“In a race like the Olympics, where there are only three riders in a team, you need riders who are a danger, because otherwise if they attack the teams know it is a pointless move and won’t tire themselves out in reacting. It’s crucial to have people in the team who are not just able to help but who are a threat in their own right because it makes teams work a lot harder.” Next week, when the pair ride a Welsh men’s stage race, the Ras de Cymru, they will be trying to hone those team skills.
With an 11km ascent in each lap, the Beijing road-race circuit will suit a climber such as the 25-year-old Pooley. When she visited last December, the steepness of the climb, and recent snow, meant that at one point she and other athletes had to push their bus. “The view is stunning and there were peasants there digging away the snow, brushing the road. It’s awesome the way it winds up the hill. The only problem for me is that the race finishes at the bottom of the hill not the top.”
Having taken up road racing relatively recently, Pooley admits her achilles heel is the tactical and technical side, summed up by last year’s women’s Tour de France, where she attacked Cooke on the Col du Tourmalet, gained two minutes by the top of the mountain, yet could not hang on. “I was only two and a half minutes behind overall and, if I’d been a better descender, it might have been a different story. I almost looked dangerous for a while. It’s a slow learning process: most racers start when they are juniors and they are naturals at it.”
Pooley was a runner as a schoolgirl and made the transition from triathlon to road racing purely by chance while a student at Cambridge after going out training with the local cycling club. She now combines full-time racing with a PhD in soil engineering at Zurich. If the occasional need for a little flexibility with the demands of her studies is accepted, that is not surprising: her tutor is Sarah Springman, president of the British Triathlon Association.
Whereas most elite British cyclists are full-time athletes, many of them having come through the system from junior level, Pooley is a throwback to the days when bike riders worked or studied alongside their racing. “I have bad races and think I could be in a job that pays a pension but I couldn’t quit now. The problem is, I do have an option and that’s dangerous because you have a get-out clause.”
“There was a time [in 2006] when I wanted to quit and I was persuaded to go on. People tell you your potential and give you a dream of greatness. I can see the potential. I can see races where I do something wrong, a technical thing, but I do OK, so if I can learn those things I will go well. I’m 12th in the world rankings, which is not to be sniffed at but from nowhere to there in a few months is pretty exciting.”
Pooley has yet to discover where her new-found ambition will take her, because her rise has been so rapid. “Until I won the Binda Trophy, every race was a bonus. I should have been happy to come sixth in La Flèche Wallonne, for example, but when you’ve won one World Cup race, you want to keep improving at the same rate.” As the French say, the more you eat, the bigger your appetite, or as she puts it: “The better I do, the more driven I get.”
Pooley is one of the athletes I most like to write about: sparky, driven and fun to interview. At Beijing she was one of the “bolters”, coming from nowhere to take a silver medal in the time-trial, backing that up a couple of years later with a world title at the discipline. She deserves a world road title some time in the next few years.
Romero changes seats in pursuit of history and independence
29 July 2008
When Steve Peters describes the characters of his charges as the Great Britain cycling team’s psychiatrist he likes dog analogies: Chris Hoy the German shepherd, Victoria Pendleton the golden retriever, and so on. Rebecca Romero, double world champion and potential Olympic gold medallist in the 3,000m individual pursuit, would probably be a greyhound – fleet of foot and a bundle of pent-up nervous energy.
Romero does not do yes and no. A question to her is met by a lengthy answer that hints at intense self-analysis. But there is no debate about what is beckoning her this August: a unique place in British sporting history. Already a silver medallist in the quadruple sculls in Athens, Romero could become only the second British athlete to win medals in two different sports at the Games – more significantly, perhaps, the first woman to do so.
The feat has not been achieved since the 1920s, when Paul Radmilovic took medals in swimming and water polo – disciplines which are arguably far more closely related than sitting in a boat and sitting on a bike. There are few doubts that Romero can win gold, particularly among those who watched her take her first 3,000m individual pursuit world cycling title in Manchester in March, when her comprehensive demolition of the American Sarah Hammer in the final was followed by a yell of ecstasy.
Romero says of that title, and her British record of 3min 29.593sec for the distance, that it was “so unexpected, unthinkable, that I wonder if there was an element of luck; I can’t understand how I could possibly achieve this”. It has fallen to her coach, Dan Hunt – a massive influence since she joined the cycling team in 2006 – to remove the doubts, reminding her that “becoming a world champion doesn’t just involve luck”.
With Hunt’s assistance, her progress since moving across from rowing has been way beyond expectations: initially the plan was to spend two years trying merely to qualify for Beijing. By this January the target had been revised: gold or silver. Now only gold will do. For a novice who joined cycling in June 2006, it is amazing progress. Romero did have a cycling background, of sorts, but it was at Pearson Cycles in Sutton. She helped out after school – making tea, taking bikes out of boxes and helping shut up shop. Even then she was a self-starter: the job was taken so that she could buy a bike on account, setting her earnings against the cost.
