Project Rainbow

by Rod Ellingworth

  I thought, ‘Shit’, and raced to the hospital, thinking it was going to be really bad. What had happened was that a car had pulled out in front of them, and Cav had ploughed into the side of it and gone over the bonnet. I was quite concerned after the business with Gee, so I went racing through this hospital, asking people where he was. As I got closer and closer to the ward all I could hear was Cav going, ‘Quack, quack, quack,’ and laughing and joking. Straight away I was pissed off: I’d come racing down there in a panic, and all I could hear was Cav giving it large. I drew the curtains back, and there he was, with this nurse talking to him. He was in clover.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Yeah, there’s nothing wrong with me, but they insisted on putting me in the ambulance.’

  ‘Come on, let’s go home.’

  He was full of it – ‘I had a great time in the hospital, all these lovely nurses looking after me’ – and I was so pissed off. Now I just laugh about it.

  As to why Mark crashed so often, technically I don’t think he’s that good. He’s not always super-balanced on the bike. To be in there to win those sprints you have to put yourself on the edge at times, and he’s not scared. He would never hold back. He would always push to win. Until recently, he’d very rarely actually crashed in a sprint – it had always happened while he was getting there. He would take risks, race really hard; he gets away with it because when he does have a collision, he has so much speed that he stays upright half the time. Even when he’s not going well, he still races as if he’s at his best; sometimes he doesn’t quite have the condition, and when you’re on the edge you’re likely to get into trouble.

  The funniest one I had ever had with Cav was when he got a splinter. It’s one we all still talk about now, partly because for Cav and the other lads the academy was such a massive shared experience. They still say things like, ‘You didn’t have it as hard as I did,’ ‘Yeah, but you did this,’ ‘Yeah, but Rod was super-hard on us,’ and so on. We were doing a Madison session behind the motorbike, practising changes; it was Ross Sander who I was worried about, because he was just coming back from a broken wrist. I’d been looking at the track by the start and finish line and thinking, ‘Oh my God, it’s all broken up where they wheel the start gate up and down time after time.’ The wood was all worn; you could feel the splinters standing out as you rubbed your fingers along the boards. I had a clear view in the wing mirror. I spotted Ross coming down the track for a change, and my gut feeling was, ‘Whoa, they’ve got this wrong.’ We were going at a decent rate of knots when Ross and Cav got hold of each other, touched their front wheels and flew over the bars. And they both fell straight onto their chests on that bit of track at over 50 kilometres per hour and slid along.

  I was worried, but as always on the motorbike I didn’t come to a sudden stop because I had the other riders lined up behind me. By the time I realised what had happened I had gone round the next two turns on the opposite side of the track. Ross was up, Cav was rolling around a bit, and they were both a bit shaken. They both got back on their bikes and said they thought they were OK, so I said to ride round for a little while – ‘Good for them that they got back on their bikes,’ I felt. The next thing Cav rolled off the track, and he was looking at me, quite concerned. He parked up, and I finished the session and went to stand on the green part in the middle of the track. Cav had his skinsuit on and he was walking a bit bent over, a bit awkward. He had this face on him, laughing slightly but in pain. He opened his skinsuit and there were splinters all over his chest. There were a couple of long ones, not in very deep, so he was pulling them out. He said, ‘But that’s not the worst thing,’ and he pulled his skinsuit down and there was this splinter right through his penis. I’m dead squeamish about anything like that, so I sent him off to our then doctor, Roger Palfreeman. Twenty minutes or so later Cav came bounding into the track centre with the splinter in a little bag, waving it proudly in the air. I’ve no idea what he did with it.

