Project Rainbow

by Rod Ellingworth

  I wanted to get the riders under one roof three times in 2009; this was the first camp, forty-eight hours before the national road race championships in Abergavenny. I like the idea of everyone in a team being in a room together, so that you can explain in one fell swoop exactly what you are aiming to do. It’s about going to the start line and being so clear about your job, so clear about your form, so clear about what your mate is doing next to you that there are no discussions; you just have the same understanding. It all comes back to the Steve Peters principle: ‘Get in a room and tell them.’ I had to get them to understand, bring up the challenges and the things that might hold us back. I had done quite a lot of my stuff with Steve beforehand, so I felt quite confident. I knew this was going to work. If bringing this group together was the pinnacle of my cycling career so far, I’d done my apprenticeship at the academy. And that’s where I was fortunate: I had worked with 80 per cent of the group, so they believed in what I was doing. Steve would say, ‘Target one guy and get him to buy in, because he will lead the others.’ While Cav was the obvious leader, the one I felt I had to win over was David Millar. Dave’s a bit of a talker; he lobbies for things. He had the perfect credentials as road captain, the guy who would orchestrate tactics on the road: he was massively experienced, very articulate and not afraid to stick his neck out and say what he thought.

  What I wanted to do here was to kick-start the entire project. I had to make sure Dave Brailsford was at the meeting because he gives an event like this that stamp of authority which he has. I also wanted something more than that, something that would capture the imagination of all the lads. It was Tom Simpson’s nephew, the writer Chris Sidwells, who went and got the jersey out of the museum. I kept everybody out of the room beforehand, and when they came in, the jersey was hanging in the corner. I didn’t say anything; they didn’t look at it. All I said was, ‘Welcome, guys,’ then – bang! – the lights went off and I played the archive footage from the 1965 Worlds of Simpson and Rudi Altig fighting it out in the sprint finish and Simpson pulling on the jersey on the podium, with David Saunders’s commentary playing flat out on the big speakers I’d put in the room.

  Chris White at the English Institute of Sport had found a short video clip of every single rider who was going to be at the meeting, and up they came, one by one: Dave Millar, Ben Swift, Ian Stannard, Geraint Thomas, Roger Hammond, Jeremy Hunt, Chris Froome, Brad – actually he wasn’t at the meeting because he didn’t turn up – and Cav. Some of the clips weren’t great, but that didn’t matter: I really wasn’t interested in the flashy side, in it looking all showbiz. It was just plain and simple, a roll-your-sleeves-up-and-go presentation. Then I wanted to go straight to the heart of it: right, how are we going to win the rainbow jersey again?

  When the lights came back on, I pointed out the jersey in its picture frame in the corner: ‘This is the prize we are all going for; this is the jersey we are trying to win.’ They couldn’t believe that they were seeing the jersey, the one worn by the legendary Tommy himself. All of them were open-mouthed, but I got the best reactions out of Cav and Dave Millar, the two guys I was particularly looking to tie in. We were on our way.

  *

  The difference between trying to win the Worlds and running the academy was that before I had been working with athletes at a formative stage in their sporting lives. For the Worlds I was dealing with mature athletes, most of them in their physical prime, and most of them hugely experienced. It called for a different approach. The academy was very much a regime; some people called it a dictatorship. It was a matter of ‘do or don’t do’; do and survive, or don’t do and don’t survive. Dave Brailsford had said to me, ‘Look, Rod, you’ve got to change your coaching philosophy’; obviously I appreciated him telling me, but I was aware of it. All of a sudden I would have to be in a support role, the guy behind the riders rather than the guy telling them what to do.

  What I had learnt from the academy was this: how to get athletes to buy into an idea. What counted was getting the riders to work towards one goal and getting the message across to them. And even if I didn’t have an intimate knowledge of the professional cycling world, I was fortunate that I did have respect from a lot of the riders for the hard work I did. They understood that we were pushing hard to win something big and they knew I would support them. When we began talking about the whole project, there was no question with Cav: he knew I was going to bust my balls to make this happen. He knew that even in his darkest hours – when he was ill or had crashed or whatever – I would always be behind him and supporting him. And all the other lads knew that as well. They knew I was always going to be there.

