Project Rainbow

by Rod Ellingworth

  On the other hand, Jeremy Hunt, Ian Stannard, David Millar, Geraint Thomas and Steve Cummings had been totally in on the idea from the start. The selection was relatively easy, because younger riders like Ben Swift, Peter Kennaugh and Alex Dowsett hadn’t quite performed at that level of racing, or not to the extent that you could be certain they were still going to be there and doing the job after 250 kilometres of racing. One major thing right from the outset had been that there were never, ever going to be any development spots at these Worlds. It was only ever going to be the best team we could put on the line. We weren’t going to test anybody and we weren’t going to give anybody a bit of an opportunity. That had been a constant message. So that was quite an easy one to rule on when the time came.

  Adam Blythe took himself out of selection quite early on. I’d spoken about honesty, and this was a good example: he was saying, ‘Actually, Rod, if you had picked me, it would have been quite obvious you didn’t know what you were doing.’ Roger Hammond was a big call, because he so wanted to do it. I felt a bit sorry for him because he had really bought into it. He really did like the British angle I had been constantly pushing: ‘We are out there fighting, we are the British team and we are going to put a British team on the podium. It’s about us as a team pulling that jersey on and feeling proud.’ It was a really hard call, phoning him up and saying he had not been selected, but Roger didn’t have the form and he hadn’t been going that well all year. Daniel Lloyd was another hard one: he too was very much on side, and at the Tour of Britain he had really good form – he was in the top ten overall – but the thing with Dan was that he had only just hit that form.

  We’d already gone through two selection cycles before this, so the riders knew the criteria, and I never missed a beat in terms of phoning each and every single one of them on each of the selection dates so they would know exactly where they were. This was another benefit of coming in with a long-term plan: we’d nailed the administration side, all the nitty-gritty things where people had slipped up in the past. With selection dates, selection criteria, training camps and rider numbers fixed in people’s minds from day one, when the time came all we had to focus on was the performance side: getting the qualification points and deciding which riders we were going to put in.

  It was so hard to leave any of them out, but Dan was our first reserve. One of the other things I had worked on over the previous two years was the need for the reserves to keep in form. I made a real plea to them: ‘Please keep training because twenty-four hours beforehand you could be called up if one of these guys crashes or is sick. Anything can happen, so keep yourselves on the ball, guys.’ To be fair to Dan, he kept himself going. The selection was quite easy; who was going to do what and when was left until the last few days.

  By the end of August I had a pretty good idea of the team line-up and I’d issued a massively detailed guide to the entire world championships. The idea was that there should be no excuse for them not knowing something. With that in place, I set off for Colorado to negotiate the Colombian Sergio Henao’s transfer to Sky; I took Tim Harris with me, as he knew Sergio from spending time in Colombia, and he can speak good Spanish. We were in Brussels airport waiting for the flight to New York, when we caught sight of stage four of the Vuelta on a TV in the terminal. It was a hot and hilly stage through southern Spain, and the first thing we spotted was Cav, struggling at the back of the peloton. By the time I got to the TV, Cav was already out of the back of the peloton; the group had just gone over this little climb towards the end of the stage, with a team driving on at the front. My first thought was that he must have punctured, but then I saw the way he was pedalling. He was in a right state. And so was I: ‘Flipping heck, we’ve got five weeks before the Worlds. Oh shit.’

  There was nothing I could do. I had to get on the plane with Tim and sit there for five hours, not knowing what was up with Cav. To fray my nerves a little bit more, our landing in New York wasn’t a happy one. We were well into our descent to JFK, when the plane went back up again. We were circling around New York for ages before the captain came over the tannoy: ‘Hello, guys, we are really sorry to tell you we are unable to land at JFK; there’s been an earthquake in New York.’ People started getting a little concerned at that, but then the pilot added, ‘We’ve got a bit of a dilemma: we have only thirty minutes’ worth of fuel left, and they’re shutting all the airports on the east coast of America, so we may have to head for a military airbase. We need to make the decision soon or we won’t be able to make it.’ Then it was near panic: the other passengers started being sick around us. And all that time I was worrying about Cav, sitting there thinking, ‘Fuck it, I just want to get on the phone and ring people about Cav. He must be ill.’

