Project Rainbow

by Rod Ellingworth

  I’d been away so much more than I was used to already that season. I was absolutely knackered, and it wasn’t good calling Jane and telling her I was off for another six weeks – which is what it would be by the time I’d got back from the world championships two weeks after the Vuelta – but there was no option. That was a personal blow and a major worry. Sean ended up having a pacemaker fitted, and that was his season over. We got through the first stage, a team time trial, and that evening Txema started feeling a little bit ropey. The next day he felt quite sick, really under the weather, so he told us he would stay at the hotel and rejoin us when he improved. It’s something that happens on a long stage race from time to time.

  It was burning hot – over forty degrees – and suddenly the team started falling apart with stomach trouble. Ben Swift went first, then Tim Kerrison – we had to leave him in a hotel the same way we had left Txema – then more riders: John-Lee Augustyn, Peter Kennaugh and Simon Gerrans, all of them throwing up within the first half hour of the stage. I was feeling rotten as well, and Marcus was having to stop the car to keep throwing up. We were all sick, and we assumed that was what had hit Txema; we heard that he had taken himself to hospital and had been discharged because the doctors knew we were all poorly and assumed he had the same thing.

  Then came the phone call from Steve Peters, the Great Britain team psychiatrist, who was head of all things medical at Sky; he was telling me, ‘This is really serious with Txema; he’s got septicaemia. He’s not going to make it.’ By this time Juan Antonio Flecha had fallen ill; we got really worried about him, so we took him to hospital at two o’clock in the morning. We were four or five days into the race and I hadn’t been sleeping at all, and then we were told there was nothing wrong with Flecha, but what was weird was that his symptoms were similar to what Txema had: sickness, high fever, and so on.

  The call saying that Txema had died came on the Friday. Apparently he had got a little cut on his leg and that was how the infection got in; once it gets hold of your organs you never get rid of it, and that was it. It was an immense shock. He was so healthy; he was always good fun, even though he had ended up with a lot of work put on him because he was one of those guys who actually cared about his job. He took it seriously and was prepared to do the little extras we were adding to the carer’s role; we used to get frustrated because there were other carers who didn’t want to take all that on. It was unbelievable to think he could die from a little cut on his leg, and then we began thinking, ‘Bloody hell, when did he get that cut? Did he get it messing around in the swimming pool with us?’ You just don’t know.

  The phone call came on the Friday; we still had about twenty kilometres to go in the race. It was weird because within the peloton everyone had heard about it; we weren’t going to tell the riders until afterwards, but there were so many people in cycling who were good friends with Txema that the word got out and went through the peloton. By the time we finished the stage the media was going mad around our bus. We crammed on there. Nobody said anything. It was horrendous. By now Dave Brailsford was on his way; he arrived that evening and asked how we were. The answer was, ‘Everybody’s fucked. We can’t carry on, we just cannot carry on. We’ve lost half the team, we don’t know what’s happened; everyone has been so sick and people are still feeling a bit ropey.’ We were put into quarantine at the hotel where we were staying; a local hospital sent staff in to take swabs and blood samples from us all, and we had to stay there until we got the results.

  His poor wife and kids; you can’t imagine what it was like for them. What struck us was that she wanted the team to be at his funeral, to turn up on the bus. We had to get that across to the young lads and make it clear they should stay and go to his funeral. It was a long trip up to Vitoria, in the Basque Country, where he lived, but I think when they look back they will be glad they stayed on. We took every vehicle we had up there, and on the day of the funeral we had a police escort from the hotel – the whole team in convoy – and we pulled up outside the church, all in team kit. It was only then that I realised how into this team the guy had been; his widow let us know how proud he had been to be part of it.

  Txema had been around cycling a long time. There were some we had brought in who hadn’t bought into the way we were going about things, but he seemed to really enjoy what we were doing. He was massively popular among the riders, quietly spoken like a lot of people from the Basque Country, really good at his job – all the lads wanted him to massage them. His death changed Sky. It was the first time I had sensed the team was a bit of a family. There is a different feeling within a professional team compared to a national squad because you spend so much of the year on the road. When you do a Grand Tour together, you get to the end of those three weeks and feel you’ve been through this massive voyage of experience. You do actually get quite close to people, and we’d experienced that with Txema. I’d been through the Tour and the Giro and all the other stage races with him; you just end up with that feeling that a team are like family. His death was a catastrophic end to a really hard year, but it brought us together in that way.

  We still talk about Txema a lot at Sky. At the end of the year we have different awards in our review of the season; the one for most outstanding staff member was named the Txema González Award. There are staff at the team still who were really good friends with him before he came to us, so he’s not forgotten. The team wear black armbands on the anniversary of his death; there was a stage in his home town on the 2012 Vuelta, and something was organised around that. There are still photographs of him on people’s computers; in one of Brad’s books there is a picture of him massaging Brad’s legs at the 2010 Tour, and we’ve got that hung up on the wall in the office. He is still part of the team.

