Project Rainbow

by Rod Ellingworth

  Brian looked at me when the race radio broadcast the numbers of the eleven riders in the break and we worked out who was in there: ‘This is not bad at all.’ We came onto the circuit, the bunch was spread across the road and the break was going away, and then all of a sudden our guys started riding. What Steve Cummings and Chris Froome did after that was absolutely insane. They rode on the front from about 190 kilometres to go until about fifty-five kilometres or so to go – about three and a half laps to the finish. They spent a hell of a lot of time at the front; it was a phenomenal effort. The Germans gave us a bit of help, thinking of André Greipel, and the Aussies and Americans put riders up there at various times, but with about four and a half laps to go there was a massive pile-up in the middle of the peloton, with Thor Hushovd, Edvald Boasson Hagen and Fabian Cancellara all involved. Greipel made it through, but quite a few of the German team didn’t, including their strongest rider, Tony Martin. That changed the race for us; the guys who we thought would help us later on were gone. There was a feeling in some quarters that we’d set to work too early; I took some calls telling me that we had got it wrong, but I had to just ignore them.

  Brad got stronger lap by lap, and eventually Dave Millar said he felt he was struggling a little bit, so they swapped roles. Dave went before Brad from about two laps out, right into the final lap, and Brad did the final bit of riding after the bell to keep it all together. He said later that Dave was sitting behind him, continually saying that he had to wait, wait, wait, and without Dave keeping him on a leash he would have gone too early and ripped the race to bits. As it was, when he did go, it was a massive turn on the final lap, a good six kilometres which took us up to four kilometres out.

  I’ll give you two examples of how they worked on that last lap. There was a moment when Ian Stannard began elbowing Carlos Barredo of Spain with five or six kilometres to go. Barredo was trying to make some space and kept going whack, whack, whack into Ian, but Ian kept coming back at him, and that was exactly what he had to do; it was the perfect moment to shove people left and right. And right at the finish, in the final 500 metres, I saw Geraint Thomas looking around for Cav, and I knew that meant that Gee was totally committed. He could have gone for the finish himself at that point, but even that late on he was still devoted to the cause. To reinforce my point, there were three Italian and two Spanish jerseys showing up in that lead group when I looked at the TV in the finale, but they weren’t helping each other. Cav always says that if you get second and fourth in a bike race you’ve completely and utterly failed. We always made a big thing of that at the Great Britain academy: first and third, first and tenth – great, because all that matters is winning it. Getting second and fourth doesn’t mean you weren’t committed to winning the bike race; it just means you haven’t got it right.

  The Friday before I’d stood at the bottom of the straight with Cav, and he’d said, ‘I can be as far back as tenth. I’ll be better coming from that far back rather than being in second or third with people behind me.’ We got that from the Tour de France stage finish at Cap Fréhel, when he had come around Philippe Gilbert at the last moment. He said, ‘If I’m in the same position as I was there, I can get around people, as long as the road doesn’t get blocked in front of me.’ Coming into the finish he lost Gee’s wheel, and we were all going, ‘Shit, he’s lost him!’ But I said, ‘No, he’s OK – he said he needed to be eighth or tenth on the last corner. We’re flipping well in there, we’re OK.’

  We were all slamming the brakes on in the cars as the riders went up the straight, because we had to turn left into the team car parking where the riders went right. All the riders who had been dropped from the bunch were coming past us, and everyone was sat in their cars watching the finish on their tellys. And all the crowd were standing up on the barriers trying to look down at the TVs in the cars – it seemed like they were right in our faces. The final 400–500 metres were the first time I could take my hands off the wheel since ten o’clock that morning and watch the telly properly. When we saw Cav go, we were just shouting and shouting and shouting. He was shouted up that hill, for sure.

