Project Rainbow

by Rod Ellingworth

  After that Dave said to me, ‘Mark’s not fit enough,’ but the reason was that he’d been sick. It was a bit of a kick in the teeth, but after that Dave was hot on our tails to make sure that Mark was in the right form for the Olympics. That’s where Tim Kerrison got a lot more involved in terms of Cav’s physical conditioning. Tim did a good job – Cav doesn’t really identify with sports scientists and numbers, but this is where Tim is very smart. He presented it in a different way. He gave Cav a chart with his weight down one side, his power along the bottom, and explained that to ride up Box Hill at a certain speed – which was what he’d need to do on race day in August – he would need to be a certain weight with a certain power.

  We had done a few tests up there and we had the information from the test event the previous August. Tim said, ‘If you want to float around the circuit, you need to be this weight and this power.’ Cav chose one of the squares on the chart – ‘I want to be at that one. I’ll be good enough.’ He didn’t quite get to it but he was only about two or three watts off. It was well presented and it gave Cav a goal to focus on, so we just went out and got on with getting him to the power and the weight he’d chosen.

  Ghent–Wevelgem that April was a near miss, and a big one. It’s a Classic that Cav feels he can win, and it should suit his profile because sometimes it’s won by a sprinter, as long as they can get over the climbs in the middle of the race. The team messed up there; it was a case of Cav getting a bit cocky, a bit relaxed, and the race just slipped away at a crucial moment. He wasn’t far off his goals at the Giro – he had a massive crash; without it he’d have won the points jersey, which he missed out on by a single point. After that we went down to Italy for ten days’ training, just me, Cav and Andy Naylor, the soigneur who had worked with the academy. We had a great time – fantastic training, good weather, the new Olympic-issue bike to play with, and Cav had great form. He had a few days’ rest and went straight into the ZLM Tour in Holland, which from the outset he said he thought he could win overall; we’d been saying for a few years that small stage races were the best way for him to progress from his sprinting. It was his first overall stage-race win as a pro – and it wouldn’t have happened if he hadn’t done the training he’d been doing. He was down to a good weight, which enabled him to get over the climbs. We didn’t need to do a lot else before the Tour de France.

  In between times, we did a few sessions on Box Hill; we used to do a fifty- to sixty-kilometre loop to get warmed up, then five or six laps around the circuit behind the motorbike, going up the climb at different speeds so that Mark could get a feel for it. That ZLM Tour was confirmation that he was climbing well and that Box Hill wouldn’t be an issue – his morale was really high after that. And then we got to the Tour, where we knew as long as Brad stayed upright and raced well, he was going to have a good chance of winning overall. Cav was going to win stages there, but from a coaching point of view his focus was always on the Olympic Games.

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  We knew from the year before that we were going to be competitive in the Tour, and as early as January 2012 Tim Kerrison was very confident about Brad; from all the research he’d done through 2011 he’d learnt enough of what Brad could do from a physical point of view and what training he needed to do. What Brad did was almost exactly the same as in 2011, but with a few tweaks. One big conceptual change they made was to say, ‘Right, we’re going to bike races to win. We’re going to learn how to win and how to hold onto a yellow jersey.’ And this is where Sean Yates came into his own, because of all the experience he had working in teams that were looking to control a stage race.

  We’d done a lot of planning beforehand using the experience we’d gained in 2010 and 2011. For example, we had anticipated that Brad would take the yellow jersey at the summit finish at La Planche des Belles Filles – on paper, that was the most likely place, if you assumed he would be fastest in the prologue time trial and would have a good first week. We built around that day: we had a media plan with the press officer Dario Cioni, we planned how we would do the warm-downs and we’d catered for Dario and Brad to have a separate car so that they were completely independent of the team. Every day Brad was in the yellow jersey, he needed his own cool box in that car, with his own recovery drink and food, and his race bag would always be in there. We’d even figured out four or five weeks before the race when we were going to do extra feeds and who was going to do them out on the mountain passes and so on.

  Part of my job for the Tour was logistics. I would do a three-day rolling plan so that every day everyone knew where they would be, what car they were travelling to the start in, what their role was, what car they were going from the finish to the hotel in. If anyone had any problems, they had to come to me, not blurt them off somewhere else. In terms of the performance on the ground, Tim Kerrison was running the conditioning side and monitoring the riders’ fitness. He would look at the SRM boxes, which measure the riders’ power outputs during the stages, assess what condition each rider was in and figure out what they were capable of doing day to day in the race: could they ride at the front in the next stage? Is Brad in good form for this time trial? What strategy does he have for it?

