Racing Hard

by William Fotheringham

  When Pendleton retires, the legacy of her long period of dominance will not be limited to her Olympic gold medal and eight world titles. The tracks of Britain are currently swarming with young women who want to emulate her success, who have no qualms about taking on the men and who sport her pioneering look of Ugg boots worn with Lycra leggings.

  The women’s youth omnium events, which act as a feeder into the lower levels of the British Cycling development pyramid, are hotly contested. That has fed through to senior level: women’s races across the country are oversubscribed even before the season has got under way.

  Another striking product of that system is Laura Trott, still only 18, a competitor for England in the Commonwealth Games last year and a definite contender for a place in London in either the women’s team pursuit or the omnium or both. “The future of the omnium,” was the verdict of one British coach yesterday, and her fourth place in the European championships last November was more than promising.

  In the afternoon, she qualified comfortably in the women’s scratch and was one of three British under-23 women who rode 3min 23sec in qualifying in the 3,000m team pursuit on Friday, together with Dani King and Katie Colclough. All three will join their seniors in the mix for the world championships.

  At the start of this year, British Cycling was given £1million to fund a programme to get 80,000 more women riding their bikes. They have no shortage of role models.

  This was an important piece, I felt, because every time I visited a velodrome in Britain I seemed to see dozens of ambitious young riders, male and female, but the significance of Pendleton as a role model was obvious. Varnish went on to partner Pendleton in the team sprint in London, being unlucky to miss out on a medal. James suffered ill-health in the build-up, but was named as reserve for the home games. Trott, of course, was to become one of the stars of London, having risen rapidly together with King, who was also a gold-medallist. Colclough switched her attention to the road with Team Specialized.

  Hoy goes up a gear with focus on perfection

  20 October 2011

  The issue facing Sir Chris Hoy and the managers of the British track team over the next nine months is simple: how do you replicate perfection? In winning three gold medals in the Beijing Olympic Games – in the sprint, keirin and team sprint – Hoy could have done no better; in taking seven on the track, the cyclists could barely have done more. In London next August Hoy will have the chance to do the same but it is a huge task to contemplate. He is philosophical about it, which seems surprising until you figure out this is probably the only way you can be in the face of a challenge of this magnitude.

  “I could repeat it, but it’s an unlikely thing to achieve. It would be amazing if I could do it again. The way I’m looking at it at this stage is that London is an opportunity to win a gold medal in front of my home crowd, to win two would be better, to win three would be better still. I don’t feel as if … certain riders in the team talk about the Games as if it’s this huge pressure, a horrendous thing to worry about, I can see why you might think that, but for me it’s a chance to do something I’ve not done before. If I do everything I can and don’t make it, I can accept the result.”

  So how do you go about tackling it? You go back to the basic British cycling principle: process rather than outcome. You don’t think about the bigger picture, but focus on getting the details right. That principle is what pervades the conversation with Hoy during the break between rounds in the national keirin championship, as he munches on a frugal lunch – sandwich, malt loaf, protein shake – in the gym in the Manchester velodrome.

  “I started thinking beyond London this summer and realised there is no point thinking that far ahead. I don’t know what the next 10 months is going to bring. It’s not about the big picture, it’s about saying you will hit every day the best you can within what you can control.” Hoy makes no bones about the fact that since the Olympic countdown started for real, after March’s world championships in Holland, he has gone up another gear.

  “I’ve compromised a bit the last couple of years, there were things I chose to do, certain events, communication things, media, charity things. You have to have a balance in your life and if I put the foot to the floor for four years the chances of being able to keep it going to London would be slimmer. But I’ve kept at a level where I’ve been in touch with the best guys in the world, still had some good performances,” – of the opposition, he accepts merely that the Frenchman Gregory Bauge has moved on in the past couple of years – “but now we are within striking distance of the Games I’m not holding anything back.”