  He had another accident in 2004, a few days before we were going to race the amateur criterium at the last stage of the Tour of Britain in London, with £1,000 on the line. Cav had won a good few races by this time, and the academy lads had really started to knit together as a little unit. The race was on the Sunday, and on the Wednesday or Thursday they were out training around Manchester way when I got a phone call. They were panicking like mad: ‘Cav’s in hospital, he’s smashed up big time.’ He and Tom White were out near Hatton Park and had tangled their handlebars when they were messing around. They went down, and Cav fell straight on his face. I went to pick him up. They thought he might have broken his cheek – he had massive cuts to his face, a ripped lip and was really bruised. He was in a right state. Roger Palfreeman was adamant: ‘This guy can’t race at the weekend.’ We were all massively disappointed, because these guys were all set to do well for themselves and they wanted to earn a bit of cash.

  Cav was pleading with me: ‘Rod, you’ve got to let me race, you’ve got to let me race.’ It was one of those moments when I did go against the doctor’s orders. I was looking at him and thinking, ‘He’s absolutely fine,’ but Roger’s issue was that if he fell again on his face, he would be in trouble. I ended up saying, ‘He’ll be all right, he’s a tough lad.’ So Cav won the race. But what struck me at this one wasn’t his determination to race; it was his recall in the sprint. Afterwards he went through the entire final kilometre with me as if he’d been going at fifteen kilometres per hour: ‘I came up here. I noticed the lads skipping up a drain cover here, so as I was going up the gutter I went slightly to the left of it. I sensed someone coming here, so I just moved a little bit this way. I pressed on at this moment, with 100 metres to go.’

  I can’t remember the exact details, but I remember what I thought: ‘Bloody hell.’ It was the first time I’d seen that in any bike racer: this guy could recall the sprint finish as if it was in slow motion. He could go through what happened on every corner; he knew which team was where and had such incredible awareness of what was going on around him. It goes back to the question of how he got to Manchester for the interview to enter the academy: ‘I took the M56 to this place, and then I got the number 10 bus going to somewhere else.’ His awareness of what he’s doing is quite special. It’s a skill that some people have. I don’t think it’s something that you learn.

  In the same way, as a sprinter you either have that speed or you don’t. Has he worked on it? Perhaps as a young lad, but he’s just got that ability. I remember having conversations with him: ‘Have you always believed you could sprint?’ ‘Oh yeah, I’ve always known.’ ‘When did you realise?’ ‘When I was a little kid riding BMX. I was always fast.’ I remember him saying, ‘Even when I’m knackered I can sprint.’ And he always sprints home. Physically, he has so much going for him: you look at his muscle quality, how he lies over the bike when he’s sprinting – he’s small and much more aerodynamic than someone like André Greipel. Cav can always get himself into a good position in the bunch, which may partly be down to his upbringing in bike racing. As a young lad he had relatively little strength and endurance; to compete he had to learn to scuttle around people. Ben Swift is exactly the same. Cav also has incredible leg speed when he is sprinting out of the saddle. In 2009 we did a complete analysis on all the sprinters: Cav was spinning on average at about 105 or 110 rpm when he was out of the saddle turning a 53 × 11 gear; most of his competitors were at about 90 rpm. If you assume they are mostly using the same gear, they’re not going to get anywhere near him because their legs simply don’t spin fast enough. Seated, Cav will turn the pedals comfortably at 130 rpm.

  One year I managed to get hold of the overhead footage of all the stage finishes Cav went for in the Tour; with the shots from the helicopter you get a fantastic view of the movement in the bunch. We were looking at how other teams worked. At the time I was saying to Mark, ‘One day somebody else is going to challenge you here, so we need to start looking at other teams, what they are do
ing differently. Are any guys doing things that could work for you?’ What we noticed in the overhead footage was exactly how he moves. He’s skilful; he doesn’t sit right behind the rider who is in front of him. He’s not straight behind their back wheel; he sits slightly to one side. It’s as if he was riding an elimination race on the track, so he’s got room to move out. That means he creates space for himself all the time; he’s got room to come back and get onto the wheel if he knows it’s his teammate’s and he wants to get it; he can latch onto the wheel of a rival if he’s coming past, or he can just bluff by constantly moving from one side of the wheel to another.