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  The Worlds project was what kept me alive through 2010. Sky wasn’t enjoyable; it consisted of a lot of things that I couldn’t control with a lot of people I didn’t know and involved a lot of situations coming out of nowhere that I had to firefight. On the other hand, the Worlds project was familiar territory and was something that I could do on my terms. That year it hinged on the national road race championship in Lancashire, which was the main training camp of the year, and the world championship itself in Geelong, near Melbourne. That camp and the Worlds were the only things that I enjoyed in 2010.

  At the Nationals Sky took the first three places, with Gee winning. We had a great camp – really good fun, a good training ride the day before, four hours on Friday, a couple of hours on Saturday. What really struck me was their morale – the lads were happy to be together. They’d all come in from different teams but were having a good time together. They enjoyed it and they were all upbeat. I felt we were moving the Worlds project along nicely. The riders had a good understanding of where we were headed; they knew what we wanted to do.

  Cav trained for a couple of hours behind the car on the Saturday, and then they all rode the national road race on the Sunday, on a super-tough circuit, which put most of the field out of contention in the early kilometres after Gee, Peter Kennaugh and Ian Stannard broke away. Cav had been doing his normal programme – the Giro, the Tour of Switzerland – and we always used the national road race as a final hit out before the Tour. So within a few laps who was on the side of the road? Cav. I purposely drove up next to him, stopped the car, looked and didn’t say a word. I just kept on driving. He knew what I was thinking – ‘What the fuck are you doing sitting on your arse? There are still groups going around, so why aren’t you with them? You’re not trying to win these Nationals but you need the work before the Tour.’ So he went out on his bike again.

  I was still coaching Cav; some people had made comments about a possible conflict of interest given my involvement with Team Sky. I’d said from the beginning that if it became an issue, I’d have to decide one way or the other, but it was squashed pretty quickly. Dave was supportive there, because I was still working for British Cycling as well as Sky, and the Worlds project was
a big objective. Brad, Gee and Swifty were all on the Olympic track programme, Peter Kennaugh soon would be, and Cav was part of that group even though he wasn’t with Sky.

  Although I’d been coaching Cav through his earlier years as a pro – in 2007, 2008 and 2009 – I’d not been to many races, so I’d met up with him when he was back home in Manchester or Quarrata. All of a sudden, in 2010, I was working at a lot of races which Cav was riding, so our contact was in a different environment, which was pretty refreshing for us. We didn’t do anything different. Cav had a decent year and came good at the Tour, where he won five stages and was just eleven points from winning the green jersey. He was ticking over. One of the big things was that he had said he wanted to be in good form at the end of the year. That was always going to be the plan, to rehearse the transition from the Vuelta to the Worlds themselves. That was what we would do in 2011, so we had to find out what it involved, what were the potential pitfalls.

  At Geelong what mattered was the process: finish the Vuelta, go training, race the Worlds. It was an easy one when it came to getting fit – Cav just had to go and finish the Vuelta, and he would be in whatever shape he was when he came out of it. There wasn’t a lot we could do, there wasn’t a lot we could control – but with Cav, nine times out of ten it’s a matter of working him well, working him hard, making sure he’s riding his bike every day, and he’s going to get pretty fit. And coming into the Worlds Cav won the points jersey in the Vuelta – the points jersey in one of the three big Tours had been one of his career goals, so that was a big thing for him.

  For Melbourne in 2010 I wanted to practise the run-in from the Vuelta to the Worlds: what training do you do? How much, how little? What’s the mindset of the team? What do you do when you’re on site? That was where Mark was really good. He paid for himself and the other two riders, Dave Millar and Jeremy Hunt – we had only qualified three – to go business class or first class. Dave was very critical of the training that we did beforehand. He’s the kind of rider who likes a big hit of training and then to rest up, stop cycling. That’s different from what I’ve seen with Cav over the years: you need the right balance, you need to keep him working. We aimed for the top ten, and although I don’t think he would have medalled, I believe Cav had the form for a top-ten placing, if we’d got it right leading into the race. There were three reasons why he didn’t perform: he finished the Vuelta on his knees because he was fighting for the points jersey all the way, and that took quite a lot out of him. On top of that, I think he kept panicking in his training, and I didn’t rein him in. I didn’t say ‘no’ when I should have done. It wasn’t every day, but he did a couple of big sessions where I was thinking, ‘Ouch, I’m not sure you needed to do that.’

  The other factor was that Cav didn’t settle down. He hardly sat still for the whole time we were there. He was constantly up and about, shopping, going for a coffee, walking around the hotel talking to people. It was just stuff the guys tend to do, but I was really frustrated about it. There were other distractions: Dave knew a few people around the place; Jeremy had lived in Melbourne and his wife was around all the time. So we got all that wrong, but I think we learnt a lot from it. So a year later in Copenhagen it was, ‘Right, Cav, sit on your arse, don’t do more than absolutely necessary.’ These were all little things that we were learning as we went along; they all add up.