  That means setting personal bests in the gym, which Hoy has been “hitting hard, which I didn’t the last two years for fear of injury. You still lift heavy, but not pushing it.” This year, he has lifted more than before Beijing – “It doesn’t make you fast but it increases your potential” – and there are other items such as “nasty lactic intervals”. “You look at every area, there’s no reason not to be 100 per cent. I’ve had a good five months.”

  He ponders, for a moment, when he may have a drink this side of London. “I’ve not had a glass of wine or beer for quite a while. I’ll have a bottle of wine after the Kazakhstan World Cup [in early November], that’ll be the first for ages, then it’s New Year, then hopefully a celebration after the world championships in Melbourne. That’s three bottles between now and the Olympic Games. It’s not like I’m craving alcohol, but the need to relax, let your hair down, do something different.

  “You think: ‘What difference will a bottle of wine make?’ but it’s not about the Games, it’s about next week’s training. I will race the best I can and if I don’t win I’ll shake the other guy’s hand, he’s a better man than me. But I don’t want to not win and start thinking: ‘I did that appearance, the week after the training wasn’t great, it had a knock-on effect to the week after,’ or: ‘I went out for two beers and had six because a mate was back in town.’

  “That doesn’t affect London directly, but the whole process. If you look at a good season you can find a certain point when it kicks off, a good week in a month away, it becomes three weeks, then four. The whole thing is about morale, momentum, and it can go the opposite way. You have a bad session, you feel a bit crap, and go downhill.”

  The point that has to be made here is that, although Hoy races relatively rarely compared with a road cyclist such as Mark Cavendish, every training session is competitive: times have to be matched or beaten, team-mates monitored, certain weights surpassed. He is, he says, “racing every day”, with a constant succession of targets.

  There is a glorious emotional twist in what Hoy is trying to achieve in the next nine months. It is more than 15 years since the Scot and the Lancastrian Jason Queally first teamed up for a major international championship in the team sprint, but on Friday the partnership is set to be reforged in Holland. It was 1996 when Queally dislodged a foot from his pedal in his starting effort alongside Hoy at the world championships, in the hoary days before lottery funding transformed the Great Britain team; both men will be hoping for better fortunes in the European championships in Apeldoorn, the Netherlands, this weekend.

  “To think of him coming back in and potentially being part of a team that has the potential to win a gold medal is incredible,” Hoy says. “I remember when Jason stepped up to get his gold in 2000, thinking that he could retire now: “It doesn’t matter what he does, he will always be an Olympic gold medallist.” It was what set the whole cycling programme rolling. It set us on our way for the next 10 years.”

  At 41, Queally is six years older than Hoy, who says, having once contemplated retiring in his early 30s, he may – just may – follow his example and continue at the highest level as his 40s approach. “There’s no reason why I shouldn’t go on as long. Illness and injury can conspire against you the older you get, but as long as you are healthy and have motivation … It will depend on whether there are other things I want to do in my life after
London and Glasgow. You can’t plan too far ahead. At my age you don’t even buy green bananas.”

  CEREAL ACHIEVER

  Hoy’s life has changed dramatically since his golden exploits in Beijing:

  2008: Becomes first Briton in a century to win three golds at a single Olympics. Follows this with BBC sports personality of the year title, has Scotland’s Commonwealth Games velodrome named in his honour – and becomes brand ambassador for Kellogg’s Bran Flakes

  2009: Knighted in the new year honours, rustles up an autobiography and receives a second honorary doctorate, but on the track crashes at a World Cup event in Copenhagen and misses the world championships

  2010: Gets married in April. Wins keirin gold – again – at the worlds, but is beaten in the quarter-finals of the sprint. He then suffers a humiliating defeat to little-known Irish rider Felix English at the Europeans, though he takes two golds at the Melbourne World Cup

  2011: Reminds his rivals who’s boss by taking keirin gold at the Manchester World Cup, left, and cleans up in the sprints at the nationals

  The box shows that Hoy’s progress towards London was not seamless by any means. The Scot would, however, go on to take a brace of gold medals in London, in the team sprint and keirin, having been left out of the match sprint, where Jason Kenny was given the place. Queally’s hopes of making London ended in that World Cup; he suffered a loss of form, and the search began for alternatives, with the team eventually opting for the young Philip Hindes at starter in the final weeks before the Games.

