Project Rainbow

by Rod Ellingworth

  We qualified a team of three riders, which was a bit frustrating, as we’d have liked more, but we chose Ian Stannard, Swifty and Jonny. It was a bit of a surprise to us that Jonny ended up with the medal, because actually Swifty was the one they were riding for. Here, what paid off was the way the riders had been trained to think for themselves during the race, to communicate and to be honest. Swifty’s legs gave out on him in the last lap and a half, so they changed roles on the road. Swifty and Ian are good team riders; if one is going better than the other, they’re happy to ride for whoever has the best chance. They were a well-knit team – it wasn’t a case of all three of them going into the race thinking they were going to win. It was about the team winning, something I had homed in on all the time.

  With a little bit more belief Jonny could probably have won those Worlds. He definitely had the ability – he’d won the scratch race at the European track championships that summer in real style, with absolute grunt and determination. He had massive top-end speed; he wasn’t super-fast like Cav, he just had an ability to go and go and go. Jonny was always a bit wild, though; there was always something going on with him. He constantly caused me grief: going out, pushing the boundaries of the rules, and he would get other riders into trouble because he would want to do something and drag the others along with him. He won the medal, and unfortunately he switched off after that. He turned pro with the CSC team, and it’s impossible to say how his career would have developed if he hadn’t had a near-fatal moped crash in 2009. He has never reached those heights since.

  *

  Our first-ever world under-23 road race championship medal was a breakthrough, but Cav and I were beginning to think of aiming far higher. Cav rode at those world championships in Stuttgart, but in the professional race. In his early years with the academy, he’d set his goals out: one day he wanted to be world road race champion, and to do that he needed to win Milan–San Remo. I don’t remember when we first discussed it, but it became a regular conversation we had. At that point I thought, ‘OK, that’s an ambition.’ All these guys dream big; they all want to be Olympic champion or win the Tour de France, and maybe there’s something in it, but you’ve got to put a lot of work in. The idea of getting Mark a ride in Stuttgart was not that he was going to perform there; we just wanted to have a good look at the other nations, see how they moved, figure out the differences between them and us.

  It was at those Worlds that we started talking about it a lot. I remember standing outside the hotel with him and discussing it: ‘Yeah, you could win the World’s, of course you could.’ We ended up talking about it constantly. My feeling was always that the rainbow jersey is fantastic: you look at it and think, ‘Wow!’ I’d begun talking to the British pros more as well; every year when we did the Tour of Britain with the academy, I always had one senior pro in the team to guide the under-23s. A couple of times it was Roger Hammond. He was great with the lads, absolutely fantastic. I’d be getting him to work with these young guys, and at the same time I’d be talking to him about his experiences so far with British Cycling. I was thinking, ‘Bloody hell, we could do so much more for these pros.’ And Geraint and Cav were good examples of riders who had come through the academy, gone into the Podium programme, turned pro and then ridden the Tour de France in preparation for the Olympic Games in Beijing. By now we knew we could produce professional-quality riders who could fit in with the British Cycling system. The pro Worlds wasn’t my role – my brief was the under-23s – but part of my job was to work with Mark, and this was a goal for him.

  In Stuttgart, I was starting to think about how the other nations build up to the race. The Italians, for example, have a whole myth around what they call la squadra, and I thought to myself we could create something along those lines. One of the key things for me was how the pros rode together as a team. Take the Spanish, for example: do they work for each other or not? What’s the difference between the Worlds and a normal professional race? Can you build a team that actually believes in one person? Quite often you could look at the race on television and see the Belgians thinking, ‘Oh, we’ve got three leaders,’ and the Spanish thinking, ‘Oh, we’ve got five.’ There was always internal conflict within the teams; even though the Italians have this mythical squadra and they build this great atmosphere, they never manage to have one single voice in the team.

