Back then, Italian races still had the old system where the team managers can chip in on the internal radio system – normally you don’t have them on for talkback – so they would all be jabbering away to the commissaire. On one occasion the commissaire had said something in English over the race radio for my benefit, and one of the directeurs sportifs said down the radio in English, ‘Fucking English, go home.’ That was the attitude towards us. Our tactics were that we would always try to win the race, even though perhaps we wouldn’t succeed. Sometimes we would get on the front of the bunch and ride together to win the race, then perhaps miss out on the sprint. Some of the other teams used to go mad at us. That must have made it quite hard for Max: a lot of his mates, other ex-pros like Luca Scinto, were running these teams, and Max didn’t have a great deal of input on how we raced. I think he felt embarrassed because we weren’t doing very well and he had wanted us to come in and perform.
I felt confident in the guys – ‘Let’s just keep plugging away’ – and we had to build a reputation. We were there to work hard and we could put up with all that shit – riders trying to run us off the road, the cheating that happens, particularly riders trying to hang onto cars. I wouldn’t let the lads do that; it was our first rule – if I see you hanging onto a car, you are going home. I found out that the Australians had the same rule as well. In the under-23 Giro that year, Geraint Thomas went over the top of a climb just off the back of the first group, about thirty to forty seconds behind; he was racing away on his own behind a group further up the road – he could see them but he wasn’t catching them. A few cars and a couple of motorbikes went past with a load of riders hanging on, and they were all shouting at him, ‘Inglese!’ Geraint just said to me, ‘Fucking wankers, I’m not even English. I’m Welsh.’ That used to wind Gee up: all he ever heard was ‘Inglese, inglese!’ He would say, ‘It’s Great Britain. Does this jersey say English to you?’
There were so many times when the lads were getting bulldozed by the Italian riders. They would work against us to make sure we were never, ever going to get in any breaks. It felt as if the peloton was entirely against us, but I believed we had to earn our stripes. We were in their country, coming in to try and win their races, so I can imagine how they felt. There is one event called the Gran Premio di Capodarco, a massive race, one of the best under-23 races in the world, with forty teams of five. We were a long way off the pace when we rode there that first year. But in 2008 Peter Kennaugh won it in absolutely magnificent style; in two years we went from being a million miles away to winning several times a year. That was pretty special.
Tuscany was a hot spot for top under-23 teams; we’d see them everywhere, and they all had a similar structure: the riders live together in team houses rather than all over Italy; they train as a unit in a certain way; the directeurs sportifs have links with the pro teams. So when we were out training we would see them all the time. The fundamental difference was that all those teams were run like miniature pro teams. Even in the second year in Italy, when it was starting to come together, I still had only one carer and one mechanic: Andy Naylor and John Keegan. Andy had raced all over the place as an amateur and had come in from Australia to do the job; Johnny was Irish, and a real character.
To give an example of the way we worked, Johnny was never allowed to touch any of the bikes. The riders had a single bike each – they were still not allowed a race bike and training bike – but if there was a young lad who didn’t know how to take the cranks off and change the bottom bracket, Johnny wouldn’t say, ‘Out of the way, let me do it,’ he’d have to stand there and tell them how to do it. The riders had to clean the bikes when they were at home; Johnny would clean them during stage races. When we were at races, Andy was never allowed to make the lads’ race food; what would happen was that we would turn up at a hotel, he’d set up a table in his room, and while he was massaging the lads they would have to come in room by room – six of them, in three pairs – and they’d make their own food for the following day. He’d show them how to do it, and they’d pack it up, wrap it in silver foil, put it in their musettes and make the drinks – just enough for the bikes, and Andy would make the extra ones. They always had something to do; we’d get home after a race, and on Sunday evening I would email them all the jobs for the next day. I’d take the race car round and the people carrier, and they would have to clean everything – the cars, the cool boxes, all the bottles. We weren’t a professional team and we couldn’t afford to bung the bidons away, so they would clean all the bottles, wash the bikes, then do an easy ride.