  “I wait until your face gets red, then squeeze the throttle harder”

  15 December 2011

  Ben Swift is squeezing the sweat out of the pad in his crash hat. It is a dark midwinter morning in the Manchester velodrome and about the time much of the country is setting off for work or school. “This shouldn’t be happening,” he mutters grimly. Around him are seven pairs of bleary eyes in drawn faces. It is close to the end of the Great Britain 4,000m team pursuit squad’s boot camp, a key part of their Olympic title defence next year on home turf in London.

  The pace this morning is between 52 and 58 kilometres per hour for 20 minutes or so at a time, lap after lap, round and round the velodrome, which is devoid of human life apart from a workman clearing up beer barrels. Swift, Ed Clancy, Andy Tennant, Peter Kennaugh, Sam Harrison and Steven Burke – all potential starters in London – line out behind a motorbike driven by the coach, Dan Hunt, who is wearing a thick ski jacket against the morning chill.

  They are joined for the morning only by two road professionals with track backgrounds, Andy Fenn and Ian Stannard, who view this as a convenient alternative to their usual training. The eight form a neat string, one rider swinging up from behind the padded back bumper each lap. On a toot of the horn the eight split into groups and begin racing the motorbike, upping the speed to gain a lap on Hunt. Another toot and they are racing each other in pairs, each pair trying to catch the other and then take a lap on the motorbike. Then they do it again in fours, half a lap apart, chasing each other in an imitation of a team pursuit.

  The technical term for this is “interval training with inhibited recovery”. For the layman, it means the riders blast like crazy for a little while, then rest, but never quite as much as they need to get rid of the lactic acid pain. In the five-minute intervals between sessions, they gulp down energy gels, stretch aching legs, and grumble, in a good-humoured way. As they rest, one of the eight asks Hunt how he gauges the pace. “I wait until your face gets all red, then squeeze the throttle harder,” he replies. He is joking. Perhaps.

  Every now and then during the day, the performance director, Dave Brailsford, nips out of his office to watch Hunt and his charges. It is a little indication of how much this particular title matters. No disrespect to Sir Chris Hoy or Victoria Pendleton, but if the coaching team in Manchester were asked which gold medal would count for most next August, it might well be this one. The reasons are a blend of history, tradition, and circumstance.

  The team pursuit is seen as a key indicator of a nation’s cycling strength, because, unlike the match sprint – the two-wheeled equivalent of the 100m – there is direct crossover with the road racing pyramid topped by the Tour de France. Bradley Wiggins, lest we forget, began his career here. The British tradition in this event goes back to the previous London Games in 1948. Since the Olympic track disciplines were controversially rejigged post-Beijing, this is the only endurance medal left with any real tradition or history.

  The thinking behind the boot camp is simple. The team pursuit has become more competitive since the British quartet of Clancy, Wiggins, Geraint Thomas – absent from the camp on our visit due to illness – and Paul Manning smashed their own world record en route to the gold medal in Beijing. The Australians are still as competitive as ever, but the Russians and New Zealanders are posting ominously fast times.

  “As yet no one has gone faster but other teams are going as fast as us,” says Hunt. “It’s a four-horse race now. Right now the Australians are probably favourites because they are double world champions. It’s difficult to think about it eight months away, but the four [British] guys on the line will be expected to win. It’s about small margins now – we won Beijing by six seconds, caught the other team, but this time there is going to be about a tenth of a second in it.”

