Racing Hard

by William Fotheringham

  The approach taken by Brailsford and Keen before him boils down to a quest for perfection which extends to unlikely areas. For example, in Sydney the team used largely off-the-peg cycles; now, looking to save fractions of a second, they have moved to making their own bikes, wheels and components.

  The team also researched methods of keeping the riders cool in Athens’ 30C-plus (87F) temperatures by linking up with the Naval Research Station in Gosport, who had looked at ways of treating servicemen in the Gulf. “They pointed us to the fact that the best way of cooling is by immersing the hands in water at 18C to 22C (65F to 72F),” said Brailsford.

  “The question then was how to apply the science and we ended up with something simple: the riders have to sit in a chair when they are in the track centre waiting to race, so we have chairs with two bags of water at the right temperatures, so it doesn’t matter if the weather is humid.

  “Chris Hoy was sitting in the chair before his gold medal ride in the 1km, so that’s an example of pure science being applied to this environment.”

  People management has also been given priority. “There have been big staff changes since Sydney when there was a lot of unrest in the camp. If you want to get the best from a rider on a given day, the people around him have to know what makes him give his best and they have to be inspired. We wanted to develop the best back-up team we could.

  “It’s not about happy families, that would mean we were in a comfort zone. I like the mood being a bit grizzly because everyone is pushing hard and is on edge.”

  Merely to employ a nutritional adviser might seem old hat, not so a forensic psychiatrist who has worked with prisoners at Rampton mental hospital. More conventionally, Chris Boardman has also been brought in as “expert adviser” to the squad, largely to use his experience to brief riders on what to expect as potential medal winners.

  The national lottery has pumped £6.7m into cycling since Sydney. That means more than £1.5m per medal here but the medals are only part of a bigger picture, says Brailsford. Brailsford points out that as acting chief executive of British Cycling, the national governing body, he has a responsibility to get people on their bikes. “What we’re hoping is that Olympic success can be incorporated into helping cycling as a sport and recreation.”

  The ongoing success of the track cyclists, for example, is bound to have been a factor in the re-creation of the Tour of Britain which returns to the calendar next week.

  But Brailsford’s wider aim is to use the Olympic medals to draw major firms into pushing recreational cycling as part of the government’s agenda of cutting obesity levels. He and his organisation are in advanced talks with “a major corporation” to back a high-profile campaign based around mass cycle events – a sort of “leisure cycling for all” – which is aimed at getting the nation back on its bike.

  This follows from the Sydney piece (So where has this band of cyclists sprung from?) as an exposition of the methodology of the Great Britain track cycling teams and the marginal gains approach. Steve Peters – the psychiatrist from Rampton – makes his first appearance, although clearly I had agreed to keep his name under wraps for the time being. Chris Boardman reappears in the first of a variety of roles. The Tour of Britain was relaunched that September on the back of that successful Games; after a shaky start, it is now a massive event. Finally, Brailsford floats the idea of a leisure cycling sponsorship for the first time. Sky were to do this four years later.

  8. INSIDE GB CYCLING

  29 June 2008

  This piece appeared in Observer Sport Monthly in the aftermath of the record medal hauls at the world track championships in 2007 and 2008, by which time it was clear that the Beijing Olympics would be something special. I was given several days access to the team in the run-up to Beijing in order to compile this exposition of the team’s philosophy of “aggregation of marginal gains.”

  To be among the Great Britain cycling team at the world championships in Manchester in late March was to share a single feeling: can it really be this good? For once, the term gold rush was not overblown. This was a collective surge of emotion that mounted as each lump of the precious metal was hung around another Briton’s neck, as each vignette of victory was stored in the memory. Rebecca Romero’s yell of triumph on winning the women’s pursuit; Chris Hoy’s incredulous look on taking the men’s sprint; Victoria Pendleton’s burst around the final banking to defend her sprint title; Bradley Wiggins, three gold medals in the endurance disciplines to his name, showing his son, after the crowds had gone, how to raise his arms on the podium.

