Project Rainbow

by Rod Ellingworth

  Sean Yates and some of the other directeurs love being in cars, and they seem to live for darting around the back of the peloton. I don’t think I’m a bad driver, but it’s a dangerous game. It’s ludicrous when you think about how close to the riders you are, the road furniture everywhere, the competition for space between the cars, the way you have to multitask. You really need experience. I can do it – I drove in the Tour that year on the cobbled stage, which was the most intense of the lot. But I don’t look forward to doing it, and I told Dave it wasn’t my best area.

  At Sky we had our heads down all that year, learning as we went along. One of the biggest differences was that all of a sudden I was working with foreign cyclists. Since I’d started at British Cycling I’d only ever worked with British riders; I had never had anything to do with foreign ones. Some of the riders at Sky couldn’t speak English, and if they didn’t have French I found it hard to communicate with them. We’d talked about it beforehand, but until you experience it you can’t understand what it’s going to be like. Personally, that was a big shock for me.

  There was a very clearly defined culture which had built up in British Cycling over the years. At British Cycling we’d get the odd team member joining from outside Britain – the sprint trainer Jan Van Eijden from Germany, our Belgian carer Luc de Wilde – but they were joining a British team with a British culture. So there were sixty of us at British Cycling who were influencing one or two people coming from outside. But at Sky we were trying to run a British team with the same British ways, but out of perhaps eighty people only ten of us had that British Cycling background. So we were a small minority trying to influence a big group of people who were very set in a historic way of working. That was a constant bind.

  For example, at British Cycling we have always used performance plans. When a team is travelling to a race, you set your stall out before it starts – you communicate as a group of people, so before everyone gets there they have an idea of what they are doing. The idea is that at least a week before the race the riders receive a document saying this is the goal; this is how we are going to achieve it; this is your role within the race. For example, it might avoid a situation at a road race where a rider turns up and finds out the evening before the start that he’s got to work for someone else; or that he’s the leader, but he’s been sick for two weeks and has told his coach he just wants to stay in the wheels. We developed that by giving it out to the staff so that everyone could see what we were trying to do as a team. Traditionally in professional cycling you don’t do it like that, and there were people who were resistant; trying to get the idea across to the ones with that sort of mentality was frustrating. And that in turn creates personality clashes. The issue was getting them to take it on board and actually do it. This was where Sean Yates was particularly good: even though he’d been in the sport for forty years and had always worked in that traditional way and wasn’t particularly computer literate, he took it on board pretty well. It was fortunate for us, because where he led, the others followed.

  There were so many examples where we were trying to do things differently and had to change people’s mindsets. Just calling the carers ‘carers’ and not ‘soigneurs’ was a cultural change for the traditionalists: they would go, ‘Carers, humph. What does the word mean?’ And then there was the work we expected our carers to do – for example, dealing with food and hydration for the riders on the bus after every race. They generally worked in the same old way or were left to their own devices without a lot of direction, but we are more regimented: the carers make up drinks for each rider – cherry juice, pineapple juice or whatever – and they are left in the fridge. But that is extra work for them. You’d have a carer from another team who’d say, ‘We don’t do that. I’ve never had to do that before.’ We worked with a bedding company to produce mattresses and pillows for each rider that would be taken on stage races, so that they would have the feeling of being in the same bed every night, get more sleep and recover more quickly. They’re heavy and unwieldy, so it’s a big job to lug them around. When they were asked to move them, some people’s attitude was, ‘You are fucking joking,’ but now it’s part of the routine and they feel proud to be doing it our way. Other classic ones included meetings: we had a few issues about those, so it became clear we had to calm down on them. We like our meetings, but people don’t need them; they just need good information so they know what to do the next day.

  One massive bone of contention was the time trial set-up. It was a classic example of us coming in from outside pro cycling, trying to do something new and drawing a lot of flak. We looked at what we did on the track and what we had developed at British Cycling over the years. If you look at the team pens at a major track event, there are people in there left, right and centre, such as mechanics, who waltz through as the riders are trying to get in the zone for racing, and people from other teams, who come in and ask, ‘Hey up, mate, how’s it going?’ So at British Cycling we brought in a protocol that the only people allowed in the pen are the carers, coaches and riders. No one else can go in – not even mechanics, which is why they set up outside the pen. It’s a performance environment. So we know that works. And on the gate there is a pit manager who looks after the timings for everything. As a coach I could come into the velodrome with my riders, go to the pit manager and ask where we are on the programme; he’d have the full list in front of him and say, ‘We’re here. You’re about thirty minutes behind schedule because you’ve had three false starts or something like that.’ ‘Perfect, thank you very much.’

