1 : All I Ever Wanted
I first went to the road Worlds when I was nine. I’m right there in the video footage of the 1982 pro championship in Goodwood, Sussex, but I’m not riding my bike. I’m standing in the middle of the road along with my brother Richard and my best mate Simon at the very moment when Bernard Hinault retires from the race. How the hell I got there I still do not know, but what I do know is that on my head is a Sem-France-Loire racing cap, as worn by Sean Kelly, who was my hero when I was a kid, partly because my mother is Irish.
Cycling has always been my life. All I can remember is wanting to be a cyclist or a fireman. My dad was a cyclist, one of the founder members of the Clayton Velo Cycling Club in Burnley, where I was born. All our holidays were centred around our bikes: the Cyclists’ Touring Club’s New Forest cycling week, the Harrogate cycling festival. We never went abroad; if we had a break, it was always in the UK so we could ride our bikes. Goodwood, the second and up to now last time the world road championships came to the UK, was another one of those trips: we camped out the whole weekend, watched Mandy Jones win the women’s race for Great Britain and watched the amateur race on the Saturday. Shortly before Giuseppe Saronni flew up the rise to the finish to win the pro race on the Sunday, we swarmed into the grandstand. We didn’t have tickets or anything, so everyone just stormed in.
I grew up with cycling. After we moved from Burnley to Grantham in Lincolnshire in 1976 or 1977, Dad would take us to watch the city-centre criteriums in Nottingham and other places. He was the organiser of the town-centre races in Grantham, and my granddad was the one who did the time-keeping at the local ten-mile time trials for our club, the Witham Wheelers. They still run an annual road race named after my great-granddad, the GT Ellingworth, in late May. We were constantly at bike races.
After my parents split up in 1979, I stayed with Dad. It was a cycling house; life there revolved around it. It was where the lads would come and meet before going training or riding the evening chain gang. We had a VW camper van, and that was the centre point at races – all the guys would come over, sit around and have a cup of tea while they were putting their numbers on. Richard, who’s older than me, began racing before I did – my dad made me wait until he thought I was old enough – so every weekend we were off supporting him in whatever schoolboy circuit race he was riding. I rode my first race in one of those circuit events, run by the English Schools Cycling Association. I was mad about road racing and the Tour de France. We used to get Cycling Weekly magazine every week – it was at the time when they had really good front and back covers, so my whole room was covered with them, and they were all over my school books as well. There was no ‘Do I like it or not?’ It was everything to me.
I was lucky that my granddad was really good at getting us to go out and do things, to ask for stuff. There were two moments when this made a real difference to me as a young bike rider. The first was in 1988, when he persuaded me to ask the headmaster at my school to fund me for a youth-training week run by the ESCA during the holidays. It was a week when you would learn the kind of stuff that British Cycling’s Talent Team do now – skills, race tactics, and so on – but it cost about £150 and it wasn’t something we could afford. I remember my granddad saying, ‘Why not ask at school?’
At that point cycling was nothing as a sport. I was doing a sport which wasn’t really recognised, which had no presence in schools, and no one there knew anything about it. When you do that kind of sport, you’re always seen as a bit different. You’re the one who bangs up and down the A1 in those stupid time trials. But I wanted to go on that youth weekend, so I went into school, aged fourteen or fifteen, sat down with the headmaster to show him all the information and asked if they could put up the money. And they did. They even bought me a cycling jersey, got the school name printed on it and presented it to me in front of the whole school at assembly. I was super-embarrassed. But getting that jersey was massive for me. I went to the races and pushed a bit more, so that I could go back to my headmaster and tell him how I’d done.
The other thing my granddad got me to do was write to the local council, because they had started doing a grant scheme called ‘Gifted Young People’, under which they would give funding for people to do arts, sport, whatever. So I went for that and got £50 for 1987, and the grant ended up going all the way to 1996, when I was getting £5,000 and a car. One way or another, that relationship lasted all the way through until I finished cycling in 2001. I was lucky the school and the council took an interest in me, but it only happened because my granddad asked me to approach them. There are times when if someone doesn’t point you in the right direction, you don’t know what to do.
