Project Rainbow

by Rod Ellingworth

  We had moved on quickly after Beijing, but that wasn’t surprising – the London Games had been in the back of our minds for three years. On 5 July 2005 we were at a training camp in Grantham, getting ready for the European track championships; I’d taken them there for some training and racing on different roads. I went into one of the lads’ rooms to hear the announcement of the venue for the 2012 Games; they were all in there – Geraint Thomas, Ed Clancy, Matt Brammaier, Mark Cavendish, Tom White – and when London was announced they all jumped up, shouting. They assumed that was going to be their first Olympics; I don’t think they thought Beijing would be within their grasp. It was a really nice moment in that pokey little room.

  The rumours about the course for the road race in London began almost immediately after that. We were getting word that it wasn’t too hilly; to begin with we thought it would be in central London. In 2006 the Tour of Britain ran a stage on closed roads through north London, taking in Primrose Hill. That, everyone imagined, was a blueprint for a possible Olympic road-race course. Cav’s immediate thought, of course, was, ‘I can win there.’ We had also heard that Copenhagen would be hosting the world road championships in 2011. I’d been talking to Brian Holm about it, and he was certain it would be a flat course. My first thought was, ‘We’re on our way here.’ After that, the next question was: how do we actually do it? Nobody told me to do so, but at the end of 2008 I wrote up a four-year plan to win the road race in London with Mark Cavendish. The four-year timeline had three big hits in it: Milan–San Remo, the world road championships and the Games themselves. What became known as the Worlds project was up and running, but it was an Olympic project too.

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  Great Britain had never approached the elite men’s world road race – as the pro race was now known – with any structure. Historically, it had always been open to whoever wanted to ride, with selection based on who was available. In 1965, the year Simpson won it in San Sebastián, he had paid for the other riders to back him up, but that was a complete one-off. Sometimes there had been a rider capable of getting a medal – like Robert Millar in the mid-1980s or Max Sciandri ten years later – but the team was never built around them, mainly because there was no core of riders capable of performing. The debacle in Madrid in 2005 summed up where GB was at the time: the squad was highly organised and brilliantly focused when it came to track racing, but the professional, or elite, side was completely informal, an add-on to the track. The root of the problem was that no one had any belief.

  For the first year, I began with this thought: ‘What do we need to know?’ We knew when the world championships were and we knew the date of the Olympics. We knew where the Worlds would be. I began by thinking about Italy, the team everyone in cycling regarded as the best at riding the world championship – they’d won it for the last three years and seemed to get a medal most years. So what do they do? How did they build up? How did they get the team racing together? They used the whole of August, when there was a programme of one-day races where the head coach would be watching the riders. The Australians used to do a training camp, all of them together in Varese, Italy, where the AIS under-23 team was based; that seemed a good idea. The Aussies always had that base in Europe where their pros would come if they needed something; if they had an injury, for example, they could go there to get treated. The way we worked in British Cycling was that there was a tightly knit group of riders within the team, and then there were those who were just affiliated. We had a good number of pros, but the ones who hadn’t started out with British Cycling had no way in. I thought we needed to follow the Australians’ example and open up a little bit. In his time as road manager, John Herety had always tried to help and support the pros, but we had to go one step further.

  The first goal on the timeline was that by September 2009 we needed to be travelling to the Worlds – which were in Mendrisio, in the southern part of Switzerland – for the pro race as a proper team, which was something Great Britain had never done before. I didn’t care if we performed, but we’d go there as a unit, with all the riders feeling that they were included. At least I knew we had a leader. Every single rider in the UK, every single rider in the world was looking at Mark Cavendish and thinking, ‘Bloody hell, this guy is unbeatable, he is so much faster than the rest.’ We were lucky that Cav is a natural leader – I wouldn’t have to persuade anybody to get behind him. It was obvious that if this guy was in the right place with 300 metres to go, he was going to win the bike race – you’d put a hell of a lot of money on it. So it would be easy to get the riders to buy in.

  I went all the way back to basics and listed the riders who could be a part of that group, all the way to London in 2012. There were about thirty; I was thinking that there were some who weren’t pros at that point, but they would be soon – academy riders like Peter Kennaugh and Alex Dowsett. There was Bradley Wiggins: he was already working with British Cycling because of his long involvement on the track, but we would still need to talk to him. There would be no issues with the lads I’d worked with, but there was a host of riders who we’d never really had very much to do with: David Millar, Roger Hammond, Jeremy Hunt, Dan Lloyd, Dan Fleeman, Russ Downing, and so on. They had to be included in this; everyone had to be on side, all thinking the same thing.

