19 August 2008
Amid the talk of aerodynamic skinsuits, superbikes and performance analysts, the human dimension in Britain’s triumph on the velodrome should never be overlooked. “They have bled for this for two years,” said the 4,000m pursuit coach, Matt Parker, after his proteges Bradley Wiggins, Geraint Thomas, Paul Manning and Ed Clancy had pulverised their own world-record time to take the British cyclists’ gold medal total to six.
Parker revealed the work in January in Mallorca that led to these results: six months out from the Games the team pursuit riders were already training over the island’s mountains for seven hours a day at a blistering pace, including a combination of the standing starts that begin a pursuit and lung-bursting extended efforts at huge intensity up the toughest Mallorquin mountain pass, Sa Calobra.
Back then it was sobering to find out that they were training in a way that would daunt Tour de France professionals. Yesterday it made perfect sense when they gained the high point of all the peaks attained in the 10 days since Nicole Cooke sprinted across the line to win the women’s road race. It surpassed, by a whisker, the team sprinters’ demolition of the world fastest time for three 250m laps that opened Britain’s track medal-fest.
Forty-eight hours earlier their 3min 55sec ride in the first round had opened a dramatic prospect but the ensuing British time of 3:53.314 took this event into a new dimension in the same way that Michael Johnson shattered the 200m and 400m times in Atlanta or Bob Beamon took long jumping to a new level in 1968.
This was perfection: rarely more than a few inches between the wheels, each change impeccably timed and in the final kilometre the prospect of catching the Danes to spur the quartet on. They ended up ignoring the schedule and deciding to blast for the record, on the strength of a few barely audible shouted instructions as they rode. As they took their gold medals, there was a moment of reflection for Wiggins and Manning, both bronze medallists in the discipline in Sydney and silver medallists in Athens.
“We were saying what an eight years it’s been,” said Wiggins. “We spent a few years going nowhere, cruising about the 4min barrier, then Shane Sutton came along and gave us a bit of a kick up the arse, the two kids [Clancy and Thomas] came along and added impetus. They don’t seem to know what fear is. They will lap it up until Christmas.”
Those who wonder why the British are so successful should ponder this: the quartet’s training programme began in October 2006. According to Parker, the turning point came at the World Cup in Manchester in February 2007 when Wiggins, Clancy, Manning and Rob Hayles broke the 4min barrier once and would have done so twice had they not been impeded in the final as they caught the Russians. “We deliberately tried to go under 4min twice on the same day which had never been done before and that instilled confidence in the youngsters like Ed and Gee.”
Beijing was a Games of defining cycling performances and this was one of the highlights among those, taking the team pursuit into a new dimension and opening the prospect of a sub-3min50sec ride. In January I had spent a day with Parker following Wiggins and company in the team car as they prepared in Majorca: it sounds simplistic but I was stunned by how hard they trained, given that the main event was seven months away. Clancy and Thomas repeated their gold medal and world record four years later in London. Manning retired after Beijing and went on to train the women’s trio to the world record and gold medal at the 2012 world championships and Olympics. Parker’s next move was to mastermind Wiggins’s transformation into a Tour de France star, before becoming “head of marginal gains” in the run up to London. After those Games he joined the Rugby Football Union as No 2 to the England coach Stuart Lancaster.
Impenetrable Hoy joins greats after sprinting to third gold
20 August 2008
For the second time in three days, Great Britain’s track cycling coaches had to deal with a conundrum thrown up by their team’s dominance: two riders in a major final. This was the most prestigious title on the track, the men’s sprint, the blue riband of track cycling because of its tradition going back to the 1896 Games, in which Chris Hoy was bidding to become one of Britain’s greatest Olympians by winning a third gold medal in a single Games.
Hoy’s victory ahead of his own team-mate, Jason Kenny, crowned an unmatched day for British sprinting with the women’s title going to Victoria Pendleton, but behind the win was an intriguing piece of man-management. In the one corner an athlete at the peak of his powers, on the brink of making history, in the other a thrusting youngster in Kenny, one of the surprise packages of the five days racing here. A delicate situation, which might have had lengthy ramifications had it been wrongly handled, if one man felt he had been favoured over the other.
“From now on, they are not allowed to talk to any of the coaches, they can give them time checks in the countdown to when they are ready to roll, and that’s it,” said the team’s performance manager, Shane Sutton, after the two men had won into the final, Hoy by beating the Frenchman Mickael Bourgain, Kenny with a straight-rides win in his semi-final against the German Maximilian Levy.