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So cycling was my life. As soon as I started riding in the local club runs, I was one of the ones who would finish with the fast group, and they’d all be asking, ‘Who’s this kid?’ I always remember I did twenty-nine minutes five seconds for my first club ten-mile time trial, because my dad had said he wondered if I would get inside thirty minutes, which is the big barrier for anyone riding their first ‘ten’. I was thinking, ‘Too right I can get inside thirty minutes.’ And I started riding track leagues on Tuesday and Wednesday at Nottingham and Leicester, alternating with the club tens and schoolboy criteriums on Saturday and Sunday. At that time there were loads of city-centre races, which always had kids’ events; if you look at the calendar now, there are about a third the number of races there were then.
I enjoyed going to school because I loved the social side of it. At that time I was flicking back and forth between my parents. One minute I was living in one place, then in another, and that’s a crucial time in your school life when you begin secondary school. I couldn’t really be bothered with the studying. I just wanted to go cycling. There were three things I wanted to do at school: study French, because I wanted to go to France and be a cyclist; technical drawing; and PE. I was in the first year that took GCSEs, and at that point PE wasn’t one of the options. There was no exam.
If there had been, my life might have been different, because although I wasn’t smart at school, doing that might have pushed me to do other doings, such as sports science. I loved PE. Every subject we did they would give us monthly marks out of four, and I always got four out of four in PE. I always wanted top marks in it. I was captain of the team in every sport we played, but there was nothing you could do with it. It was a different story with maths and so on, where I’d be below average because I was talking all the time in class. I wasn’t a troublemaker, but I couldn’t be bothered with things like that. After the third year at secondary school, they only let the top two classes in the school do French. I was so pissed off about that. I remember thinking, ‘Sod them. Why should I bother if they won’t let you learn what you want?’ We were restricted in what we were allowed to learn. The things I wanted to do weren’t there, so I couldn’t be bothered.
But there was always cycling. The Witham Wheelers were a good group, and my dad was a big character among them. He was a fiery type, always arguing with people, and he ran the club runs in a disciplined way, something that’s been lost a bit now. If you were mucking about and he shouted at you, you’d be back in twos and riding sensibly at once. You weren’t allowed to get away with swanning along, never doing a thing and then sprinting for a village sign. We would sprint for all the signs, and there was no way you could sprint and then just go to the back – you had to keep doing your turns at the front.
As my mother wasn’t there waiting for us to go home at the weekend, we’d go cycling on a Sunday and stay out all day. There would be me, Dad and Dave Strickson, who is a bit of a legend in Grantham; he’d be out twenty-four hours a day riding at the same pace, so now if I’m with Dad and we see a cyclist, we say it has to be Stricko. We’d stop at a cafe with the club, and then the three of us would cycle to a pub for dinner and ride home in the dark. So we’d be out all day, on our bikes the whole time. When I was eleven or twelve, Dad lost his licence for drink d
riving, so we cycled everywhere for a whole year: down to the shops; out to a time trial on a Saturday, stay overnight, back on a Sunday; off to a youth hostel for the weekend. It was old-school cycling, where you lived on your bike, and it was fantastic for a kid.
There were a good few kids at the club – my brother lived with our mum, but was still out on his bike – and the club activities continued through the winter. There would be roller-racing sessions – where you race on stationary bikes, pedalling like hamsters on a wheel – and if guys had been on cycling trips in the summer, we would sit there and watch their holiday slides. The club coach, Bob Howbrooke, had a circular slide projector and used to show us his snaps. He had been on a few courses, but back then we used to take the mickey out of him a bit. Everyone had the attitude of ‘What’s a coach?’ He had some good ideas, but because there was no coaching background in cycling, we never really listened. And the same two ladies – Janet East and Christine Edwards – would always do the teas and coffees. At the end of the club ten in the summer, you would hand in your number, and one of them would give you your cup of tea.
