Project Rainbow

by Rod Ellingworth

  8 : Our Leader Steps Up

  Through the 2008 and 2009 seasons Mark Cavendish went from being a promising sprinter to the best in the world: that Milan–San Remo victory was the cherry on the cake as he landed ten stages in the Tour de France. By now he was winning around twenty races a year. Those two seasons were when he really broke through. If I had to put my finger on one key factor that helped him move on, it was when he moved from Belgium – where he was living with Roger Hammond – to Italy. It was a big move for him. There were people around him, like his directeur sportif at Columbia, Brian Holm, who had concerns. I’m a big supporter of Brian and his relationship with Cav is very good, but Brian was brought up in the Belgian cycling world; he likes the hard work, hard weather, rolling your sleeves up and cracking on. He had an issue with Mark going to Italy because of the people who might be around him, but I said to Brian, ‘Look, I’ll be there too. It’ll be fine.’ We knew Cav would have to be kept working hard or he might get drawn into the life down there – he likes to live the good life, go out for dinner – but I’d take care of that. He ended up with a really good routine in his life. My idea was that Cav would train with the academy guys, because he liked that whole scene and he would have a masseur and mechanic at the academy; he was a pro, but British Cycling was still supporting him at this time.

  Compared to his debut in 2007, the biggest difference in Cav’s sprinting when he rode his second Tour de France in 2008, something that massively changed his racing, was that he became capable of going full-on from 250 or 300 metres out in a sprint finish. It was the major thing he had learnt in 2007. During the first week of the Tour that year he was unsure when to make his move, so he tried different things: he put a fifty-four-tooth chain ring on so he had a bigger gear, then came back down; he was wondering whether he had enough power, whether different length cranks would make a difference or not; he was trying to figure out why he was getting caught up in the crashes. My answer was that the level of competition at the Tour was higher compared to other races; he was hesitating, not coming out early enough when the sprint happened. We concluded that he had to jump earlier. We had to try training him to sprint for a little bit longer so that he would be confident enough to hit out early. A lot of riders didn’t have the nerve to do that; they tended to wait for the 200-metres-to-go marker, and often someone else would get the jump on them.

  We didn’t do specific training for that, but we did do longer sprints. It was pretty simple, but for Cav it was more a mental thing, just getting it into his head: ‘Yeah, I’ve got to go out from 300, and I can.’ Then his style of sprinting did the rest: punch, bang, create a big gap – because people can’t hold him when he comes off the wheel – then he would cruise a little bit, then he would go again. In 2008 that was his key thing; that was why he won so many stages. He would consciously wait for the other riders to start catching him up, and then he’d put his foot down again. It’s not very often that you see Cav do a long sprint, flat out from the point he emerges to the point where he crosses the line. The only time is on the Champs Elysées, where he hits 300 or 350 metres out and goes; he doesn’t look back, he just goes and goes and goes, and he wins by flipping lengths. The reason why he always wins by so much there is that it’s one of the only sprints where he absolutely empties the tank.

  The move to Italy led to a massive shift in Cav’s professional development. I knew that for him to win Milan–San Remo he was going to have to go over the climbs better. How are you going to do that? There’s no point being based in Belgium. If you live in Italy, you can’t avoid decent-sized climbs, so even on your rest days, when you do an easy ride, you’re still going up a five- or six-kilometre ascent. That in turn means that all of a sudden your idea of what makes a hard climb changes; you don’t worry about the smaller ones. So suddenly he believed he could start getting over decent climbs, and he learnt how to do it.

  I was doing hours and hours with him, sometimes six to seven hours with him behind the motorbike. We’d have a coffee stop and I’d have to have a couple of fuel stops, but we used to go over the climbs pretty bloody quick and I’d put him on the rack every single day. We’d do different things: sometimes he’d do four hours, then I’d meet him so he could spend two hours behind the motorbike; sometimes I’d just meet him on a finishing circuit and do that as if we were racing; other times it would be an hour with one big climb, or perhaps the whole ride behind the motorbike. The crucial thing about training behind the motorbike is that you can have the pressure on, put the speed up when you’re training, and because you are in the slipstream you’re working at race speed. It’s not something you can do on your own; it’s the only way of replicating race pressure when you’re training. Whatever we did we’d always finish with a big sprint – nine times out of ten when he is training Mark finishes with a big sprint because he’s a sprinter, and that’s as extensive as his training for sprinting gets on the road.