  Over the years I’d gone round the pro teams and looked at their time trial set-ups. My first thought was, ‘This is so bad’ – you’d get everybody in and out, talking to each other, someone slapping someone else on the back, but the guy next to you might be in the yellow jersey, trying to perform. Most teams put out the tensa barriers, arrange the turbo trainers on the floor, pavement or whatever it might be, then off they go and that’s it. The turbos will be put anywhere, with the spectators half a metre from the riders’ faces, taking pictures, trying to talk to them. So we thought, ‘How can we do this better at Team Sky?’ And I spoke to Brad a lot in 2009 as we were putting the team together to get his thoughts on what our set-up might be like. Brad likes to get in his zone, get his headphones on, feel like he’s on his own and have no hassle.

  We came up with a whole strategy based on the need to pen the riders off a bit, but we got it wrong at the beginning. We wanted to create a bit more space, so we put up what looked like a carbon-fibre box – we wanted to make it look quite good – but it went down really badly; even the race organisers and so on were asking, ‘What’s all this about?’ We changed it pretty quickly, learnt our lesson. The point was that we’d come from an environment which was about pure performance rather than a circus. Basically, a pro team is about showing your riders to the public and displaying the team sponsors’ logos. We’d come from an environment where you don’t have to give a monkey’s about sponsors or media – we didn’t have to advertise anything, we just had to perform. The Olympic medals were the advert.

  The carbon-fibre box wasn’t the only thing that drew comment. The Sky time trial set-up has black foam flooring which we put down every day, so wherever we are – a gravelly car park, a field in the countryside, a wet pavement – the environment will always be exactly the same, and the riders can get used to it. It also means they’re not slipping around on their cleats. We have screening, which means the spectators and media can see in but the riders can’t see out easily – it’s about two metres high at one end, then goes down to normal barrier height across the front of the bus. That creates a private area where you can put your key rider, but the crowd can still see plenty because they can see through the screen; they can come to the part where the barrier is low, but the rider doesn’t see out and get affected by the people staring in from the other side. Putting the flooring down is an operation, on the same scale as moving the mattresses; it takes a
bout an hour from start to finish to set up for a time trial. I swear on my life we had other teams laughing at us because they would turn up and – boom! – in ten minutes they would be done. We would be installing the flooring, putting the screens up, putting the clocks up, making everything look nice and tidy. The other teams thought it was hilarious – especially when we were underperforming in the first year – but we were getting good feedback from the riders straight away – they liked the environment. I had to keep saying, ‘I don’t care. We’re going to stick to our standards, and we know this works.’

  It wasn’t easy getting people to come round to the idea of the pit manager restricting entry. If the rider wants something, he calls someone in. You can imagine the first year, having to tell staff who were used to going everywhere, ‘You’re not allowed in here – I’m the pit manager.’ It was one of the biggest things. Now you look at it and the riders think it’s great.

  The first thing the pit manager does on the morning of a time trial is ride down to the start, then set the clock in the pit to the official start time. I still have a Casio watch which Matt Parker bought me in 2010 – it cost him five euros, and I swear it’s hardly lost a second. You come back and set all the clocks on the bus to that time, so we’re all running off that. We have TV screens displaying it as well, because you can’t afford to get it wrong or you could be in big trouble. We do the same thing every time: the night before I go round the riders: ‘When do you want to eat? What do you want to eat? When do you want to leave the hotel? When do you want to warm up?’ Rather than a printed sheet of paper, for every time trial we give the riders a credit-card-sized piece of card to put in a plastic sleeve, with all their timings for the day, so when they go out for their ride in the morning they can just put it in their jersey pocket. It’s details like that that make a difference.

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  The 2010 Tour was horrendous from start to finish. There had been so much hype about the team beforehand, because Brad had finished fourth the year before; the assumption was that having joined Sky he would be bound to improve. I remember thinking, ‘Oh my God, why is everyone so excited about what we’re doing?’ Dave had said a few things too; he wasn’t wrong, because we’ve done everything he said we would, but I think everyone thought we would just come straight in and dominate, and of course when we didn’t, all we got was slander. Brad was in a difficult place. He was struggling to take the whole thing on. He’d made comments – like Sky being Manchester United and Garmin being the equivalent of Wigan – which obviously fuelled the fire, although I don’t think he was wrong at the time in fact.

  It was inevitable that we would underperform in the Tour. Brad wasn’t fit enough, and the team wasn’t ready for it. It was obvious from early on that Brad wasn’t going to perform. You could tell that things weren’t ideal at the training camp in the Alps before the race. The camp was well organised, it came at a good time, the number of people out there was small and nothing went wrong. It was exactly what the riders needed – but the atmosphere wasn’t there, and it didn’t feel right.

  I was working with Brad because there wasn’t really anyone else to do it, and that wasn’t ideal. In hindsight, it was never going to happen. I’d known Brad for quite a long time; he knew me, and I don’t think he ever really believed in my coaching. I think he understood what I’d done with the academy and he always backed that. But when it came to getting him to perform, he’s very much a numbers person and I’m not, so it wasn’t going to work. Having also raced together when he was a youngster, we were almost too close – why should he believe me?