This was the British cycling world at the time, pretty much as it had been since the 1950s, and I thrived on it. At the time, racing in France – or anywhere abroad – was a million miles away. The people we admired – Sean Kelly, Sean Yates, all those stars – seemed like legends. The racing they did was way beyond anything we could do. There was no commitment there, no belief that what they did was something we could do. When I think how British cyclists are now – we are really pushy, we think big, we believe that everyone has two arms and legs just like the rest of us. But that’s something we have grown into; back then the attitude was, ‘You’ll never make it into that kind of racing. No one from Britain is ever that good.’
I think that things must have been tough for my dad. He was made redundant one year and he was living on his own with me. We certainly didn’t go on family holidays abroad, although I did go to Malta once with my mum. Perhaps Dad wasn’t overambitious, and as a result of that I wasn’t that sure about going off and racing abroad and making it as a European pro like Kelly or Yates. And at that time there was a good little professional racing scene in Britain. In a way, it held a lot of people back – riders like Chris Lillywhite, Chris Walker, Rob Holden – because they could earn a bit of money without going abroad, and I got drawn into the tail end of that.
I was never among the very best. I would win races, get a decent result here and there. I could always handle my bike and get in the right place. But I never looked at how to train properly, how to eat the right things, how to race to your full potential. When I think now of what I did, perhaps I wasn’t smart enough to look at everything and break it down. But I was in there, racing was my life, and I just enjoyed it. I went with it.
There was one evening in October 1988, when I was sixteen and had left school. The phone rang; Dad answered it, and I remember him speaking a little bit posh, a bit proper. ‘Who the hell is that?’ I thought. Dad came in and said, ‘It’s Doug Dailey on the phone.’ You think of people with radio voices, and Doug is one of those. He has a very distinct, powerful voice; he just bellows it out. Doug was involved with British Cycling from the mid-1980s to 2012, and at that time he was national coach. He never changed; he remained a key part of the national team for all those years, fully committed, and was just the same then as when I worked with him later.
‘Doug Dailey here, Rod,’ he said. ‘I’m very happy to tell you you’ve made the national junior team.’ And what got me was that he added, ‘You’ve not just made it onto one – you’re on both the road and track teams.’ It was brilliant. I got a letter telling me to go for a medical in Edgbaston, and I’ll never forget the journey there, clutching the letter all the way. So I rode in the junior world championships in Moscow in 1989, and then in Middlesbrough in 1990. It was all a bit of an experience. At Middlesbrough we were going OK in the team pursuit, heading for about fourth, when Matthew Charity crashed, and that split us up.
After that I started racing in Europe a little. There’s a guy called John Barclay who took groups of riders to race in Belgium. He’s a bit of an institution in British racing – he’s been doing it for years and is still taking guys out there. He had a bloody great Peugeot estate which could hold six or eight of us, bikes on the roof, bags in the boot. You’d be asked to go through word of mouth. You’d meet at a service station on the M25 on a Friday afternoon, get the ferry, stay in a youth hostel or a barracks or something, pay him a bit of petrol money, race your race and then be dropped back on the Sunday evening.
There were trips with the local Centre of Excellence – regional set-ups which received small grants to help their riders progress, with racing abroad and training camps at home – with riders like Mark Dawes, Mark Armstrong, David Standard, Paul Spencer, Lee Burns and Andrew Roche. When I think of what I’ve seen since, some of them were definitely world class – Mark Armstrong won the junior Liège–Bastogne–Liège in 1990, for example.