  I didn’t have any sophisticated objectives for this get-together. These guys aren’t used to sitting in classrooms, listening to people lecturing them. This was completely new; there was nothing from the past to go on. A road team always went to the Worlds every year and to the Olympics every four years, but there was no real drive, there was no clarity of vision, and there was no leadership in terms of getting a group together and making it a focused programme. So I had a clean slate to work from. I wanted to get the lads feeling, ‘Here we go, this is the project.’ I wanted them to come up with their own selection criteria, and now they needed to start talking about how we would win – what would the whole strategy look like? The idea was to understand where we were, to put together some general ideas about what we were trying to do and how we could make it work. I also wanted to set out our standards and principles.

  The official programme targets were: 2009 Worlds, top ten; 2010 Worlds, top ten; 2011 Worlds, top three; 2012 Olympic Games, top three. But in fact the goal was simple: to win the professional world road race championship in 2011. Note that: to win it. In spite of those official goals, there was no ‘Let’s try and get on the podium,’ no ‘Medal or nothing,’ which was the Olympic track team principle; this was about the gold medal and the rainbow jersey, and nothing else. When you’ve got someone like Cav, you’ve just got to win. He was never happy with second or third, so why should we be? We had to win. And we never took our eyes off that objective, which was symbolised by that jersey hanging in the corner.

  During the rest of the meeting, I made a big point of looking time and again at that jersey, to make sure that the riders’ eyes would be directed to those rainbow stripes. I made a huge thing of something else: each time I said the phrase ‘to win the world road race championship’, I would pause after I’d said it and leave a gap of four or five seconds before I moved on to the next point. I would look at each and every single one of the riders, right in the eye. And every single one of them was listening.

  I had been quite nervous about this meeting; putting a team together in this way for the road Worlds was a completely new thing for Britain. I had taken a couple of ideas from Sir Clive Woodward – my girlfriend Jane had bought an audiobook about his campaign to win the Rugby World Cup in 2003 – and one aspect that was helpful was the way he had broken the whole thing down into different parts. Another was injury prevention: injuries can cripple a team, so what we did before and after training and racing would be important. Another inspiration was a British Lions DVD I’d been given by Richard Wooles, a GB soigneur who ended up running Canada’s track programme; that got us talking about team building and what a team stands for. Someone else put me onto Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares – where that helped was in finding out the good and bad characters to have in a close-knit body of people.

  We went through the Great Britain principles. It was quite straightforward: we don’t cheat. That meant in every way – no hanging onto cars, no doing anything that broke the rules. I made no bones about it: the riders had to agree to the GB anti-doping policy, and that was that. If anyone didn’t agree with it, they wouldn’t even be getting a start. They were all professional bike riders, riding for different teams for the rest of the year, but riding for GB means riding for GB. I had to make this a big point: they had to feel proud putting on a British jer
sey, they had to feel honoured – ‘Let’s not take this lightly, you are riding for your country.’

  Honesty was another key thing I talked about; in the end, it was one of the key factors at the Worlds. Eventually, I was getting riders ringing me up during the selection process and telling me, ‘Don’t choose me because I’m not fit enough.’ Adam Blythe, Jeremy Hunt and Dan Lloyd were the three I remember very well at various times in the years the project ran – and I really appreciated their honesty. This wasn’t about any single individual; this was about a group of riders going to the start line and trying to win a bike race, and the example of those three really made that point. And when it came to the race, they had to buy into the roles and responsibilities of the team – each and every single one of them.

