Project Rainbow

by Rod Ellingworth

  It wasn’t just Russell, it was the whole group I was working with in 2003: Owen Wallace, Russell Anderson, Kieran Page, Steve Cummings, Ben Hallam, Tom White and Kristian House. I was continually thinking, ‘Something isn’t right here.’ I don’t know if that came from my background, the ten years I’d spent before that not earning anything and scraping by, but it seemed to me that these riders had a GB jersey on and it was far too easy for them. They didn’t lack for anything. I couldn’t see any sign that they were hungry – that’s what it was.

  Throughout that year I’d watch them training on the track. They were never pushed. These young lads would come into the track centre and their bikes would all be there for them, the right gears on, tyres pumped up, ready to go. They’d have exactly the same kit as the Olympic team, but the only thing they had to achieve to qualify for the Olympic development squad was to hit those age-related times. It wasn’t as if to get on the national team they were having to win five races, win one of the biggest one-day races in Britain – the Premier Calendars – or an international race, or show their ability to handle their bikes in the bunch. The philosophy was, ‘Can you do this time and within an hour back it up with another?’

  I remember one day we were going off to a race; I think it was the Girvan Three-Day in south-west Scotland. I had Russell Anderson and Kieran Page in the car with me. They both had their headphones on and wouldn’t talk. I was thinking, ‘For the next few hours they’ve got a chance to get a whole load of information about bike racing out of me …’, but they weren’t interested. Kieran was reading the newspaper and talking to me about some general news in there, and I was thinking, ‘Mate, you’re nineteen or twenty, you’re in the GB national team, you’re sitting next to the coach – why aren’t you talking about cycling? You’re in the wrong game, pal.’

  I remember asking them, ‘What have you got planned for next week?’

  They said, ‘Nothing.’

  ‘How do you mean “nothing”? What races are you doing?’

  ‘We’re not racing.’

  ‘When are you racing next?’

  ‘The so-and-so stage race’ – in a month’s time.

  ‘What are you doing in between?’

  ‘Nothing, you guys haven’t entered us for anything.’

  ‘But don’t you want to race?’

  ‘We don’t want to race unless you make us race.’

  That was something I simply couldn’t get my head around: how could you not want to race if you were a bike racer?

  They were doing only twenty or twenty-five days of racing a year, but they didn’t have to win those races as long as they could keep doing their qualification times, and I was thinking, ‘So what? What does that get you?’ They had the same kit and clothing as someone who was a professional bike rider or an Olympic medallist. None of it added up for me. They didn’t have to work hard enough for it. They didn’t have to prove anything. They’d made it. And everybody was wrapping them up in cotton wool. They were scared to push these guys.

  People had got comfortable. The words ‘minimum standard’ make you think. To get in the team you had to hit a minimum time standard. It wasn’t a question of ‘Here’s the fastest time in the world. Let’s pick the riders who get closest to that.’ It was: ‘Here is a minimum standard to get you on the national programme.’ There’s an important difference. That way of doing things doesn’t create winners. It creates people who say, ‘Right, as long as I can do four minutes twenty-four seconds for 4,000 metres, or whatever, that’s great; I’ve got my money and I can live a nice comfy life.’ I didn’t even feel that our senior squad were what they should have been. When you looked at the Aussies, the team we were trying to beat, they were staying in Italy together, living the life of bike racers, and that meant they knew each other inside out. Our guys would go home, come together for a few races, get looked after like pros and go home again. It looked as if there was no real bite to them, no major commitment. Their basic understanding of cycling was poor. They were nice kids, but they didn’t have a clue. They weren’t really into it. They had no passion for cycling. We were a million miles away from where I wanted to be.

  3 : Man with a Plan

  I seemed to spend most of 2003 writing. I’ve always been into writing my ideas down. I constantly give myself lists of things to do; I don’t care how the end product looks on paper, I get it all down so I can understand it. From the moment I came back from the hospital with Russell I started putting my ideas down. I could see a massive window of opportunity. I could change it all so easily, and I could make it bloody good fun for the lads. I would get so absorbed by the process that John Herety, who was rooming with me in Bendigo, would ask, ‘Could you not stop working and just calm down?’ But I had to do something. I’d just got the job and was so enthusiastic; it felt as if I was jotting down ideas around the clock. I’d learnt a lot from Simon Jones, and now I was ready to put the programme together. I really enjoyed that time. I was so immensely into it, looking at everything and believing I could make it all better.

  I wanted to make sure I was going to do a good job; if I didn’t make a success of working for Great Britain, there was nothing else for me to do. I remember saying to Jane that this was the only option I had: ‘I’ve got to be ready for this, I’ve got to put everything into it.’ This was either going to work or else I was going to have to get a normal job that I didn’t want to do. I was bloody well ready for it. I’d always committed to my bike riding; I’d always known, for example, that if I wanted to go out on the Nottingham club run, I had to be out of the house at eight in the morning and no later. If you didn’t put that commitment in, you wouldn’t get anywhere, and if I made the same kind of effort now, I’d be OK.

