Project Rainbow

by Rod Ellingworth

  That day the Great Britain team was a victim of its own success: when you win so much, people do turn against you – and this was something which had been in the backs of our minds beforehand, though no one had actually said it. It’s not something you can account for: you can’t gamble by not winning races leading up to something big, just to make people think you aren’t in form. We did get some things wrong, though: looking back, the lads started riding at the front too early, and they started riding too fast. I wouldn’t change the tactics, but if we’d been using radios I’d have told the team to hold back a little bit – ‘Easy, easy, there’s a long way to go’ – but they started riding very early in the race. Froomie got it completely wrong by not taking enough drinks on board – and that was something I missed, the simple thing of saying, ‘Guys, look at hydration, how are we going to go about this?’ Cav has a pretty sound nutrition strategy in a race – he feeds every fifteen to twenty minutes – so I took it a little bit for granted with the other guys, and Froomie was completely wasted. He couldn’t even get out of the saddle when he came off the circuit because he’d had only three bottles in all that time. The Olympic-issue skinsuits were quite thick, and that’s one thing I’d change because you get a bit warmer and need more liquid as a result.

  There was a key moment on the last circuit of Box Hill, when Fabian Cancellara went across from the bunch to the front group. Cav went to go with him, but David Millar told him to stop. Dave was road captain, he made the call, and we stand by that, because if Cav had stopped trying to get across and the team had pulled the lead group back, we’d have said, ‘Thank God you told him to stop’; if he’d gone and won, we’d have said, ‘Thank God you went.’ It was Dave’s gut feeling at the time, and you never know whether it was the right call or not. Cav waited, so he must also have felt it was the right thing to do. I think he could have made it to that group with Cancellara, but he still wouldn’t have won, because people weren’t going to ride with him.

  The gap to the break at the top of Box Hill the last time around was forty-three seconds. We’d said that if there was a small group ahead, we could afford to let them have as much as three minutes. It was at this point that we needed another team or two to step in, but the Germans and the Aussies still didn’t really get involved. The Germans tried but they were weak, didn’t have anything in their legs.

  One of the big challenges for the Games was always going to be getting certain individuals on the line as fit as they could be, and we did a pretty good job there. The guys were on fire, they had such good form – and they were totally keyed into it. Bradley Wiggins had just won the Tour de France, and he had the time trial coming up three days after the road race. That had been one of my concerns – how much would Brad buy into it? He still rode hard, all the way to about two kilometres from the line. Ian Stannard rode hard all the way to the finish, even though the race had gone. There was one final thing that didn’t go our way: as Cav came over the line, he came into the pits and said, ‘Feel my front wheel.’ I pressed it and it was soft. He heard it go with about a kilometre and a half to go. He said afterwards, ‘I’m gutted, because I wanted to win the bunch sprint at home – I was determined to do it.’ He wanted to show that if it had come down to a bunch sprint, he’d have pissed it. His words were, ‘It wasn’t meant to be.’

  So physically we got it bang on and tactically we weren’t too far off, but road racing isn’t an exact science – you can’t always predict what the opposition will do. Our five were trying to control 135 others, so part of the strategy was the gamble that other nations would want the same outcome as us – and up until fifty kilometres to go, I thought we were in with a shout. You have to gamble sometimes in a race and hope it falls your way. We didn’t want a formal plan B because that would have diluted things in the riders’ minds. I actually spoke to Dave Millar about a back-up plan, but not to anyone else: if Cav turned round and told Dave he was swinging and couldn’t do it, Dave was to make the call about who would step in and go for it. It wasn’t a plan as such, more just making sure Dave was aware that it was down to him to make that call. Banking on Cav was a risky strategy. Would you have put money on us winning? Not as much as you would have put on Brad in the time trial or the Worlds in Copenhagen or a stage race, where you can have it go against you one day but still have a chance to put it right. But that unpredictability is the beauty of a one-day race.

  The anger and disappointment I felt as I drove back to Foxhills that night made me appreciate all the more what we had achieved in Copenhagen. What makes the Olympics such a fascinating target for most coaches is that you have so few chances to get it right. A Games only comes up once every four years. You get it wrong on that one day, and you have so long to wait before you get the opportunity again. We missed out in London, and perhaps we will never have the same chance again. We applied the same planning that helped us succeed in the past, but it didn’t happen; that was what made me realise what we had achieved at the road Worlds. When you think how far Cav was from winning the Olympics – he wasn’t in the picture, even though so much went right. A few crucial things went wrong, and with hindsight we could probably have done some things differently.

  That could have happened the year before at the Worlds: we could have come second if Matt Goss had had a better run to the finish. There could have been a crash among the first ten riders somewhere on the circuit, leaving us a thirty-second gap to bridge – that could have made all the difference. The only time I did worry in that final kilometre in Copenhagen, the only time when my heart sank a little bit, was as Cav was coming off that last corner. He clashed with somebody; he was on the underneath and he hit them on the outside, and I thought, ‘God, say those pedals had been at the wrong angle, or if the other guy had just moved a little bit differently, or his handlebars had been lower and he and Cav got tangled up with each other – that would have been that.’