  Not one of the riders finished in Geelong, so on paper the result looked horrendous, but I walked away thinking, ‘OK, I’m all right with that.’ Looking at the long-term picture, I wasn’t really bothered, and I said so to Cav. I don’t mind when we lose as long as we are moving forward. Sometimes you have to take a step back to progress, and I knew we’d learnt some more. We’d gone through the process again. I like working on long-term projects because you have to work hard to get somewhere. I like the problem-solving, although I get frustrated when I read stuff slagging you off for not performing. I’m prepared to sit there and go through with it as long as I can see the way forward clearly in my head. And that was what the Worlds project and Team Sky had in common: goals like winning the Worlds with a British cyclist or being a Tour de France-winning team or winning the Classics are massive objectives. These are the biggest cycle races in the world to win and it doesn’t just happen overnight.

  11 : Turning Points

  There is a stage in the formation of every team when the teething period ends, the message has clearly got through, and it is as if a switch has been flicked. Suddenly the whole thing starts to move forward. Morale improves and momentum sets in. It happens in this order: good results, morale, momentum. You get results and then, as Dave Brailsford says, people get in the right seats on the bus. Everyone has their place, and they find it. In a team everyone has an ego; people protect their ground, some have to lead, some want to follow, some rub each other up the wrong way. That was certainly how it was at Sky, where no one knew each other.

  I’d seen it at the academy, with the Worlds squad in 2010. With the academy there was no real staffing change; it was a matter of the work ethic among the riders. At Sky it was a matter of clarity among the whole group. Suddenly everyone got in line, and we went forward. It happened in May 2011, at the Bayern Rundfahrt. Geraint Thomas won the overall title, Brad took Fabian Cancellara’s scalp in the time trial, and almost overnight there were happy faces and a sense of momentum. Winning breeds success. You get the results, people start smiling, and then you want more.

  It was not as if 2010 had been a complete disaster: we’d taken twenty-two wins, including the prologue of the Giro d’Italia with Brad and the Het Nieuwsblad Classic with Juan Antonio Flecha, which is far better than many professional teams achieve. But we are an ambitious bunch; we had big goals, and there were prominent races such as the Tour de France and Tour of Britain where things didn’t work out. Personally, I never thought we were off course; I was able to keep my eyes on the bigger picture. I was quite prepared for a bit of a struggle early on, which is why it never even crossed my mind to leave. I did wonder at times about whether I was good enough to do the job, but just upping sticks and leaving was never an option. It was a challenge – working with the pros was a whole new world to me – but I didn’t feel quite as vulnerable as I did early on when I started working for British Cycling; by the time I started at Sky I knew that the under-23s had been successful, so that was always going to be there for me.

  Sky turned around quickly enough. All of a sudden the staff started to work well together, the performance team started to gel, and the riders started to enjoy being around each other. I remember having a conversation in 2010 with David Fernández, one of the mechanics, and he was saying, ‘Why do we do all this work? We are the last team up at night working on the bikes, and we still don’t win races. What is going on?’ It was as if overnight all these guys started to walk around with smiles on their faces and we were getting places. In June 2011 Brad won the Dauphiné Libéré, the biggest stage win of his career, and that put him where everybody knew he could be.

  Brad doesn’t lead a team in the same way that Cav does. Mark sets an example on the bike and he also heads it up around the dinner table and on the bus, quite often pushing his ideas. Brad leads purely with his legs, and he was doing a bloody good job by now. He and Tim Kerrison were starting to build a really good relationship; Brad identified well with Tim, realised his training style was working for him. Tim is very thoughtful; he looks at detail far more than me, and Brad really identifies with the way he works. Personally, Brad had turned a corner; he’d had a good talking to during the winter. Dave had a new principle of compliance: as trainers we can set the training, but the question was, how much of that do they actually do? So it became our job to make them comply, actually do the training, rather than just give them the programme and trust them to get on with it.

  It helped that we finally got the training camps nailed; that laid the foundations for the whole year. In that winter of 2010–11 we decided to go back to Majorca, use the same h
otel we stayed at with British Cycling and run it to the same format – as a drop-in centre. It was a radical departure from the usual professional-cycling training camp. The idea is you have several weeks in which you take over the hotel, with all your equipment there. You invite riders in for certain periods of time, but they can also drop in whenever the weather is bad at home, so they know that there are staff there and other people to train with. My idea was to invite them for a week at most and make them short, hard weeks. Then we would find that they wanted to stay for a few more days, so we would get more out of them because they were staying of their own accord. It worked so well; in the six or seven weeks we had there through 2010–11 I remember only one or two days of rain. It was a massive difference to the year before; the riders had a better winter and were getting better results from the start of the season.

  Most importantly of all, the staff began to settle down. When you first start an enterprise of that size, with sixty-five people being brought in from all over, all the egos get going: you are trying to fight your ground, prove your point, make people aware that you’re worth employing. And we had got rid of a lot of people: not many riders – they were pretty much the same group as in 2010 – but perhaps eight to ten staff who didn’t buy into our ways, bringing in other staff who potentially did. So that completely changed the balance.