  When they did open the airport and we eventually landed at JFK, it was chaos because of all the flights coming in at once: people and bags everywhere, everyone trying to figure out where they were going. In the midst of all that, I finally got through to Cav, several hours after the event. He was in pieces, all over the place, with no idea what to do. On we went to the Tour of Colorado to meet Sergio Henao, but though my business was in Aspen, my mind was back in Europe. I bumped into Brian Holm, and he told me the doctor had said there was nothing wrong with Cav, although another report said that the doctor’s view was that ‘He was so tired that he could sleep in the team car.’ At that I lost my temper: ‘What do you mean, there’s nothing wrong with the guy? Why on earth would he pull out of the Vuelta when he is meant to be going for the Worlds in five weeks’ time and he knows he needs to finish it to have the fitness?’

  All the while I was thinking, ‘Fuck, the whole thing could go belly up.’ The question was: how sick was he?

  12 : Rainbow in the Air

  My first thought when I put the phone down was: ‘I need to commit to Mark here.’ I rang Dave Brailsford straight away. There were races I was still scheduled to do with Team Sky, but they were going to have to go by the board.

  ‘Have you seen that Cav is out of the Vuelta?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Dave, I’m going to have to go and deal with this.’

  ‘Down tools, drop everything, go and do what you have to do.’

  The significance of Dave’s decision can’t be underestimated. Earlier, in 2010, he had been on the receiving end of a fair bit of adverse comment regarding the balance between British Cycling and Team Sky, and a review had been commissioned from Deloitte by UK Sport to assess the impact of the pro team on the Olympic side of what we did. I had a role at both organisations, but there was no question which would be the priority for Dave when a decision had to be made as rapidly as this one did, with a world title on the line. His view was that I had no option but to put the Worlds first and that I needed to support Cav.

  I believe that you can be sick five weeks out from a major event and still come good, but on the other hand, if Cav had something really wrong with him, it would all be over. I knew Mark didn’t have to be at his best to win the Worlds; he had to be fast but he didn’t have to be at his best in terms of fitness, so we had a little bit to play with, if you like. Tim Kerrison would be able to put it into numbers, but with me it is a matter of gut feeling, and my instincts were telling me Mark only needed to be 80 per cent fit to win those Worlds. As it turned out, he wasn’t at his absolute peak. Over the season I was more concerned about the other riders who might be in the team, because they would be the ones who would be sitting at the front and driving the peloton along; they would have to be super-fit for that job.

  What Cav told me was that he had felt really poorly, lifeless, with nowhere to go. He said he had got to the point where he felt that if he carried on, he would end up doing more damage to himself, so he would be better off stopping, getting better and then starting again. The first thing was to reassure him: ‘Don’t worry, you have done exactly the right thing. Don’t fret about the Worlds, we’ll put a plan together. Just go and rest up for two or three days. I’ll get home and then we’
ll go from there.’ It dawned on me that the tension within the HTC team had come to a bit of a head, and ultimately Cav didn’t want to be in the race. These are the moments with Mark when you just have to settle him, tell him, ‘Stay put, don’t worry, chill out.’ At those times you have to forget what is coming up in four or five weeks’ time and hone in on the here and now.

  It doesn’t matter how many times they get sick, all athletes panic when it happens. They all think it is the end of the world. That is how you are as an athlete. It’s why I say to any lads I coach, ‘If you wake up any morning and feel a little bit under the weather, and you don’t know what to do, ring me. It doesn’t matter what time it is – seven o’clock, six o’clock, five o’clock – ring me because I can help you make the right decision. I am not a doctor, but I can help you decide whether to get your ass out of bed and get to the doctor’s or go out for a little steady spin because you’re only feeling a bit groggy.’