  I looked for Mark on the TV, and waited for a gap to open for him as they went up the finish straight. I’d been watching him all day, in his black aerodynamic helmet, so he wasn’t hard to spot. He had got Matt Goss’s wheel through the final corner and came off the wheel on Goss’s right-hand side. It was all a bit of a mess, riders going left and right, but I could see exactly where he was from the overhead television shot, and when the gap opened – it was about 300 metres out – he didn’t hesitate. He had wanted to leave it a little bit later, but he didn’t want to take the chance of the door shutting on him again. When he went, I knew he was going to get it. I could tell he had strength in his legs, even though Goss was coming back at him. He was looking around him all the time. I could see André Greipel coming up on his left, but he had been unable to get out early enough and had started his sprint too late.

  When they got into the final metres all I could see was Cav in the right-hand gutter. I didn’t see anyone else: I was focused on Cav and the line coming closer and closer. I could see him looking around him, the position he was in on the bike, and I knew he still had all his strength left. I can always tell when he’s going to lose a sprint – he doesn’t move the bike in the same way; you can tell he’s not confident. This time he was solid as a rock, bent right down low over his bike, his head up, looking to his left – he’d still got all his upper-body strength. When he crossed the line, I went hoarse. All three of us were just screaming our heads off.

  Knowing Cav, I think he would have liked to have won in the middle of the road in full view of the whole world, but he wasn’t taking any risks – being in the gutter he only had to worry about being overtaken on one side. Quite often he will tell me a few days before what he’s going to do when he wins, say, a stage of a big race – pretend he’s on the phone or something. But there are times when it’s not premeditated, it’s just his arms in the air with both fists clenched – pure instinct. That’s how it was that day: he wasn’t going to lose that sprint – and he told me afterwards he knew he wouldn’t – and you could see that all the way up the straight; the way he threw his hands up, it was clear he was desperate to get to the line. You think, ‘Fucking hell, he wanted that.’

  As we sat there in the car, all the fans on the barriers were going, ‘Who’s won? Who’s won?’ They must have heard it over the loudspeaker, because then they all started cheering us, which felt good. The cars started moving again as they went into the parking lot, but we didn’t budge. We just stayed there, all of us in tears, all hugging each other for a few minutes. It was a moment of absolute relief more than joy. That’s the difference half a wheel makes. There had been all the years of build-up, and I knew that Cav wanted it so badly, and the team had made the whole race look so easy, so simple. If we had lost, it would have been a real gut-wrencher.

  Then I started to think, ‘Oh my God, he’s won it, I can’t believe it.’ Then it hits you: a real feeling of release after you’ve been knotted up all day. My guts had been twisting and turning even early on when we stopped for a piss, because I’d been so nervous that something might happen when we were out of the car. I’d felt under pressure all day because not everyone had agreed with our tactics; I wasn’t sure everyone had bought into the lads dominating the race as they did. I’d been getting messages, people saying the commentators were questioning what we were doing. But dominating the race had been the plan. That’s how Cav likes it – he likes to have the pressure of knowing that the lads have committed totally to taking control of the race and that he can’t afford to fail.

  So when that knotted up feeling went, I thought, ‘Thank fuck for that.’

  We parked up at the Great Britain team bus, and everyone was hugging each other there too. I missed seeing Cav on the podium because it was a bit of a way away and it was over by the time I got there. But I saw Gee standing there on his own watchi
ng, so I stood with him for a bit, and then he gave me a backie back down to the bus and we waited for Cav. It seemed a lifetime because he was kept there doing dope control, television interviews and the press conference, and by the time he got to the bus we’d already started on the champagne.

  *

  Perhaps I’ll never have a bigger moment than that in my career. It felt surreal for ages afterwards – ‘We’ve actually won the Worlds.’ I’d never thought when I finished my racing career that I’d end up winning the world road race championship with someone I worked with, but it had been a deep-rooted desire since I started working at British Cycling. I’m proud to be British and I was proud to go out and stuff it up some nations who, when I was racing, clearly used to look down on us.

