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I didn’t know exactly how many camps we would have before Copenhagen, because we were having to fit them around the demands the professional teams made on the riders. The national road race was an obvious time because most of the riders would come back from Europe for that, so it became our regular camp. In 2010 that was the only one we did; in 2011 we had a second hit, the Olympic test event in London. The key issue at the camps was to overcome the fact that most of them had different employers; getting them to feel like a team, racing alongside each other and building some common ground was what we needed to do.
We met again in Mendrisio in early August, about a couple of weeks after the Tour de France. We had a big turnout: Ian Stannard, Chris Froome, Jeremy Hunt, Roger Hammond, Jonny Bellis, Ben Swift, Dan Fleeman, Geraint Thomas, Steve Cummings, Mark Cavendish, Russell Downing, Daniel Lloyd. We flew them out there and made sure all the GB vehicles were there, although I was doing it off a bloody small budget. I think I had about £15,000 for the whole year – to do the two camps, the rooms, the flights. It was done for nothing really. In Mendrisio we did a couple of days with a training ride of about a hundred kilometres. They wanted a cafe stop, and I was a bit pissed off, so I just sat in the car waiting for them. I think Cav knew I was a bit unhappy about it, because we didn’t have much time, and there were a lot of staff there: Dave Brailsford, Shane Sutton, Nigel Mitchell, the nutritionist, and Dan Hunt, who was working with the track endurance riders.
The question of making attendance compulsory came up here because a couple of people got quite shirty about it. They were a little bit upset that certain people hadn’t made it to the camp. Dave Millar had had a stag do the day before, so he missed his flight, and nobody knew where he was. There were a few people who were a bit disappointed about that, saying, ‘Should he get selected?’
The minutes say, ‘Much discussion followed. Most riders expressed their opinions and it was felt that a show of commitment to the team from the riders was appreciated … the commitment of Bradley Wiggins and Dave Millar was questioned, and the subject raised considerable debate. The riders felt that they had committed, travelled and given up free time, and given that they were talking about riding for Dave Millar and Bradley Wiggins, it was felt that the commitment was not matched by those missing.’
I did discuss it later with Dave and Brad. But at the meeting I hit back at the riders: ‘Guys, we agreed from the very outset you don’t have to be here. So yeah, OK, Dave Millar’s been on the piss, what do you want us to do? You talk to them as well, tell them how disappointed you are.’ People were more pissed off about Dave than Brad, because I think with Brad everyone said, ‘Yeah, you know …’ We can all get frustrated, but we’re never going to change people. Brad does buy in when it comes down to it. I knew Dave was totally behind the idea, but as with Brad, he had bought in in his own way. It wasn’t in the same way as Mark Cavendish or I, but he was 100 per cent committed on his terms.
I’m glad I made it clear from the outset that attendance at training camps wasn’t compulsory, because I think I would have been in trouble otherwise. A lot of teams in various different sports do get themselves into trouble by creating rigid rules. I remember one year with British Cycling, the winner of the national road race earned automatic selection for the Olympics. That meant if you had a freak winner, an outsider, or one of the best guys punctured or crashed, you were going to leave one of your best riders at home while someone else went off to have a good holiday.
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Mendrisio in September 2009 was our first world championships as a team. We had qualified nine riders, the most ever in any Great Britain team, because Brad had just finished fourth in the Tour and Cav had won a heap of stages – and the UCI had yet to bring in the ruling that to qualify nine riders you had to have the riders get the points between them. That came in because Luxembourg fielded nine riders in Mendrisio – the Schleck brothers had ridden well in the Tour and scored highly – but they didn’t actually have nine pros, so they had to fill the team up with amateurs.
The selection brief I sent to the GB management beforehand began like this: ‘The goal is to race the best any GB elite team has ever ridden at the Worlds. Every rider will go to the line with a goal/job; two riders will be delivered ready to race with four laps to go (fifty-five kilometres). All of the riders will support these two with several different jobs.’ After that, I went into an overview of the race, with the jobs the riders would be expected to do: ‘Dave Millar – 234 to 262 kilometres, lead rider, waits until the final moves with two laps to go; needs to be patient and sit tight all race.’ And so on down the list: ‘Geraint Thomas – his job comes in between 179 and 234 kilometres, sits with Steve Cummings all the race, but starts to work with him after 179 kilometres. The rest of the time he sits and waits and leaves the jobs to the others.’ The idea was to make it quite clear who was doing what, but it didn’t end up like this because Dave had been quite sick, and although he did start, he felt bad.
Mark wasn’t selected because immediately before the Worlds Jonny Bellis had his horrendous moped crash in Quarrata; he was close to death, in intensive care in hospital in Italy, and Mark was with him, supporting him and his parents. So Mark didn’t have to be in Mendrisio, and I wasn’t expecting him to be there, but he called me up and said he was going to drive up, because he knew that more than the result on the road, this Worlds was about the camp and being together as a group. One of his friends was in hospital, nearly dying – it was a huge thing for Cav to turn up at all.