  I would have to live with Mark for that final month. Fortunately, there was nothing majorly wrong with him; he just had no energy and had picked up a little bit of a bug. First up, he took three or four days off completely to get his strength back. By then I’d put a bit of a plan together for the next few weeks, and it was clear that he had plenty of time to get in decent shape, if we did enough work. Firstly he went to stay in Girona, where a lot of the Garmin riders are based, because David Millar was there and Jeremy Hunt was around as well. I flew over with a bit of equipment, put myself in a hotel in the outskirts of the town, hired a car and said, ‘Right, we are going to train for a week.’ We didn’t do a huge amount, but he rode his bike with the lads every day. I followed them, they did a little bit of motor pacing behind the car, and we had a nice week getting him back into the rhythm of training.

  Critically, we had managed to wangle a start for Cav in the Tour of Britain. It was a bit of an operation; a professional cyclist can’t be entered into two events at the same time, but if you pull out of one, you can race another as long as you have a letter from the organiser of the first event to the UCI saying that they are happy for you to ride another race. Cav’s team, HTC, had got through to the Vuelta organisers and explained the situation, and they were fine. Britain isn’t the Vuelta in terms of the quality of the field or the toughness of the course, but it was eight days of racing, which would get some competition into Cav’s legs and give him the chance for some morale-boosting wins. With that in mind, he came back from Girona to his home to Essex. Alex Dowsett – who had turned professional with Sky that season – was there as well because he lived in the area; he would be company on the bike. That was where Mark put in a lot of the work, replicating the overload he was missing out on because he wasn’t at the Vuelta.

  We were doing 240- or 260-kilometre days, back to back – two three-day blocks of that kind – and every day he rode the last hundred kilometres behind the car, which was unmarked to avoid attracting too much attention. Because I didn’t know the roads too well, we did the same hundred kilometres every day. We stopped at the same cafe, had a quick cup of tea and then did the hundred kilometres behind the car, finishing with a big sprint.

  There were no problems with the traffic, apart from one massive run-in with a road-sweeping lorry. We were going along a dead quiet, dead straight road, it was pissing down with rain, and this lorry began sitting half a metre off the back of Cav’s wheel; there we were at a steady sixty-four kilometres per hour, me in the car, Cav a few inches off the back bumper, and this lorry right up his backside. Cav didn’t know he was there, and I was thinking, ‘My God, if Cav hits a pothole or has any problem, this guy will run over him.’ We got to a roundabout and I accelerated away; the lorry came round Cav, cut him up and – boom! – nearly ran him off the road. We then came into a little town where there were some roadworks, so the lorry had to stop. Cav came flying past and began giving the lorry a load of abuse, and this great big driver got out. My dad had come down for a couple of days to watch Cav training, and he is a bit feisty, so he got out of the car and told the lorry driver, ‘You’d better get back in your cab, mate, ’cos you are going nowhere.’ I told Cav he’d better be on his way.

  It was the only hiccup, although the weather was a mixture. There was one day when Cav and Alex were both behind the car and it was chucking it down. The two of them were laughing their heads off, and I was looking at them and chuckling as well. It was really foul, rain bouncing off the tarmac, and they were killing themselves laughing because it was so ridiculously bad. So we had a good time, but Mark did a lot of work. It was a nice set-up: he was at home with his missus, I was just down the road, and we would go and meet Alex at the same time every day, because he knew all the roads. We did similar routes on each ride, so Mark knew what work he was going to be doing. It was just the routine he needed: work hard, rest well, eat well, get up and do the same thing the next day.