This meant that the riders didn’t get total recovery. They didn’t get massages all the time, even in races; once a week maybe, because it’s not a necessity – it’s a luxury for when you’re a pro. My thinking was that when they had the chance to recover totally, they would appreciate it and their lives would change because of it. One day they would be pros with team helpers to look after them; they would appreciate what these people would be doing for them, and they would improve physically too, because for the first time they would be completely full-time bike riders, able to devote large chunks of time to resting up and letting the training and racing have an effect. The academy was just a stepping stone.
There were things we did gain immediately from the move. All of a sudden we were training on the climbs, in the heat, and the lads were acclimatising and improving. The biggest upside was that we brought in the riders at eighteen, so they’d barely raced in the UK, yet they were racing at this high level from the very start. The lads would struggle with the fact that the Italians would be cheating, hanging onto cars, but I constantly reminded them: ‘Listen, guys, at the European road race championships and the Worlds they will not be able to hang on. If you keep doing what you’re doing, you’re going to come good one day.’ The move took them out of their comfort zone, out of Manchester, making it a little bit more controlled in terms of the amount of work they could do, and it meant they had to bond together as a team because they had no other friends in the entire place.
The Italian move pushed the academy rapidly to another level. Upping sticks was at the base of all that came in the next few years. It guaranteed that we had enough British riders to put teams together at the very highest level. Back in Italy, you could see that people started to warm to us. I kept saying to the lads, ‘We are going to stick to our game here. We are going to be polite. We are going into the races in the right frame of mind. We aren’t going to win every race but we are going to give it our best every time, and we are going to talk to as many people as we can.’ By the time I left Italy there was a massive difference. Cav was spending a lot of time in Quarrata, as he wanted to stay close to the academy – he still goes down there to train sometimes – and his growing fame helped us get accepted. Other British pros were gravitating to the area: riders like Steve Cummings moved down – he still lives there – and Gee and Ian Stannard stayed there when they got pro contracts. People wanted to know about our riders, wanted to take them on. In 2006 Mark Cavendish was a nobody, but in 2007 the whole pro cycling world began to say, ‘Wow, who is this British guy?’
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By 2007, as the academy went into its second year in Italy, Mark had really started to come on. He’d turned pro for T-Mobile on the road and started to win races quite early on in the season: the Scheldeprijs in Belgium and stages in the Four Days of Dunkirk and Tour of Catalonia. The management at T-Mobile started thinking, ‘Bloody hell, we’ve got a true talent on our roster,’ and Mark was on a roll – he was going for everything. He was so hungry for it. He was a young pro, not earning lots of money – I think he was on the minimum wage at the time – but he felt he was moving forwards and felt really happy with himself.
I’d made one thing clear when he turned professional. One thing I’m always afraid of from a coach’s point of view is that you think you know your riders really well, but if it turns out one of them is doing something you don’t know about – doping – no one woul
d ever believe you. I remember talking to Cav just before he went off and signed his contract. I built myself up for the conversation; it wasn’t an easy one to have. I said, ‘Look, Cav, you’ll do whatever you want to do – at the end of the day no one can stop you – but if you are ever in a situation where for whatever reason you do the wrong thing, just fucking tell me first so that I can get away from you.’ I’d never worked with anyone who was a proper professional, and I was scared of that particular situation.
We had to be equally direct when it came to getting him into the Tour de France. I always think, ‘If you don’t ask, you never know’ – and at worst, the people you ask can only ever say no. Talking to Mark that spring, the Tour kept coming up. We’d be chatting away together, and he’d be saying things like, ‘You know, I don’t think the team have got anybody else for the Tour. I think I could do as much as anybody else.’ He was desperate to go, so I just said to him, ‘Why don’t you ask the guys who run the team?’ ‘Oh no, I daren’t.’
