Racing Hard

by William Fotheringham

  “You build the lactic acid in your legs, and it takes time to come out,” Edgar says. “For 10 minutes afterwards, you just can’t get comfortable.” As the afternoon progresses, Staff and Queally grow visibly older, their faces greying and drawn as they complete their maximal efforts, warming up high on the banking and using the height to gain speed as they swoop down to the baseline for each 100 metres, with Gardner and Dyer yelling encouragement.

  “People ask what we do – you say you are on the track for two-and-a-half hours and you did four efforts that lasted five seconds, and it’s hard to grasp,” Queally remarks. “I often lie when I’m asked, so it sounds like a bit more.”

  “With the power we produce, you do a lot of muscle damage, people can’t understand that, because they can’t put themselves in that situation,” Staff says. And who, indeed, can empathise with a body that produces 2,000 watts of power, with rotational torque on the start line that is briefly almost twice that of a Formula One car, not to mention legs that can spin the pedals at four revolutions a second?

  Busiest of all the rooms in the velodrome is the mechanics’ lair, where the sprinters drop in to have their bikes serviced before each session. Ernie and Spike are two of the eight mechanics employed (‘not enough by a long way”, they reckon). The demands go well beyond the routine of servicing, preparing and washing bikes.

  Of all the team, it is Bradley Wiggins, the triple world champion, who probably has the most machines (14, they estimate), and it is Edgar who requests the most tweaks: “Saddle down, saddle up a few mill, bar tape thickness here and there; his attention to detail is incredible.” The women in the team are continually changing their saddle positions in search of greater comfort; the team pursuiters like to experiment with different arm rests and alter the position of their hand grips.

  The handlebars that Wiggins used in the Tour de France’s opening time-trial in London last year were built here, as his professional team’s supplier could not come up with precisely what he needed. “We used this,” Ernie says, brandishing a length of anonymous aluminium tubing.

  Success comes at a price: the black carbon-fibre track machines are worth up to £10,000 each; the bars alone cost £1,700. Replacing the specially made, extra-stiff chainrings that have been in use at major events since Sydney will cost about £100,000. Some of the team use individually made shoes with soles custom-made from plaster of Paris moulds. [These are made by Bont, the make that Wiggins would put on the world stage in 2012.]

  Beijing will be a colossal operation. “We move like an army,” Ernie says, opening up the 18-page spreadsheet on his computer that lists every item for Beijing down to the gazebos that will keep the sun off the road time-triallists as they warm up. The containers of “dead goods” – sports drink, exercise bikes for warming up, those gazebos – left for China on 12 May. Two hundred items will be sent in by air freight.

  The bikes will be individually checked on to the plane using bar codes held by the airline; merely getting the team truck into Heathrow requires special arrangements due to security. The petrol-based cement used to stick on the tyres rates as a dangerous substance and needs the same licence to enter China as the shooters’ ammunition.

  Later in the week, the sprint coaches meet the team’s senior managers – Brailsford, head coach Shane Sutton, and Steve Peters (Boardman is absent, on a research trip to Italy) – to talk through the selection criteria for Beijing. For the male sprinters, the stakes are high. Only four will travel. While Hoy, Staff and Edgar are most probably assured of their places, having set the fastest time by a British team at this year’s world championship, Queally is being pushed hard by the younger generation of sprinters such as Matt Crampton and Jason Kenny, who were within a gasp of winning medals in Manchester.

  Queally has not ridden a world championship in two years and accepts his efforts this spring may be for nothing, although he will not leave racing without a fight for his place. “I’m clinging on, trying to make the most of it. But it’s a good position to leave in. When I began, getting in the top 10 was something, now you don’t get a mention unless you get two golds at the world championships.”

  The dilemmas the managers face are familiar to any selection panel: gut feelings or objective data; experience and history against youthful potential. There will be a trial, on 4 July, but even the data gathered on that day will be relative, because of the variables.

  The ability to ride quickly around the track is not the only consideration. Can riders adapt to the other events? Can they “back up” over the four days of competition? Complicating the picture is the need for the sprinters to contest three drastically different events – the match sprint, man-to-man over three laps; the team event, in which three are timed over three laps; and the motor-paced keirin.

  The specifics of the meeting remain behind closed doors, but, as so often within the velodrome, the process is what counts: letting the riders know precisely what they have to do and how they will be judged. Brailsford is open about the fact that every step forward creates fallout of some kind. “There are always glitches, we push so hard that there are always issues,” he says. Many of those are raised fortnightly at rider-development meetings, essentially a forum where any athlete can get anything off his or her chest.

  The four men complement each other well: Sutton, the passionate ex-pro with an instinctive feel for the riders; Boardman, the cold-headed technical visionary; Peters the non-judgmental human face from outside cycling; Brailsford drawing together the different strands, tweaking here and there. “I’m like a sculptor – you shave off a bit here and there,” Brailsford says. “The danger would be if you took a mallet to the structure and the whole thing shattered.”