  The bullet-headed performance director, Dave Brailsford, stood on that podium each evening – it was a handy vantage point in the track centre – and each evening his jig of triumph grew more animated. By day four, with nine gold medals won, Brailsford could rightly claim “we’ve crushed everybody”, which is a rarity for any British team in any sport.

  It could be added, without hyperbole, that the final tally of half the 18 titles on offer meant this was the best world championship for any British team, anywhere. It was achieved on home soil, when it truly mattered in an Olympic year, and as a result Britain’s cyclists will travel to China in a few weeks with a realistic chance of taking between six and nine gold medals.

  Yet 10 years earlier I had gone to the world track championships and returned after a few hours, because the team’s sole hope, Chris Boardman, had bombed in his event. There was no one else worth watching, no true gold-medal hopes. Boardman had managed a gold at the Barcelona Olympics, but was past his best, while the Scot Graeme Obree was in retirement.

  The British Cycling Federation were in meltdown, their members deserting in droves. The velodrome that hummed in March 2008 was, back in the 1990s, derided as a white elephant. Only Boardman flew the flag in the Tour de France and he had only a couple of years in him. The notion that 10 years later Great Britain would enjoy such dominance and such confidence for the future was laughable.

  The turnaround, begun by Brailsford’s visionary predecessor, Peter Keen, has been incremental and inexorable: a single gold in Sydney, two in Athens, four at the 2005 world championships, seven last year. Worryingly for the rest of the cycling world, Britain may be set to dominate Beijing, but the current flow of youngsters through their programme means their performance in London in 2012 could be even better. Under Brailsford, with his mantra “medal or nothing”, a web of academies has been developed to identify and nurture talent, while his current goal is a professional road-racing team to compete in the Tour de France. It looks perfectly attainable: in 2007 five Britons rode the Tour, all connected in one way or another with the GB system.

  It is a success story that is unique in a sporting country so attuned to failure that we shrug when all four football teams stay at home during Euro 2008 and merely purse our lips as our athletics stars fall by the wayside with the Olympics in view. British cycling is now where foreign coaches come to work with the best, and where professional cycling teams turn to learn how to create drugfree squads. [This was a reference to the fact that in the wake of the Cofidis doping scandal in 2004, their management visited British Cycling to explore how to put a drug-free team together.] While those on the inside are occasionally astonished by the momentum they have achieved, it has not happened by chance.

  On those March evenings at the world championships, the GB cyclists were competing at home, in every sense. The Manchester velodrome is not merely on domestic soil; it has been the team’s base since Keen turned up in September 1997 and nipped out to a second-hand shop to buy himself a desk. Now, the building, once seen as a waste of money, is home to the entire programme, with its 52 full-time staff, as well as the rejuvenated governing body, British Cycling. Spending a week in the neon-lit corridors, around the echoing oval of timber bankings, I discover that it has also become home to a peerless methodology that can be a benchmark for any British sport.

  I start the week in a meeting room above the wooden boards of the velodrome, where th
e sprinter Jamie Staff is standing in his boxer shorts as his skin – and what little subcutaneous fat hangs on it – is palpated between a pair of callipers. “I’ll be a miserable git if I cut out the biscuits,” Staff says. Nutritionist Nigel Mitchell assesses Staff’s considerable shoulders. “The gig to have in this game is to work with the Brazil volleyball team,” he jokes.

  In Beijing, Staff has a key role as starter in the team sprint relay, one of the few events where Great Britain will not be the favourites. He has a kilogram of body weight to lose and the responsibility seems to be hanging heavily upon him. “At the Olympics I don’t want that kilo. I want to be that perfect,” he says, and clicks his fingers at the avuncular figure of Mitchell. “I’m thinking about the weight I’ll have to shift out of the start gate. I don’t want to move a pound more than I have to. People talk about losing grams of weight off the bike or the helmet, but why do that when you can save it off the body?”