Had someone been there to channel her talent and drive she might well have been a cyclist from her teens. Instead she entered rowing – again on her own initiative – having looked up the south-west London clubs in the Yellow Pages (she ended up at Kingston rather than Twickenham because the latter was locked up when she paid a visit). Eleven months after starting as a novice in September 1997, she was at the junior world championships.
She describes her experience at the Athens Olympics, where the quad were favourites but managed silver, as “traumatic” and by the time they took the world title in 2005 she wanted out. “I’d been unhappy for the last few years of my rowing career, with the squad system and the way I had to go about being an athlete. Yes, it’s a hard life, there are sacrifices, hard work, but at the end of the day the medal you get should outweigh them. It didn’t.” She sums up: “How are you supposed to eke out the last half a per cent to win a gold medal when you are unhappy and it affects the rest of your life?”
Those who ponder what alchemy it is that should bring a raft of medals to Britain’s Olympic cyclists – if the formbook is anything to go by – need only reflect on Romero’s experience once cycling came calling. “I describe it as moving from school to university. In rowing you were told what to do, you didn’t have independence. When you move to university you’re self-sufficient, you have tutors to guide you, you use their skills and do your own research. Within cycling you are part of the team but also an individual. It’s supportive, you are on equal terms, you have a voice. The athlete is at the top of the hierarchy, a whole structure, a whole staff and support team are there as services for you as an athlete. I’m trusted as an athlete.”
The essential point is that cycling was able to embrace Romero, even though, by her own admission, she is not a person who fits easily into a system. “I’m definitely the person who moves aside from the company where they are working to set up their own business. I’m independent, self-reliant, I aspire to stand on the podium by myself, not diluting my talent. I’d always have preferred to do single sculls rather than a team event. It comes with my personality, wanting to take the different route. Your destiny is in your hands. If you screw up you’ve screwed up for yourself, and if you do it right you g
et the credit.”
The adaptation was not simple. As a rower she knew how to work hard but that was it. She had to learn to pedal a fixed-wheel bike, how to ride around the vertiginous banking of the Manchester velodrome. “When I was trying to do an effort on the track, I wasn’t only trying to give it 100 per cent, it was in a position I wasn’t used to, plus the bike handling. I didn’t have the technique to get it all out. I’d finish an effort saying, ‘That was all I could do but it’s not as fast as I could go’. It was about getting the power out through two little pedals and a muscle-firing speed I wasn’t used to.
“Both are straight endurance sports, so there is a similarity there. You need a big VO2; power. If you take a standard 2km rowing race, it would be six to eight minutes; compared to a pursuit you would sit for the majority of the race just below the red line. With the pursuit you get to speed, get above the red line and hold that. Both hurt in different ways. With a pursuit it’s lungs, breathing; I’m ripped to shreds. In rowing your whole body is affected more. The difference is that in rowing you only have to do what you need to win; the pursuit is a time-trial, so you are racing yourself.”
If others take it for granted that Romero can win a gold medal in Beijing, she is the first to counsel caution. In Manchester she says “all the focus was on the ride-off for a medal and what everyone saw was the final, where Sarah Hammer blew a gasket and I beat her by a long way. But if you take the qualifying times, I was ahead but not by a massive margin”. She believes that the fact that she so dominated the final “skews what people think about my standard compared to the rest of the world. I don’t think I’m in front by a considerable margin. It’s a distance small enough to be clawed back and for someone else to overtake me”.
She is also keen to point out that the race may be changed by the different format of the Olympic Games, where the pursuit takes place over three days, compared with the world championships, where it is over in a single day. “You can look back at the worlds and say historically this person always backs up really well or they die off in the second race. But with three races in three days if you get to the final, someone who might not back up the same day might get better over three days’ racing.”
In Beijing Romero will double up with the women’s points race, largely because there is no one else in the team who is in a position to do it. Her endurance strength will count in her favour – if she can escape the field she will take some catching – but, as she herself admits, she has yet to acquire the tactical sixth sense shown by experts in bunched racing. “I have nothing to lose and that could work in my favour” is her verdict.
If she makes history this August, Romero is unlikely to be satisfied with that. There may already be a faint hint that she can see the limitations of the pursuit when she says “your life is dictated by figures, data, stopwatches. You have magic numbers you work to”. Adding a third sport to her list has certainly crossed her mind.
“I’d definitely be tempted. I want to get to Beijing first but, if I can manage one unique achievement there, I might think about raising the bar a bit more. If the same opportunity happened, as happened in cycling, I could jump at it as a personal challenge. It might have to be a winter sport as I might not be able to wait for another Olympic cycle.” Nordic biathletes and cross-country skiers have been warned.
Romero got her gold medal in the pursuit and made her piece of history, yet another of British Cycling’s breakthrough athletes of 2008. But Beijing was the end of her brief international cycling career. She was unable to find a discipline that suited her when the individual pursuit was dropped and retired at the end of 2010.
Cooke does her homework and gives Britain first gold of Games
11 August 2008
Road racing has never been an exact science and never will be, but the British cycling performance director Dave Brailsford and his team have been working on it and it showed yesterday. When Nicole Cooke sprinted across the line to claim Britain’s first medal of these Olympic Games, it not only marked the pinnacle of the Welsh woman’s eight-year international career but was also the culmination of a meticulous planning process going back more than a year.