  As well as Cav coming up the finish straight first, and the lads doing their job all day, and the back-up staff doing all that they did, that win was about me getting up early and staying up late, following Cav around like I’d done for all those years. I’d never dropped my standards. I didn’t really have a moment when I thought it might not happen because I’d always had that goal, and all I could think was what a great opportunity it was. I’ll always be part of that success. It wasn’t the first time we’d won the road Worlds, of course – Tom Simpson’s win in 1965 was the historic one – but when you think of the name Tom Simpson and what it means, you think about how we started out on the project with a few of us in a room looking at the jersey he won on that day more than forty years ago. It’s about that long, long build-up, but it’s about other things too: getting the right television and the right guys in the team car – all those little things that make it all come together.

  *

  When he crossed the line with his arms in the air, one of the first text messages I sent was to Roger Hammond, Dan Lloyd and all the guys who hadn’t made the team, thanking them for their support and for playing their part in the story. To me a team is only as good as its first reserve, and this was a team victory. We’d left some bloody good bike riders at home that year – Dan was flying, and Roger would have done a good job.

  Everyone else had played their part, but it meant so much to me and Cav. We had been going on about the possibility of winning the Worlds for years and years – all those little conversations I had had with him, in race hotels and during car journeys when I picked him up from stations or airports. In every single one of my notebooks every other page seemed to have a ‘Worlds’ heading. It looked like a very simple thing – stick the riders on the front and they’ll bring it back together to win the Worlds for Cav – but we’d been going through every single scenario, all the ups and downs, the entire plan. I’d been writing about the Worlds in my notebooks all the time, right from 2007, from that day in Stuttgart when he said he could win it – things like wheels, tyres, helmets, team line-up. What would you need? What would you ride? What’s the best?

  Sometimes he’d tell me to button it because I’d be talking about the Worlds a year out: he’d say, ‘Shut up, you’re making me nervous already.’ 2012 was all about the Olympics, the year before all about the Worlds. I sometimes think that Cav and I don’t have a lot to talk about now. We became fathers at the same time, April 2012, so we tend to talk about our kids. That was what made him crossing that line so special: whether it was one, two or ten bike lengths in front, or just one centimetre, it was about that shared focus, all those talks, all that planning, all the training, all those hours with him behind the car and the motorbike. I don’t think there is anyone who knows what that feels like other than Cav and me.

  13 : Get Me to the Mall on Time

  Throughout 2012 I had a recurring nightmare: I was driving the Great Britain team to the start of the Olympic Games road race in London and we turned up late. It got to the point where I was waking up in the night, asking myself, ‘What the hell am I thinking about?’

  The London Olympics had been knocking on our door since 2005; all of a sudden they were right there on top of us. It made 2012 a massive twelve months, but there were other things about that year which made it very special. I turned forty and became a father, both of which are landmarks in your life. We went into that Olympic Games with a British winner of the Tour de France, Bradley Wiggins, a little bit of history in the making. There was one other thing: every day I looked at Mark Cavendish in his world championship jersey and felt bloody proud to be working with him. Not that I’d made any of the effort on the bike, but I felt like I’d contributed a fair bit towards that jersey. It was a huge year right across the board.

  Cav’s transfer to Sky was all sorted out by October 2011, just as he finished his season on the road. I was the intermediary; it took quite a lot of work because Mark wanted to be sure he was doing the right thing, and at Sky we wanted to be sure his move was best for us. Having him at Sky felt right at the time; it was the obvious place for Cav to be given his background with GB. It made a nice change having him back in the same team as me after six years, and it made sense having him in the same professional squad, because we were both so bound up with trying to win the Olympic Games road race.

  Getting the road-race team to the start at the Mall on time was an obsession, but that reflects the reality of coaching: your biggest fear is arriving late anywhere with the team. At the Tour de France in 2011 we were behind schedule getting to the start for the time trial in Grenoble. All the teams had had to stay in l’Alpe d’Huez, and we didn’t transfer down in time because we didn’t realise how busy the roads were going to be. The upshot was that Swifty was late getting to the start line and Juan Antonio Flecha and Simon Gerrans had to get changed in the car as we drove down. They turned up, got out and went straight to the start line. It’s stressful stuff, and you don’t forget those moments because it’s part of your job to get it right.