I think he didn’t feel people would listen to him. So I said to him, ‘If you write them a letter, a proper letter, they will read it, of course, and wonder what all this is about.’ It was exactly the same as when my grandfather made me write to the school and ask for the grant to attend the ESCA course. So he wrote a letter to the T-Mobile team managers. I remember giving him a bit of an outline of what to write: that he would like to be considered for the Tour de France, and these were the reasons why. I remember saying to Mark, ‘You’ve got to point out that they’ve got nothing to lose because you will either win a stage or two or, if you don’t, you’re going to learn loads about the race.’
He got the OK and was absolutely ecstatic. It was the year the Tour started in London, and he went into it with massive ambitions. He wasn’t going to the Tour thinking, ‘Great, I’m riding the Tour.’ He was absolutely cacking himself; he seriously didn’t know what he was getting into and didn’t take it lightly at all. But in the next breath he would say he was fast enough to win a stage.
At about that time, I was in regular contact with the T-Mobile directeurs sportifs Allan Peiper and Brian Holm as part of the support I still gave Mark. Allan said to me on the phone one day, ‘I can’t believe it, this young guy wrote a letter to the management.’ My first thought was, ‘Bloody hell, they really did read it, didn’t they?’ and I do think it got him a ride in the Tour de France.
Going into it Cav had such huge aims, so I was a bit nervous for him, but I knew how he loved these big hits. The problem is that the Tour – along with the Worlds and the biggest Classics – will always be a big step above any other bike race. I’d never been in that environment and it felt like a massive step up for the riders. But Cav wasn’t the only rider from the academy among the starters in London. Geraint Thomas had found a place in the Barloworld squad for 2007; they were only a small team, but that meant he was drafted into their squad for the Tour. He was only twenty-one, the youngest rider in the race, and it was a baptism of fire for him. He really suffered on a few stages, but he got through. Being at a level where he could finish the Tour at that age was quite something.
Cav has always been one to get stuck right into any race, and the Tour was no exception. He’s never been overawed by reputations. On the Tour of Britain in 2005, he took third on the stage into Blackpool, and the next day Jeremy Hunt came up to me and said, ‘You need to tell that Mark Cavendish to bloody well calm down. Who does he think he is?’ I just said, ‘Flipping heck, Jeremy. To be honest with you, I encourage them to get stuck in; if they don’t, then they’re scared of you guys.’ And Jeremy laughed – he had been lethal as a young rider; he would either win or fall. Cav was the same, and in that first Tour he crashed on the stage into Rochester, which he had targeted as one he really wanted to win, and he had a massive pile-up in Ghent and lost a load of skin. The effects of the crash began to get to him in the Alps and he abandoned, but I don’t think it was planned that he would go all the way to Paris.
In all my time coaching Cav, that Tour was the biggest learning curve. He was pissed off with how it went, but he learnt a massive amount. We were on the phone constantly. He was trying every different way to get up there in the sprints. It looks easy when you’re sitting in front of the television, but you could see he was having to make huge efforts. He realised that if you want to get in there in the sprint, from fifty kilometres out from the finish you have got to be constantly in the first twenty of the bunch. In run-of-the-mill pro racing you can move up in the last fifteen kilometres, but in the Tour it has to be fifty or else you use too much energy to get to the front at the key time. That was what he was tending to do that year – come up too late. As a youngster, if he was really going to get stuck in he needed teammates in front of him all the time, to take him right up close to the finish like a proper leader, and he hadn’t quite got that yet. The team were dropping him off too early because they hadn’t quite bought into him, and then he was on his own. And he needed to hit out earlier when the final sprint happened, but he still didn’t have the strength to do that.
Of those three things, he’d perhaps get two of them right on any given day, but he wouldn’t get the third. In the conversations we had, Cav was constantly telling me how frustrated he was. He just couldn’t quite work it out and didn’t want to hear where he was making mistakes, but he went away and thought about it. With the help of Chris White at the English Institute of Sport – which is where all the performance analysis is done for the GB track team – I got him a load of footage of all the sprints on a DVD; that meant he had something to go at rather than just trying to filter it all. He learnt loads from those. Cav and Gee were at opposite sides of the spectrum: Cav was at the sharp end trying to perform; Gee was trying to get through, although he did get up there in a couple of stages. That meant I was having conversations with Cav about how to win stages, followed by talking to Geraint ten minutes later about just surviving.