  The camp is a chance to put the riders through a massive block of intense base training under the supervision of the team’s support staff in Manchester. The nutritionist, Nigel Mitchell, can be seen ferrying little flasks of urine around the hotel first thing in the morning – the samples are taken partly to assess the riders’ hydration levels, but more as a reminder to them to keep getting fluids down them.

  Mitchell ensures they get the calories they need each day, up to 7,000, cooks their lunches of basmati rice, quinoa, sweetcorn, chicken and ham, mashes up the anti-acid broccoli juice known inevitably as “green shit” and cooks rice cakes for the lengthy road rides over the Pennines. The physiotherapist, Phil Burt, has scanned each rider for flexibility before the camp, and is on constant hand to fix injuries before they even occur.

  Getting the riders into the velodrome for several weeks has another purpose, as Hunt explains. “I’ve got seven riders training at a time when they traditionally wouldn’t be. It’s eat, sleep, ride, go home at the weekends. There is a physical element and a teamship one. They are going through things together, helping each other. The gold medal will be won by guys who have unity, who have spent so much time sitting on each other’s back wheels that they know a flick of the heel here or there means they are good or bad. Twenty-four hours before the race, these are the sessions you remind the lads about.”

  The morning session is about pure endurance, foundation work, and is followed by massage, lunch, rest in the team room in the velodrome. The speed comes in the afternoon. The current world record is 3min 53.314sec; Hunt and his team of sports scientists believe in London it could well go down close to 3min 50sec or below that barrier. “It’s not something we say flippantly. It’s a whole new area.” Such speeds take massive efforts for tiny returns, to go just a few decimal points faster.

  Apart from a break when a downpour sends rain cascading through a hole in the roof on to the track, the afternoon consists of a series of “flying” five-kilometre runs starting from race speed, “like riding a team pursuit uphill but fast”, as one rider puts it. The aim is to ride for longer than in a four-minute pursuit, with the legs churning a larger gear than usual, to build the strength necessary for riding at approaching 70kph in formation, when adapting to the minutest variation in pace makes huge demands on the leg muscles.

  It looks like high-intensity weight training, and seems about as pleasant. Each is a brutal five-minute effort with four of the riders riding in team pursuit formation, the other two hanging off the back.

  By the fourth one, the faces are showing the strain. By the end of the day, the riders have covered close on 70 miles on the track. So much fo
r Tuesday; they repeat the double dose on Thursday, the other “day of doom” – Clancy’s term – while the other days see long road rides or speed work on the boards.

  The day ends with a stretching session overseen by Burt in the velodrome gym. The big-gear efforts are damaging for the muscles, making the riders predisposed to injury; flexibility is vital. “I’m absolutely wrecked, my arms are hurting, everything is hurting,” says Kennaugh, who is one of a group of riders jostling for selection behind the two shoo-ins, Thomas and Clancy.

  “You try to recover at the weekends, but the track is that intense that your legs are just battered. It’s definitely working for me. Try getting me out of bed at six back home to go training, I’d just turn the alarm off. The bottom line is, it’s hard mentally and physically, but if it was easy, everyone would do it. If we can’t do this once every four years, what are we here for?”

  The best bit of access I enjoyed before the Games for which thanks to Dan Hunt in particular. What impressed here was the level of effort involved, nine months out from the main goal – as I’ d seen with Matt Parker in Majorca the January before Beijing. Harrison and Swift didn’t make the cut for the Games; Tennant was if anything more unlucky. He was selected as one of the final five and assisted them to a world title ahead of Australia the following April, then had to look on as Clancy, Burke, Kennaugh and Thomas rode to gold in London. Hunt moved to Team Sky as a directeur sportif in January 2013.

  Cavendish’s landmark of glory on long road to 2012

  18 December 2011

  If the bookies are correct and Mark Cavendish is crowned BBC Sports Personality of the Year on Thursday, it will be due recognition for a towering achievement. Cavendish’s world elite road race title was an event of elusive rarity, and it crowned a team performance of consummate perfection which merits a place alongside the 1966 and 2003 World Cups.