Project Rainbow

by Rod Ellingworth

  There were six who made it through: Cav, Christian Varley, Bruce Edgar, Tom White, Ed Clancy and Matt Brammeier. Of the six, Cav was quite bolshie about what he thought he could do. He said, ‘I want to be a pro.’ He was quite clear about what he wanted – if it wasn’t the academy, he was going to Belgium. He didn’t behave as if our way was the only way, which impressed me. He seemed very streetwise. He knew exactly how he’d got over from the Isle of Man to the interview; he’d been doing that journey since he was a kid. He seemed sure of himself but wasn’t particularly cocky. At this point, he was working full-time in a bank; he’d just had his tonsils out and was quite sick and wasn’t riding his bike. I remember him calling me and saying, ‘I’m not going to let you down. I’m really looking forward to this opportunity. If it wasn’t this, I was saving up to go to Belgium.’

  If you talked to Marshall Thomas, the national junior coach, it was as if Cav was the devil. Marshall didn’t like Mark, and Mark was very resentful because he didn’t get selected for the Worlds. It’s well known that Cav wasn’t a lover of sports scientists; he didn’t like their methods and he didn’t want to do times on the track. His view was that he had won national championships across the board, on road and track, sprint and endurance, so why wasn’t he being taken to the Worlds? He was right. One of the reasons we did choose Mark was that this guy could win bike races, the same as Ben Swift a couple of years later: you put them against the clock and they weren’t that good, but they knew how to win races.

  Ed Clancy was the other way round: perhaps he couldn’t win races all the time, but his physical qualities were something quite special. He wasn’t particularly open and aware in the interview – he was very much on his own, very quiet, a tough one to crack. But get him on the bike and he really, really wanted it. He is an athlete who is built more like a track sprinter than a road racer, which is why he has been so special at the team pursuit. The academy really challenged him; racing on the road cracked him at times, but on the track you could see he was good. He was very quiet – the lads would be walking down the street, and he’d be walking ten lengths behind them on his own. He always wore the same Ferrari T-shirt because he was dead into his Formula One. I think he only had the one and he never washed it. As much as Cav and Ed are good friends now, they went through quite a hard time together. But Cav could see that Ed had something special about him, and Ed could see that about Cav. I don’t think the academy was perfect for Ed, but he learnt a hell of a lot there.

  Ed could have gone to university, but my view was that the riders could go and do a degree in something or other, but it wasn’t going to help them with cycling. I always believed these guys could earn from cycling, and now they are doing that. They may never have to have a normal job; a lot of them will finish their careers and remain in cycling because it’s been their lives.

  The hardest year at the academy was the first year after I put the plan together. The discipline level and the commitment to the work for ten months a year was at boot-camp level, whereas later on it was cut down to a three-month period. It was just a bit too intense. The boot camp wasn’t called that until the end of 2004, but basically that’s what Cav and all the others went through the entire year. Their daily routine changed a lot from the first year to the second. In the first they were like guinea pigs, and it was as much about me learning as them taking things on. The objective during the winter – one of the key things – was that these lads would do more track riding and skills-based work than any other under-23 in the world.

  The challenge I set for the riders was this: could these guys get their track skills to a level where they would be like ducks in water? When they were moving back from being road pros to racing on the track at the Olympics or the Worlds, they would be out of the water for a couple of years, then they would land on the water and have to swim immediately. It was a challenge for them. Riders like Peter Kennaugh and Geraint Thomas were all part of that. I think it helped them; think of the success in London, where they were both part of that GB team that won the team-pursuit gold: they knew going into the Olympics that they could go and do lots of stage racing, then drop back in and with one or two sessions look pretty good on the track. I’m sure that’s because of all the work they’d done in their early days at the academy.

