Project Rainbow

by Rod Ellingworth

  That winter we really started to put systems in place to make the team function smoothly. As soon as we got back from the Worlds, it was full gas: Tim and I spent every single day together coming up with ideas, and we were constantly selling them to Dave. I came up with this little phrase: ‘We have got to make Team Sky’s world smaller.’ The problem was that we weren’t all working from one location – everyone involved with the team was split up around the world, particularly once the season got going. That winter Dave introduced conference-call systems, and, together with Olly Cookson, who is in charge of a lot of the team’s admin, Tim and I set up a drop-box system. It’s a live online structure where you can pick up information. It’s where all the information on Team Sky is stored: insurance, cars, contacts, how to do your expenses, how to find people, race programmes, training camps, all the information on the riders. It’s an incredibly useful tool. So if one of the staff wants to know what a particular rider has been doing, what he is going to be doing, how he is coming back from injury perhaps, they can just go straight in there and look.

  After each race you have a report written by the directeurs sportifs, and the coaches take that information and give feedback to the riders. They write a weekly training report on each rider, and the DSs come up with a performance plan for the next race, using the information from the race and coaches’ reports, plus a medical report. That ensures that at any race all our DSs have the information they need about every rider. For example, at the Scheldeprijs in 2013, my plan for Ian Stannard was that he was not going to race hard, because the next day I wanted him to be fresh for a training session which would be an important part of his build-up to Paris–Roubaix. In the coach’s report, it would be there: Ian Stannard will just ride around at the Scheldeprijs without going for the win.

  We also have a conference call every Monday morning where these sort of things get discussed; there is an agenda which any of the coaches and DSs can add to, so we can talk it through without all having to be in the same place. This way, everyone is completely informed of what is going on across the team. It cuts out a lot of the risk that the right hand might not know what the left hand is doing. In year one Scott Sunderland and I had a race programme, and once Scott left I looked after it, but I just used to send it out to everybody on a weekly basis.

  The point about the race programme is that it is constantly changing because riders get injured and fall ill. So you’ll have a provisional line-up perhaps three months before a race, but that will mutate constantly. I look at the race programme every single day of my life; it’s still a constant. But the difference compared to Sky’s first year is that now I can make those changes, and anyone can look at the latest version immediately; there is only one copy in the drop box and people only have to go to one place.

  What isn’t always obvious to outsiders is the complexity of the logistics involved in a professional team. For example, in spring 2012 we had a set of vehicles going to Tirreno–Adriatico in central Italy, then on to the Tour of Catalonia, and at the same time we had a training camp for Milan–San Remo and a week or two later the Criterium International in Corsica. It’s a matter of making sure that the right bikes go in the right team vehicle for the right race. There is a lot of kit circulating, so the staff have to know what is going where. If you are, say, running the team at the Criterium International, you want to know when the riders are flying in so you can send people to pick them up. It’s all there in the drop box, and if anything changes it gets updated straight away – every race, every training camp, all the travel. For example, if one of the staff has a car accident, they can find the insurance documents on their phone at once.

  The performance plans written by the directeurs sportifs for each race are on there as well: this is what we need to do, stages to target, priorities, support available, roles for each rider, details of each stage, the challenges each day, official race information, all the profiles. That means I can be sat in my home in England and follow everything that’s happening. It’s the information that will be presented to the riders on the bus at the team meeting before each race or stage; if need be, I can take a look the night before and suggest something. Having all that information in there well in advance means that the DSs don’t have to do any of the set-up; they will just go through what the weather is like, the terrain – key points for the day’s race. Everything should be in there. There’s the staff planner as well – what races they are doing, how many races they are at in a given year – and a list of performance impact areas, performance support and nutrition.

  All the work on communication made us function more smoothly, but getting these systems in place also freed up time and mental space. It eliminated a lot of the firefighting that goes on in a big organisation if you haven’t got everyone on the same page. Get rid of the firefighting and crisis management and you immediately have more space to talk to the riders and think about what makes them function more effectively.

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  The philosophy which underpins Team Sky, the thought constantly in the back of our minds, is that you have got to put the bike riders first. I think we listen to our riders more than any other team – not just the one or two big hitters but every rider. What we try to achieve is make it all completely seamless for them, whether they are going to a race, going home, going to a training camp or going to a media session. They shouldn’t notice anything; we could be paddling like hell underneath, but there should be nothing on the surface to make them aware of that. We want them to be left to get on with training, looking after themselves and competing. We began coming up with different mottoes: ready to train, ready to race, ready to inspire. That sums up who does what: the riders have a responsibility to be ready to get on their bikes and do the work, not eat like pigs and be as fat as anything; to get them ready for racing is down to the coaches; and being ‘ready to inspire’ is the function of the DSs. Racing well is what inspires those who follow the team: if you think of the way Ian Stannard competed in Milan–San Remo in 2012, getting in front in the finale, putting the British national champion’s jersey out there, with fans jumping out of their seats in front of their TVs and shouting at him with two kilometres to go, as I was – that’s uplifting.

