Project Rainbow

by Rod Ellingworth

  All this meant he could see the difference the skinsuit and the filled-in helmet made in terms of aerodynamics. His bike was his bog-standard road racing bike, a machine he had ordered from Specialized which is in a museum on the Isle of Man now, with the race number on and so on. It was plain black, but on the inside, the seat stays and the forks it was silver. Cav being Cav, he had thought about everything, ordering brand-new shoes with the same colour scheme as the bike – black with silver.

  I had worked hard on managing the final week leading into the Worlds – when to bring the riders in, what training to do, how hard to work them. Melbourne in 2010 had forced us to be a bit different – because we were racing in Australia we had to be there together a bit longer than usual – so Mendrisio in 2009 was the model we used. The riders would come in on the Wednesday night, have Thursday, Friday and Saturday together, then we would race on the Sunday. It was crucial to get that week right: we’d learnt from Mendrisio and Melbourne that how much work the riders did should be decided on an individual basis because they were all coming in off different races, and some – in Copenhagen, Brad and David Millar – would be riding the time trial on the Thursday.

  Everything seemed to go well: the timings for getting to events, the training sessions. It helped that we’d had dry runs, and that year in, year out it was what we had been doing; with British Cycling it was always about detailed planning and getting it right. It was a bit of a dream week. Nothing went wrong, apart from one puncture, although it wasn’t completely plain sailing. Cav was incredibly nervous. I remember going into his room and asking him if he had definitely tried on his skinsuit. I made all the riders try their skinsuits on, but in particular Cav; he had had a bit of a problem because the makers had forgotten to sew pockets on the back into which he could put his energy gels, so we had had to get his skinsuit remade at the last minute. It arrived on the Thursday or Friday. When I went in to see if Cav had tried it on, he was sitting on his bed with his head in his hands, saying, ‘I am so fucking nervous.’ All I could say was that it was fine and completely normal: ‘Flipping heck, Cav, don’t worry about it, you are meant to be nervous.’

  The thing is, Cav does get worked up. He’ll be sat there talking with his legs going up and down, up and down, up and down. He’ll be constantly moving, and you have to tell him to calm down. Before the Olympics it was the same, which is surprising when you think how many races he’s won on the big stage. He gets so worked up, yet he handles it really well. He only shows it to certain people who he thinks know him inside out.

  I was worried too, but I was trying not to let people see it. It had been such a long build-up and now this was it, this was the moment. The elite men’s race is the last one of the championships; you spend the week watching all the other races and are the last to go off. It’s always a huge day organisationally because you have to get people to where they have to be: into the pits, out on the circuit doing the information board, down to the start. Everyone had to set up early. We had the Team Sky bus at the start of the race and had to make sure that it had time to get to the finish, but I had planned the logistics of the day well before – who we were working with, what staff were around and where they had to be and when.

  *

  Most importantly the lads were happy. We were winning medals all week: Lucy Garner and Elinor Barker medalled in the junior women’s events, and Emma Pooley in the elite women’s time trial; Brad won the silver medal in the time trial and Dave finished seventh, which put him and the pro riders on a roll. That all helped to create a good feeling in the camp.

  We had the Australians in our hotel with us, which was a weird mix. The Aussies had Matt Goss, who was probably the biggest challenger to Cav, who was quite openly saying he feared Gossie more than anybody in the race; and there was Matt Hayman, Mick Rogers and Chris Sutton, all of whom were riding for Team Sky that year. I was coaching all three of them, and all of a sudden it was us against them. So there was a lot of good banter – all those years on the track it was always Australia versus Great Britain at the Games and Worlds. Matt White was there – I get on with him, and he is good mates with David Millar, as he was his directeur sportif at Garmin. The Team Sky Australians were constantly coming to our bus to get bits and pieces of equipment, with us saying, ‘Oi, you’re not in Team Sky this week’ and so on. Plus Shane Sutton was there – he’s a GB coach, but Chris Sutton is his nephew. It’s a friendly rivalry, but we all pretend to hate each other, so it was quite lively around the hotel.