  So for me it was important that they got into it. It was a full-time job, eight till five. I wanted them clocking in and clocking out. What I’d experienced myself, and what I’d seen in my early days of coaching, was young lads thinking that they’d made it just because they’d got on some kind of a full-time team. They’d be training but in the afternoon they’d spend half the time in a cafe or shopping, spending all their money. My attitude was that I was going to keep these lads so flipping busy they weren’t going to want to go out. Some days they would have to leave their house at about ten to seven in the morning. Even though some of them had cars, they weren’t allowed to drive to the track; it was a rule that they had to ride in, because to me this was all about riding their bikes, and that half-an-hour ride meant an extra hour on the bike every day. The track would open at seven thirty, they’d ride on their rollers in the gym for twenty minutes and then we’d be on the track from just after eight until ten o’clock. After that they’d have a lesson over at the English Institute of Sport for two hours, then they’d come back and do two till five on the track, and after that they’d ride home. So they were getting home at quarter to six or six o’clock, and then they would have to do their washing, sort out the food, and so on.

  One item on the education list was anti-doping, which we ran through Brian Barton at British Cycling. There were quite a few workshops for the young lads, as the feeling was that this was a new generation of bike riders and we had to teach them to race in the correct way, to do the correct things and to understand what they could do within the rules. Could they take a cold supplement, for example, or did it need to be declared? It was a matter of teaching them the basics, such as ‘whereabouts’ – the system of declaring where they were at given times for random testing, which had just come on stream. There were older riders even within the British scene who kicked up a massive fuss about having to do that, because it was a bit of a pain. But the young lads never knew any different – it’s what they’ve had to do their whole careers, so they don’t make it an issue.

  What we were looking at was: if someone offers you a supplement or you want to take one, how do you find out if it’s acceptable or not? You go to the doctor and you’re not sure about a medicine, then what do you do? It wasn’t, ‘This is what the pros are doing, this is what you may come across.’ Because we didn’t know, and I’d have just been talking rubbish. A lot of the anti-doping groups – like 100% Me, one of the schemes run by UK Sport, which was one of the backers for the academy – would get people who had done the dirty to speak on film saying how much they regretted it, how they felt they’d let their parents down, their wives and husbands, the damage it had done to their health. It was quite impactful stuff. You would be thinking, ‘Phew, you don’t want to be doing that.’ We would constantly get people in doing presentations and so on; some of the lads thought it was a bit of a pain, but it was critical for them at that stage.

  I wanted the academy to be structured like a university, so it was all timetabled: what time they were leaving for the track, what time the first session was, when and where the education lessons were, what track sessions there would be, what time they would be leaving for a race. It would all be there so there was no doubt about it.

  The biggest, hardest days for them consisted of a track session from eight o’clock in the morning till ten, then education, two till five on the track, stay for track league and then ride home. They would get home at eleven o’clock at night. Or it would be three hours in the morning on the road, then ride to the track, a two until five track session, then ride home. That made for five or six hours of actual riding in a day, but they didn’t realise it because it was split up into different disciplin
es. But when you think about what Mark Cavendish, Ed Clancy, Geraint Thomas and all these lads did as young guys, they put a fair few kilometres in their legs.

  I knew the academy would get bigger, but I only wanted six riders at first. My whole idea was that I wanted to develop a programme that would enable them to move forward. I remember saying to Marshall Thomas that if none of the group actually made it, it wouldn’t be an issue. I didn’t really care. What we had to do was look at the system after a year and ask, ‘Is this going in the right direction or not?’ The lads all knew it – in the presentation we made it clear that we hadn’t done this before, that we were trying something different and they were there to try the system out. They were very much the guinea pigs.

  4 : Keeping Tabs on the Guinea Pigs

  As I drew up the academy plan, I began talking to a new arrival at British Cycling. Steve Peters was a forensic psychiatrist who had worked at Rampton and who had been brought in by Dave Brailsford to help the team out. He was to become extremely influential. I hadn’t had anything to do with guys on the mental side of sport since I was a junior, when the national squad had worked a little with John Syer, who was Chris Boardman’s sports psychologist. I’d enjoyed working with John – he was the guy who had got me on to writing things down, making lists – so I was looking forward to working with Steve. Plus it was another chance to ask someone outside cycling how I could make the academy function.