  There were other things, starting with the financial side. These guys were professional cyclists and they raced for a living. If we won, what did they want? What were people’s expectations? Dave Brailsford stood up to explain that Lottery funding was not going to cover all of them, but on the other hand we appreciated that the winner would do well out of it, so they would need to be rewarded. Getting Dave to stand up and explain gave it that gravitas: they were hearing it from the man at the top. And he had to explain a bit about Team Sky, because this was June of 2009 and it was very much in the making, and Dave and I were bloody busy at the time; it was full on throughout, so I was pretty knackered. So Dave stood up and gave a bit of an update on where Team Sky was, which wasn’t easy, given that not everybody in the room was going to be signed up to ride for them.

  The gist of what I had to tell the riders was this: last year at the Worlds there had been no goal and no plan, and that had been the case in the years before. That was just how it was, but now that we had the riders, we could build the team together with a long-term plan. So I went through it, pushed the new ideas and looked at the detail. A major point I wanted to make was that the plan would be based on understanding the life of a pro cyclist. That was a big point that Dave Millar wanted to make – ‘Nobody understands what we do, how many days we spend on the road.’ So I gave this undertaking: no camp was compulsory. If someone didn’t turn up to one, he would not be ruled out. It was about putting the best nine riders on the road, and that was all. For example, Bradley Wiggins never came to any of the camps, but I could tell he had been reading the information. He clearly understood the history of it and what we were trying to achieve. The only person who I said had to go to every single camp was Cav – he had to buy into every one we did. I made that clear to him before we even started. To make that work I had to fix the dates around him, because he was the key person in all of this.

  I told the riders, ‘You’re the ones who can make this happen.’ They were a good mix of old and developing talent, established professionals like Cav and Dave Millar alongside younger team members who might come on board in future – the likes of Peter Kennaugh and Alex Dowsett. I went through the events we would ride in over the next few years – a hilly Worlds in Mendrisio, a rolling one in Melbourne, the Olympic test event in London, a mainly flat Worlds in Copenhagen and a pretty flat Olympic Games. I’d heard a little whisper that maybe the Worlds would be in Britain in 2013, so I added that in as a bit of a teaser.

  We went through the potential riders for these events, what the team might look like, how many riders could qualify, possible team tactics. I’d also got them printouts of the qualification rules from the UCI: what do you have to do? What events count? How many riders need to qualify? That was pretty straightforward because it was there in black and white, but just explaining it in front of them helped, rather than letting the lads end up with their own interpretation. And they all seemed to sort of remember it. That was the key thing – they seemed to get into it a little bit.

  I had looked at the Italians’ way of working, and all they seemed to do was have a race calendar that was quite helpful: they go to a series of one-day races leading up to the Worlds, and the pros come together as a national team on a couple of those occasions. Whoever the manager was – Paolo Bettini at the time, Franco Ballerini before him – would go round those races, and you’d see pictures of them stood by the team cars with their shades on. What I thought was, ‘What are they actually doing?’ They were going round all the riders and selecting them for races, which is all fair enough, but I always thought to myself, ‘We can do a better job than that.’ One problem with the Italian system is that getting in the team is so important, so prestigious, that the riders fight all summer to get selected. You can’t help thinking there must be an element of ‘Phew, job done, I’ve got in the team,’ which actually damages the way they compete when the race itself comes around. They get so much publicity – even when they get in the Worlds, they have motorbikes following them with cameras and so on – but it seems to be all show.

  Selection was the key one: we split the riders up into groups and left them for about twenty minutes to come up with ideas. The principle was this: ‘Tell us what you want as a selection policy. How do you want to be selected?’ That way you’re giving them the cards. It’s the way we had operated at Great Britain for a while – it’s a Steve Peters thing. They have their say, but usually they don’t want to make the call, so they come back and say, ‘Tell us how you want to do it.’ It always happens like this.

  They wanted clearly predefined dates. My view was, ‘Perfect, we’ve got that.’ They wanted a personal phone call, which was one of the things that had come up when I first spoke to them; they didn’t want to find out any other way. They wanted complete and utter openness and clarity in terms of why they didn’t get selected. It was all pretty straightforward stuff really. One of the other questions was who would be selecting. I’d actually put down ‘Selection Panel’ as a heading, so we went through it: Steve Peters, Dave Brailsford, Shane Sutton, Chris Boardman. We would take the results from 1 January to 1 August, I would give my recommendations as the person heading this part of the programme, and then the panel would select from my recommendations.