  On the one hand, we had a really young group who knew how to work with British Cycling; on the other, we had this bunch of experienced guys who had never really got that involved, who had always felt that they were on the outside. I thought, ‘Bloody hell, if you put them together we could use them really well.’ I had already tried to do this a bit by getting Roger Hammond to help out the young lads at the Tour of Britain, and I’d had the odd word with Jeremy Hunt – ‘If you’re racing against Geraint Thomas and he’s doing something wrong, take an interest in him.’ But there was more we could do: if they had injury problems, we might be able to help them out; if there were things they needed with their bikes when they were in the UK, we could sort it out for them.

  It was a three-stage process to begin with. First, I had to call them and see how interested they were; then I would have to meet them and explain face to face what we were trying to do; after that, I needed to start getting these guys in one place and bring the groups together. For that, I drew up a training-camp programme for when we could do this: the national road race championship in June, because most of the riders would be in the area to compete in that in any case; Mendrisio in August for a look at the world championship circuit; and then the race itself in late September. These would have to be organised as well as I could manage, so these guys would think, ‘Bloody hell, I want to be part of this.’

  At British Cycling there were a few people – Shane Sutton in particular – who were against me doing this. I think Shane felt that if we did all this for the lads, we would have to do it for the women, but I told him that wasn’t my problem; I was trying to get this group together to win the world championships and Olympic Games, and that was all. There were some people in British Cycling who felt that we should keep our distance from the professional side because of the knowledge – particularly when the original plan was put together by Peter Keen – that doping was so prevalent in European pro racing. But as I saw it, it was simple: British Cycling had clear-cut doping policies, and the riders adhered to those policies. If they didn’t, they would have to leave and they would have no input.

  The project got moving at the end of 2008, when I got all the lads, including Bradley Wiggins, together for a session on some of the circuits I’d used with the academy around Jodrell Bank. I split the riders into two groups to do some lead-outs. It was what I’d been doing with the academy for years, but this was the first real senior session. At this stage we were doing two or three rides on the road every week as a team; we had two rides when we met at Manchester velodrome before or after a track session, with rides over the weekends as well. I was inviting all the academy guys and as many of the senior riders as could get there; it was like
going out with a big club and meant all the riders were getting together. Cav was coming over from the Isle of Man for a track session to keep his speed up, and then going out on the road with them. We even had Jason Queally – the kilometre rider who had won the first GB gold medal of the Lottery-funded era, at Sydney in 2000 – out on the road a few times as well, which was interesting. Jason didn’t like riding in a group because he’d had a horrendous injury in a sprint at Manchester, so he would sit ten lengths off the back of the group. But he’d get round with no problems at the end of four-hour rides, and I couldn’t help thinking, ‘Bloody hell, this guy’s got some ability, hasn’t he?’

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  There was a third project I was involved in by the end of 2008 and into early 2009. The move to get the professional team going was rumbling along. I began to spend quite a few long evenings with Fran Millar and Dave in Dave’s office in Manchester. It was a massive brain dump in which we listed all the jobs we had to do to get this up and running: how the hell do we get this team off the ground? What does it look like? What does a race programme look like? What vehicles do we need? We didn’t have a clue, but we wrote everything down. With Team Sky beginning to happen, that was another side to the Worlds project – having British riders in a British professional team at a time when we were trying to win the Worlds and the Games would be beautiful.

  Part of the world championship and Olympic road race plan dealt with the question of how we would get enough riders to qualify; we needed to make sure that we got five riders into the Olympics, and qualification was decided using the same ranking system as the Worlds. Both use a complicated formula based on world ranking and the number of riders who have scored those ranking points; having British riders racing for a British pro team would help us get those points and get them with the maximum number of riders.

  At that point, of course, Dave was starting to think about which riders to sign for Sky – experienced guys like Dan Lloyd, Roger Hammond and Jeremy Hunt, for example – but we realised it would be healthy to have British riders in other teams as well. If British guys were riding for Cervélo or BMC, you would have more chance of British riders scoring points in more events. Not having all the British riders in Team Sky had to become part of the strategy.

  My initial phone calls to these riders were key moments in the project. I spoke to them all: ‘What do you feel about the thought of winning the world championships? What’s been your experience so far of British Cycling?’ In the timeline I’d given myself a deadline of the end of March 2009 to speak to them all initially. I had to meet them face to face by the end of May, because the first training camp would be in June. The things I heard were amazing. Bradley Wiggins was an easy one; he was up for it, and I never really heard much more from him, but that’s Brad and that was fine. Roger Hammond said, ‘Yeah, I’m in, but I’d like a bit more support from British Cycling.’

  ‘OK, what are your experiences?’

  ‘Well, you don’t know if you’re getting selected or not. You don’t know. Nobody ever really calls. Nobody takes an interest.’

  Dan Lloyd was even more critical: ‘You find out that you weren’t selected on the internet. Nobody ever rings and says, “You haven’t got the ride in the Worlds.” If you were going to the Worlds, the travel and everything was always a bit disorganised. You didn’t really know what you needed, you didn’t know when you were going, you didn’t know if you were racing together or not.’