  It was the combination of every little thing going right which made that day so special. If the Games is a once-every-four-years chance, Copenhagen could be the kind of opportunity you only get once in ten years – a flat course made for Mark Cavendish. You have got to grasp your chance and go with it, and when it works it is the most special event you can imagine.

  14 : Aiming for the Stars

  I didn’t know exactly what I was expecting in the long term from that bunch of young lads who turned up at the velodrome in Manchester in November 2003. I had an idea in my head of what we wanted: riders capable of winning Olympic medals. At the same time, in the back of my mind was the thought that if those young lads were good enough to win medals, they might also eventually become heroes on the road, winning some big races. But I didn’t have any specific goals for them.

  Once we chose the lads we were going to work with, I did a little bit more homework and began to figure out their characters. I knew Mark would always speak up, but it still took me aback when he said he wanted to be world road race champion one day. I remember standing there and thinking, ‘Bloody hell’, but the one thing I didn’t do was laugh at him. That’s something Cav always says was important: I didn’t react with, ‘What the hell are you talking about?’ – which other people might have done.

  You have to remember the scale of the goal. It is a hell of an ambition from a cycling perspective to say you want to be world road race champion. There was no British model to emulate; we had a few good riders out there on the road, but the best British pros racing the European circuit, such as Sean Yates and Robert Millar in the past, still seemed so far away. There was ambition, though. These lads could see there was something happening in the UK; that is what gave them the belief. As juniors they would go to Europe and race with their chests out, because we were doing well on the track with riders like Chris Hoy, Brad and so on. But there’s a big difference between an Olympic gold medal on the track and being world road race champion. That felt light years away.

  That Mark was aiming so high was unique. Some of the lads around him
had no idea what they wanted to achieve. They were just racing, they were enjoying it, they had done quite well among the juniors and they had been selected for the programme. The goal most of them had was to be an Olympic gold medallist, but Mark wasn’t saying that: he was saying Olympic gold medallist plus world champion, which is quite a difference. I began thinking, ‘Why not?’ It is a Steve Peters principle: don’t aim for the sky, aim for the stars. If you aim really, really high, you may not quite make it, but you will come quite close if you are dedicated enough and have got the ability. That is the kind of thinking behind the foundation of the academy: we were aiming high, but we didn’t know where specifically.

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  It’s a massive question for any coach: how do you respond when a young athlete in the formative stage of his career comes up to you and says he or she wants to be a world champion? In practical terms, if that young rider came to me now, I would start by asking some basic questions, as I did with the academy lads: what does it take to be a world champion? What does it take to win a gold medal? What do the challenges look like? How committed do you have to be? When Mark Cavendish came to me at seventeen and said he wanted to be a world champion, he had already made it into the national team; he had a bit of a pedigree – there was something there. If it had been a seventeen-year-old kid who had never done anything on a bike in his life, it would be a different story.

  Peter Keen came up with a set of criteria, which we went through with the riders, scoring them out of five according to where we thought they were. How dedicated are they? How technically skilled are they? In the world rankings are they in the top ten? Top twenty? How committed are they to our programme? We scored them as coaches and the riders scored themselves, and we examined any discrepancies. For instance, if you asked, ‘How committed do you have to be in order to be an Olympic champion?’ most people would say ten out of ten. In reality it is about eight or nine out of ten, because you can be too committed for your own good. If it is icy out on the roads and you go out, fall and break your arm, your dedication has worked against you. You have got to be committed enough to get the work done, without going over the top. You need a lifestyle balance, and if someone doesn’t have that, then potentially they might not make it.

  What mattered was the difference between the scores: if the coaches put eight and the rider put ten, that was a model for discussion and you came to an agreement about what needed to be done. The classic example would be the Madison, where in terms of technical skills you might score a rider five, and they might give themselves a score of nine. You would say, ‘We don’t see what you are seeing,’ and then you work from there. I used that as a tool with the young lads and did it every year at the academy, just a general discussion and a list of everything it takes to be the person you are aiming to be: they would say you have got to have endurance, you have got to be able to go fast, your health has got to be good … the list is endless.

  Those questions lead you to the stepping stones that the rider needs to follow. You have to get them to identify where they need to be for their age group. For instance, a junior cyclist can’t be expected to have the endurance they need to win an Olympic gold medal, but you can expect them to have the stamina appropriate for that age group. If there are twenty grades of endurance that take you to Olympic-medal standard, being a junior you might only get up to block four, with another sixteen to go. This is where commitment and discipline come in: those qualities don’t change whether you are eighteen or twenty-nine. You would also look at endurance, technical skills, tactical awareness and the ability to be part of a team. For example, Mark scored highly in tactical awareness but super-low on endurance; he was also quite disorganised. He was working out a lot of his bike racing on his own; he didn’t have a lot of guidance. I said to him, ‘I really don’t care about your cycling – your commitment to that is a given – but your life around it is what we are going to work on.’ I had exactly the same conversation at the start of 2013 with Joe Dombrowski, the American rider at Sky.