  Fortunately for Staff’s mood, he can have his biscuits, but their number has to be carefully considered, as well as the variety. Their joint conclusion is that thin oatmeal ones would be best, or perhaps a few squares of chocolate as a treat. It is not only the biscuits that have to be analysed. There is the recovery drink Staff imbibes during training sessions, his intake of amino acids, creatine and fish oils, the size and number of tortillas he had for dinner the night before. The pair are to meet every few weeks in the three-and-a-half months until the Games.

  This meeting lasts an hour and is a telling little insight. Over the next few days at the velodrome, a strategy becomes clear: to seek small, incremental gains in every area where a cyclist can become as good as is humanly possible. When every small increase in performance is put together, over the decade since the lottery-funded team was founded, the result is today’s healthy advantage over the opposition. Staff’s 60 minutes with Mitchell is just one tiny part of this very large picture.

  On Tuesday morning, Staff is one of a group of sprinters training in the velodrome’s gym. As Staff waits for his digital alarm clock to tell him it is time for the next set of squat thrusts, Mark Simpson, a strength and conditioning coach from the English Institute of Sport – the sports-sciences organisation that supports elite athletes – is on hand, his computer monitoring each cyclist’s progress against their personalised programme. It is a far cry from Staff’s early days on homemade kit in a loft in Ashford, Kent, with only the book Weight Training for Cyclists to guide him.

  Under Simpson’s guidance, many of the sprinters are practising techniques common in powerlifting, to develop the explosive force needed for instant acceleration. “If the rider is a Formula One car, in the gym we are building raw horsepower,” Simpson says. “The aims are to get the legs as powerful as possible, and at the same time make the cyclist’s core strong.”

  The riders would, he explains, get by without his presence, but “I want a no-compromise service. In a lot of instances you need to change the sessions because someone is injured, fatigued or even feeling extra good. I can encourage and motivate, and, as I write the programmes, I want to see how they respond.”

  After eating a sandwich that looks minute and sipping his protein drink, Staff gets on his bike. The group of sprinters circling the track includes Pendleton – double world champion a few weeks before – the up-and-coming Ross Edgar, and Jason Queally, who won the kilometre time-trial gold at the 2000 Olympics. All are doing subtly different training: Queally is doing top-speed work; Pendleton is working on her starting efforts; Staff is doing a medium-gear session, as he has the morning’s gym work in his legs. Monitoring them is the sprint coach, Iain Dyer, and an EIS performance scientist, Scott Gardner.

  After warming up behind Dyer’s motorbike, the sprinters rest in the track centre and adjust their bikes for the next phase. “This is the glamour side,” Pendleton says ironically, as she picks up an Allen key and changes her chainring, surrounded by scruffy plastic chairs, the velodrome echoing to the bounce, bounce of a basketball as a team of disabled players practise. Edgar has detected a rattle in his aerodynamic carbon-fibre frame. “It sounds funny,” he worries. “That’s the 50p you lost last week,” Dyer says.

  The scale of the British cycling operation becomes clear as you wander the never-ending windowless corridors, with their pictures of the team’s medallists, and, outside the door of the offices, a map of Beijing. “People who work here call it the dungeon, because they never see the light,” Staff says, pointing out the gym, the rows of changing rooms, the canteen that serves dodgy-looking pasta and sandwiches.

  In one room, with soft sofas and a whiteboard, the team’s psychiatrist, Steve Peters, takes each cyclist through their “foundation stones”, a massive list of individual items that can affect performance: everything from diet to disc wheels to a dispute with a significant other. Peters estimates that 50 per cent of his work is with athletes, 50 per cent with “significant others”, mainly the coaches.

  That might seem a little obscure, but not in a system where every area is open to improvement: ironing out relationships between the athletes and the people who work with them is seen as critical. Peters is also behind the athlete-centred training system, where cyclists are given freedom to define their own programmes, the coaches playing the role of expert advisers rather than dictatorial father figures.