  *

  I believed that there was a bottleneck in the British senior men’s endurance team. Riders like Bryan Steel and Chris Newton had been around for a long time, and in my mind they were blocking the system; how could the young lads beat them if getting into the squad was just about going fastest in a straight line? If you’re trying to get to Olympic-medal standard in the team pursuit, how do you show whether you’re good enough when there are only a couple of races in the year? I wanted to take these young riders away from the senior squad and make the European under-23 track championships their main goal, with the under-23 world road title their other focus. Those were age-related goals, so they would be competing against their peers. I wanted to get the young riders away from the older ones, away from that senior bubble. They had to have their own programme with its own coach, completely separate from the senior team.

  The stepping stones were there. The best example was Bradley Wiggins, who had won the junior world pursuit title in 1998 and broken through to the senior squad for the Sydney Games; two years later he had gone on to a successful career on the road and a place in a professional road team. If the two ends of the spectrum are the athlete and the pure bike racer, Paul Manning would be your athlete through and through, while Phil West was a good example of a bike racer who really loved his cycling. The best ones – Brad, Rob Hayles, Chris Hoy – combine being a great athlete with massive racing ability and a passion for cycling. That’s because to be good on a bike at any level you have to be able to hurt yourself. If you are really fit, you still hurt, but you just sprint faster or go across the gap to a break more quickly. The pain is the same. The best cyclists find it easy to hurt themselves because they have that passion. In the case of Brad, cycling had always been his life: he’d read all the magazines, had the posters on his wall. You can imagine him riding around Herne Hill pretending to be in a six-day or riding through the lanes pretending to be in the Tour de France. And he’s a great athlete on top of that. He’s the complete package. That was the kind of cyclist I wanted to produce.

  To get some ideas from outside, I had a look at other sports – athletics, netball. I visited the Winter Olympics performance director and went to the English Institute of Sport in Bath. I wanted to speak to peopl
e who worked with similar age groups, developing athletes. The Winter Olympics was a new development programme; netball the same. Athletics was interesting: there were around nineteen national coaches, so how did they work together? I left the majority of them thinking they were not as structured or as disciplined as I was intending to be. They also had lots of issues with external coaches, which was something that wouldn’t be a problem for us.

  British Cycling’s development manager at the time was Simon Lillistone, who would go on to head up the whole cycling programme at the London Olympic Games in 2012; back then he managed all the junior programmes. So through 2003 I stayed in the office with Simon late into the evenings working through the whole concept of an under-23 academy – what it would look like, how it would work, what discipline level we would start at. The idea was that I would coach it, and he would have an overview and manage things like logistics.

  Discipline was a big part of it. I knew what I wanted: a crack squad of lads who behaved themselves, knew where the line was, had a good time and loved their sport but respected the people around them. If you don’t have a basic regard for the people in your orbit, you’re not going to get anywhere in any field. It would be simple and strict. I wanted them to look at it like this: you clock in in the morning, you clock out at night; this is full-time; this is a job; you’re responsible and accountable for your actions. I wasn’t interested in whether these guys were tired and couldn’t perform on the bike. I was interested in a system, a regime, in getting these guys feeling like they were part of such a strong unit that one day that bond would bring them so close together that they would perform as a team.

  It had to feel like they had gone through a journey, a massive experience in their lives. Everyone who’s gone and lived abroad and experienced that loneliness has that in common, even complete strangers. It was the same concept. The Aussies were coming all the way to stay in Europe, living in each other’s pockets. They would have a bond. They would live and die for each other. When it comes down to a key moment in a bike race – for example, when someone is doing a big lead-out for you – you want to know what that guy is thinking. You’ve got to trust him. That was what I wanted. The question was how to create that within a team.

  From the British Lions – and from the time the school gave me that cycling jersey at assembly – I got the idea of having a welcome ceremony for the riders. When a player joins the Lions, he is awarded his Lions cap in front of his teammates. Everybody is there and they all applaud and so on. So at the start of every year I would do a presentation for the academy riders and all their families. I would tell them what we were expecting, set the targets, lay out the plans for the season, and so on. I wanted them to feel that they were joining a family. We took them on a tour of the velodrome; it was a way of saying ‘Welcome’ and getting the riders’ families to buy in. I wanted them and the riders to have the background on how we worked, and the parents could take the information pack away and refer back to it. And the new riders would be awarded their jersey there. I knew the importance of that first jersey because I had kept mine, one of the classic GB ones in blue with red sleeves, which I may have been supposed to return!