  Steve has a distinctive way of working. He looks you straight in the eye, and he’s very quick when it comes to asking or answering questions. He talks fast. Sometimes you wonder whether he’s trying to catch you out. It’s as if he knows he can read what you’re thinking, but is steering away from it to concentrate on the job in hand. And he has this way of turning questions back at you: what would you do? What do you think? That means the conclusions you come to are yours, not his. What I wanted to know from Steve was how much work I could give the young guys who would be coming into the academy.

  One day late in 2003 we were sitting up in one of the hospitality boxes in the Manchester velodrome, having one of our very first discussions, when he looked at me in that intense way of his.

  ‘Rod, in this position you’re the coach, but you could be their mentor, their father figure. You may have to act like a friend, you may have to be the person who’s going to punish them, the person who’s going to put an arm around them when they need it. Are you ready for this?’

  He paused and let the question hang in the air, which is typical Steve, and I sat there in the silence, thinking, ‘Shit, is he really asking me this? I’m barely thirty-one years old; am I actually ready to be father figure, brother, friend, coach – all these things that he talked about?’

  I looked at him and said, ‘Yes, I am.’

  ‘OK, now we can carry on …’

  *

  The most important principle that Steve and I established was this: rules and consequences. We felt you’ve got to make your standards clear with young people: these are the rules, and if you break them, there are consequences. It wasn’t just about the riders. We talked a lot about what I had to do. I would need to be consistent. Steve taught me to start by getting everybody into a room, and I would say, ‘Right, guys, what are the rules that we have to have?’ I knew what I wanted, but what Steve had taught me was that you’ve got to have open-ended questions, so that the lads would be the ones who arrived at the answers. Each year you would say, ‘OK, these are the rules from 2006. Are there any new ones?’ We had house rules, on-race rules, rules about how we would operate, how I would behave as a coach towards them, how they would behave as athletes towards me. What it amounted to was that the riders wrote their own rules, with my guidance, and agreed on the consequences of failing to follow them.

  A classic example was that they had to be on time for every session. I told them to imagine that they were riding in the Olympic Games. You’ve trained for four or eight years, the bus leaves at nine o’clock in the morning, and you miss the bloody thing. There was one occasion when Ben Swift, at a track World Cup in Moscow – on his eighteenth birthday of all days – missed the bus, and I left without him. That was my point to Ben: ‘You’ve learnt your lesson here. You’ve trained for this all year and then you miss the bus. You don’t miss the race because there may be another bus in half an hour, but you get to the race more stressed than you need to be.’ It’s all about being prepared for the race: we turn up perhaps an hour or an hour and a half before the start, and there is a difference if you turn up just half an hour before you start warming up. More importantly, if a rider is part of a four-man team and isn’t on that bus, then the other three are going to be affected. They will be wondering, ‘What’s happening? Is he sick? Has he overslept?’ So we would say, ‘OK, guys, what’s the punishment for poor timekeeping?’ It was all written down – there’s one notebook I’ve found where I’ve scribbled: ‘Consequence not bad enough, need something that will hit them hard.’

  There were rules for me too: for example, I could never come into their bedrooms unless they said I could, or unless I knocked on the door and asked to be let in. They knew that, and I stuck to my word. I think some of it sprang from me saying how I wanted to work. I didn’t model it on anything, but I wouldn’t want any Tom, Dick or Harry just waltzing into my room. A rule we did have was that the living areas in the houses and the kitchens had to be spotless. You leave your cup out and someone else has a moan about it, I’m going to tell you, because that other guy has every right to moan about you leaving your rubbish everywhere. You’ve got to keep a happy ship.