  That was eating at me; I believe totally in having unity in a team. What I hate is if you have a team sprinting for the finish, and you end up with one rider finishing third and another ninth. To me that is total failure because it means that one rider hasn’t committed to the other. If you do a proper lead-out, when the person who does the final stint drops the sprinter he should be so empty that he can’t keep sprinting and be able to get fifth or sixth. Sometimes in Mark’s case, particularly when he was at HTC with Mark Renshaw, he would win and his lead-out man would get second or third, but that was because they were so far ahead of the rest. If you win and get second too, great, but if you get second and eighth, that’s failure.

  My feeling was that if you’ve got someone in the team who’s super-fast on the bike, then the road Worlds should be quite easy. There are only so many riders who can win a race in a sprint, so that’s why it would be straightforward: all we would have to do is get the riders behind one person. In our case, that would have to be Mark. Having a proven winner who is confident in his ability and prepared to take on the leadership is an easy way of getting people together, to get belief in the team. It’s much simpler to get a whole bunch of guys thinking, ‘Yes, I can do this, I want to do this,’ when the leader is a sprinter on a suitable course because it’s obvious he has the best chance, compared to when you have several leaders and various options. I didn’t know the road Worlds were going to be in Copenhagen in four years’ time, but even at that point, in 2007, I thought, ‘Bloody hell, if you could pull a squad of riders together riding for the fastest sprinter in the world, it would be an easy win, wouldn’t it?’

  7 : Beijing and Beyond

  Six of the Great Britain squad at the Olympic Games in Beijing had emerged from the academy, which was astonishing. Ed Clancy and Geraint Thomas were part of the gold-medal-winning team-pursuit squad; Steven Burke figured in the individual pursuit, where he took bronze; Cav raced the Madison; and Jonny Bellis and Swifty were in the road race. It had never been a priority to get so many there, but I always knew the riders had the ability. I had just concentrated on getting as many of them to the highest level as I could, rather than fussing about how many would be ready. In British Cycling we talk a lot about focusing on the process, not the outcome, and this was an example.

  We had a conference during 2007 where we began detailed planning for the Games. Staff from every area of the Olympic Podium Plan were called in; we all had to stand up and say how we were either going to be involved in the Olympics or how our work was going to impact on the Games. If you were a Talent Team coach, you would get on your feet and say, ‘I’m going to be super-organised. I’m going to have my budget set well in advance, so that I don’t have to bother Dave Brailsford or any of the Olympic performance team.’ What I said was that I was going to run the academy in Italy, we were going to keep our heads down, we were going to keep developing as we were, and I was going to support Matt Parker – who had taken over as the men’s endurance coach when Simon Jones moved on – in any way that he wanted, helping Steven, Mark, Geraint and anyone else in my orbit. Dave had made the conference a really big thing, and he was dead right: it made us all think, ‘I’ve got to be perfectly organised for the whole year.’

  I had spent a lot of time working with Matt; he had come to see us in Italy a fair few times, and we had built up a very similar working relationship to the one I enjoyed with Darren Tudor, the junior coach. That meant I was looking both below the academy and above it. I would keep an eye on the senior riders who had left the academy and were living in and around Quarrata – Cav, Gee, Steve Cummings. I was working with them regularly
, but Matt was leading their training, so we would communicate constantly. When Steven Burke went the other way, from being at the academy full-time to spending long spells training on the track in Manchester in preparation for the world championships and Olympic Games, I would help Matt with him.

  It’s a matter of sharing knowledge. One of the things I had learnt from working with Burkie was that every night before you leave him you have to say, ‘Burkie, what’s on tomorrow? What do you need? Is everything ready?’ Steven was a very young athlete who wasn’t given to thinking ahead. So if he wasn’t given a nudge, he’d wake up the next day and realise that he hadn’t got a clean skinsuit or something like that. Matt was used to working with adults who had wives at home and maybe kids – riders like Paul Manning or Rob Hayles. They were well organised, and you could have adult conversations with them and be dead upfront with them. Burkie and the others were young lads who were still playing computer games, but they were now competing at the highest senior level.