“We’ll let them race. There will be a handshake before they start and we will let them go. There will be no camps, no sides,” said the sprint coach Ian Dyer. When the time came to choose who pushed off which rider in the final, Dyer and the tactics coach Jan Van Eijden changed over between the two rides so there could be no accusation of favouritism.
“That was the fairest way to do it, because one of them could have said to me, ‘oh Jason’s riding this gear’ or something,” said Hoy. “It was very clear they wanted to be level and fair. It was difficult because normally you have a chat about how are you going to beat this guy and we were on our own this time.”
Kenny said: “It was exactly the same in one way. You have a plan and a plan B. But you get used to being told what this guy is going to do, so about 10 minutes before the race it was like ‘what I am going to do?’ So you have to think about it, and you think ‘I have ridden a couple of these races in the past.’ You just try to do the basic things right.”
The youngster was British under-16 champion four years ago this week and is a product of the SportCity Velo cycling club, based at the Manchester velodrome. He proved Hoy’s doughtiest opponent after showing astonishing bike handling ability during his first semi-final round against Levy.
His first-round gambit was an early jump which forced Hoy to respond with a lap and a half remaining, while in the second round he attacked at the bell and they raced shoulder to shoulder into the finish straight. Hoy was a clear winner, and he subsided in tears in the arms of his father before he joined Kenny and Pendleton in a clinch in the track centre.
Hoy seems impenetrable, as solid as the Mount in his native Edinburgh, but the emotion finally got to him. “From the outside, it looks as if you are all calm and everything is great but there’s always doubts you have. You try to push them out and focus on the job you have to do. I didn’t think about three gold medals, not even today. I wasn’t thinking about that. I was thinking purely about the sprint itself, the technical elements because if you break it down, it takes care of itself.”
Of all the British track cyclists, only Hoy and Bradley Wiggins had competed on all five days and the Scot had come through with a perfect performance, unbeaten in every round. For a man in only his second major sprint championship – the first earned him a world title in Manchester – it was a supreme effort.
“You’re drained mentally but we prepared ourselves for this,” said Hoy. “We knew it was a five-day event not just two or three like a World Cup. I’ve trained hard on my recovery, a lot of hard efforts with short recovery time. It’s paid off. Psychologically you know you have it when you come to the tough bits.”
Hoy’s motivation and his ability to think forward can appear superhuman at times. Within an hour of the national anthem playing, with three gold medals hanging around his neck from one Games, he declared he was already thinking of the next, in London.
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p; Kenny, and others, will push him all the way. He says he may, if all goes smoothly, finish his career at the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow in 2014 and if there is any justice in the world by then he will be at the head of a train of young Scottish sprinters who see him as a role model.
But the key to this win may be in his thoughts on the one key factor that made the difference between him and the others here. “The Olympics. The gold medal, that’s the factor. If it wasn’t for the Olympics, probably after the kilometre was dropped I’d have thought that’s it. It’s the desire to rekindle that feeling of what it is to be Olympic champion, it wouldn’t matter if it was in the team sprint, or the keirin, table tennis, volleyball. I’d do any sport for that.”
Another day, another defining moment, another national hero breaks through. My prediction that Kenny would push Hoy all the way to London was prescient if not exactly the toughest call ever.
Pendleton masters the waiting game of nerves and will
20 August 2008
There are hidden depths to Victoria Pendleton’s bubbly girl-next-door persona. After she crossed the line in the second leg of her final against Anna Meares, taking the title that has been her sole goal since 2004, she said something to herself while whizzing round the banking, before lifting her arms in triumph. She could not recall what the words were, “and I don’t think I could repeat them if I did remember”.
The Queen of British track racing might have said something not totally regal but that was understandable. Pendleton is an utterly driven athlete who had this one single chance to take a gold medal – unlike Chris Hoy, who at least had two back-up events if he slipped up in one – and she had to keep her patience until the final hour of the final day before her moment came. Not surprisingly, later on, she was overwhelmed, to the extent that she could not distinguish one ride from another when looking back.
That barely mattered: they were all perfect. She was never truly threatened, not because the opposition were not up to the task but because she was in total control of each round from the moment on Sunday when she qualified in an Olympic record time. A cast-iron will to dominate is the key element in a successful match sprinter and Pendleton has developed that since her inglorious exit in Athens when by her own admission her mind simply was not strong enough.
What is astonishing with Pendleton is the difference between her clinical racing style and her regular admissions that she is a bag of nerves. The man who has enabled her to master her emotions at the times that matter is the team psychiatrist, Steve Peters, the key to her success she said yesterday: “The psychology of what drives me as a person has been essential, getting everything in perspective, getting me in the right mind-frame. My expectations were too high. I was beating myself up psychologically at every moment. It was knocking me back.”