That planning went to one extreme that few cyclists have contemplated: a dress rehearsal on the road of the most likely scenario for a sprint finish, so that when Cooke arrived within sight of the line yesterday, she had in effect been through the sprint before. “We were trying to cover all options and we were hoping that exactly that would happen,” said the women’s road-team manager, Julian Winn.
What happened leading to that sprint was the dream scenario evoked in team meetings: a relatively calm race until the field arrived at the two circuits up to the Badaling fortress and down the hill again, a strong attack from Cooke’s team-mate Emma Pooley at the bell to sow confusion in the field and tire out the opposition, and Cooke using her strength and extensive single-day racing experience to execute the coup de grace. That is straight out of most tactical manuals; not so the dress rehearsal of the finish, which was another example of the British cycling team’s determination to leave no stone unturned.
“We did a lead-out on the hill on Thursday, the training day,” said Winn, who was racing himself until only recently. “I led them out, then Emma picked up the tempo, Sharon Laws was on her wheel, so we had already rehearsed that finish. We knew the point, at 200 metres to go, where we wanted Nicole to go. We knew at what point the legs would be getting heavy.”
The only moment of doubt – among those watching at least – came when Cooke emerged from the final corner a few lengths behind her four companions. Like the other British riders she had started the race using lightweight tyres, which they opted not to change when the rain started. The downside was that she could not lean her bike as far as usual on the last bend.
“We wanted to make sure she laid off coming into the final corner, but perhaps not that far,” said Winn. “We were afraid someone might come down in front of her, so we told her to keep to the left. We knew she would chew them up after that.”
There was equal precision in the attack from Pooley that proved the springboard to Cooke’s race-winning move. “The plan was Emma would go three kilometres from the turnstiles on the last lap,” said Winn. “As soon as she came into the road she was to attack as hard as she could to put the Germans on the defensive. It worked. Emma’s attack was fully committed.
“Nicole could watch and wait because the other riders know what Emma can do on her own, so they were thinking, would she ride away or was she bluffing? We felt the Germans were the most dangerous and they were put on the defensive. One was using up all her energy chasing and Trixi Worrack, their best rider, was flapping.”
Critically, the searing chase when the Germans responded to Pooley’s attack left the big favourite, Marianne Vos of the Netherlands, without a team-mate to assist her once Cooke had escaped just over the top of the climb.
In every road race, there is a key moment when the winner has to make an instant commitment or opt to wait, and for Cooke that instant came when she joined the three women – Emma Johansson, Christiane Soeder and Linda Villumsen – who had just begun chasing the Italian Tatiana Guderzo after she escaped at the top of the climb. “I thought, ‘Yes, we can stay away, these girls want to catch Guderzo so whatever happens we’ll be going fast.’ There was no decision, it was just, ‘Yes, this is the time.’”
This first Olympic gold in a road race for the national lottery-funded cycling squad vindicates the creation in May 2007 of “Team Cooke”, an informal group including Brailsford, the psychologist Steve Peters, Winn, the performance manager Shane Sutton, the women’s endurance coach Dan Hunt and the cyclist’s father Tony. “It was like a working group trying to find out the best-case scenarios for getting me to the Olympics,” she explained. “It’s a team effort but it’s not just the riders, the staff and back-up as well.”
One aim was to ensure Cooke had the necessary support on the road, and here the team were helped by
the rise of Pooley in 2007 and the discovery earlier this year of Sharon Laws, who was unlucky to crash twice here. Hence her glowing tributes afterwards to both team-mates.
Another crucial element was Cooke’s willingness to adopt a new structure to her season, over-riding her competitive instincts and opting out of short-term success in lesser races to save her mental and physical energy for this single day. “I had tried the other route, racing all season, but got to major championships without full energy in the tank so why do the same thing if it had been proven not to work?” she said. “But it was a high-risk strategy because I was trying it for the first time. I stuck to the plan and I believed in it.”
Chris Boardman, an individual pursuit gold medallist in 1992, once compared road racing to a lottery, in which a cyclist has only a few chances of taking a winning ticket. The ultimate accolades will rightly go to the gold medallist herself, who showed incisiveness – in itself a sign that physically she was completely on top of matters – and courage exactly when it mattered. However, as she would be the first to admit, “Team Cooke” made the Welsh rider’s chances of pulling out that ticket as good as was humanly possible.
This was one of the key moments in Beijing: the uplifting beginning in the first cycling event of the Games which put GB on a roll. The critical thing, as this report shows, is that nothing was left to chance, either by the team in the immediate build-up, or by the wider “Team Cooke” in the months before the race. Cooke would go on to win the world title in Varese that September, but after that she would struggle to regain the heights of 2008. Winn, for his part, left the GB squad at the end of 2008 and subsequently worked as a directeur sportif at British squad Endura.
Four brush world aside after blood, sweat and tears
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