner, a pair of wheels and a set of Allen keys. Most of the amateur lads would do their race, which would be before the pro six, stay up and watch the pros, then get up at eleven or twelve in the morning and race again. There was one day in Bremen when it was raining. Geraint and Cav had ridden three hours in the morning, and when they got in they met a couple of Belgian guys who had just got up. The Belgians asked why our lads were out on their bikes. I just said, ‘They can’t bloody lie in bed all day.’ We had a good routine: ride in the morning, lunch, talk about the racing, race in the afternoon, dinner. After that they’d ride to the race from where we were staying with their lights on. They used spoked wheels because it was about them putting in the hard graft and learning how to race, not just winning. We’d watch an hour of the pro racing, then go home. That week Cav and Geraint won every single night, in spite of two massive falls.
A turning point for the academy came that winter, when we invested in going to Australia for two months ahead of the 2005 world track championships in Los Angeles. We went down to Cronulla, south of Sydney, and this is where the lads put in a lot of work. They really grafted. There were five of them: Ed Clancy, Matt Brammeier, Tom White, Geraint Thomas and Mark Cavendish, and we also had Matt Crampton, the sprinter, with us. This was where the academy really took on a life of its own. I didn’t have to discipline these lads any more; they were in the rhythm, they could see that it was working. When we were doing all the six-days, they had started to feel good about it, and at the track World Cup in Sydney they were getting medals. They could see they were starting to get results.
On some days in Australia they were doing 260 kilometres: for example, they might do three or four hours in the morning, ride to the track, which took an hour or so, do a track session and then ride home; on other days they would do a little spin going to the track, train there, ride home, then ride a criterium in the evening, riding to and from the race, which might be half an hour or forty minutes. They were on their bikes all the time. It was decent weather, and they were out on their bikes at six o’clock in the morning. There was healthy food and plenty of climbs. We had days out as well, because they were there a long time. They were young lads and they needed to get more out of it than just the racing, so we went round Sydney harbour and over to Bondi beach.
It wasn’t all good times. We were transferring from Cronulla to the hotel for the World Cup in Sydney, and the lads were going to ride down – it might have been thirty-five or forty kilometres. I’d been pretty specific about not leaving anything behind, because I didn’t want to have to come back to the hotel in Cronulla. I left twenty minutes or so after them, stopped at a petrol station and was just getting in the car when Matt Brammeier called: ‘Rod, ever so sorry, I’ve left my racing licence in the drawer of my hotel room.’ ‘You’re bloody joking, Matt.’ I spun the car round, went back and got his licence. I was ten minutes into the journey back when Matt rang again. I nearly didn’t answer it – my first thought was, ‘Sod them, they’ll just have to do without whatever else they’ve left.’ I picked up the phone and said, ‘What the bloody hell have you forgotten now?’ He was in a total panic: ‘Rod, Geraint’s on the floor.’
I hadn’t known Geraint that long, but what I did know about him was that he didn’t stay on the floor just because he had a big crash. He had crashed in every single six-day he had ridden with me; there was a massive one in Ghent when he was getting back onto the string of riders after lapping the field, and at the top of the track someone flipped up and shoved him into the barrier. He fell right at my feet – didn’t even hit the banking, just straight onto the concrete, head first. I stood looking at him fiddling with his bike, and he was on the floor wheezing because he’d winded himself so badly. But he got back up, carried on and rode the race. So with Geraint I knew that something must be really wrong if he was still lying on the floor. I asked Matt: ‘Have you called the ambulance? Calm the lads down, stay where you are, make sure the road is safe.’ And as I turned up they were just putting Geraint in the back of the ambulance.
They had been riding two by two. Gee was in the third couple, with Matt Crampton and Ed at the front. Ed felt really bad about what happened, but it was just a bit of bad luck: there was a massive steel spring lying on the hard shoulder of the dual carriageway where they were riding. It stood half a metre high but it was wound up – and they hadn’t seen it. At the last minute Ed had shouted, ‘On your left.’ Tom White, who was second in line, hit it, and up it went and back down into Gee’s wheel. It chopped his fork straight off, and of course Gee went straight down and hit his bloody chest. We hadn’t cut down the fork extension on his new bike – we’d said, ‘Just leave this for a little while’, as it was only about one centimetre high – but he got that straight into his chest and it ruptured his spleen. The one thing that I remember Geraint telling me as he got into the ambulance was, ‘I feel like I need to piss, or I’m about to,’ and straight away I knew something wasn’t right.