  Why wouldn’t I be on the panel? We never do it like that. It’s the same for all the coaches in British Cycling: before any major event we write down our recommendations, and the panel goes through them. The idea is that the coach can keep that distance; if a particular rider isn’t selected, he doesn’t feel it’s the coach being personal with him. It’s not me doing the selection; I’m simply recommending. I was trying to be dead honest with them and say, ‘Guys, you know I totally appreciate you all want to be part of this. It’s not an easy decision. I will have to make some hard decisions, but it’s not personal. It’s not about me; it’s all about getting the best team on the line.’

  I’ve worked according to what we agreed at that meeting for the last two or three years. I always do a long list, so if it’s nine riders, I want to bring it down to a group of twelve by a certain date – ‘OK, you’re in the pre-selection, so knuckle down to work.’ Nine times out of ten, that sort of selection is done quite easily, because there are always one or two who are sick or have an injury or a crash or whatever. They know that the final cut will be made on a particular date, and I make sure that once I have that information, Abby Burton, the GB press officer, sends out a press release. But she isn’t allowed to send it until I’ve contacted all the reserves and riders who have made it. We’ve always stuck to that, so riders don’t end up seeing the news on the internet or having journalists ringing up saying, ‘Hey, I’ve heard you’ve been selected for the Worlds!’ or ‘How do you feel at missing out?’

  We had quite a lot of discussion over one question: what challenges do we face? Getting the buy-in from the riders, all aiming for one goal, was pretty straightforward; so too was bonding the team together, in spite of the fact that they all rode for different pro teams. The history between us was a big one. You might have Dave Millar and Cav spitting at each other because when Dave is leading out his team’s sprinter, Tyler Farrar, they might all clash. Cav hates Farrar for a while, and he hates Cav, t
hen Dave ends up in the middle because it’s his team. I made quite a big thing of us putting all that to one side and working as a unit.

  There were specific issues that might come up on the day of the race, little things that I had heard over the years, such as ‘the end of season blues’ – the fact that the race takes place at the end of September, when some of the guys have been putting numbers on their backs for eight months. There’s a fair bit of mental fatigue out there. A lot of people complain about the Worlds being at the end of September and want it back in August like it used to be. So I turned that on its head and said the date was what makes the Worlds special – riding there means you’re a pro who is capable of racing and earning money all year.

  Another one they brought up was that the Worlds were on a circuit, lap after lap. When you think about it, pro riders very rarely race that kind of event. More often they are competing in a place-to-place event, whether it’s a Classic or a stage of a race. On a circuit it’s easy to get off when you’re having a hard day, because you’re going past the team pits every lap, maybe seeing other guys who have abandoned because they haven’t got the legs. Then there is the fact that the Worlds are a big occasion: a team can get a little bit too excited about that and push too hard too early.

  Compared to how they usually race, at the Worlds the riders have to adapt to different tactics. Normally it’s one professional team against another; here it’s nation versus nation. Some nations can have teams within teams – maybe the Belgians aren’t quite together, or the Italian team manager can’t make the call, so they have two leaders – and that can dilute everything. The directeurs sportifs giving them the race information aren’t the ones they usually work with. A national team will have different staff, different race food, different food at the hotels and different kit, which is a massive one. They ride in a certain pair of shorts all season, then they rock up at the Worlds and for one day in their life they ride in different shorts and think, ‘Oh my God, this chamois is cutting me in two!’ I remember saying, ‘There’s no option here, guys. We’re riding skinsuits, and we’ll try and ride the best kit that we can.’ Wearing skinsuits for a long road race rather than the conventional jersey and shorts was just coming in at the time – it was Rob Hayles who began it – and there’s an advantage there, so we had to follow suit.