  For me, bike racing isn’t all about the scientific side, and that’s one area where we saw eye to eye early on. Cav is the sort of guy who will say, ‘I don’t care if I can produce this number of watts in training if I can’t scratch my arse in the bike race or I can’t get over that climb.’ It wasn’t about the data you put out on your power meter or in rig tests, but that was what was drilled into him as a junior – the numbers, the numbers, the numbers. In the end his attitude was, ‘I just can’t be bothered about the numbers.’ We used to do rig tests and so on at the academy, and we’d use some numbers, but not in quite the same way as the rest of the GB team. I remember that he didn’t want to do his first rig test after joining the academy – it was a ramp test, where you constantly increase the power until you crack, and he said, ‘I don’t want to do it.’ My answer was, ‘Well, you don’t have a choice, you’re doing it.’ In the first year of the academy they did one every three months, and it was quite a key thing. I got him to come round to it by saying I didn’t care how he compared with Matt Brammeier or Ed Clancy; what I cared about was how Mark Cavendish on 1 January compared to Mark Cavendish on 1 April. What we wanted to know was whether he had moved on, whether he was fitter. When he understood that, he didn’t mind doing the test.

  All the bike riders have different attitudes here. Geraint Thomas is half and half: he likes to use the numbers to train with, but sometimes likes just to ride his bike. Bradley Wiggins is about the numbers. Although he has all the cycling knowledge and history at his fingertips because of that amazing memory he has, he really buys into the numbers for training and racing. Cav got more into the numbers in the run-in to the London Olympics because he could see that, delivered in the right way, they can be useful. I would say to anybody that if you’re having a conversation with Cav, you always have to finish with ‘in the bike race this is what happens’ – you always relate it back to bike racing, rather than just referring to data. If you don’t bring it back to the racing, you lose him.

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  The quality that has made Cav special over the years hasn’t left him. Even now, when he earns good money, he’s still as passionate about winning races as he was when I first met him. It’s not money that drives him. He likes earning it – and why shouldn’t he? – but if he was earning £10 a week he’d still have the same drive to win bike races. That’s just how he is. He constantly wants to win, and he gets frustrated when he doesn’t. It’s not that he’s selfish. When he wins, he sees it as winning for the team – he’s very genuine when he says thanks to his teammates. He’s always been like that – he would always be very opinionated on how they were going to win races. In the early days of the academy, I remember it got to a point when I began to think, ‘Bloody hell, he actually does know how to race. This guy has got a good racing head on him.’ We didn’t always agree on race tactics, but I always tried to encourage the lads to speak up, because they won’t go to the line understanding what they’re doing if they don’t discuss it first. Mark would always come up with pretty good ideas for how to win races.

  The other thing I’ve learnt with Mark is that what you see is what you get. When you hear him being interviewed after a stage of the Tour, he will come out with something, and you know that’s really him saying it. It’s not a front. I agree when Brian Holm says, ‘I like him talking’ – and Bob Stapleton said the same thing in the HTC days. But when Mark was at Team Sky I think people were trying to control him and what he was saying, and I didn’t like that. It became a bit robotic. You can’t squash Mark Cavendish. You can’t keep him in a box. He needs to be a bit more flamboyant, be himself, not just give the regular answers.

  Cav has more ambition than any cyclist I’ve ever known. He certainly has more than Brad, but in a completely different way – comparing those two is like comparing Usain Bolt to Mo Farah. It’s a different mental attitude. I think Cav is really good for Brad – Brad feeds off Cav’s desire to win in a very positive way. The ambition is not in Brad in the same way. He wants it badly enough, but he’s not this outspoken character saying, ‘Right, we’re going to get out there and win today.’ But when Cav is alongside him he really believes in him, and Cav believes in Brad. There is a good balance there. Cav has never changed. He is his own person: always streetwise, always ahead of the game in his thinking. I’ve only rarely got on the phone with him and found him down. He had a few problems with his girlfriend in the past, some real down moments, but those are about the only times when he wouldn’t be talking to me about ideas, about moving forward, about the next thing and the one after that. Normally, you get him into a cycling conversation, and it’s ‘I want to do this, I’m looking at that, do you think I could win this race?’ He’s always thinking ahead.