  That was where the academy set-up made the difference: if those young riders had been living at home and coming into the velodrome for blocks of training, we would never have tackled their lifestyle in the same way. I am not saying Mark would never have made it as a pro without the academy, but I would agree with what he has said: it would have taken him longer to make that step up.

  Another key thing is that even though a rider is just seventeen and seems like a young kid, they are still legally old enough to have a child and get married, and drive a car. A lot of people forget that. You have to listen to them. A lot of people feel that because those athletes are younger, you can make them do it in a certain way, but in fact that is what had been happening with Cav throughout his time as a junior: nobody was listening to him and he didn’t fit the model everyone had adopted. What mattered to me was how I was going to get the best out of them, and you do that by listening to them. Some of what you hear you might throw away, but you might not want to make it clear that that was the case.

  I got the balance right with those riders at the academy, but I don’t think I realised what I was actually doing. I knew what I was aiming for, but I was shooting in the dark a little bit. No one told me I should have those formal sit-down sessions, that it would gain me their confidence, but that moved us a long way forwards. The riders felt that they had an opportunity to tell me about their frustrations. You have got to build trust.

  Working with Steve Peters made me realise how different people are, and how you need to deal with that. You have to speak to them individually and listen to them individually. It’s just a matter of using those little techniques Steve taught me: for example, ask the quiet one first, because your Mark Cavendishes will always speak up. If you just say, ‘Who wants to tell us how we could do that better?’ then Mark will always say what he thinks, whereas Ian Stannard or Geraint Thomas wouldn’t say a great deal. If you ask them directly, however, they might come in with better answers.

  You have to give some people time. They all think and react at different speeds. If you ask a group of cyclists, ‘How are you going to win this race?’ there are those, like Mark, who will tell you straight away, ‘I am going to do this, I am going to attack the bunch here and I need to wait here,’ while there are some who will panic and won’t be able to answer immediately. But if you say to them, ‘How do you win this race? Come back to me by tomorrow morning,’ they will come back with really good answers.

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  Once you’ve gone through what it takes, it’s a matter of ‘Let’s get out there and ride a bike.’ That classic one with Mark was: ‘You’re unfit. You got dropped up Gun Hill, you’re unfit at the “Go Till You Blow” session on the track, you get dropped at track league’ – Cav was getting shot out the back in the first week of track league in Manchester – ‘so you know what you have to do: keep riding your bike to get fitter, and we are going to concentrate on getting you organised and ready to race.’ It’s about being patient; young athletes take things on at different times. It would have been so easy to get rid of Mark, but you could see from a very early age that if you just got him fit enough, he’d win bike races. That has been the essence of his career: get him into shape, get him to the start line, and he will win. In a way, it’s pretty simple with him, whereas if you take a rider like Peter Kennaugh, who is more endurance-orientated and better suited to stage races, it is a much longer process for them to start winning. Sprinters like Cav tend to start winning early because it is easy for them to win races compared to the slower guys.

  Many coaches skip around unpleasant realities because they’re not nice conversations to have, but one of the things I talked to Cav about early on was that as a professional cyclist he would have to get used to riding around in the back group in order to survive in a stage race. There was no point hiding from it. In the last couple of years I’ve watched him at the top of the climbs in the Tour; he is quite often the last one to the top and he always looks in a r
ight state when he gets there, and then he has to chase like mad to get onto the group. I think to myself, ‘I taught him that when he was at the academy at eighteen.’ I felt you had to say, ‘Right, what are your challenges?’ Mark is never, ever going to climb the Galibier in the front group, so you may as well prepare him for that as a young lad.

  It’s about telling people exactly what they are facing and not skirting around any issues. Cav once said to me that one thing I always did was to paint quite a dark picture first, and then it gets better. Some people might see that as a bit of a negative attitude, but it’s similar to being highly disciplined with the riders at first, then backing off. Things get better, not worse. You show them exactly what is in front of them in the bike race – ‘These are the most dangerous things that can happen, these are the hardest parts’ – and then you move on to the good points.

  The lessons I learnt at the academy and while guiding Mark to that rainbow jersey can be translated across to most other team sports and to groups working towards any goal. In any team sport the key aspect is bringing the team together and creating that understanding between the athletes; they need to have a single mindset. It’s a matter of goal-setting and identifying the challenges. I remember doing a team-building exercise with Steve Peters and the lads at the academy in which we were given a scenario and split into two groups. The group I was in was up in the mountains in Norway; we’d got stuck, we had a certain amount of equipment and we had to figure out what was going to get in our way as we tried to get down.