  On Friday we had a good look at the circuit when it was shut off to traffic; the riders rode around and I was on the motorbike so that I could be in among them and discuss things as they cropped up. The idea is just to let them get the feel of the circuit. The thing to remember with the professionals is that they race every single day on open roads and come across different ones all the time. They are so used to remembering a stretch of road from one year to the next – it’s their job. That means you don’t have to overdo looking at a circuit – you only have to do a lap or two and they remember it really well.

  Brad was quite concerned; he came to me on the motorbike and said, ‘Jesus, this is like a big criterium circuit. Whatever you do, don’t give me a job late on, because I’m going to be nervous; give me an early job.’ He reckoned it was going to be a shitfight. The team were going round at forty kilometres an hour on the Friday, just floating round, and Brad was saying, ‘God, this is so fast.’ Cav just said the nature of the course made him feel even more confident; his view was that he felt flipping great. Dave Millar was looking at the course for the first time, although he had seen the video; his take on it was, ‘We are going to piss this – we are going to be able to ride all day.’ I just got a really good feeling from them. I had been a little bit worried about Brad because he seemed super-tired after the time trial and I didn’t know whether he was going to commit. Going into the team meeting on the Friday night I still wasn’t sure about him.

  I absolutely had to get it right. To start with I didn’t want too many people on the team bus, so there was only Dave Brailsford, Tim Kerrison, the riders and me. Olly Cookson set up all the information for the presentation, and I did the wording. We looked at the route first: the race started in Copenhagen and went around a big loop, thirty or forty kilometres, before getting onto the circuit. There were photographs of those roads just to remind the riders what it was about, then photographs of different sections of the circuit, again just as a reminder. The critical part was where we went through what we were trying to achieve – win the bike race – and how we were going to control the race. I wanted to set the Worlds up as if it was just another bike race: ‘OK, it’s a big occasion for us, but this is what you do day in, day out for a job. It’s no different. It’s a bigger playing field, but the job is the same. The way you controlled the race in the Olympic test event or the Tour of Britain is how you have to control the race in the world road race championship.’

  There was a bit of discussion about who was going to be working when and who would be doing what. The first thing to establish was that if we were going to let a break go away, it had to have the right composition of riders. There were six of our lads who had to be vigilant from the first kilometre – basically everybody except Jeremy Hunt and Cav. Jeremy was to look after Cav all day, so Cav was to sit behind him as long as he could stay up there. We chose Jeremy because he is great at moving around the peloton, and him and Cav really get on well. Cav had said he felt comfortable sitting behind Jez, so that was an important thing.

  Cav was sitting there, rocking his feet up and down as he always does when he’s nervous. Gee, on the other hand, takes it in his stride: he sat there confident as anything that he could do the job. Ian Stannard was his usual self, so strong but never completely confident in himself until he is in the race. Steve Cummings is a nervous character – we had our issues at Team Sky and never quite connected, although we are fairly good friends, I think. Steve had always been in on this fr
om the start.

  David Millar was our road captain because of his experience. As a bike rider, he’s confident, sometimes overly so, and here his form wasn’t quite as good as he thought it was. He brings a bit of panache and experience to the team, a little bit of something extra; some people argued that he didn’t deserve to be on the team because of his doping issues in the past, but it wasn’t my job to rule on that. Personally, I think anyone who’s caught doping should be banned for life, but if he was eligible to ride, that was that.

  Jeremy is solid as a rock: you know what you are going to get with him, and he doesn’t beat around the bush. He and Cav had come up with a strategy which involved the two of them dropping back on the one climb to save Cav’s legs, then moving gradually back up through the peloton on the rest of the lap. They said it was what they were going to do – they were very connected and they had done a little bit of it the year before in Melbourne. It was something that Dave had suggested right from the beginning. It was a tactic he remembered seeing in world championships with riders like Rolf Sørensen, who was one of the cleverest and most successful one-day riders of the 1990s. You would see it in one-day Classics: the leader gets in a really little gear, floats back through the bunch to save energy on a climb, then they have a teammate to take them back to the front. So every lap Jeremy did the same thing: he and Cav waited for the same point in the circuit where the guys who could flow through the wheels and manoeuvre well could scuttle through and back up to the front of the group.