That July was a fantastic time for the academy; we were in Cottbus, in Germany, at the European track championships, so we would ride in and train or race, then dart back to watch the end of the Tour stages. We had Peter Kennaugh with us; he was a junior but rode up a category in the under-23 team pursuit, which we won. Being from the Isle of Man as well, he was so excited at Cav riding the Tour. I’d always encouraged the academy lads to watch racing, but all of a sudden we weren’t just watching pros on television, we were watching two lads who had come through the academy. You couldn’t have asked for better: you’ve got two riders who started in the first year of the academy, came through it, and four years later they are in the Tour de France. There’s no better motivation for young riders than to think, ‘In three years that could be me.’
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Gee, Cav and Ed Clancy had moved on to the professional ranks for 2007, but there were plenty of characters coming through. Ross Sander is no longer a cyclist, but he was the only rider I saw who was capable of getting round Cav on the track. Ross came from South Wales – there are some fantastic pictures of him and Geraint Thomas starting out at Maindy cycle track – and he was very, very quick. However, he seemed to have a lot of problems at home and always struggled with the discipline; it wasn’t that he was trying to get himself into trouble, he just got into it, and my position would be, ‘I’ve got to stick to the rules, Ross, and if you break the rules, there’s a consequence.’ I tried hard to work with him because I could see he had problems. His stepfather was a cyclist, but his real father lived in America, and when we were at a training camp in San Diego, Ross suddenly decided to go and see him, and that was it; he stayed on in America for a while and eventually joined the US Army. He sent me an email about two years ago, just saying, ‘Thanks for all the help, it’s served me so well. I’m finding the army quite straightforward because I understand the discipline.’
Ross was part of a group of young riders who got the team-pursuit silver medal at the Junior Worlds; another was Steven Burke, who joined the academy for 2007 and wo
uld go on to win a gold medal at London 2012. What was interesting from a coaching point of view was that when they took Ross out of the team and put Ben Swift in, the team moved on. It wasn’t down to ability or physical potential; it was just that while Ross had more ability, Ben committed more. That’s what we’ve seen all along with him. Maybe his raw ability isn’t the absolute best, but he commits 100 per cent. You will always get more out of an athlete like that.
Swifty was this tiny kid with spindly legs who we used to see all the time at the track in Manchester – he’d pop over from Sheffield with his parents. Then all of a sudden he grew to six foot, and we all thought, ‘Oh my God, where did that come from?’ He’s a great little racer. He cut his teeth in Italy with us and found his niche; he’s fast, but not as fast as Mark. He’s not a big bunch sprinter, but if he is in a group of twenty or thirty you would put a lot of money on Swifty winning. He has one thing in common with Mark: as young kids they weren’t particularly powerful, so they had to learn to win from within the wheels; they had to stay in the pack late and learn to come around the other guys at the last minute, fighting for the wheels, pushing for position. The guys who are big and strong at thirteen, fourteen or fifteen just have to turn right, come out of the slipstream, press on the pedals and they can come round the others. They don’t need skill or fluidity – it’s all grunt.
Swifty had the skills, became a bigger, stronger lad, and Italian racing suited him because you’d often have a smallish group coming into the finish after a section over the climbs. So he was winning races regularly in Italy, and in 2008 he was one of the best three under-23s there.
Going to Italy in 2006 was another breakthrough for the academy, but in terms of performance on the road we hadn’t stepped up. But that year we won the team pursuit at the European track championships, and you could see the progress: in 2004 and 2005 we didn’t really do anything – although in 2005 we would have won but for the sandbag in their wheels. But the following year we won, and after that no one ever got near us. In 2007 the lads really started to move on in the road events, partly because we’d adapted to being in Italy, and we managed our first medal at the under-23 road Worlds in Stuttgart, thanks to Jonny Bellis.
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