As far as the results in Mendrisio went, Steve Cummings wasn’t far off the top twenty, and the lads raced quite well as a team. It wasn’t a bad start, but we didn’t really do anything. I was fine with that. The old GB saying – ‘Process not outcome’ – really applied here. I remember thinking, ‘We’ve had three good hits this year; we’ve brought the group together.’ The biggest thing for me was that I had integrated the riders who weren’t usually backed by Great Britain – Jeremy Hunt, Roger Hammond, Dan Lloyd, Dave Millar. They were all in. That was quite a big thing for me.
But there was one other major development which made a big difference: the Madison and the points race were pulled out of the Olympic track programme. For Cav, this was quite a big thing, and he was super-disappointed. He loved the Madison. His original target for London had been to win two gold medals – the road race and the Madison. And you wouldn’t have put it past him. A lot of the riders, including Cav, totally changed their way of thinking about 2012 – mainly the riders who had come up through the track programme, like Ben Swift, Peter Kennaugh, Geraint Thomas and Brad. Some of them kept going with their eyes on the team pursuit, but all of them became focused more towards the road.
10 : Growing Pains
I really didn’t enjoy Team Sky’s first season in cycling. I wouldn’t ever want to have to go through the stress of 2010 again. We’d said to a lot of riders that Sky could be a great outfit and we’d given them an idea of what we felt we could do, so I felt quite a lot of weight on my shoulders. But we underestimated how big a deal setting up Team Sky was, and how much it was going to take out of everybody. Part of the trouble that we encountered that year stemmed from the fact that we were entering the final two years before the Olympics. London was such a big deal, and Dave was trying to concentrate on getting Team Sky up and running while at the same time keeping his eye on the Olympic programme. How the hell he did it, I don’t know; the guy just gets through so much work.
My initial role at Sky was Race Coach – not a title that had been used before in pro cycling. My brief was to deal with anything to do with the performance side, moving that along, learning and capturing things: how do we race? What training do we need to do to get better at racing? The point is, I’m not a physical trainer, so it wasn’t so much ‘Here are the numbers you need to hit in training.’ It was also partly linked to the role of directeur sportif: the idea was that I would be out there coaching people through the races, while
the DSs dealt with tactics and logistics on race day. It was a massive learning curve, because no one had ever tried to split up the jobs before: traditionally, the directeurs sportifs had tended to deal with everything, while riders might have personal trainers employed privately who had no input into the racing.
There were so many teething troubles. Dave had employed Scott Sunderland, an Australian former pro who had worked at CSC with Bjarne Riis and who had set up the Cervélo Test Team; the thinking was that Scott could come and run Team Sky, but it didn’t work out. The bottom line is that Dave is the boss – Sky own the team, but Dave runs it and has the ultimate say in everything – and I don’t think that Scott quite understood that.
Part of my job was to set up training camps. I was confident we could do it better than any team had ever done it, and I think we do now. I was sitting and listening to the current pros, the lads I worked with, to find out what their camps were like, what worked and what didn’t. I tried to capture all this and I presented it all to Dave the year before the team started – even down to some of the detail with the hotel rooms. For example, the size of the bathrooms was important because if you have a decent-sized bathroom with a big shower and so on, you relax more after your ride, and that means you will train better the next day. We were looking at little things like that.
We wondered whether to stick with what we knew, which was Majorca, or find something else. Scott said he’d found a really nice place in Valencia, and they would do us a good deal and so on. I went there with Scott to look at it. Chris White at the English Institute of Sport had done a weather analysis to find the best place to train between December and February. The Algarve was the best, then Valencia, then South Africa, which is in the same time zone. So we thought, ‘Wow, Valencia is one of the best places; that’s another good reason to go.’ But I didn’t have a great feeling about the roads, and it ended up being quite difficult because as soon as we got there with the riders it snowed – for the first time in twenty-five years – and we couldn’t go over the climbs. Dave was not happy.
I set it all up in terms of the training. The main thing for me was to change the training style, keep the groups quite small – not have one big group but split them into two or three smaller ones, which was something that other pro teams weren’t doing. I had to fight against all the directeurs sportifs, and Scott as well – ‘Oh no, the riders all need to go out together.’ There was no particular reason, but obviously it was easier for the management. The camps were a disaster partly because of the weather, but also because the climbs weren’t long enough and there weren’t enough roads to train on with any variety. That came early on, and it got us off to a bad start – a lot of the responsibility for that was put on me.
I had already realised I would have to change my way of working after going from coaching academy riders to guys who, in some cases, have been pros for many years. In those conversations I had about my coaching style – after beginning the Worlds project – it became clear that you have to involve the riders a lot more, let them take the lead. And if you don’t know something, you have to go and find out. Don’t try and tell them if you don’t know. I tried some new things, like getting the riders training for sprint finishes. I had thought, ‘How many times does a pro bike rider actually sprint if they’re not a sprinter? But how many times do you finish a race on your own? Not often.’ For example, I asked a rider like Juan Antonio Flecha, ‘Are you going to finish Paris–Roubaix on your own?’ It wasn’t very likely, so he needed to practise his sprint. It was a simple way of making things happen, but a lot of pros don’t do the simple things. At first there was a little bit of resistance, but people got it eventually.