  You always want your riders to be near the front, but there was another good reason for being among the leaders in Copenhagen: the feed zone was badly managed. It’s a problem every year at the Worlds: the peloton comes through the pit area, where all the teams have their boxes, and every lap riders are grabbing bottles and feed bags, with team helpers and hangers-on crowding onto the road. There were so many crashes in the feed zone in the earlier races that year, and there were more in the pro race; there were just too many people on that bit of road. But because we were at the front on every lap, that made it easier; they missed the crashes, and all the other riders would get stuck in a bottleneck as they rode into the line of helpers and would have to sprint back into position in the bunch. We had an easy flow every lap, which meant the lads saved energy.

  Feed zones are a danger area in any race because there are bottles, bags and people everywhere as the riders come through. But at the Worlds they’re riskier than ever because the riders go through every lap, rather than having a single feed as you do in most pro races. You never know what control there is going to be in the feed zone. They need to have a restriction and a clear line that the helpers aren’t allowed to go over; if the soigneurs all stood back, the riders would have so much more space. We managed it by making sure that Cav would never try to grab a feed bag; it was always Jeremy who snatched them for him. We planned that Cav was never to go on the right-hand side of the road, where most of the helpers stand – he was always to stay out of trouble. In hindsight it seems so easy, the lads going over the finish line first each time to be out of trouble at the feed, but it was something else to do it on the day.

  Jeremy had another key task. I had taken him and Cav to one side before the meeting to go through it with them, and then I said it in front of the whole group: ‘Right, Jeremy, one of your jobs is to keep Cav calm.’ I told Cav that I’d given Jeremy permission to intervene if he started gobbing off. These were my words: ‘Jez, if you hear Cav gobbing off at ANYBODY, tell him to shut the fuck up! Bang him on top of the head, get him to button it!’ I told everybody in the meeting, ‘This is Jeremy’s job: “Patience, Cav, patience, patience.”’

  One of the things I started working on with Mark a long time beforehand was what that last lap would feel like. Cav has this fixed idea that when you come to a bunch sprint, everybody should get out of the way and leave the road to the bunch sprinters and the sprint teams. When he is at the Tour de France and the non-sprinters get involved, he says, ‘OK, I’ll just deal with it because I know what they are doing.’ But in any other race all you can hear is Mark Cavendish shouting, ‘Get out of the way, you’re not a sprinter,’ and throwing his weight around. I said to him, ‘Cav, every single one of the guys coming to the finish of the world championship has a right to sprint, even if they are not a sprinter.’ At the time he was worked up about the French riders, who seemed to get involved all the time, so I said, ‘You are bound to get some French guy coming up to you and giving you an elbow in the ribs. What are you going to do?’

  ‘I am just going to concentrate and follow the wheel.’

  ‘Right. OK, great.’

  You have to put yourself into Mark’s shoes. He feels so good as he’s riding along in the bunch, but every single time he wins a race it’s only the final fifteen to twenty seconds in which he has to perform. For six hours before that, in every race, he has to be so patient. He has to trust his team, guide them, concentrate on saving his strength and keeping his cool. He’s so good at doing it, but sometimes when he’s fired up he lets it all out. At the Worlds it was a hurdle, a major mental challenge for him. The risk was that he might lose the plot and end up tangling with somebody, and perhaps having a fall when he didn’t need to. I wasn’t going to just hope for the best.

  We went through the roles for each of the riders. We had decided that once the break developed, we weren’t going to let it get more than a four- or five-minute lead; at that point Dave Millar would make the call, and once he did so, Steve Cummings and Chris Froome were to ride at the front. They had to try to ride for as long as they possibly could, and then it was down to Jeremy and Dave and Brad and Gee and Ian. In the final lap, it was Gee and Ian to get Cav there, plus originally Dave and Brad, because it was possible that Jeremy would be gone by that point. And then Cav for the finish.