  I felt like we weren’t doing a very good job running the team in 2010, but many of the Sky riders were still saying that it was better than anything they had experienced before. Guys like Juan Antonio Flecha, Matt Hayman, Thomas Löfkvist and Mike Barry had been around a lot of different teams and seemed happy with what they had found. Kurt Asle Arvesen had been around the block and was close to the end of his career, and he said he could feel from the outset that something interesting was happening under the surface, even if we weren’t quite getting the results we wanted.

  Everything settled down in 2011. Tim had started to get going and he began to add input on the training, with some good new ideas, which was a massive relief to me because it wasn’t just me having to think about it. We started working with the Training Peaks computer programme, which interprets power output and other factors to give an assessment of a rider’s training and racing workload, and Tim being Tim he really got into it. We expanded the training group as well by bringing Bobby Julich on board. Bobby was an American former pro who had been around for fifteen years, and he came in to help on the time-trial side. That relieved the pressure on Tim and me, and so did the expansion of the directeur sportif group to five, although we only had one who was an experienced DS, which was Sean Yates, so we were trying to develop guys like Nicolas Portal, who had been one of our riders, as new DSs. At the time Sean and I had responsibility for the race programme, and Sean being Sean, he always spoke his mind and never sat back on anything. We all challenged each other; at times it was a little bit edgy, but in general it went well. Bobby took responsibility for a group of riders, and it was there that the relationship between him and Chris Froome really started to grow; what was happening was that Tim was spreading his training knowledge and ideas through
myself and Bobby, and in 2011 all of a sudden Chris started to perform.

  That was another breakthrough. Chris really started to buy into the training and the idea of having a good coach alongside him, and Bobby lived near him, which was a massive help. Bobby is quite an intense person, but what came with that was an attention to detail: he never let anything go. If we agreed on how we were going to do something, he would completely get his teeth into it. He was perfect for Chris because he really kept him on the ball. The culmination for Sky was the Vuelta, where both Brad and Chris were going for the overall win. We made some massive mistakes there with gearing – we just didn’t have low enough gears up the Angliru. That climb was where the Vuelta was decided because of the time Brad lost after getting dropped and the time Chris lost waiting to help him. That was what cost us the race, but it kept us hungry. You learn from your mistakes; it was a massive learning curve for Tim as well, who was looking at how the riders perform through a Grand Tour. We really worked on hydration and nutrition before and after the stages, making sure that the riders were getting enough fluids in them and not just leaving it to chance, really badgering them. This was where Brad was particularly good; he agrees with the marginal-gains side. After a stage you never see him without a recovery drink in his hand.

  I would estimate that 80 per cent of the practices we have now were put in place that winter, after that first year of learning. In terms of performance we went back to the old principle: ‘Let’s do the simple things really, really well.’ By ‘simple things’ I mean hydration, logistics, fuelling, training, communication with the riders. We had to make sure they turned up at a race and knew what their role was. If they receive a performance plan a week before and, for example, one guy doesn’t want to sit on the front and work because he feels he’s ready to go for the win, he can ring up and say, ‘Listen, I want my opportunity.’ Whatever the outcome, at least he’s got the chance to speak his mind. And the egos settled down; there were no issues in terms of who did what in the system – we all accept Dave as the boss, the man with the ultimate say. He is all over everything.

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  Team Sky wasn’t really at the forefront of my mind once we got through the winter and the 2011 season got under way. By then I was almost completely focused on the world championships, trying to build the momentum for the riders without it being energy-sapping over the course of the season. I had to make them gradually more and more aware of what we were getting into, and at the same time be wary of the end-of-season blues. The time that really mattered was the last week in September; there is a lot of racing before then, so my focus on Cav was quite intense. I didn’t want Mark to switch off in any way, but there was a lot going on with him which could potentially take his mind off one of the biggest goals of his career. He was falling out with his team, and there was immense speculation about whether he would end up at Team Sky. There was a constant dialogue with him all year, and I was the go-between, stuck in the middle: Cav would talk to me, I’d talk to Dave, Dave would talk to me, I’d go back to Cav.

  The riders were given a DVD of the 2011 Worlds route at our last training camp, the national road race championships in north-east England in June. There the riders were split into groups and asked to detail what tactics they would use to ensure a bunch sprint would happen for Cav. I wanted to nail down how we would race. Cav was vocal about two things: he wanted the team to take on the race, and he wanted to be kept out of trouble, with someone to shepherd him all day. Mark’s view was that if a team takes control on his behalf, it puts pressure on him to deliver, and that is how he likes it. That was how the team would have to ride, and that came through as what they all wanted at the meetings when we discussed ways of winning. When I put up the tactical plan on the Friday before the race, they weren’t my tactics, they were the riders’.