  They are already looking beyond Beijing: next winter’s World Cups have to be planned and invites to post-Olympic celebrations are coming in. Between them, the group have created an approach to their sport that few others in this country have matched. “There is,” Brailsford says, apologising for the jargon, “clarity of mission. Everyone is here because they understand we are here to win medals. Anyone, in any job, can sit down and pinpoint what they are doing towards the medal-winning process now or in the future.”

  The idea that every area can be perfected, without compromise, has been taken to its logical extreme. It is summed up in the appointment of Peters: to get mindsets right, do not just hire a psychologist, take on a forensic psychiatrist who worked at Rampton’s high-security hospital. Experts such as Gardner, Mitchell, Peters and Boardman have the freedom to innovate, but their skills are perfectly channelled by Brailsford. “What you have to do is give someone a budget, a programme to work to, delegate to them and make sure they are surrounded by a culture where everyone is striving for excellence,” he says. It sounds simple. The reality is a complex chemistry.

  A management consultant would say that process and outcome have been perfectly harmonised, but Boardman offers the best definition: “In Beijing, the athletes will get on their bikes and say to themselves, ‘The guy over there has no advantage technically, I’m personally within 100g of the weight I want to be and mentally I’m prepared for an audience of millions of people.’ What we are shooting for is that the cyclist sits on the start line and says, ‘I’m as good as I can be, in every way.’”

  Post-Beijing, the Senior Management team would be narrowed down to just Sutton and Brailsford; Peters remains involved with British Cycling to this day, although he is now working across other sports. Boardman ringfenced his position to that of head of R & D in the run-up to London and has recently given up the post.

  9. BEIJING 2008

  There were several strands to this Olympic Games: the personalities that emerged over the summer, the performances themselves and the background. The issue when selecting pieces on Beijing is a tough one: what to leave out, when there was so much going on?

  The mechanic of the mind with an inside track on winning gold

  8 May 2008

  The sign on the d
oor in the bowels of the Manchester velodrome reads simply “Steve Peters”, but there is plenty else it could say. Abandon preconceptions, all those who enter here. Logic not emotion. “The voice of reason,” as the Olympic champion Chris Hoy puts it. “The glue,” to quote another athlete, referring to the unseen force that binds a complex unit into a coherent whole. If you ask Peters to describe himself, he uses these words: the mechanic of the mind.

  The British cycling team’s psychiatrist – silver-haired, breezy in manner and in his mid-50s – has been an unobtrusive yet powerful influence in a recent run of success that culminated in nine gold medals from a possible 18 in the recent world championships. He is one of the four-man core management team at the heart of the squad that is expected to provide a tidy pile of medals at the Olympic Games in Beijing this August and was a key element in the success of Hoy, an Athens gold medallist in 2004, and the six-times world champion Victoria Pendleton.

  This week, more of his clients will be in action: the world champion BMXer Shanaze Reade begins her Olympic build-up with the Copenhagen World Cup event, while the triple world track champion Bradley Wiggins will start the Giro d’Italia. Next week it is the turn of Nicole Cooke, Britain’s top woman road racer, in the arduous Tour de l’Aude.

  It is not widely broadcast, but Peters’ influence extends well beyond the world of two wheels. His clients include the quintuple junior swimming gold medallist Lizzie Simmonds, the UK’s taekwondo No 1, Sarah Stevenson, an Olympic judo qualifier in Karina Bryant, and the Olympic bronze medallist pentathlete Georgina Harland. He also works in diving, netball, trampolining, cricket, sailing and Premier League football, and assisted Brian Ashton’s England rugby team on their way to the final of last year’s World Cup.

  In cycling, Peters’s brief is tailored to suit every individual. “He brings an understanding of how humans think and behave, way beyond anyone else that I’ve ever met,” says cycling’s performance director, Dave Brailsford. “More importantly, he can actually translate that understanding into clear and practical solutions. That permeates all aspects of what we do.”

  As well as the obvious roles his job title suggests, supporting the cyclists and their coaches, Peters also chairs selection meetings, as a neutral from outside cycling. “There are general things where he is of help,” says Hoy. “If you are happy in your life, it generally shows in your sport. Before the races, he’s a neutral, objective person you can speak to. He’s there as a sounding board between the riders and the staff.”

  Peters’ background is in forensic psychiatry; he once worked at Rampton Secure Hospital. He has no quick answers, “no recipe book” as he puts it.

  “I don’t come in and tell people what to do. I ask people to see in themselves what they need to be doing and help them get there. If you said ‘I want to get fit’ and you went to a gym, you could possibly go there and train yourself and do really well, but you would probably be better going there with a strength and conditioning coach who can work with you. It’s exactly the same with the mind.

  “You walk in with a belief system, ideas, behaviour that you apply to sport. Some people can do very well, but most of us aren’t sure how to use the equipment. I say ‘This is how your mind works, this is how you get strength in certain areas, this is how to build up on the weak points, this is the skills base you need’.”

  Peters’ background has encompassed a maths degree – “Logic theory, which has a bearing on how I operate” – before a medical degree and psychiatry as well as, in his early 40s, running a 10.9sec 100 metres. At Rampton, he worked with men who had personality disorders.