  The classic climb that we used all the time was San Baronto, which is up behind Quarrata. You have no option but to go over it if you’re coming back into the town from the west, and there are several different ways up it. There’s another climb called Vinci – close to the village where Leonardo came from – which we did loads of times. It’s about twelve kilometres long, but the average gradient is only about 4 per cent, maybe not even that; that means it’s a climb you can go up on the big chain ring, a fast one. I used to put him through the mill all the time up there, so he’d build himself up for it as if it was a race finish. It was a brutal climb to work on with the motorbike because it had corners, so I’d be on the motorbike, the corners would be a bit too fast, and I’d be taking silly risks to get round them, with Cav spinning away behind.

  The other element in Cav’s training was work at the velodrome in Manchester, again behind the motorbike, just as we did in the academy days; that was general speed rather than specific sprint work, although he’d finish each block of work with a sprint. That was one of the key sessions before he won Milan–San Remo: he’d go out on the road in the morning, then come in and do a track session. We’d put a 52 × 15 gear on and he’d ride his UKSI bike, the carbon-fibre one made by the UK Sports Institute that he’d ride at an Olympic Games or world championship. He liked that; it made it a bit of a special session. It was just me and him, one on one, and we’d try and do about an hour and a half in blocks of fifteen to twenty minutes; we’d try and average about 130 rpm for the session, and then he’d finish each block with a sprint, getting up to 150 rpm or more. I remember him saying after he won Milan–San Remo, where the first two hours had been covered at an average of fifty-two kilometres an hour, ‘I was sat there thinking, “Bloody hell, I’ve been doing two hours at fifty-five kilometres an hour at 130 rpm. I can cope with this speed. It’s nothing for me.”’ When a rider feeds that back to you after a race, you think, ‘Job done there.’

  The other training we made sure we did for Milan–San Remo was to vary the speed and intensity on the climbs, to replicate how it would be in a race. This was something I could never understand with the other teams when they were racing against Cav: if you want to get rid of him on a climb, you have to do lots of accelerations, not just ride at one tempo; if you ride at one tempo, if he’s got enough fitness, drive and momentum, he’ll hold the wheel, because he’s great at that. That comes back to a lot of those motorbike sessions, where he’s just sitting there, on the edge for a long time. You can’t just burn him off with speed. We saw that on the stage into Aubenas in the 2009 Tour, where there was a long second-category climb before the finish: they took it at a sustained speed, Cav hung on up there when most of the peloton got spat out, and then he was all over it at the finish and won by a street.

  If you look at the way the riders race on the Cipressa and the Poggio, the two critical climbs close to the end of Milan–San Remo, the pace is very much on–off, on–off, so we did some sessions like that up the climbs. It was pretty simple: sometimes twenty seconds on, forty seconds of
f; at other times I just randomly accelerated and decelerated, time after time. We would do that in the fifth or sixth hour of training rides to replicate roughly the time at which he would have to do that in the race itself. The critical thing with Cave is that the finish of his race isn’t the final hundred metres; it could be fifty or a hundred kilometres before, on a climb. This was something he got into, something I always said to him: ‘You could be absolutely empty at this given point, on your knees, completely wasted, but nobody is going to drop you on the descent which comes after the climb, or this lumpy road here into the town where the race finishes – and you’ve won.’ So his personal finish line might come at 150 kilometres. He’d be quite nervous going into races, so you’d break it down. It’s a Steve Peters thing – what’s the biggest challenge, the biggest obstacle? Well, it’s this climb here. OK, what does it take to get over that climb? When are you going to eat? Where in the bunch do you want to start the climb? Before the climb, where do you move up through the bunch so that you are in that position?