It was chaos, but fortunately Shane Sutton was over there managing Great Britain at the World Cup, so he went directly to the hospital. It was pretty tense getting hold of Geraint’s parents; he was in intensive care and he was pretty bad. And just to make it worse, Cav flooded the hotel. It had rained on them one day out on the road, and he decided to try and dry his shoes with a hairdryer. He left the hairdryer on with the shoes, but it set off the fire sprinklers – not just in the room, but the whole floor. The hotel staff were going bonkers. While this was going on, we were shuttling back and forwards to the hospital, and Geraint’s family were coming over. Fortunately, he was fine, although he ended up with a massive scar. The poor guy was in hospital for ages, so the lads went to visit him every other day, taking him things. It was a really testing time for them, but you could see the bond they’d built up.
When Geraint did get out of hospital, we didn’t send him home; he stayed with us and would come to help me every day with the coaching. He had actually been selected to ride the world Madison championship in Los Angeles with Rob Hayles; the reserve was Mark Cavendish, so Cav got the ride, but Gee flew to California with them so that he could take in the whole experience. I wasn’t in LA because I came back with the others to Manchester, but that world championship was the big breakthrough: Cav and Rob won the Madison, Cav finished fourth in the scratch, and Ed Clancy rode in the team pursuit, only the qualifying round, but they won the gold. That was the moment when senior members of British Cycling started to say, ‘Crikey, this is working, this is quite interesting … what work have you done?’ I think Simon Jones had seen the progression over time, but Ed riding so well in that team pursuit was critical because this had always been the key discipline for Great Britain, and here was the evidence that we could produce riders who could earn their place and perform on the day. It had been an incredibly quick progression. Things had sud
denly started to gel, for no one particular reason. The team started racing well together, the staff started working well together, the riders started to understand what we were trying to do, and it was as simple as that. That was when the whole academy idea came of age.
Those world titles gave all the lads more belief. The mindset became, ‘Right, let’s just get stuck into a really good year.’ We started going to stage races abroad and winning: Geraint won the Flèche du Sud; Ed won a stage in the Tour of Berlin in fantastic style on his own, clipping off a group of six riders; Cav landed the points jersey in Berlin and was winning races at home willy-nilly. About then I began thinking that the only other person I had seen at that level, winning races by lengths from the rest, was Robbie McEwen, who had been a prolific stage winner at both the Tour de France and the Giro d’Italia, and had taken the green jersey in the Tour. I still stand by what I thought then: if you’re going to be fast as a pro, you’ve got to be winning by five or six lengths as an amateur; if you’re just throwing your bike at the line and nipping in by an inch, you’re not going to be quick enough to beat the very best guys.
In 2005 the academy was unique, because we didn’t have a whole new cohort of riders – Geraint was the only new recruit – and so we didn’t have to start from scratch. It wasn’t that the funding was cut; the riders weren’t there. But they were about to start coming through. During the first year I had written up a junior programme to link in with the academy, because the kids who were coming through weren’t good enough. They didn’t have the skills. What they were doing was too individual – no group sessions, big weekends or school holidays together. So British Cycling got a Welsh coach, Darren Tudor, in to do the job. We had a good working relationship, and everything he did was based around what the academy did. At half-terms he would have what was called the academy week, because it was all about preparing them to come up to the next level. It was basically the same regime: lots of split days, with a bit of education during the middle of the day. A lot of people think that the academy was where the riders cut their teeth, but it wasn’t; it was one of the stepping stones. The junior programme was a big part of it, but so was the under-16 Talent Team programme: it was all feeding off what we were doing at the top. That in turn meant that the quality of the riders coming to me at the academy was even better.
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