  Talking to the riders so early on in the process was absolutely invaluable. It was clear there were fundamental things we would have to do to get people involved. We would have to get the selection right. We had to get the communication right. When I met them face to face, it was another opportunity, this time to show them something of the plan I had and give them an idea of how we were going to manage it all. I went on my own and showed them the outline plans that I’d written, talked to them about the academy, explained about the young lads. I thought guys like Dan Lloyd and Roger Hammond would be really into all this.

  David Millar was already buying in, but he’d had more contact with British Cycling than most of the other experienced pros; he’d been friendly with Dave Brailsford for years, and had got close to riding for the Olympic track team in 2004 before he was busted for doping. And when he came back after his two-year ban, he had help with his return to racing from British Cycling. He’s a thinking bike rider, so it wasn’t that much of a surprise that after our conversation he sent me a long email, listing all the points that he thought would make this work. One suggestion which I followed, and which worked really well, was that the selection process had to be super-clear. He also wrote something which I felt was hugely powerful: ‘British Cycling does not understand the demands that are made of us as professional cyclists.’

  Dave felt that we needed to understand that the travelling the pros did meant that they couldn’t just be anywhere and everywhere; they were on the road for 360 days a year, so they needed flexibility in what was asked of them. There were some more concrete questions: would they get funding or not, would there be a payout if we did win? As David Millar was saying, they were professional athletes, so what would happen if they were injured? Could they call on British Cycling and get help from the doctors and physios? These were simple things that he felt were holding this group back, or that he had seen in the past. I used many of his suggestions to help me mould the project. I didn’t see myself as the guy who was going to get the credit for whatever we ended up with; I was the person who was going to sit between everything and hold it all together.

  The only British professional rider I never talked to was Charly Wegelius. He was one of the most seasoned pros we had, one of the best team riders in the business, but he’d been banned from racing for Great Britain ever again after the episode at the world road race championships in Madrid in 2005, where he had ridden for the Italians. That meant there wasn’t a great deal of point in approaching him. Personally, it was a difficult one for me because I’d got to know Charly well in my last years as a rider, though we definitely went our different ways a little. I didn’t really feel it was my job to reconcile him with British Cycling; Dave Brailsford had taken the stance on it and it was his issue. My personal opinion was that it was such a shame because we could have used Charly so well, and he would have loved to have been part of it.

  From the start of 2009 I began sending the riders monthly newsletters. Initially, they were headed ‘GB World Road Race Project’; a few months in, the title became more specific: ‘Road Worlds Project 2011’. They weren’t great works of literature – they were written in my style, with my passion behind them. But that was the point: I wanted to show them that I felt really strongly about this. I didn’t want the win more than them, but I was as patriotic about the GB jersey, and about GB being the best team in the world, as anybody in this country. I still am. And I wanted the riders to feel that coming from me; if you are working with somebody who gets out of bed in the morning and clearly wants to support you, you’re more likely going to go with them.

  The newsletter was an obvious way to keep them all in touch and bring them together; every month they got an email which had updates on what we were aiming to do and gave the outline structure of what it was all about. I started saying to them early on that such-and-such was going to be the date when they would know if they were selected or not. It was important to keep them up to date with where we were in the selection rankings. For example, it was important that they knew that if we qualified nine riders to start, it would mean we could name twelve on the start list; that in turn meant that the three reserves – riders ten, eleven and twelve – would need to stay fit because they could be called in the day before the race started. Every step of the way it was about getting these guys to remember the one goal. The objective was theirs – it was up to them to go out there and pedal their bikes, to win the race. So there was the goal, but how would we achieve it? My job was to answer that.

  Getting them to ab
sorb that sort of information was key; so was the simple fact of keeping them in touch with each other, creating a group spirit. I would write a general introduction – ‘This is how we are doing in terms of qualification … So-and-so has broken his wrist, so give him a call if you can …’ In the early newsletters I even put that I wasn’t going to select the team; they were going to select it themselves, but the selection process was going to start in June 2009. They were going to write the rules about how they would get selected. I gave them all the dates, plus all the travel dates for the Worlds, all the basic details, early on in 2009, but I said the heart of it – the selection criteria – was something they were going to work out in June.

  2009 was the critical year for me, because in order to qualify all the riders we needed, we had to get them thinking about how they would qualify for each year’s Worlds. I’d give them a breakdown: ‘This is where we currently are in the rankings; this is our score in points; for those of you going to this race or that race, these are the last opportunities to score points.’ What I could do then was call those riders and say, ‘Listen, if you can pick up a point or two here or there, that would help – can you speak to your directeur sportif?’ I’d encourage them to put their hands up and go for a sprint or something like that. But the biggest thing for me was if I could get Jeremy Hunt talking to Ben Swift, with the common denominator between them the world road race championships. If that happened, it was bingo! – job done.