  And I may have given him too much rope. I had come from a system where I was telling these lads at the academy what to do, and all of a sudden I was faced with something different – working with professional athletes who I needed to have more open discussions with. Perhaps I took that too far and was not strict enough or on the ball. Inside I’d be thinking, ‘How’s this going to work? Why should this guy who’s finished fourth in the Tour listen to me? All I’ve done is coach a few under-23s.’ I felt that pressure all along.

  I took a lot of flak. I felt I was in the firing line because I was on the road with the team a lot – Dave wasn’t there so much due to his work for British Cycling – and I was trying to hold up what I believed was the British Cycling side. We were fortunate to have Sean Yates, who stepped into the breach as lead directeur sportif after Scott left. He believed in the way that British Cycling had worked in recent years, even though his career as a pro went back as far as the early 1980s. He struggled with the British Cycling ideas at times, and sometimes he didn’t get it, but eventually he revelled in it. He’d always come round to our way of thinking – for an older guy who’d always been so traditional he was very open to ideas. But Sean is young in his head – the way he dresses, the way he is around people.

  Another issue that year was that Brad and Sean’s relationship was constantly up and down. It was a challenge for both of them. Sean was expecting a lot, and Brad wasn’t dealing very well with all the pressure of expectation. I ended up in between them and felt quite uncomfortable. I’d turn one way and hear something, then turn the other and try to pass the message on. I’d be trying to get them to communicate, to understand each other. The problem for Sean was that he was in a situation where he was having to coach the lads through the races. Sometimes we were the last car in the convoy: it’s decided on your overall position, and on a few races we were twenty-first out of twenty-one teams. Sean said once that he had never, ever been last car in a stage race. He wasn’t very good at coaching somebody through a difficult situation; what he was excellent at was when you had a rider in the yellow jersey and you were defending that jersey. He was absolutely world class at the strategies, the tactics; that’s why he was so successful with Brad in 2012. But when Brad needed coaching through a race, needed an arm around him, Sean wasn’t that sort of person. That meant they clashed a lot and wouldn’t talk to each other, and being in between them wasn’t a nice place to be.

  Matt Parker was involved in Brad’s training as well, and was trying to bring new ideas into the team. The trouble was that we weren’t quite ready for recovery ideas like ice baths, compression boots, and so on. We were doing a lot of stuff like that; perhaps we were putting more energy into it than into the lads’ training. All along I wanted to keep things simple, but the expectation around the team was too big for that. For many teams, getting round their first Tour with two riders in the first twenty-five and some decent performances here and there would have been fine. The problem was that the hype around the team and around Brad set us up for a fall.

  I believed that Sky would need one year in which we would have to learn, plus a second in which we would get on top of things and really understand what we were doing. By the third year we would be up and running. That’s pretty much what happened. The big change was that by the end of 2010 Tim Kerrison, the Australian physiologist we had brought in from swimming, started to get more involved as he acquired more understanding of what was needed. He was a cycling novice at the start of the year, but it didn’t take him long to learn because he’s a smart guy. He didn’t get the flak I took early on because he was helping out, following and observing, so he was fairly well protected from it.

  I did feel quite isolated that first year, with the responsibility for coaching all twenty-nine riders as best as I could. Somehow I had to manage what they were doing, and then suddenly I was thrown into working as a directeur sportif far more than I had wanted. All the time I was trying to keep the Worlds project on the road – and the Worlds was going to be in Australia, so it wasn’t simple. On top of that, I was getting calls from riders in the academy telling me how unhappy they were, but I had to stay out of it and let it run its course. I was thinking, ‘Fuck, I’ve done all this work on building it up and now it’s going out the window.’

  It was generally just a bloody hard year. I constantly felt up against it. I was thinking, ‘We’ve just got to get thr
ough this.’ In fact, the entire year and the way we struggled through the Tour were the best things that ever happened to Sky. You learn through failure, and we are an ambitious group, all wanting to be successful. There were a few times when my relationship with Dave was teetering on the edge because I felt under pressure and Dave had high expectations of me. Perhaps I was reading more into it than was actually the case, but when you’re in there you can’t see out. It would have been easy to say Team Sky wasn’t for me and I was leaving, but I never thought of stopping, not once. I hated it at the time, but I wasn’t going to bail out.

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  We went through the mill in 2010, but I don’t think we’d ever have imagined quite how bad it would get. The Vuelta a España was where we hit our absolute lowest point. We didn’t have a particularly strong team, but from a development point of view we had some good young lads in there: Peter Kennaugh, Ben Swift, Ian Stannard. I flew in on the Monday before the race began in Seville, and our soigneur Txema González picked me up. We went out that night, rolled in at 4 a.m., doing things the Spanish way, and then a few of us messed about in the swimming pool. The following evening I took a call from Sean Yates, who was going to be our lead directeur sportif at the race. He was on his way down, but had checked himself into hospital in Bordeaux with a heart problem. There was no way he could do the race; the only option was for me to stay on as second DS to Marcus Ljungquist, who would be stepping in for Sean.