When you look at the British Cycling system, the whole idea is that the Talent Team should keep pushing up towards the next level, with the juniors and the academy doing the same. My goal was to get the academy riders to be Olympic Podium athletes – good enough to get on the senior programme and win Olympic medals – when they moved on at whatever age. They needed to be ready to go onto the Podium programme, as the senior programme was also called, with no shocks, or ready to be pro bike riders on the road. That meant I had to look at the whole thing, ask what it should look like and break that down. That’s what I was always trying to do with the Talent Team and the junior programme. The skills were a key element. A fifteen- or sixteen-year-old athlete can show potential physically, but there is only so much they can actually give you. There are some who are ridiculously good at that age, but there are a lot who perhaps don’t have it yet but will grow into it eventually. What you can work on are the skills for when they get to eighteen or nineteen – that’s the time when they can start working hard. At that age, you can’t rely on your talent; there are lots and lots of other gifted people in your sport, so your training, physical conditioning and attitude come massively into it. If you’re trying to improve physically, and at the same time still trying to learn those skills, you’re not spending your time well.
The European track championships were another opportunity to integrate the programmes, because the juniors and the under-23s would always be racing together. At the Euros I always told the under-23 guys, ‘You are on show here, and I want you to stand up, be proud to be part of the academy, because I want those junior lads thinking, “Look how good these academy riders are.”’ During the Euros I would always have a meeting with the juniors so I could get to know some of them; I’d go around their rooms, check up on them, always trying to find out, ‘Are you guys on this or not? Are you guys up for this? Are you guys good enough or not?’ I always did it with Darren, linking in with what he was doing; he would be working in a similar way with the Talent Team, and I was constantly feeding information up the chain in the same way to Simon Jones or Matt Parker or whoever was looking after the senior track endurance team.
With those wins behind us we started getting ready for the European track championships, knowing that we were going to perform. They were training well and riding well. I didn’t really think about how quickly it had come together. I just had my head down and was constantly thinking about what was coming next. We needed to move on in some way, and I needed more numbers. I was looking at that junior programme and doing quite a lot of work and discussion with Darren, who was looking after the likes of Ben Swift, Ian Stannard, Peter Kennaugh and Jonny Bellis. We both knew that it was going to be pretty damn good when we got the next batch of kids on board as well.
I wanted to prepare the team properly for the Europeans, like the Olympic team, so that the riders would get experience of preparing for a major event. It was a big moment: as a team we’d concentrated massively on it and we turned up in a really confident state of mind. The lads would have absolutely dominated the team pursuit, but Tom White hit one of the sponges that the judges put at the bottom of the track to keep the riders from going too low; his wheel picked it up and threw it into Cav’s front wheel. It stuck underneath the fork crown, and I don’t know how he didn’t go down. It stopped Cav dead in his tracks and split them all up; they ended up fifth by about a tenth of a second, so they didn’t even get a second ride. They were absolutely gutted, but Cav took fourth in the scratch race and then won the points race. We had had a target of one gold medal and we managed it, but this was another moment when it hit home: these lads really are at world level. They were really competitive, all of them.
That took us to the summer of 2005. Cav won the national circuit race championship in Otley, and that got me thinking: ‘I’ve got a load of young juniors coming along who are going to be good, we’ve got two world champions on the team, we’ve got a European champion, we’ve won stage races.’ We had the space to move on now. The next step was to set them all up with teams abroad in August and September, going into October, to get them into a different world.
Cav went to Sparkasse, a German semi-pro team; Gee went to another one, Wiesenhof; and Matt Brammeier and Tom White went to France, to CC Étupes and UVC Aube. We started forging links with T-Mobile as well, through Heiko Salzwedel, who’d worked at British Cycling and was running their development side. It took a bit of time for people in the professional cycling world to understand how Cav works, however. In 2005 we had a meeting with T-Mobile at the Tour of Britain, on the morning of the criterium on the final day, and I said to their directeur sportif Brian Holm, ‘Keep an eye out for this guy Mark Cavendish. This guy is going to win the stage today.’ Brian had a look of ‘seen that before, heard that before’, and unfortunately Cav crashed on the final lap; he was brought down because the pros were giving the GB guys a bit of a hard time, as they sometimes do with the amateurs. If Cav had won that stage, they would possibly have taken him on as a stagiaire – apprentice – or looked at him for the following year.
Even when Cav did turn pro, he needed quite a lot of support, because people didn’t totally believe in him. But if you look at the results from the academy, he was in everything: Madisons, team pursuits, road races. His name was in all the results, but he also brought something else: an X-factor. He was passionate about winning, and would be asking, ‘How are we going to win?’ He’d be looking at it and breaking it down, not scared to take it on and be the leader. He wouldn’t hide behind anybody.