  “You try to contain their behaviour and see if you can adjust their belief systems,” he explains. “What you do is help them change their personality or behaviour to what they want it to be. You have a spectrum of personalities, it’s a completely individual thing. You use similar principles with a person off the street to an athlete – all you’re doing is getting the optimal beneficial functioning for a human being. That’s my job: to make people function as well as possible and in the way they want to.”

  Peters sees things differently. The prime example of this came during England’s erratic campaign in the rugby World Cup last year, to which he came late in the day and in which he worked with certain players in areas such as controlling emotions and channelling aggression. In the psychiatrist’s view, the team turned their campaign around in the 36–0 defeat to South Africa, precisely the point at which most judged they were heading for the exit.

  “I saw that match with friends and they were saying ‘They’ve had it’ but I saw a mental strategy in place that could take them forward. As a result it was awful, but I had six parameters on whether they were working as a team. They weren’t working as individuals trying to prove a point. There was courage and tenacity. They started going for every single ball. Everything counted. Did they control their emotions? These are basic things but they had pulled themselves together as a team.”

  Pared down to the basics, the Peters way involves three initial steps. First, the athlete is made to look at himself. “You get inside your head, see yourself as a machine. It’s about how you interact with the world. It’s quite complex and can take up to 12 months.” The second step is where the athlete learns about how other people function, while the third involves communication skills. Peters underlines that 50 per cent of his work is with athletes themselves, while the other half is with “significant others”, mainly their coaches.

  He has an eclectic brief. “In my work with people, I look at them holistically, with everything on the table. It’s the approach I would use in mental health work. It’s vast.” The result is the system of “foundation stones”, in which the athlete and coach write down “everything they know which can make them succeed. You might have 150 points for one event, from physical skills and attributes, through nutrition and mental skills to personal life. The athlete decides which ones they would like to work on.”

  Peters’ role extends to competition day, naturally, but here, again, the approach is comprehensive. “Some have natural coping strategies, some don’t, so they have a strict mental warm-up plan. They will know what kind of things stop them performing, what goes through their head. We remove the negatives. They learn what part of their brain is giving them completely negative thoughts and they switch over, and that is a skill.”

  Where the British cycling team has broken new ground is in taking a bottom-up, athlete-centred approach, and here Peters has been key. “The athlete has to own their own programme,” he says. “They formulate what they are doing.” Rather than the coach telling the cyclist how he or she should be training, the athlete is strongly encouraged to take the coach’s advice and take the final decision according to rules that have been previously agreed on, with the coach viewed more as an expert adviser. Commitment, ownership, responsibility and personal excellence are the watchwords, and again the nuance is important. “We would like excellence. What we ask for is personal excellence, which is very different.”

  “The athlete agrees a benchmark to aim for and then the whole team gets pulled in – the strength and conditioning coach, the nutritionist, me – so you have what Victoria Pendleton will call ‘Team Pendleton’, where Vicky selects who her team are. When I first arrived, it felt like the benchmark was set by the coaches [and] the coaches said to the athletes ‘You do the following.’ Sometimes the athlete didn’t make it and we had a problem. Now, there is no guilt or blame, we’re all trying to get them to that benchmark, and if they don’t get there, it’s sad. It’s a whole philosophy – we call it the carrot with no stick.”

  This was one of the first times Steve Peters broke cover. Like the rest of the British cycling team he went from zero to national hero overnight.

  Pooley determined to outsmart Cooke

  28 June 2008

  In a fortnight the British Olympic Association will announce a cycling team for Beijing boasting unprecedented strength and depth. Many factors
account for that but among them is sheer serendipity. The right athletes have emerged at the right time and a prime example will be found on roads around Helmsley, North Yorkshire today, where Emma Pooley will attempt to give Nicole Cooke a run for her money in the race for the women’s national title.

  Three years ago Pooley travelled to this course as an unknown with three road races behind her and was a surprise fourth. Now she is ranked ahead of Cooke at 12th in the world – 13 months ago she did not have a single ranking point to her name – and she became the only British woman besides Cooke to have won a round of the World Cup when she took the Binda Trophy in late March. Selection for Beijing is discretionary, based on results, so she should be a shoo-in to join the Welsh woman in Beijing. Today, naturally, she would like to break Cooke’s iron grip on the national title.

  “I’m not going to race for second. It really annoyed me last year that everyone treated the race as if it was a foregone conclusion, as if they were assuming that Nicole is going to win. It’s frustrating but I think it’s worse for her in a way because she has to win or everyone will ask what is wrong. She has been overwhelming at the nationals. She’s very strong and very smart, so I’ll need to be smarter.”

  When Pooley managed two top-10 placings at last year’s world road race championships in Stuttgart British officials could not hide their excitement. Suddenly the Beijing equation had changed. Cooke’s ability to challenge for a medal has never been in doubt but in Athens, as in world road championships over the years, she lacked a team-mate who could back her up at key moments. Pooley’s spectacular rise could be part of the answer, as she explained at her base in Zurich recently.