  I was so obsessed with not messing up the London start that I went to extremes. We spent the few days before in the Foxhills resort in Surrey, just outside the M25 and within easy reach of the road-race circuit, and we’d decided months before that we would travel into London the night before the race. All the bikes and so on were kept in Foxhills, and the key staff – the carers, the physio and I – travelled in with the team and stayed in the city centre. In the morning all the bikes and various bits and pieces came in super-early, so that meant we didn’t have to get out of bed so early – the trip was far shorter. We’d done exactly the same thing at the world road championships in Melbourne in 2010, but at the Olympic Games it was very different. In Melbourne we had been just 500 metres from the start, so the lads got on their bikes and rode there from the hotel; with the Olympics you have to go to the start along a certain route and you have to go through all the security checks to get in. I wasn’t quite sure how that would work out because it was the first day of the Olympics. We all know what the traffic in London can be like, and I wasn’t certain which way we were meant to be entering the starting area. I had all the maps and I knew where the entry point was, but I still wasn’t 100 per cent sure. So when we got back to the hotel after Brad had rung the bell at the opening ceremony, I did two dummy runs on my own from the hotel to the entry point. I got back in at about midnight, feeling a bit clearer in my mind, which at least ensured I slept that night.

  The nightmares might have had something to do with the background: in the lead-up to any Olympic Games the Great Britain team is not a comfortable place to be, with Dave Brailsford on your back twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Dave was driving us hard. He was onto everything. His attitude was, ‘If there is anything we must get right, it’s the Olympics.’ All of the coaches were under the cosh, constantly. Dave is supportive, yet he’s watching everything you’re doing: is this rider right? Are they fit enough? Is this right? Have you got that? Have you done everything? Have you covered everything? Is the equipment right? Are the staff right? Are the logistics right? Everything, everything, everything. No stone is left unturned. Some people cope with it well, some don’t. I had my ups and downs, as I think most pe
ople did, but you look back and think, ‘Christ, if we didn’t have Dave doing that, perhaps it wouldn’t be the same.’ He takes a lot of credit for what he does, but he gets the best out of you. Team GB isn’t a pleasant place to be, but then you come out of an Olympic Games and think, ‘Bloody hell, we did well there. Why were we successful? Well, Dave drives you hard.’ The reason we’ve won so many medals is because he never lets up.

  The big things for the London Olympic road race were exactly the same as at the world championships in 2011: getting the selection right, getting Cav into form – in this case he needed to be at his very, very best – getting people on the start line in the right frame of mind and actually getting them to the line on the day. Early in the season we had a massive concern over Mark’s fitness after Milan–San Remo, which could be traced back to a fairly disrupted start to his season. His first race was the Tour of Qatar in February, where he had quite a lot of bad luck – the lead-out train never really got going for him and he crashed on the last stage. Critically, however, he was sick when he arrived. I went to meet him off the plane, and he was sitting on a bench near the baggage area, sweating like mad but feeling cold. He was seriously poorly – it had come on during the flight. For forty-eight hours he just lay in a blacked-out room because he couldn’t stand the light.

  I felt at the time that the doctor didn’t get it right, and Cav carried that virus for most of the early season. He went on from Qatar to Oman, which is a killer trip. It’s too long at that time of a bike rider’s year, and the racing is so different at the two races that you can’t get what you need if you do both. He came back from there and won the Belgian semi-classic Kuurne–Brussels–Kuurne, which was a big win for him in the world champion’s jersey because it was one of the objectives he’d flagged up before the season started. About nine or ten days before Tirreno–Adriatico he was supposed to come to the Manchester velodrome to do a speed session behind the motorbike with me, but in the morning he called in – he didn’t feel well and had a rash all over him. What we realised was that he was carrying a post-viral condition. The doctor said he had two choices: rest now and hope for the best for Milan–San Remo, or carry on with training. We decided, rightly or wrongly, to do half and half – rest for a week and still go to Tirreno–Adriatico and see how he felt. He won a stage at Tirreno but never felt great; in hindsight, though, we were kidding ourselves that he was in decent shape for Milan–San Remo.