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The academy had three riders selected for the world championships in Madrid in late September 2005. The target we had set ourselves was a rider in the top twenty, and Mark managed fourteenth, so we achieved our target, although they didn’t ride that well together. Within British Cycling you could feel that things were starting to move; it was getting a bit more road focused. Max Sciandri had got involved with the GB set-up; he was an Italian pro, born in Derby and brought up in the US, who had got a bronze for GB at the 1996 Atlanta Games, pretty much off his own bat. Max had arranged for the team to have the use of the Lampre pro team bus, which was another step forward. On the women’s side, Nicole Cooke had been one of the best in the world for a few years, and she got a silver medal for us. So, for the first time, we had potential contenders in all the road races.
But the key moment for me was when I sat watching the professional race on the final day. Roger Hammond was a good one-day rider who’d finished seventh in the Athens Olympics the year before and had come third in Paris–Roubaix, matching the best any Briton’s ever done. There was a massive kerfuffle when Charly Wegelius and Tom Southam rode for the Italians early on in the race, basically repaying a favour or two. It was the sort of thing that happened at the pro Worlds in those days: the bigger teams might get a bit of help from a smaller one early on, and there would be a reciprocal deal somewhere else. John Herety, the road team manager, ended up taking the rap for it, and lost his job in the end.
That race was when I first thought we could do a lot better than we were at the world championships. We didn’t have a big team in the pro field, but it struck me: ‘Bloody hell, we’re a lap out from the finish and we’ve still got Bradley Wiggins and Roger Hammond in this bike race.’ If they had all ridden as a team – Roger, Brad, Tom and Charly, and the other riders, Steve Cummings and Rob Sharman – what could we actually have done? I was sitting there thinking, ‘Charly’s good enough, Brad’s good enough, Roger’s good enough. Why haven’t these guys got the belief? What’s happening? We’ve got some great riders, so why aren’t they together and why isn’t it working?’
6 : The Italian Job
It was baking hot at the European track championships in Fiorenzuola in June 2005. I was sitting in the stands with Dave Brailsford, and I said to him, ‘These lads are ready to move on; the academy’s ready to up sticks.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I think we need to move
abroad. We need to stay in Manchester this summer, but we should think about how we can go and live somewhere in Europe, how we set up out there.’
Fair play to Dave, he just turned round and said, ‘Listen, you’re the person who’s going to do this. You go and find out where. Come back to me with a plan, and I’ll back it.’
To start with I was thinking of Germany, Belgium or France. Germany appealed because they were strong on the track side, so I thought they’d understand a British national team, plus we’d already got involved in placing riders at teams like Sparkasse. I’d read about the Bundesliga: there were two hundred under-23 riders there. But I was looking at France as well because I had some connections there and I knew the racing. And there was a case for Belgium because of the volume of races you could ride there, all the kermises.
But then Dave suggested something to me: Max Sciandri was now involved – I think Dave had employed him purely because he thought he might be useful somewhere – so what did I think about going to Italy with the academy? It was daunting. I had never really been to Italy. We’d had riders do well there: Jamie Burrow, who got a contract at Lance Armstrong’s US Postal Service team, was one that sprang to mind; Russell Downing had been out there; and earlier on, Dave Rayner. I’d heard that the under-23 racing calendar there was something quite special. On the other hand, I’d also heard that there was a lot of cheating going on in Italy, even at the under-23 level. I’d spoken to quite a lot of people, and all they would talk about was how hard the racing was, how difficult. However, I knew the Australians were based out there and I always believed the Australian Institute of Sport’s system was pretty good – they were well structured, driven hard, and their approach was similar to ours. But I didn’t say yes to Dave there and then; I went home and thought to myself, ‘Bloody hell, I’m quite scared about this, but what’s the academy about? It’s about being a bit ballsy. This is different. This is something new, so why don’t we do it?’ I went back to Dave and said we should go for it.
Max lived in Quarrata, a little town in Tuscany off the main road from Florence to Pistoia which looked as if it could be a handy base, so we started putting the plan for the move together. At about the same time Dave spoke to Shane Bannan, the Australian performance director, and the two of us went over to Italy to meet him. I thought it was pretty good that the guy who was in charge of our biggest rivals was prepared to meet us and help us set up down there in Italy. I think he did it because he really believed in what we were doing and felt that the more people were racing out there, the better it would be. What he said to us was, ‘If you get better, we’ll only get better, because you’ll force us to keep moving on.’ I thought that was a pretty open way of looking at it.
Shane talked us through loads of stuff: he was really good at how the system worked in terms of getting in there; how the Italians were; how you entered races; the different standards of races; what you can and can’t do in Italy. It was good to go through all that. But the main thing we gleaned was just how hard it had been for them in their early days. He said they’d get into the top twenty and crack open the champers, but he also said he used to sit on the end of his bed crying because it was that tough for the young lads. It wasn’t going to be straightforward.