  For Milan–San Remo, we’d gone through how to ride in the bunch as well, the need to be sitting right up the backside of somebody all day – it was Bernie Eisel or Thomas Löfkvist, as it turned out. It was the old sugar-lump principle, which I had learnt from John Herety: you see yourself as a big lump of sugar, and every time you make an effort you’re knocking bits off. You’re going to whittle away at it, but you want to get there with as much sugar left as possible. With each pedal revolution you’re chipping away, so it comes down to how hard you press on the pedals. If you brake too hard here and you have to press on the pedals a bit harder there, you’re going to use some. If you go forwards up the side of the bunch on your own rather than using someone else for shelter, you will use some. If you go up the outside of the peloton rather than up the soft spot in the middle, you use more. I always talked about that. So in Milan–San Remo he had to sit behind a teammate, as low as he could on the bike, and save every ounce of strength, because he was going to need every bit of energy for those final climbs.

  Cav and I constantly went through scenarios like that. At the 2009 Tour de France, which started in Monaco, I challenged him over the first road-race stage, because he’d never come into a major Tour and won the first stage. I felt that might be down to a slight lack of training over the last day or two, or just a little disrespect for his fellow competitors. That first day in Monaco was quite a hard stage, with a couple of little obstacles, and Cav was super-nervous. I was staying down there, because Dave Brailsford, Carsten Jeppesen – our Head of Operations at Team Sky – and I had gone down to talk to riders we were looking to sign for the team. I would talk to Mark on the phone; we would go through the profile of the stage, and I would get him to explain what he was concerned about. The conversation might go: ‘What’s bugging you?’

  ‘This climb here, it’s after 120 kilometres.’

  ‘Are you fit enough to do it?’

  ‘Yes, I am.’

  ‘Well, that’s good. How long’s the climb? What’s it like – has it got corners in, is it straight up?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Well, go and find out. Who are you going to ask?’

  ‘I’ll ask Brian.’

  ‘Well, give us a ring when you’ve done it.’

  That was the kind of stuff we were looking at. In that 2008–9 period I was working well with Brian Holm, Rolf Aldag and Allan Peiper, the directeurs sportifs at Columbia – or HTC, as it became in 2009. I would give them ideas to talk to Cav about, and they would consult me over working with him – ‘Cav’s just said this. What do you think?’ – so I’d explain how he is, about calming him down, getting him to concentrate on something, trying to get him to invest in cycling, little things like that.

  In 2009 he won a stage in every stage race that he rode. He was just buzzing. He’d come into the main square in Quarrata, and you could feel the energy radiating off him. That’s the other thing with Cav: as well as the talent he has on his bike, the energy he has is pretty phenomenal, whether positive or negative. Sometimes he rubs people up the wrong way, because he’s opinionated and can act like a bit of a prick at times.

  He bounces around deliberately to wind people up on occasion. He turns it on and off when he wants to. There was an interview in one of the cycling magazines in 2007, an article titled ‘Cool Britannia’ which featured Gee, Swifty and Cav, with clothing by Paul Smith. I was trying to arrange the whole photo shoot, as it was a good story about the development of those three academy lads, but Cav was really against the whole thing and didn’t want to try the clothes on. Ironically enough, he has a good relationship with Paul Smith now. I spotted him afterwards; he came bounding into the dining hall in the hotel where we were staying and said to me, ‘Thanks for pushing me to do it. We had a great laugh.’ I said, ‘You looked happy coming into the dining room.’ And he said, ‘Yeah, yeah, I did that on purpose, bounded in to make sure that everybody saw me.’ I thought, ‘You cheeky sod’ – he was this new kid on the block at that point, but that’s how he was. Sometimes he deliberately walks into a room with his head held high, with a real swagger to make people go, ‘Shit, that’s Mark Cavendish.’ It can get him into trouble occasionally, but that’s his way.