  When it came to discipline, I wanted to go straight in – ‘whack’ – and make bloody sure they knew where the line was. We were not going to mess about. I wanted to come in hard at the beginning, then back off a little bit; not let the standards go, but back off in the sense that I wouldn’t need to be all over them. I remembered that the best teachers at school were the ones who would discipline you from the word go and then relax several months later. So at the beginning I was going to be all over the lads 24/7. I wanted a good, shipshape group. I like the ethos of the Russian system or the army – that hardness, being a unit. When you think about it, when you go to a bike race it’s similar to going to war. You’ve got to do as you’re told. There are workers and there are winners, and they all have to do their job. If one person doesn’t, that can mean the whole thing fails. If you want to be good, you have to be on the ball.

  For most of the academy programme, 2004 was about seeing what worked and adjusting things that needed to be changed. There were plenty of times when the riders broke the rules; there were various consequences, and a lot of those involved making the riders do a heap of work on the bike. I was criticised a little bit for that; people would say it was a bit over the top. For example, there was the time we went down to Cornwall for a round of the national under-23 series; as always when it was an under-23 race, I put the pressure on because they were riding against their own age group. You ask them, ‘You’ve put all that special kit on, you’ve got all this backing, now I want you to perform – are you up for it?’

  The first break went away after two or three kilometres, and we never saw it again. At the finish line Matt Brammeier was about five seconds behind Evan Oliphant, so we were close to winning it. My whole point was not about their work ethic from kilometre eight up to the finish – it was the first eight kilometres. Not going with a breakaway at eight kilometres had nothing to do with physical or tactical ability; it was just because the riders were lazy. What I’d noticed was that the lads had gone off the start line at the back of the bunch, as if they thought they were the big hitters. They came into the car park afterwards, and I was steaming – ‘Pack the car,’ quite stern – and they all knew something was up.

  As they were putting the bikes in the car, I said, ‘Line up,’ so they did, with the other riders and parents all around, packing their kit away and so on. I went up to each and every one of them, looked into their fa
ces and said, ‘Right, did you see the break going?’ They said, ‘Yes.’ So I asked, ‘Were you tired at that moment?’ Every single one of them said, yes, they saw it, and no, they weren’t tired. I’ve always said if a rider physically can’t do it and has tried his best, you’ve got to look at the coaching or other things that weren’t good enough. But if you’re just lazy or not taking it seriously, then you’ve got a problem. So I said to them, ‘Right, guys, I am not happy you messed up. Basically, you’ve shown yourselves up. You’re the Great Britain bike team and you’ve shown yourselves up. Get in the car, I don’t want to hear another bloody word from you.’ We drove from Cornwall all the way up to Manchester with hardly a word said. I told them, ‘I’m not stopping other than for fuel,’ so if any of them wanted a piss they had to piss in a bottle and empty it out of the window.

  We got to Manchester late at night. Normally Monday would be an easy day – ten o’clock start or something, rather than nine o’clock as it would be on a training day. This time I said, ‘Right, be ready to ride your bikes at eight o’clock – it’s going to be a long one.’ Even though I’d spent my weekend driving the little bleeders down to Cornwall, the next morning I got up early – I lived forty-five minutes away at the time, so I had to guarantee I was there waiting. They rode for five hours around the circuit we used regularly, which was out in Cheshire, near Jodrell Bank. It was a bit rainy, a drizzly sort of day but not belting it down, and one of the lanes we were going down was really muddy, a farm track which wasn’t easy to ride on. Once we got onto the little circuit, they did about three hours of through and off, each one taking a turn at the front so they were sharing the pace as if they were in a breakaway or chasing the break from the bunch. I wasn’t bothered how fast they were going; they just had to do the work. I drove behind them, and every now and then I would cut across the circuit and hide behind a bush or something to make sure they were doing it. Then they rode home. The point was simply this: ‘If you miss a break, I will make you do something you don’t like doing.’