While all that was happening, all of a sudden I had six riders to look after for 2006. Geraint Thomas was still with us, but there were five new members who joined on 17 October 2005: Andy Tennant, Ian Stannard, Ross Sander, Ben Swift and Ben Greenwood. Cav and Ed Clancy were going to ride in Germany for Sparkasse for the whole year; they would ride a few races in Italy with us but had moved on to join the senior programme. With the new lads, I began a three-month boot-camp period, a condensed version of what we had done in the first year with the same mix of split sessions of track skills, track league at Manchester, education, plenty of hours on the road, and in between, the amateur six-days. With Steve Peters I tweaked the rules and consequences, bringing in things like having to clean the GB team cars rather than more time on the bike. The rule was they had to be at the track at ten to eight waiting for me, helmets on, waiting for instructions, so that by eight o’clock we were on the track. It was pretty strict: sometimes the consequences would apply to the whole group, so that if one guy did something wrong, everyone suffered. The idea was that they would work with each other: you would get your mate out of bed rather than just leave him to suffer on his own.
At the same time we were preparing to go to Italy: finding a house out there with Max and sorting out all the equipment we would need without the British Cycling umbrella in Manchester to support us. It was a good winter in terms of results – the riders were getting up there every time in the six-days, with Swifty and Gee winning in Dortmund, and Stannard and Tennant in Stuttgart – and then we went to the Commonwealth Games in Melbourne. I’d worked with all the GB guys by now, but for the Games they were spread across all the home nations – for example, Cav was riding for the Isle of Man, Gee for Wales – and so were the coaches. I was seconded to Wales. What I did was keep the riders racing and training together; we were pretty determined to put one over on the Aussies on their home turf.
Just how determined became clear when we were planning for the scratch race. Cav would be one of the fastest, with the only real threat an Australian sprinter, Ben Kersten. I went to discuss tactics with the lads and said, with a dead straight face, ‘We’ve been thinking about it and we think the best way to go about winning this scratch race is to take this guy out. We need to take him right out so he can’t get back up. Hands up, who’s up for it?’ It was Geraint Thomas who raised his hand. ‘I’m up for that.’ ‘Only flipping joking, mate …’
Cav’s gold medal in the scratch was the first major title I saw him win. He was in a group of about five or six who gained a lap early in the race, and with only those few riders to worry about he was bound to win if he got a clear run to the line. I could hardly believe my eyes: the Aussies had none of their best riders in that group. I sat there thinking, ‘Oh my God, have these guys not been watching what has been going on? Do they not realise that this guy won the World Madison last year?’ I couldn’t believe that they let that group go with Cav in there, but it was perfect for us. Given the rivalry we’d had with the Australians since Athens, it was quite entertaining.
That gold medal was a massive thing on the Isle of Man, and Cav was so happy, because he’s so proud of where he comes from. But one thing that shone through for me was just how driven he is as an athlete. He called me that night at almost eleven thirty from the Isle of Man house: ‘Oh, Rod, I don’t know what to do.’ The team wanted to throw a party for him and had got the champagne in, but he wanted to go to bed because it was the road race in a couple of days. He wasn’t going to sit back: he’d won the gold medal, he was the Commonwealth Games scratch-race champion, but he’d already moved on.
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I came home early from the Games and drove straight out to Italy with a car full of my kit for the year, leaving Jane at home. I was there a couple of weeks before the lads, in a little B&B about three kilometres out of Quarrata. It was dead quiet; every morning I’d get up and there would be no one in the house. The owners would leave me a cake and a glass of orange juice, with a flask of coffee on the side, and I would sit there thinking, ‘Oh my God, what am I doing here in Italy?’
I didn’t speak the language and had to rely on Max. His role was to deal with housing and language issues, help us get into the races – help us settle in, if you like. He would have a coffee with the riders but not a great deal else, although he came to the first couple of races. You can imagine the young lads moving out to Tuscany: nice weather, foreign parts – they thought they were on a bit of a jolly. But I wanted to keep the same momentum and the same standards as at the academy; that wasn’t going to change. Training rides were at nine o’clock, recovery rides were at ten, and this was one of the first big clashes I had with Max: he wanted to ride with the lads, but he didn’t want to get up for nine o�
�clock. The Italian style is that you meet in the cafe in the square, have a coffee, then you go for a ride from there, but I’m not interested in that. Maybe it’s a British thing, but I’m not interested in meeting for coffee first; let’s go training. Max never agreed with me on that, but we stuck to what we wanted to do. His heart was in the right place and his ambition was for us to win, but he just didn’t understand how I wanted to do it. That’s why we really never got on from a coaching point of view, which in turn made it a little bit difficult with the riders.
We didn’t race much in that first year because it was hard to get into the races. The racing was so sparse that I’d bring in a mechanic and a carer part-time for two or three weeks, then they’d go home for a fortnight. We didn’t get many results – a couple of second places for Gee was as good as it got – but we got so much hassle when we did race that it felt like going to war every time. We were always fine in Quarrata, because Max had quite a reputation in the town; he was a bit of a character, people knew who he was. I also used to work a lot on the lads about living there: ‘Be careful what you’re doing, be respectful to the locals. If a car gives you a load of abuse on the road, think about it before you respond, because you’ve got a British jersey on your back and they know who we are and they know where we are.’ We had hardly any issues of that kind; it was the reception we received at the races that made it tough.
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