  The long-term goal was that the academy would produce at least two riders who would progress to the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing. In the short term, however, the whole set-up was to be based around preparing riders to be professionals with European teams. The two objectives were completely compatible. I’ve always felt that the track is a young man’s game: it’s fast, it’s about enthusiasm, it’s punchy, intense. An athlete can’t do that for ever. I see track racing as a stepping stone to being a pro on the road. The track is a good way in for a young rider, because you learn all your skills and you can become an Olympic champion; throughout that time you can learn, which is fantastic, and then you can go on and earn your money by becoming a pro. At that time there weren’t too many pure team-pursuit specialists like Ed Clancy and Steven Burke. Nowadays, the discipline has moved on in terms of sheer speed, but back then the team pursuit was for riders like Rob Hayles, Chris Newton, Paul Manning, Jonny Clay – we all know they could have been fantastic pros on the road in the Bradley Wiggins mould.

  At the time, Simon Jones was very much in favour of putting the team pursuiters in top-level road races, because Brad had gone on to be a pro and so had Rob, and you could see the benefits in other areas of track endurance as well. So the idea with the academy was to start the riders on the track, then move them onto the road. Getting them to progress to being pros was in the plan. It was overt. Peter Keen had said before he founded the World Class Performance Plan in 1997 that it was about ‘building a team that was ultimately a prelude to a full professional team … preparing people for life in teams where they will earn a lot of money’. Even then Dave Brailsford had the idea of running a pro team off the back of the track squad.

  So there were many different things that went into the British Cycling academy plan. In drawing it up, what I concentrated on was this: you’ve got twenty building blocks to be a road professional or a world champion on track or road, so how do you tick them off? By riding at under-16 level you get the first couple of blocks, in the juniors you do the next two or three – but what do the blocks look like, what do they consist of? They include things like personal organisation, bike mechanics, being able to handle a Madison session, do a standing start … You could make a list of everything it takes. I was thinking that you’ve got to get these lads ready to compete. They need to be track competent – they know how to do every event on the track, but to get that good they may well need to do stage races, and in order to get the most out of that, they need to be able to look after themselves on the road.

  One big change would be that when it came to track training sessions, these lads needed to have their own designated times and not just piggyback on the seniors. We had to get back to absolute basics. I’d seen sessions where a coach would be on the motorbike with the young riders in a line behind him, and he’d be indicating when he wanted to come off the blue line, in the middle of the track, down to the black, at the bottom. It would be: ‘Moving down …’ My attitude was the opposite: ‘Put them on the fucking block, get them going flat out, get them hurting themselves.’ There was all this talk of progression, to get them up to a certain level. I just thought, ‘If they aren’t fit enough, hard luck. Let them get stuck in.’

  I began thinking about the education side. Around this time, the GB sprinters Vicky Pendleton and Ross Edgar had been to the college run by the Union Cycliste Internationale in Aigle, Switzerland. I got some ideas from Vicky, mainly about how the day was divided up between cycling and education. In terms of the latter, I wasn’t interested in someone going off and being at university, learning history or whatever. This was about cycling – their education in the sport. Learning foreign languages, particularly French, was an obvious one. We would also go into how to look after yourself: stretching, injury prevention, what you do when you have an injury, the medical side in terms of saddle sores, road rash. I got in touch with Jo Harrison from the English Institute of Sport – I was the first one of us to make proper contact with them – and got her involved. She’d been doing little bits sporadically, but this was the first time we evolved a real system. She ran the education side, and we used all the EIS facilities – they organised the language courses, for example, and a food-hygiene course at a college in Stockport.

  The racing side would be based in the UK to start off with. We had the idea of maybe going abroad one day, although we didn’t quite know how it was going to happen or where it would be. The idea was to give the riders quite big goals: the European under-23 track championships and the under-23 world road championships. We were a million miles off winning those in 2003, but these were targets that were age-related, so there was no reason why we couldn’t aim to perform there. So initially it was a domestic programme – Premier Calendars, the national championships, and so on. But what I tried to do was to have at
least one European trip every month.

  The rest of it was based around the European under-23 track championships and the under-23 world road race championships, and as many days racing as possible. I had a bit of an eye-opening moment in Moscow in 2003, when I took a team to the Europeans. We went with only six or seven junior and under-23 riders, which wasn’t very many considering that by 2003 we had become one of the leading nations on the track. There weren’t many nations as good as us at the elite level. I counted the riders from other countries, and the Germans or the Spanish had twenty or twenty-five across all the disciplines. We didn’t field riders for all the races, only certain ones, and I remember coming back and saying, ‘I don’t understand this – where were our juniors? Where were our points-race riders, our Madison riders?’ We had a budget; I took that and pushed massively for a change, to take big numbers, and from 2005 we started performing in the Europeans. We were one of the best nations at senior level, so there was no reason why we couldn’t be good enough at under-23.