  That in turn drove the selection: they said they needed certain riders to do this particular job. The biggest challenge was numbers. The best way to guarantee a win for Mark was by controlling the race. To control the race, we needed a big team; if we were in the same boat as in 2010, when we only qualified three, it would be tough: we’d be guessing about the outcome, hoping all day that the race would come back together for a bunch sprint rather than being able to make it happen. So we went through all their races from mid-July to the ranking cut-off date in mid-August – who was where and whether they might get a point or two. It wasn’t new; we were just making sure everyone knew what we were pushing for and where we were in terms of ranking and rider numbers.

  Through July and early August I was constantly on to every rider in the squad about where Great Britain was sitting in the world rankings. The difference from 2010 was that the UCI had added a new rule: to get a full team of nine a nation needed to have at least nine riders scoring points, although you could select who you liked within your quota. We hadn’t got nine riders who had scored points; for most of the year it was five, which was nail-biting. We were comfortably in the top ten in the world rankings, because although Brad had pulled out of the Tour, he had scored well by winning the Dauphiné; Cav had picked up lots of points as usual, Swifty had been winning races as well and David Millar had been scoring. But when it came down to the final qualifying event, the Tour of Poland, a week before the final deadline of 15 August, we were still looking at a team of five, because that was how many riders had scored points.

  I had begun planning around five riders. It would have been flying by the seat of our pants, but we had to work around whatever we ended up with. But the lads did really well at the death: the final ones were Adam Blythe, who scored a point in the Tour of Poland, while Peter Kennaugh and Steve Cummings got high up overall. So all of a sudden we went from five to eight riders, which gave us a massive boost. Adam, Swifty and Pete didn’t even get to ride the Worlds, but their contribution in qualifying was massive.

  I’d had a long-term strategy here, and it had worked. I’d kept chipping away at the riders since we began the project two years earlier. I’d kept the issue alive in their minds with the newsletters, constantly reminding them of the need to score, keeping their eyes on where they were. It was a big step on the way to Copenhagen, and it could have been the full nine: Ian Stannard finished sixth in the bunch sprint on the final stage in Poland, and if he had come in fifth, that would have been a single point, which would have given us nine points scorers. But Cav and I were happy with eight.

  In mid-August we had a chance to try out the London Olympics road-race course, in the test event on the Box Hill circuit, with the finish on the Mall. It was also a chance for me to put the riders in contention for the 2011 Worlds team through their paces. We stayed at the same hotel as we would for the Olympics, which was critical because the Games came so soon after the 2012 Tour de France. We already knew we were going to fly most of the Olympic team back to London on the night the Tour finished in Paris, and I wanted the lads to know the hotel they were going back to, and our staff needed to know it to ensure there would be no surprises. For the staff, it makes a difference if you don’t have to find out where you’re going, where you store stuff, where to park the cars, where you eat. If you know what issues you are going to have before you go into something, you can deal with them a lot better. When you are a cyclist coming off the back of the Tour, you are so tired that you just want to be able to go somewhere familiar. You can’t beat understanding and knowledge.

  We had two teams of five riders in the test event, under the Great Britain and England banners, but they were one team as far as the Worlds were concerned. Beforehand, Cav didn’t want the stress of leading the team. He had just won the points jersey in the Tour and felt he had been under pressure for three weeks. The night before the race he was saying, ‘No, guys, don’t race for me,’ but almost the minute they rolled off the start line he changed his mind. After that it was a matter of controlling the race, then leading him out. As a Great Britain team, we’d never taken a race by the scruff of the neck and controlled it all the way. It
ended up being a dry run for what we were going to do at the Worlds, but it wasn’t particularly planned like that. I was more interested in the way that the group had come together and that we had another weekend building the team.

  What struck me over those few days in Surrey was the commitment from everyone. It’s like players coming together for the England soccer or rugby team after kicking seven bells out of each other in the Premiership week in, week out. All of a sudden they are having to shout to each other and work as a team; here we had riders from several different professional teams now having to work together as a unit. But that had been one of the key things when we were talking about the Worlds in the first place back in 2009, and having Team Sky was only going to ensure that the team would be closer anyway. A lot of the riders at the test event and at the Worlds were coming in from Sky, so working as a team wasn’t new for them.

  Once we knew how many riders we had, the next question was selection. It was pretty simple: for what we wanted to do you need a good road captain and people to ride hard at the front of the bunch, big engines who are capable of doing the work. After that it was a matter of who was on form. Froomie and Brad were in pole position because they would have just come out of the Vuelta. I was a bit concerned about Brad. He had had a big year: he had been aiming for the Tour, which went belly up after his crash, but then he got himself back on the ball and went for the Vuelta. He had had a long, long season, and Sky had asked a lot of him. But he had turned himself around, complied with his training and been more cooperative with the media, and he was potentially a key character. Then again, he had never turned up to any of the training camps, so I had to ask myself, ‘Is he going to buy in?’ Against that, I knew that he and Cav have a really good relationship. I was banking on that.