  *

  My relationship with Cav is definitely the closest I’ve had with an athlete. You could point to a few reasons: Cav believed in the discipline side and the structure which I was building into the academy; also, at that point in his life, he was obviously looking for someone to lead him. Another way in which we got on was that Cav loves to hear about the history behind the sport, and that was something we had in common. I think the moment on Gun Hill, when he had that crisis I described earlier on, must have been influential in the relationship. He’s a sensitive guy; he’s not super-strong in his self-control, he’s not a big, tough chap. At times you have to put your arm round him and support him, and I think that’s what he appreciated with me. I’d be tough with him; I’d tell him when he’d done well, but also when he’d not done well.

  I deal with him in a similar way when he’s ill. He doesn’t cope with that too well. When he’s not winning, he struggles to come to terms with it. There are times, when he’s ill or it’s not happening in the bike races, when you have to bring him back to basics: ‘Right, what’s going to make the difference? How are you going to do this? What are you going to do tomorrow?’ He’ll have the answers, although you have to guide him: ‘I need to go and speak to the doctor. I need some medication because I’m sick.’ ‘What does that mean?’ ‘I can’t train too hard.’ ‘Right, let’s not train too hard; let’s be patient.’ That’s the sort of stuff he needs, not the ‘Go and do twenty efforts of this, or ride at this intensity.’ It’s more quite basic life stuff with Cav.

  Other people could coach Mark Cavendish and get the same results; if ten other coaches had begun coaching him at the same time I did, at least nine of them would have ended up with something similar. It was about me being in the right place at the right time. In terms of coaching his cycling, I’ve never made a massive difference to anything he would have done; it’s the coaching around his bike, keeping him on the straight and narrow when he was younger, getting him organised, pulling him back to focusing on certain things. Mark constantly has ideas; he’s always thinking about what’s next – he finishes one thing and is straight on to the next before he’s even taken breath. Sometimes you have to say, ‘Hang on, let’s look at what you did. Why did that happen?’ I don’t think he’s a great reviewer of occasions when things have gone wrong. He looks to blame other factors quite a lot. It’s at those times that you say, ‘Hang on, did you do this? Did you look at that?’ If it was other people telling him to do that, he might tell them to piss off, but that was where my relationship with him had grown, to a point where he wouldn’t. So sometimes I’d suggest things, and he’d say he didn’t agree, and occasionally I’d be right.

  One thing I’ve learnt massively with Cav is this
: don’t tell him what to do. The skill is to get him to say what he is going to do off his own bat. Sometimes it will take two or three months for him to come round to telling you what you were thinking about. Then you think, ‘Bingo, you’re on it. We’re there.’ Sometimes I’ve been six months or so ahead of Cav, putting little ideas into his head here and there, so that he will then say, ‘I’m on this one, I’ve thought about this.’ If you were an ego-driven person, you’d be in trouble; you’ve got to be prepared to sit back and say, ‘OK, guys, this is your programme.’ That was the way I approached the road Worlds, but it was something I always did with Cav.

  With Cav one example would be when he first rode the Tour de France. I thought he was ready to ride it, but I wouldn’t actually say, ‘You’re ready to do the Tour’; it was a matter of getting him to tell me, ‘I’m ready.’

  Then I could ask, ‘Why? How come you’re able to?’

  ‘I know I’ve got this. I was training well here. I was going up these climbs faster than I’ve ever done before, so I can cope with the climbing. I’m definitely working the sprints out better than before. I’m definitely more consistent.’

  Those are the answers I’d be looking for.

  *

  We’ve had our share of funny moments. The amount of crashes he had at the academy was horrendous, unbelievable, but sometimes they were just hilarious. We were over in Cronulla in Australia just before he won the World Madison championship in 2005; it was just after Gee had had his bad accident and lost his spleen, so my nerves were a bit on edge. The lads would go out at six in the morning to do three hours or so, while I’d be sat in my room. One morning there was a knock on the door. It was a guy I didn’t know from Adam with one of our bikes, but straight away I recognised it: it was Cav’s. He said, ‘Are you Rod?’ He was in cycling kit, a local Aussie bike rider, and he said Mark had told him where I was – he’d been knocked off his bike and taken to hospital.