Boy Racer

by Mark Cavendish

  Three years later, ahead of Manchester, I'd at least been one of the 'first-choice' pairing, though not before the British Federation had told me I'd have to prove myself first by interrupting my winter break after my first full road season with T-Mobile to ride the Madison with Bradley at the World Cups in Sydney and Beijing. Again, I was pissed off; I'd been riding World Cup and World Championships Madisons for years, never finishing outside the top four once; I'd been a world champion at nineteen in LA; I'd proven myself in Six-Days like Ghent and Dortmund, where the Madisons were notoriously tough. Yet here they were telling me I still had to go to the other side of the world to prove myself if I wanted to ride the Worlds and, later, the Olympics. One logic was that we still had to rack up World Cup points to even qualify for Beijing, but it was Great Britain as a nation that still needed to qualify – it didn't need to be Bradley and I. To me, it would have made much more sense to send one of the glut of good young Madison riders on the Federation's books to Beijing and Sydney for points and experience. Meanwhile, I could have spent the winter getting the rest which, who knows, might translate into freshness and speed and medals months later in Manchester and then again in China. But no – Brad and I went to Sydney and Beijing, did the necessary, then returned to Europe to face what would be a long, tough road season punctuated by the two most prestigious Madison races on the calendar.

  When I said that I shouldn't have ridden in Manchester, the convoluted, contentious process of securing my place in the team wasn't what I was referring to. What I meant, and what very few people know, is that, the day before the Madison, after a crap ride in the points race, when I felt strong but strangely one-paced, I climbed off my bike and felt a splitting pain in my groin. I played it down that night, mainly because I hate it when other people make excuses for poor performances, but, after two hours of physio, it was still hurting. Same the next morning. To the coaches' question of whether I'd be fit to race, I said that I honestly couldn't give a confident answer, whereupon they decided that Geraint would take my place and partner Bradley. Half an hour later, I could sense an improvement and let them know. 'Look, I'm not going to bullshit you and say I'm okay when I'm not. I'm the last person who wants to go out and look like a idiot ...' They took a lot of convincing, but eventually relented and the rest, our win and gold medal included, is history.

  The volume and the intensity of the support in the Manchester velodrome that day is and will remain one of my best memories in cycling. The same, purely in terms of gratification, applies to the text message that Bradley, a multiple world and Olympic champion on the track, sent me that night, saying that it had been the best of all of his major wins on the track. One reason, said Brad, was that it was his major first title in a non-timed event, in other words where he'd been racing other riders rather than the clock. The other was that it had come in an event where his dad was once one of the world's top riders. His dad who, a few weeks earlier, had been murdered in Australia.

  THE PARISIAN post-Tour party that nearly never was, at least for Melissa and me, also marked the end of my post-Tour rest. Actually that's not strictly true, not only because, in the week since I'd abandoned it, the Tour had carried on – it just carried on without me – but also because I'd been out on my bike every day. Every cyclist or fan worth their salt will tell you that, while tiredness is an inevitability two or three weeks into the Tour, so fantastic form for another two, three or maybe four weeks after the race ends is one of its major boons. My problem in that week on the Isle of Man was resisting the temptation to milk that magic feeling, when every ride is pure, unadulterated enjoyment. In a month's time, I'd be riding the Olympic Madison, and the only way to be at my best in Beijing was to ease off now then build up again over the next three weeks. The solution? Stopping for coffee twice on every ride.

  From the Isle of Man, I'd flown to Paris, and from Paris headed to Belgium for the week of post-Tour criteriums that I mentioned in the last chapter. As I also mentioned in the last chapter, as well as appearance fees, these races brought an opportunity to swell your fanbase, but also, crucially, a good training base from which to start my final preparations for Beijing. Rod agreed that these races, which typically lasted a couple of hours, were hard, frenetic and generally rewarded the use of small gears, spun fast, were the ideal appetiser for the track work that I was about to start with him in Manchester.

  Rod wasn't 'in charge' of the Madison, so to speak. Nobody was. Nobody ever had been. The man at the top of the British Cycling pyramid, Dave Brailsford, had rejigged the coaching staff and re-evaluated their approach after parting with Simon Jones in 2007, but, as far as I could see, one thing that hadn't changed was their obsession with the timed events and particularly the team pursuit. At least now they were winning World Championships and beating world records, which hadn't been the case under Jonesy. But that still didn't help me. Bradley didn't mind of course, because not only was he entered for both the individual and team pursuit, and not only were they easier to predict and control, they also came before the Madison on the track programme in Beijing. From my point of view, at every major track championship I'd attended, it was as though the coaches had shown zero interest in the Madison until twenty-four hours before the race, when the team pursuit was over; now, partly because the Madison was the last of Brad's three events, and partly because no one at the Federation was putting any pressure on him to give it any thought, it would have been naive of me to expect him to start focusing on the race any more than a few hours before we lined up together in the Laoshan velodrome on 19 August.