  With Cav in the race, going for the sprint stages, my job was to film the finishes and recce the final kilometres. The night before each stage I’d go to the finish, stay near by, get up in the morning, film the last five or six kilometres, edit that on the computer, put little coaching notes on it and zap it back to the bus at the start so that the information could be relayed to the riders at the briefing. After that, I’d drive back down the route as far as I could, wait until I was about half an hour or forty-five minutes in front of the peloton, then feed information back to the team car on wind direction, the road surface, its width, and so on. That info would then be relayed by Sean in the team car to the riders over their earpieces. Then I’d get to the stage finish, where it was my job to make sure everyone got out of there. I’d then go back to the hotel, make sure everything was OK, and after that I’d drive to the next day’s finish. I did twelve or thirteen of those stage finishes – all the flat and uphill ones, anything tricky. So I didn’t have a lot of day-to-day contact with many of the team; my job was to communicate the details and make sure everything was in place – all the communication with the riders was done by the directeurs sportifs. I had to make sure the DSs only worried about the bike race – I did everything else.

  If you ask me what my experience was of being in a team at the Tour de France with a rider in the yellow jersey for the best part of two weeks, and eventually winning the race, I’d have to say I didn’t notice for a lot of the time. I had my head down. I do look back and think, ‘Shit, I wish I’d enjoyed it a bit more,’ but my ultimate goal was the Olympic Games. The Tour was just part of getting to the start line in London.

  So while we had Bradley Wiggins in yellow in Paris – the first Briton ever to do it – my objective, my job, was to get everyone on the evening flight to London. That was hard going – while the rest of the team went on the lap of honour around the Champs-Élysées, Carsten and I were at the bus and the truck looking after all the kit to make sure no one ran off with anything and going through it all: what’s going where? Who’s where? What time is the bus coming to pick us up? It was straight back into the logistics I’d been doing for the last three and a half weeks. They all had their photo up by the race finish, and you think, ‘Bloody hell, I missed that moment.’

  I felt a bit piggy-in-the-middle on the whole of that Tour. As we went further into the race, Brad took the lead, and the yellow jersey took over everything. Cav was feeling, ‘Flipping heck, I could win more stages here,’ and in hindsight he could have. We could have done things differently, but at that moment it was all about the yellow jersey. I don’t think we did anything wrong, but we didn’t quite appreciate how Mark was feeling in terms of what winning meant to him. Even I didn’t understand what that meant for him, after all those years together.

&nbs
p; During that Tour we went through the biggest disagreements we’ve had in our time together. He said he thought the team would be going for the green jersey; in fact, he had sat in a room and said to me he thought we should go with Brad, and the green jersey wasn’t the focus. It wasn’t difficult to work out, because it was obvious this was the moment for Brad. Cav had even said to me that if Brad didn’t win in 2012, he would never win.

  The discord began when we were looking at the team line-up for the Tour and which of the riders was going to be there to help Mark out in the sprints. He wanted Juan Antonio Flecha, as well as Bernie Eisel; we went with just Bernie. I think Cav was a bit upset about that. It was a slap in the face for him, but you couldn’t get away from the fact that we were going to have to put a lot of eggs into Brad’s basket and not Mark’s.

  Maybe at the time Mark couldn’t tell us how he truly felt. I think he was saying the right things, but in his heart he wanted something else. He understood that the Olympics were a massive focus, and if anything, the Tour would take second place as a goal. I definitely think in his head he knew the Olympic road race was his objective, and Brad had to win the Tour. But once in the heart of the race, when he was getting into those sprints, he couldn’t help thinking differently. And when he started going for the intermediate sprints in the first few days, that was the moment when I thought, ‘Shit, we’re in trouble here. He’s actually chasing the green jersey.’ That’s when I knew it wasn’t going to happen. There’s nothing you can do in that situation as a coach. As far as I was concerned, we’d had the conversation about it beforehand, said back in June that this was how it was going to be. It wasn’t a nice situation for me. I felt very responsible for Mark’s position at Team Sky because I’d been very much in favour of him joining. I felt I’d let both him and the team down because I wanted to see the best for both of them.

  That was when I understood Mark a little bit more and realised how much winning means to him. I look back now and wonder why I never noticed. I think it’s because we are two totally different people. I’m not a winner in the same sense. I don’t have the same drive as Cav to cross that line first. I was convinced we could win yellow and green in the Tour in the same year with two British bike riders from a British team – I think it’s very realistic, hard but realistic – but I never said it was going to be done in the first year. And that’s where I disagree with people when they said it was all about 2012. I said it would be the second year, and I told Mark that early on. I think all of us misunderstood him. We were looking at team goals – Brad winning the Tour and Mark winning the green jersey, and being the best team in the world. But Mark needs to win and he needs to be the one performing – that’s what I got wrong.

  The one part of the Tour I was able to savour was the last time trial in Chartres before they rode into Paris. Everything was done and I had a bit of down time at the finish with my mate Glenn Holmes – the guy I went to Belgium with back in the early 1990s – his wife and another friend, Mark. We sat on a grass verge about 500 metres from the time-trial finish, and though we couldn’t see the riders, I could hear them going past. We sat there for a few hours and I got out of the bubble for the first time. The time trial finished and we realised, ‘Shit, Brad’s won the Tour.’ It was carnage around the team at the finish. I was staying at an overflow hotel in the town and the next morning I was supposed to drive into Paris, but I decided to go that night instead so I could have a lie-in.