  By now, people were coming up to us in Italy, saying, ‘God, are you guys ever going to stop winning?’ Our riders were really buzzing; they could obviously sense the build-up to Beijing, and 2008 turned out to be an incredible year. The highlight was the day Peter Kennaugh won the Gran Premio di Capodarco, and Burkie got his medal in the Olympic individual pursuit behind Bradley Wiggins. Pete is another Manxman like Cav, and he’d been a solid talent from when he was an under-16 all the way through the juniors; he’d been junior world champion in the scratch and team pursuit. His win in the scratch was pretty special. He’s a proper little racer, powerful for a small guy, with that real desire to win – he’s the only other rider we’ve had who’s similar to Mark Cavendish, with a real killer instinct, although he’s a different character to Cav, with more endurance. He’s not a sprinter, but he has a real talent for one-day races. There was no better place than Italy for him; if we had been based in Belgium or somewhere like that, it wouldn’t have been quite the same. He handles the heat really well, climbs superbly, and it was obvious that one day he would ride the Tour and be successful. The GB riders in Beijing were on the track in the morning before Capodarco started. It’s flat for the first sixty or seventy kilometres, so early on in the race I was giving them updates on how Burkie was doing. I was on the phone to one of the staff in Beijing, and I was radioing what I heard through to the riders – ‘Burkie’s two seconds up,’ and so on – and then Pete went and won in the afternoon, the biggest one-day victory in all our time in Italy.

  Those few weeks through July and August were a golden period, although Beijing ended up being very frustrating for Cav. He was really starting to perform on the road, winning his first stages in the Tour de France – the first one at Châteauroux was a big moment, you could see it on his face. He’s always held that stage quite dear since then. He had ended up winning a total of four stages, in spite of pulling out early for the Games. Speculation about the British professional team was just starting in the background, and winning the world road race championship suddenly looked possible because Cav was looking like the fastest sprinter in the world.

  That momentum built into the Beijing Olympics. Cav had been really keen to finish the Tour but he was also fully committed to the Madison after taking the world championship in March with Bradley Wiggins. That win in Manchester was a dominant one, but Beijing turned out to be a trying time. They started as favourites, but we didn’t know that Bradley had been really unwell in the build-up, before they left Britain for China. But Brad being Brad, he had ridden the individual pursuit and got his gold medal, backed with a second gold in the team pursuit, and I think after that he went, ‘Phew,’ and lost his focus. The day after the team pursuit they had the Madison, and I remember Cav ringing me that night and saying, ‘Brad’s still not in’ – because obviously he’d got all the press stuff and doping control and television and everything. Cav just asked me, ‘Am I wasting my time?’

  Cav knew, even before he got on the bike, that Bradley was wasted. Brad had been the worst one of the four when they took the gold in the team pursuit. He was swinging in that race, and Cav was thinking, ‘What am I doing here? I’ve pulled out of the Tour de France for nothing.’ At the time, I don’t think anybody in British Cycling realised how big the Tour was, because our world was the Olympic Games, but that Tour could have made a big difference in the career of a young rider who could potentially have won the green jersey. I was with Mark on that; I didn’t side with him but I was with him – there’s a difference. I worked for British Cycling but I understood what he was talking about. Cav said that as soon as they got in the race, it was obvious that Brad was going nowhere. You can’t bluff in a Madison; you need to be physically perfect, as well as highly skilled, so they were never on the pace from the word go.

  Cav was really unhappy; his view was that he hadn’t pulled out of the Tour de France for this, and I empathised with him a little bit. I think there were a few people who were critical of Mark and how he behaved afterwards, but he’d just pulled out of the biggest bike race in the world. With hindsight, there was a lot of evidence to say they should have changed the team, but unfortunately from a British Cycling point of view, the Madison was always on the back burner. I tended to see it the other way; I’d be thinking, ‘We’ve got to keep driving this on,’ and so I was quite frustrated too. Dave had asked me if I wanted to be there for the Madison, but I had felt that my place was in Italy with the academy lads. After the Madison disaster Cav went through a hell of a hard time. He became very anti-British Cycling, and I don’t think he’s ever bought back into them as wholeheartedly as he had before.