  When I started a nine-day block of training with Rod before flying to China, the rest of the GB track team, Brad included, were training at the other British Cycling velodrome in Newport, south Wales. Why wasn't I with them? Simple – for the reasons I've just explained, and above all the fact that, if I'd gone to Newport, it would have been no different to the Worlds in LA in 2005 or in Bordeaux the following year, or at the training camp with Jonesy in Perth at the end of 2006. I didn't want to spend hours twiddling my thumbs in the middle of the track, waiting for the team pursuiters to take their breaks, and leave me to train uninterrupted. There was no one there to coach me, in any case, whereas in Manchester I would have Rod and his undivided attention.

  The training was hard. I'd just ridden the ultimate endurance event, the Tour, where the explosive efforts, the five- or ten-second leg-wreckers, came hours apart, but now you could make that minutes or sometimes seconds. It was hard, but there were no excuses – I wasn't still tired from the Tour, either mentally or physically. On the contrary, one day, after the riders who'd been in Newport had left for Beijing, Melissa and I sat in the hotel which was our Manchester basecamp and watched the opening ceremony, goggled-eyed. While road cycling was my first love and my bread and butter, and the Tour the axis of my season and my universe, the Olympics was still the Olympics, and they don't call it the 'Greatest Show on Earth' for nothing.

  I may have been critical of the British Cycling Federation's attitude to the Madison, but there was no denying that other aspects of their Olympic planning were spot-on. One good example was a system whereby, in the first three years of every Olympic cycle, we travelled to and from events on inexpensive flights, with the money saved going into a fund to buy business-class outward flights in Olympic year. This was particularly useful for me as my legs have always reacted badly to long-haul flights. Apparently, it's the same for anyone with big leg muscles – after a long flight, fluid collects in your thighs and calves, and for days afterwards your legs can feel swollen and lifeless. A comfy pillow and extra legroom may not have solved everything, but it certainly wasn't going to do any harm.

  I arrived in China a week before the start of the four-day track programme and ten days before the Madison. I don't know quite what I expected when I was met at the airport by a British Olympic Committee chaperone and driven to the Olympic village, but I wasn't blown away. The blurb said 9000 rooms in forty-two buildings spread over a s
ixty-six-hectare site and capable of housing 17,000 guests; the canteen alone could seat 5000. It also had a McDonalds. If that wasn't enough of a temptation (and not one to which I succumbed, in case you're wondering), there were plenty of other potential distractions, from games arcades to an Internet café, from a supermarket to almost mowing down the fourteen-year-old diver Tom Daley on my bike, which I almost did on the way to collect my accreditation.

  My apartment slept four – me and Bradley, both in single rooms, then Ed Clancy and Geraint, both of whom were riding the team pursuit. It was good to see the lads – Gee, Ed, Chris Hoy, Jason Kenny, Jamie Staff and especially Bradley – but it was also tense. Everyone was tense. The track lot always are. The atmosphere's so different in road teams, especially my road team. By comparison, we're free spirits, whereas the track boys seem to thrive in a controlled environment, whether it's on or off the bike.

  In Beijing, often you could walk around the apartment block and think you'd stumbled into a church. Everyone seemed to be in their rooms, in their beds, in the compression tights supposed to flush the toxins from your legs after a hard training session. Meanwhile, conscious of the need to maintain my endurance for the rest of the season, I headed out on my road bike with Shane Sutton. I needed Shane and his tales from the other side of the pro cycling tracks to alleviate the boredom of grinding up and down the highway, which was pretty much the only training route available. When Shane had finally run out of jokes, it was left to whoever was sending the weather. One day, it didn't so much rain as monsoon, and we didn't so much ride back through puddles as through a vast lake.

  Soon there was another activity besides training to keep me occupied: counting the British cycling medals. By the time the Madison came around at 5.30 p.m. on 19 August, we'd won golds in the team sprint (Hoy, Staff and Kenny), gold and bronze in the individual pursuit (Bradley and Steven Burke respectively), gold and silver in the keirin (Hoy and Ross Edgar), bronze in the points race (Chris Newton), gold and silver in the women's individual pursuit (Rebecca Romero and Wendy Houvenaghel) and gold in the team pursuit (Bradley, Ed, Geraint and Paul Manning). Another way of putting it was that every rider in the GB track team who'd competed had won a medal.

  No pressure, Cav.

  FIVE gold medals in, I suppose Dave Brailsford could be forgiven for starting to believe his own hype. Dave's a down-to-earth bloke, an averagely talented former rider who had the good sense to abandon his aims of riding the Tour and get himself a degree then an MBA. A mazy career path took him to a middle-management role at the British Cycling Federation in the late 1990s, after which he impressed enough to be appointed Performance Director in 2002. Since then, and especially now in Beijing, the track team's success had made Dave a bit of a media darling and minor celebrity – or so, we thought, he'd like to think.

  The perfect opportunity to test our theory presented itself on the day of the Madison, in the restaurant at the Olympic Village. Shane and I were homing in on three free seats while Dave went searching for cutlery, when I saw the British Olympic team's Chef de Mission Simon Clegg beckoning me over. 'Mark, Mark, this is Bernie Ecclestone,' he said, pointing to the wizened, bespectacled gentleman sitting opposite. 'Bernie, this is Mark. He won four stages of the Tour de France ...'