There were lots of things that were hard work. Take race planning: the traditional way was get to the race, then plan for it once you are on site. You had a rough outline; you would turn up and the directeurs sportifs would get on with it. Then they’d get back to the hotel and say, ‘Right, what’s on tomorrow?’ At British Cycling we were more used to finding out what the race was and having a look at it, not just in terms of performance but also logistics. At Sky we’ve changed that over the years: we’re now looking in detail two to three months ahead. For a race like the Giro d’Italia we will have briefing notes several months out, containing all the things we need to know for every stage – route, timetable, accommodation. That was a challenge because people hadn’t worked in that way before.
What surprised me most was the lack of ability of some of the riders, given that we have always had the idea that professional racing is the pinnacle of the sport. I was surprised to find guys who had made a career as a pro, who had been out there for a long time, but who actually weren’t that good physically. They had all sorts of excuses all the time, were all earning reasonable money and living a bit of a life, I thought, not really buying in. I didn’t like it at all, but that gave me a lot of confidence about what we were doing at British Cycling and about the guys coming through from the academy: I realised, ‘Bloody hell, these guys are better than we thought they were – they are super-competitive.’
I knew the British lads were hungry for success, perhaps because of their age as well as their basic attitude. They were ready to go and had a lot in front of them, whereas at Team Sky we had other riders who we didn’t know. We thought they were good, but they weren’t at the standard we’d been told they were at, and we were stuck with them for two years.
We tried to use the philosophy that we’d adopted at British Cycling from Steve Peters, but people just didn’t get the jargon – the chimp model, athletes as kings and queens. They got that wrong – the riders are the kings in that they can do what they want, but some took it literally. In fact, what Steve says is that there have to be rules and consequences – as we had at the academy – although the athletes take the lead. One of the things that we try to do is put the riders first – it’s very much the British Cycling way. We constantly ask them for feedback, and I think the pros who came to Sky became frustrated because they weren’t used to that. It was part of the riders being the key people in the team, but they would say, ‘Stop asking us what we think, just put an extra carer on the race,’ because we’d got the staffing model wrong. There were little incidents like that constantly.
I had a really difficult time because I’d not been a professional bike rider in a European team. The pro cycling world was – and still is – dominated by a lot of former pros, and I’m totally against the idea that that is the ideal model. You need a balance in what you’re doing, and we’ve moved towards that within Team Sky. I was always being belaboured with, ‘What the fuck do you know?’ This was coming from riders and staff – carers, mechanics, directeurs sportifs. It was a major issue with Scott Sunderland – and as far as he was concerned, why shouldn’t he say that? What did I know? All I had done – and he would say this – is work on the track and with the under-23 group. I didn’t know a lot.
Like everyone else, I’d had the impression that professional cycling was the pinnacle of the sport, in the same way that Formula One is the cutting edge of motor racing, but it’s not that simple. Olympic cycling is purely performance orientated – for example, the thirty years that the Australian Institute of Sport has been developing sports science, or the way the German track team has moved bike design forward, all with an Olympic focus. For years in professional cycling, on the other hand, it would be a matter of someone getting some money and putting a team on the road. The riders tended to be left to do what they wanted, some managers got more involved with training them, some got into running doping programmes, but all in all there wasn’t much of an eye on improving things. For example, Manolo Saiz brought in team buses when he was running the ONCE team in the 1990s, but no one thought about how to make buses better; they just bought buses as well.
I was surprised by what I found. It still shocks me how disorganised teams are about travel. You find riders flying places, with no one there to pick them up. I’ve got the impression tha
t the riders never come first for a lot of the teams; the sport got in the state it did because riders were just expected to turn up on the start line and be healthy. Doing it right involves hard work and thought. If you think about after a race, getting the riders to recover without cheating involves plenty of time and effort for the staff. For example, in the Giro one year we had the riders eating dinner on the team bus during the longer transfers, which really helps, but involves a lot of work for the chef.
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I moved back to Italy in late 2009 to set up a base in Quarrata for Team Sky. The idea was that it would combine a service course with a training base and support facility for the riders which would run alongside the academy, replicating the hub I had created when the British pros moved there. It was intended to be similar to what we had at Manchester with British Cycling. But we were a bit premature with that idea, and it was eventually shelved.
Scott left in April 2010, when we were barely into the season, and left a massive void; we were missing our lead directeur sportif, and I had to pick up a lot of the slack. That meant I spent a lot more time away from home than I had expected, and personally that made it quite a difficult time, with Jane stuck on her own in Italy. I was doing something which I’d always said I’d never do: working as a directeur sportif at a World Tour professional team. I don’t have sufficient experience to be a DS; I’m not a true race tactician. We can all sit there in front of the television and have a good old rant – ‘Oh, they should have done this and should have done that’ – but that’s about as far as I get. I can have a good go at managing a team on the road, though, so I had no choice but to take it on. What I’m happy to do is to stand in front of any of the world’s best bike riders and ask, ‘How are we going to win this bike race tomorrow?’ and then help the group break things down. I’m always up for that, but I don’t enjoy driving around the peloton.
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