On one of the trips I realised how the Great Britain team worked back then. The guy who managed us there told me that at the end of each season there was a meeting where they went through the invitations for the next year’s international races. They would ask, for example, ‘Who wants to do the Tour de l’Avenir?’ and whoever wanted to be team manager would just say, ‘I’ll do it.’ There was no experience in the management, no coaching structure, no pathway for the riders to follow. As far as full-time employees went, there was only Doug. There was help for those at the top leading up to the Olympic Games, but nothing for the people below that. I did quite well when Alan Sturgess was the junior coach, but there was no long-term development pathway. You couldn’t see where it might take you if you weren’t part of that elite group.
British Cycling had no real base – it was run out of Jim Hendry’s place in Kettering. There was no money. They were doing all the races off the back of nothing. There was no question of ‘Ride these four races to get ready for this next one.’ You would do one race at random, then another, then the world championships. I remember watching the Worlds one year and seeing a rider I knew called Steve Farrell always sitting last wheel in that massive peloton because he didn’t have the skills. They wouldn’t bring in riders who could help the team, put other guys into the right position; it was all about who was best at smashing each other over the Yorkshire Dales in the Premier Calendar races – riders like Farrell or Mark Lovatt, who were as strong as an ox. And the guys who did have the skills, the strength and the knowledge – Chris Lillywhite, Chris Walker – never rode for the biggest pro teams, so they never got to use their ability at the highest level.
By 1993 I was riding for Dynatech, which was an amateur version of the Raleigh professional team. I was pushing for a place in the Olympic and Commonwealth Games but never quite made it. There weren’t that many options. There were plenty of lads from the UK trying to make it abroad – in Belgium, France or Holland, even Italy – but you never heard of them. There might be a little write-up in Cycling Weekly now and then, but otherwise they would just be lost. There was no level you could aim for in between racing in the UK and racing abroad, which was a long way above British racing. You couldn’t just race to improve, and there was no advice to be had. So I decided to be a professional. I wasn’t in the Olympic clique for the road or the track, so it seemed that I might as well.
The key influence for me in the mid-1990s was Shane Sutton, an Aussie who was still racing as a professional with Keith Lambert’s teams, which had been sponsored by Banana Group and Falcon. Shane went on to coach Wales and played a big role with Great Britain from about 2003 onwards. I was about twenty-one or twenty-two when I got to know him well. He was a huge influence on me in terms of how a team works, how to respect your teammates. He was a very good racer, a very good tactician, and I learnt more from him than from most of the people I ran into. He was always very, very disciplined, unbelievably strict. We would go on trips to Austr
alia, and if you were late for a training ride or late leaving for a race, you’d go home.
By 1995 I was racing for a team sponsored by Ambrosia Desserts and run by an ex-pro called Mick Morrison, who’d been part of the pro scene back in the 1980s. The team had a proper professional licence – which ruled me out of selection for Great Britain – and sometimes we would go racing in Belgium when there was a gap in the UK calendar. There was one particular spell when we went and stayed in Mechelen in a house owned by Tim Harris, a pro from Norfolk who lived out there – and still does – and who was giving a bunch of guys a bit of an opportunity. The guys living in that house were trying to get noticed by the Belgian teams, and they were living pretty rough. They were doing it the hard way, living off what they could earn in the bike races, and I had total respect for them. I was sharing a room with a thin, blond guy from Yorkshire called Rob Reynolds-Jones, who was nicknamed Log, and Ben Luckwell, an older lad from Bristol.
It was a three-storey house above Tim’s furniture place. It was freezing, with about eight or nine of them living in there, but they had a whale of a time. The toilet was in a big bathroom with a curtain across it. I was sleeping on a mattress – Rob had the bed – and next to it was a mineral-water bottle with the top cut off. I was lying there looking at it; it had marker-pen lines on it, with one about five millimetres from the top. I said, ‘What the hell is that?’ And Rob said, ‘You don’t want to be going down the steps to the toilet in the night. If you tried going down there in the dark, you’d break your neck.’ So the bottle was what they would piss into. I said, ‘OK, so what are the lines?’ ‘That’s the world record.’ That’s what they’d got to one night – I don’t know how on earth they’d have got it down the stairs in the morning without spilling a load of it.
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