  No more than a minute or two later, Shane and I were tucking into our lunch when Dave finally arrived. Shane winked at me but I could have spotted the mischief in his eyes from double the distance.

  'Ah, Dave. There you are, mate. We were just chatting to Bernie Ecclestone over there,' Shane squawked, gesturing towards the wealthiest man in the room. 'He wanted to meet Cav. Then he asked where you were ...'

  A look of confusion, then pleasant surprise spread across Dave's face. 'Oh, all right,' he said. 'I'll go over and say hello ...'

  As we watched and giggled a few metres away, the next thing to spread across Dave's face, then across his hairless dome, was a crimson-coloured curtain of embarrassment. We later found out what he'd said on seeing Ecclestone's blank expression: 'Er, hello Bernie, I'm a friend of Mark's ...'

  There weren't many more opportunities to laugh over the next few hours. There was, though, bizarrely enough, a last, failed attempt by me to change Bradley's mind about leaving Columbia for Garmin at the end of the season. Hardly the ideal mental preparation for the Olympic Madison, you might say – but then neither was Ed and Geraint clattering back into the flat and waking me up after a night of boozy celebration. They'd got their gold medals; they could afford to relax.

  But there were no mitigating circumstances: until the starter's gun sounded – I'll be honest – we were in good spirits and confident. There'd been a bit of debate before the race about whether Brad might be exhausted after his individual pursuit heat then final, and the same again for the team pursuit, the final having taken place only the previous day. But the schedule at the Worlds in Manchester in March had been almost as arduous (at the Olympics there were three rounds per event, as compared with two at the Worlds) and we'd not just pulled but stormed through. I had other reservations – about Brad's lack of specific preparation for the Madison – but, as I completed my half-hour warm-up in the middle of the track, I felt strong and optimistic. No, forget the optimism – it was as close as you could come to a cast-iron certainty that we were about to win without teetering into complacency.

  Melissa, my mum, Tony Blair and, of course, Bernie Ecclestone were all there in the stands, waiting for the next instalment of the British Gold Rush. Neither I, nor Dave Brailsford, was going to need any introduction after this one ...

  'FUCK!'

  Yet again, as it had in Manchester five months earlier, one stifled shout on a changeover told the story of our race. I say 'changeover', but what I actually mean is 'failed changeover', since Brad missed me as I swung down the track, left arm out, ready for him grab it – hence the obscenity. It also said a lot about our day that all of this took place right under the nose of Tony Blair – and easily within his hearing range.

  The missed changed was annoying, symptomatic, but no more than a minor inconvenience; basically it meant that Brad had to do an extra lap before handing over to me. In a Madison of 200 laps, like this one, it's up to each pairing exactly when and how often they change, according to strategy and tiredness. An extra lap for either one of you isn't the end of the world, but, as I said, it was symptomatic of what was fast turning into a nightmare.

  In Manchester, Brad had been a Trojan. Here, I didn't know what was going on. On the changes when we weren't grasping at fresh air, in those few milliseconds when we locked hands, I quizzed him – 'Brad, you okay?', 'You good?', 'Something wrong?' But nothing. No reply. Just a grunt or a nod then off he or I went.

  He couldn't seem to move up. Every time, when he'd throw me into the track, I'd try to pull us up to the front, to a position where we could at least contemplate an attack, or winning the next sprint, then I'd sling Bradley back in and he'd drift back. I said I didn't know what was going on, but it was actually pretty classic behaviour for someone who was struggling, or 'swinging' as we call it. The back of a bunch is one of the hardest places to be in any bike-race; in the Madison it's doubly difficult because, in the chaos and congestion of changeovers, the rider at the back finds himself weaving in and out of the riders from opposition teams peeling to the side of the track as they finish their turns. It's double the effort to slot pack into the pack, and almost double the distance, what with all the detours around the riders choking the track. Even once you'd negotiated that traffic, it cost as much energy to move from the back to the front third of the group as it did to gain half a lap. With fifty laps, I knew it was all over. We both did. You could see it in our body language. I'd tried to attack, tried to gain a lap, but the marking was skin-tight, and Brad seemed absent. Even if we had broken free and gained a lap, it was going to be in vain, as there were other teams who had already scored, and who were well ahead of us on sprint points. The tactic before the race had been to consistently pick up sprin
ts along the way and use our strength to gain a lap, as we had at the Worlds; from the arse-end of the race, however strong I was feeling, that simply wasn't going to happen. For those last fifty laps we went through the motions.

  As the Argentines celebrated their gold medal, we slowed, then pulled to the middle of the track without even glancing in each other's direction, let alone beginning a post-mortem. Brad was soon slumped on a chair, talking to British Cycling psychiatrist Steve Peters, while I picked up my road bike and headed straight for the ramp leading out of the arena and into the changing area. A few minutes later, I was back to collect my rucksack. Again, I wasn't in the mood for hanging around – although I did take time to congratulate Vicky Pendleton when she came off the track after her gold-medal-winning ride in the women's individual sprint. Vicky's was the penultimate track cycling event of the Games, the men's sprint which gave Chris Hoy his third gold medal at 7.30 p.m. the same night, the last. It was now official: I was the only British track rider who would go home without a medal.