  *

  I was beginning to think about moving on. I had done all I could in terms of turning the academy into a going concern. One objective had always been that I would build it up to a point where it could carry on running after I left. One of the things I wanted to look at next was the professional cycling world. During the Tour, I had had an invitation from Bob Stapleton at Columbia-High Road to go and visit Mark, so I had a good couple of days there seeing how it all functioned. I’d never been within a working team on the Tour before. It was an eye-opener; the enormous scale of it and the restrictions around getting anywhere near the race were the most surprising things. I was beginning to get ideas about how things could be done in a professional team. For example, I spent the day walking around the different teams at the start of the time trial, seeing how they were doing their warm-ups. I thought it looked pretty poor and could be done so much better. The riders’ environment could be improved: at Columbia, they had Kim Kirchen in the yellow jersey, but during the warm-up for the time trial even Bob was going over into the pit and talking to the riders. At British Cycling we made the pit zone a performance area; the only people allowed in were the riders, the carer and the coach. The overall manager of the team – which was quite often Doug Dailey – would stand on the edge of the pit. Even riders who had finished their event would have to clear out as quickly as they could, not sit there with their head in their hands, even if they were super-disappointed, because all the riders were coming in and trying to stay in the zone.

  At the Tour, Bob Stapleton offered me a job working with Columbia, either on the coaching staff or working with young riders. They were looking at having a proper development team, and he was keen to base it in Lucca, in Italy, which was only down the road from where we were living anyway. I felt it was a brilliant opportunity, but Dave Brailsford got wind of it while he was in Beijing. He called me on the morning of the Olympic women’s road race – the first cycling event of the whole Games – and I remember thinking, ‘Bloody hell, poor old Dave doesn’t need to be dealing with this just before it really kicks off.’ He said to me, ‘Whatever you do, just wait till I get home before you make any decisions.’

  The night after he flew back from the Games, Dave agreed to meet me in Ilkeston. I said, ‘I’ve been offered a job, and you know I want to move on. I want to do something different.’ It was then
that Dave showed me a letter from Sky saying that they would sponsor a professional team for 2010. He said, ‘Listen, this team’s on, and I want you to stay and help me do it. Are you up for that?’ I didn’t hesitate. We agreed there and then. Dave had been talking about it for a while, and I think he had always had that as a goal. In fact, when you read the original document by Peter Keen setting out his aims for the World Class Performance Plan, it’s in there: Britain would be the world’s number-one cycling nation in 2012, and to do that you’d have to have a road programme and a team. I think even Peter Keen realised that the most important part of world cycling, in terms of public interest, media and money, is road racing, far more so than all the others – BMX, mountain bike, track, cycle-cross – put together.

  Dave loves road cycling; it’s always been a passion of his, and the team is what he wanted to do – he’d begun talking to the press about it as early as 2003. But it was only from summer 2008 that he was able to say to people that he had the commitment from Sky; quite smartly, Dave held back and made sure he’d got them signed up before he started to ask people like me if they would commit to it. He was happy for me to move on from the academy; I think they felt that in Max Sciandri they’d found someone who could take over, and Max was pushing to do that – I think he thought he could do a better job than I did in running it.

  I was massively disappointed that I was never really involved in deciding who took over. We’d built something pretty big, but I was told to stay out of it. Once I did leave, I wasn’t given the opportunity to consult on it or help mould it. Max didn’t want anything to do with me; he said he didn’t want me living in the town because the lads would keep turning to me. That was a massive gut-wrencher. At the time, Dave and Shane Sutton backed him, so I had no option but to leave Italy at the close of the 2008 season. I packed up, went home and took on a new role: I became part of the senior endurance track team, working alongside Matt Parker. Matt was focused on the team pursuit, in which the guys had smashed the world record on the way to gold in Beijing; my brief was to look after the distance races, where we had taken only a bronze in China, and after the nightmare with Cav and Brad, there was to be a massive drive on the Madison.