  As I pulled my car up outside the hotel in Chartres, there were all these lads there chanting away – ‘Wiggo, Wiggo,’ that kind of thing. I thought, ‘Oh God, here we go.’ It was about half ten at night and they were banging on the car windows. I wound mine down and asked, ‘Are you all right, lads?’ ‘You’re not going to Paris tonight, are you?’ I looked at them. ‘Why, what’s up?’ There were four of them, they were staying in Paris, the last train had left hours ago and they were looking for a lift. ‘Well, lads, you’re in luck. Give me five minutes and I’ll be back.’ They were newly into cycling and had just come over on the spur of the moment: ‘Shit, Brad’s winning the Tour, let’s go over and look at it.’ So they’d booked their tickets the day before and had had a great day.

  We’d got about fifteen minutes down the motorway when I had a call from the Jaguar mechanic – we have one of their mechanics with the team on the big Tours just to look after the cars – saying he’d left his bag in the back of my car, with his passport in it. So I had to go back, with these lads sitting there a bit pissed and hoping they were going to get to Paris. I pulled up outside the team hotel and said, ‘Right, lads, I’ve got to get out of the car for a minute. Stay here and don’t make nuisances of yourselves.’ They couldn’t believe what they were seeing: all the team vehicles were having the yellow stickers put on them – and these guys were just wetting themselves. I gave them a lift all the way into Paris, and they couldn’t get their heads round the fact that they’d asked someone from Sky, of all people, for a lift.

  I woke up the next morning in Paris. It was incredible watching our team come into the circuit with a British guy in the yellow jersey and another Brit in the world champion’s jersey. We were all parked up on the Place de la Concorde, where they come out from the left, then go through the right-hander up onto the Champs-Élysées. We had the big screen in front of us and we could see Brad leading Cav out. It was an amazing sight: yellow jersey leading out rainbow jersey, both of them British, and it was a fantastic way for Brad to thank Cav, when Brad could have been expected just to sit there and savour his big moment, like most Tour winners do as they ride up the Champs-Élysées for the last time.

  I was thinking, ‘Cav is going to piss this.’ Cav winning there with his world champion’s jersey on meant so much to him – that was a massive win. We were all given T-shirts with ‘Sky’ on the front in yellow and all the staff’s names down the back. It was a great thing to be part of; it was incredible how big it was. That definitely made the lows of 2010 worth enduring. It was a long way from chasing rats in Tim Harris’s house in Belgium. Back then I’d never even imagined myself working in cycling, let alone being part of a team that had won the Tour de France.

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  The transition from the Tour to the Olympics was one of the things I had looked at in particular detail. The issue is that five days from your objective, you’re finishing the biggest bike race in the world. You can do everything right, then at the very last moment anything can happen. You have to hand it to the riders: they saw the Tour and Olympics as one big bike race lasting five weeks, or five and a half for Brad. The trick in this situation is to keep everyone aware of what’s going on, tell them what’s going to happen in plenty of time. That in turn means that you have to be very much ahead of the game in your planning.

  The riders knew a year before the Games that we were planning on going to Foxhills the night after the Tour. I gave the lads two options: they could come in on the Sunday night or the Wednesday. That meant the riders who had done the Tour could go home or come in with their wives or girlfriends, but the key thing was that we would be one team from 7 p.m. on Wednesday night. These lads had been on the road for four weeks already without seeing their families, so I said to everyone that this could be an obstacle for us if we just put the riders in a hotel in Surrey, with their wives and families somewhere else.

  That planning is a key part of getting people to buy in – they need to know what those five days will look like and how much work they will have to do. As it worked out, David Millar, Cav and Froomie came in on the Sunday night. They brought their families and had a nice chilled-out couple of days; whether they rode their bikes or not was not an issue, but they did a little ride every day. Brad and Ian Stannard came in on the Wednesday, at which point we became a team and the families had to go elsewhere.

  Cav was absolutely flying at the Olympics. He said he felt fantastic – the effort didn’t hurt him all day. Physically, he was perhaps in the best condition he’s ever been and he was so fo
cused. I felt so sorry for him that it didn’t work out. Looking at that race now, we always knew that the maximum number of riders we could have was five. So there was the issue of how many riders we would qualify – it was taken from the 2011 results – and we always knew that with five it would be hard to control the race, given its style and the toughness of the course. Part of our strategy had to be that if other teams came to the race with sprinters, we would have to take a gamble that they would help us – but gambles like that are part of road racing. The bet was that if it looked like a sprint finish, they would work for that. The plan was that we would control the race until the break was sitting there in front of the bunch. At that point, the other sprinters’ teams would think, ‘Bloody hell, we’ve only got to do this bit of work now to get the break back.’

  I was on my own driving back to Surrey that night after the road race, where Cav finished twenty-ninth, not even winning the bunch sprint. I was pretty angry with the other nations because I got the impression that they felt it didn’t matter who won as long as we didn’t. Part of the upshot of that was that we had had an appalling outcome for the sport of cycling – the worst possible, it seemed to me – with Alexander Vinokourov winning, a former blood doper who had shown no contrition and no sense of the damage he’d done to his sport.