  Then it was time to go through the ‘what if’ scenarios. It’s one of the Steve Peters things: always discuss what might happen in a given situation, so that if you end up in that situation you know what do. That was where we went through what to do if Cav crashed or punctured, at this point or that point in the race. It was there that Brad stepped in. I was sat at the front of the bus, Brad was sat in the front left-hand seat and Cav was right at the back. Brad turned round – he’s a big gangly thing so he had his legs crossed – and did what he always does: pointed with his fingers. ‘Listen, we start as a team, we’ll finish as a team. We’re all here for Cav, we’ve all agreed to ride the road Worlds to help Cav win. If we work the whole day for Cav and he punctures on the last lap, we all stop, we all wait and we all try to get back. We’ll finish as a team that way.’

  There was total silence. That was the moment when I realised that, thank God, Brad was in. One of my big jobs, one of my key targets had been to make sure we ended up as one unit with one goal, and I thought, ‘Fucking hell, we have done it.’

  *

  Other than getting the lads to the start line on time, I was done. I could have gone home, as I didn’t make any difference on race day. Brian Holm came down after the team meeting the night before the race, and I sat down with him and talked him through the plan. He just said, ‘Fine’ – he was so relaxed. ‘Yeah, they’ll be fine, there’ll be no problems. Cav is great, don’t worry, don’t worry.’

  On the day my first job was to make sure I got the lads in the right place at the right time. There was no talk on the bus beforehand; it was a matter of ‘Right, guys, stick to the game plan. Let’s go.’ It was quite cold but nice and dry, and the weather forecast was good. The lads were quite happy, although I could tell Cav was nervous; but they had music banging out on the bus – a Bradley mix of Paul Weller or something.

  I stayed off the bus and let them get ready. I was in the car preparing my stuff because I was pretty nervous. One thing I did do was wait outside the bus to wish them all good luck. I gave Cav an arm around the shoulders and said, ‘Good luck,’ and off he went – it wasn’t the time to do anything different; just stick to th
e plan. Everything was fine, the carers did a great job, and the lads looked fantastic going off to the start together. Then it was into the car, and ‘Fucking hell, here we go.’ It was quieter than usual at the start because of the race beginning outside Copenhagen, away from the circuit; there wasn’t the usual buzz. Once the peloton had gone we couldn’t do anything but be ready for every eventuality. ‘Let’s not piss around, let’s take this seriously from the word go.’ So that was it – they were gone.

  After that the tension just built through the day; the steering wheel was getting squeezed as I clenched it tighter and tighter and tighter and tighter. We had TV coverage the whole time, and first up all the groups started going off the front – it was quite nerve-wracking, but I could see the guys were flowing and not doing too much. All the other teams are run by ex-pros, so they were all going alongside each other and talking, but our car was quiet because nobody knows who I am and nobody realised Brian was with me. The break didn’t go as quickly as we were hoping; it went after about twenty or twenty-five kilometres and was an eleven-man group. We got out onto a coast road where you can look across the sea to Sweden, a rolling road through a wooded area, and that was where the move really formed. As always, once it had gone the race shut down, the riders all stopped for a pee, and Dave came back to the car to speak to me and Brian. It looked pretty good – there was nobody in it of any real significance. It was obviously controllable, so then it was down to Dave to get the boys riding when the gap hit four or five minutes.

  We had already talked about it on Friday night, so it was a matter of sticking to the game plan. The break was OK, although it wasn’t ideal because the Spanish had Pablo Lastras in there. I think a lot of nations thought they knew exactly what we were going to do, but there were some guys like Paolo Bettini, the Italian manager, who had said beforehand that the finish straight would be too hard for Cav. There had been a lot of speculation, but we were just going to do our job; we weren’t too interested in what anyone else thought.