  Mark and I had to make quite a big commitment at that point, but my argument was that he should have been doing all that work at the Vuelta. There were a couple of times in Essex when he began asking me, ‘Do I have to do this?’ For example, one day we had split sessions, morning and afternoon, and in the plan he had to do five-minute capacity efforts on the flat – five minutes as hard as you can go – and it was raining. He was supposed to be doing three of them, but he really didn’t want to, so I had to tell him firmly, ‘No, you’ve got to do this work.’ He did them and afterwards thanked me for making him do those efforts. It’s a subtle difference, but there it is: if I had given him a training programme and hadn’t been on the spot, he wouldn’t have done that work. That justified my taking such a big chunk of time away from home. There are times when the riders need that support; you can’t beat that face-to-face contact, and I think that is what Cav always appreciated.

  The Tour of Britain is eight days long; for the first five we had planned that Mark would finish each day’s stage and then ride an hour or an hour and a half back to his hotel behind the car; if it was too far, he would ride for the same length of time and then get in the car, and I would take him to his hotel. We didn’t tell anybody; it was kept really quiet so that Cav’s potential opponents wouldn’t believe anything out of the ordinary was going on. On the first day we didn’t manage it because the weather was foul and Cav won the stage; he had the presentation and everything else to do, and it was really cold, so it felt as if we should just get him to his hotel. We then did three sessions, until a stage in northern England where it was crazily windy and the race was cancelled for the day. Cav got a little bit panicky at that point, saying to me, ‘Bloody hell, should we go out and train?’ My view was that if the wind was that dangerous, he had no option but to stay put. We lost another day there, and we hadn’t planned to do the extra hours on the last three days, but by then it felt as if he’d done enough work. He raced well and won the last stage, a criterium in London on the Sunday, and he won it by coming from miles back in the bunch. I thought, ‘Job done.’

  *

  There were two fundamentals when it came to getting the Worlds right. We had to get the best riders we had to the start line, and we had to get them there in the best shape possible. But there was a host of other factors that might make or break us, aspects of putting a performance together that we’d been looking at since the project first got under way. We’d already laid out plans for how we would communicate with the team during the race. The UCI had ruled that teams had to stop using helmet radios at the world championships and Olympics, so we would have to give the riders basic instructions from the roadside. I had seen the Aussies using a whiteboard with their under-23 teams at the Worlds. I’d been trying to emulate them by holding up bits of A4, but the lads would say they hadn’t seen anything – they were going too fast and the paper was too small. The whiteboard was clearly the way to go. We tried it out at the 2010 Worlds, but we didn’t have the staff in Geelong to do it properly. In Copenhagen we selected the place for the sign carefully. It had to be on a quiet bit of the cours
e, where the riders could see it from a distance. It would be set up about seven or eight kilometres from the finish line, so that if something was happening on the last lap, the team would have time to act. There would be two boards: one with information about the race situation, the other with a brief instruction for them.

  Setting all that up was where Chris White and the performance analysts at the English Institute of Sport came into their own. They needed a television feed and a race radio to get information from, because there was no point in them being stood blind on the side of the road. We had a TV in the team cars, and I had an iPad with a television feed so that if anything went wrong, I could still stream images of the race from the internet. The plan was I would send texts to the guys on the side of the road with any messages that should go up on the board – time gaps between the break and the bunch, and basic instructions – or we would get on the phone. On the day we stopped a couple of times to talk to Chris and his team; if you are at the back of the convoy you’ve got all day for a quick check before heading off again.

  Since Beijing an Olympic Research and Development programme had been running in preparation for London, so we were getting ideas from Chris and Matt Parker, who had moved across to be the head of marginal gains for the Olympics. They developed a skinsuit with material that would be a little bit faster, although for the Worlds we didn’t get the final product that they used in London, but a development one. Cav had quite a few fittings, and he had done a wind-tunnel test that April, just after all the Classics. He had never been in one before, but we were in there for a whole day. It was all about his road bike, nothing to do with time trials, so they looked at his road-bike position, what was aerodynamic and what wasn’t. The session he really loved was a freestyle one, where there is live measurement so you can see precisely what effect everything has because it sends the scale up or down. Cav was trying all sorts of different things: jersey undone, jersey done up, elbows out, elbows in, sprinting position – just playing with it.