  Then there are the more obscure corners. There is a hidden chaos of lathes, scales and drills where Tony Robinson, the team’s engineer, spends his hours endlessly calibrating and recalibrating the team’s Powercranks. [These are the ubiquitous SRM cranks that measure power output and which are a core part of the team’s data gathering.] There is a room that contains a jig for measuring the rolling resistance of a tyre, perched on half a ton of solid steel that has to be recalibrated after half an hour’s use.

  And locked within the locked equipment room is the legendary “Beijing box-room”, containing the items of aerodynamic kit that will not be brought out until August – and soon shut up again so the competition will not have time to look at them. They are the work of the “secret squirrel club” that has taken cycling technology to its furthest limits under the leadership of Boardman – or “Q”, as Pendleton calls him.

  Other members of the club include Scott Drawer, head of R&D at UK Sport, and Dimitris Katsanis, a Greek former team sprinter who has had a pivotal influence on their innovations. Katsanis heads a company that makes carbon-fibre mouldings for companies such as the McLaren Formula One team and produces items such as bulletproof seals for military helicopters.

  Boardman has drawn on his experience as a professional when he and his trainer Keen utilized the radical, one-piece carbon-fibre “Lotus” bike with which he won Olympic gold in 1992. “I know what you can and can’t do with a bike, and you have to go outside cycling [to advance]. Pete and I were ahead of our time, but when we hit the limits in cycling, what we did wrong was not to invite other people in.” Now, with the help of his £500,000 budget from UK Sport, Boardman can, for example, call on a friction expert to look into the efficiency of the chain, or ask BAE Systems to assess axles.

  He also has the use of a wind tunnel in Southampton, and “lab rats” among the riders – the pursuiter Rob Hayles and Queally being the most assiduous. He has even invested £10,000 in “Jason’s brother”, a life-size replica of Queally with movable limbs which, unlike the real thing, never tires.

  “If you look at a square centimetre of the body or the machine, we’ve examined it,” Boardman says. “Within the rules, we can’t go further. We’ve polished and tweaked everything.” Down to the nut that holds the front wheel in place? “Down to that nut.” It all has to be done within cycling’s peculiar rules on kit, which boil down to one principle: if the referees do not like an innovation, it can be banned on the spot. As a result, anything developed by the squirrels has to be subtle, with “an element of psychology”, so that the men in blazers will not feel it is too radical.

  As insurance against the officials, the equipmen
t is quietly introduced in selected events and its use recorded so that a precedent has been established. Nor will Britain’s cyclists be the only ones to benefit from the work of Boardman and his squirrels: his aerodynamic helmets will be used in Beijing by Team GB’s triathletes, and the skeleton bobsleigh team will be using some of the technology at the next Winter Games, in Vancouver in 2010.

  As a cyclist, Boardman’s great passion was not the winning itself, but the quest for perfection. The same feeling can be felt everywhere within the velodrome. “I was passionate about understanding how things work,” he says. “The beauty of it all is that it is measurable. You start off with what you are trying to achieve, set off down a path and measure your progress and that’s what makes me passionate.”

  If every area has to be examined to the furthest limit, that includes training itself. Another day, back on the track, Pendleton does her quarter-lap standing-start efforts with a box under her saddle measuring the force she exerts each time she accelerates from the start line. “In the gym we know what stimulus a given weight will have on a muscle, but we have no knowledge in that area in track cycling,” Gardner explains as he analyses her torque curve on the trackside computer. The results will enable the coaches to determine what gear choice will give the best outcome in training for a standing start. Given that in one world championship GB’s team sprinters lost a medal by two-thousandths of a second, the attention to detail is understandable.

  The riders circle every few seconds, hypnotising the onlooker: training consists of one warm-up after another, interspersed with a few brief spells of intense pain as they sprint at flat-out pace. “Make sure you lunch three hours before and eat plain food,” Pendleton says with heavy irony. After an effort, she adds: “You feel like you are going to throw up, you lie in the foetal position. It’s character building.”