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  A key part of drawing up that world championships plan was getting Cav involved right from the very start. I guided him through every step of it, because he was the managing director, the boss. It was through him that the other riders would get involved. I had to point out to him, ‘Listen, Cav, you can’t miss a trick here. Every single training camp, every single time you talk to these riders, you’ve got to be talking to them about the Worlds.’ And Cav was chipping in with ideas, particularly about who he wanted to be involved. For example, he was very much behind having Jeremy Hunt in there.

  By the start of 2009 we had begun working on the next step in the process: if he wanted to win the Worlds as a stepping stone to the Olympics, he would have to win that year’s Milan–San Remo as part of the build-up to the Worlds. To win it he would have to move to Italy; at the back end of 2007 he’d made the move. When Milan–San Remo was on, I was in the velodrome at Manchester getting ready to travel to the track Worlds. I watched the race in the office and ended up on the phone to Matt Parker – who’d already arrived in Poland and had called in – shouting at the telly. I couldn’t fucking believe it when he won that race, just millimetres in it from Heinrich Haussler, who led the sprint out.

  It was a massive shock: ‘Has Mark just won Milan–San Remo? Oh my God, he has.’ I texted him, as I always do when he wins: ‘Well done, good job.’ That night I was over the moon. I thought over and over again, ‘Wow, the world championship is really on now.’ I was a little worried, though. Cav had committed to ride the world track championships with Peter Kennaugh – he had been talking about how he wanted to win the Madison for the third time – and now he had just won Milan–San Remo – were he and the whole team going to go out on the piss? I was staying in the Holiday Inn in Manchester, due to fly out the next morning, and it was about eleven thirty at night when I got the phone call. It was Cav.

  ‘Hey up, Cav, how are you? Well done. Where are you?’

  ‘Oh, I’m in Gatwick. I’m on my own.’

  He was booked on a flight in there before flying out to Poland. He had won Milan–San Remo and there were people desperate for him to stay and go out to celebrate, but instead he was thinking about the Track Worlds. It reminded me of what had happened when he won the scratch-race gold medal at the Commonwealth Games in 2006: his attitude wasn’t that he’d made it, but that he’d moved on. Immediately after that medal, he was thinking about the road race, and this time he was already moving on to the world track championships.

  We both knew that this was a defining moment, but it wasn’t the end result that mattered; it was the bigger picture. It was very po
werful. I had told everybody that he needed to win Milan–San Remo before 2011. It was a key part of winning over the other riders, who would think, ‘Oh my God, it’s really on.’ It wasn’t just them: suddenly, we were getting even more backing from within British Cycling than before; people could start to see what we were doing as a team and how it was building. As for how strongly Mark felt about it, the first thing he said to me when I picked up the phone that Saturday night in the Holiday Inn was: ‘I can win the Worlds now. I am going to be world champion one day.’ When he eventually got to Poland, he could hardly get his head through the door, but he had every reason to be so pleased with himself.

  9 : The Stripes in the Frame

  That evening in late June 2009, in the Holiday Inn in Cwmbran, we hung up the jersey in a picture frame, in a corner of the meeting room. It wasn’t just any jersey. This was the jersey, Tom Simpson’s jersey, nearly forty-four years old, the only one won by any British professional in the road Worlds: thick wool, rainbow stripes on the chest and the neck a little faded now against the white fabric, a small handwritten plaque on one side of the frame.

  This was the first time the riders who might make up the team for the 2011 world championships would be together, and I wanted to make a bit of an impact. I needed something that would get the project truly under way, that would pull the lads together. What could be better than this piece of cycling history? It was so long since Simpson had outsprinted Rudi Altig to win that jersey in San Sebastián: just seeing it there, a real rainbow jersey rather than just a photograph, would make the riders understand the historic scale of what we were trying to achieve.