“Just one more ride,” whispered Peters to Pendleton before she set off to face Anna Meares of Australia in the second of the two rounds. It was straightforward: a jump down the penultimate banking to take the lead going down the back straight, the definitive acceleration down the straight, a narrow lead on the final banking and a chasm between the two of them by the line. A few laps warm down and she collapsed into the arms of the tactics coach, Jan van Eijden, the man who takes her round the velodrome in Manchester with an elbow in the ribs here and a shoulder barge there to get her used to the physical stuff.
The emotion was understandable. Pendleton had to endure a nerve-jangling two days before she even took to the track. No wonder she said that once she had the gold medal around her neck, she felt “like I’ve been waiting for ever”. Asked how she spent the wait, she replied: “I painted my nails a few times, watched the TV, struggled to find something to eat because obviously you haven’t much of an appetite, went on the rollers, just biding my time. It was very tough, harder than I anticipated, especially with the success of the team. On some days I was very emotional in a good way because it’s good to see your team win and it was awesome to see my team-mates win.
“The pressure was mounting because I wanted to do what they’ve done and win a medal. It was important to be part of that. This week, watching the guys perform gave me some experience of what it must be like being a parent. I was a mess watching them and there was nothing I could do because they were on TV. I was like ‘woh, is that how my mum and dad feel, because that is awful’ and I felt quite guilty. How dare I inflict that on someone else?”
Afterwards Pendleton thanked her coaches, including one man who is not here, the English Institute of Sport weight training coach, Mark Simpson, “for kicking my arse” during the process that has put muscle on her slender shoulders. Her sessions under Simpson’s watchful eye in the gym in the Manchester velodrome are so intense they can be almost painful to watch but the punishment paid off last night.
On the day that her team-mate and “hero” Hoy became a triple gold medal-winning legend, it should be pointed out that no one will ever know whether or not Pendleton might have been capable of something similar because the cycling powers that be and the International Olympic Committee has deprived her and her fellow women of the chance to do so. The disparity between women’s and men’s track events – seven to three – is grotesque in what passes for an age of equality. Pendleton will still be racing in London assuming the younger generation have not elbowed her out and it is to be hoped that by then she will have more than a single medal to go for.
Just over a year later the UCI and IOC brought in wide-ranging changes to the track programme for London which while getting rid of the bulk of the endurance races – Madison, points, individual pursuit – did at least achieve parity.
10. THE ACADEMY
The academy: Blood, sweat & gears
Cycling in Tuscany may sound fun, but for a new generation of British road racers it is the ultimate boot camp. Can the GB academy produce a Tour de France winner?
Observer Sport Monthly
20 September 2009
If a single image is worth a thousand words, Peter Kennaugh’s mural of cycling photos speaks volumes: picture on picture on picture, all lovingly snipped from magazines and Blu-Tacked on the wall of a bedroom in a modest villa in the Tuscan town of Quarrata. The mural is higher than Kennaugh’s head, extending most of the way up the wall opposite the single beds belonging to the Manx 20-year-old and his room-mate Luke Rowe, both aspiring professionals in the Great Britain under-23 academy.
The message is obvious. On waking every morning, Kennaugh and Rowe lift their heads and see Mark Cavendish, Eddy Merckx, Roger de Vlaeminck, Mario Cipollini and other greats, arms spread in victory at the finish lines of one-day classics, world championships and Tour de France stages, faces grimacing in pain or grinning in triumph. It is a constant reminder of their mission and that of the six other young cyclists in this house: to join the biggest names in road racing and match them if possible.
Britain has no tradition of road racing: until the prolific sprinter Cavendish came along, it was incredibly rare for a Briton to win a professional event. There had been talented individuals – Tom Simpson, Robert Millar, Chris Boardman and Dave Millar – but there was no consistency and no recognised pathway to follow. The academy aimed to change that by using the philosophy that has led GB to Olympic domination in track cycling. Cavendish (2004–6) is the most successful alumnus, with 10 stage wins in the past two editions of the Tour de France and victory in the Milan–San Remo one-day Classic in March.
The house in Via Madonna is the interface between the no-stone-unturned philosophy that guided Britain’s track cyclists to seven gold medals in Beijing and the professional road cycling world. The young riders here race for Great Britain on the track, focusing on endurance events such as the individual and team pursuits and Madison, with the European under-23 championship as their main goal. In summer, they race the international under-23 road calendar, which is largely based in Italy, and culminates in the world championship next weekend in Switzerland.
Each year, the best under-23s i
n the world are snapped up by pro teams. Of the 13 Britons who have been through the academy since its foundation in January 2004, six are now professionals. It is a remarkable hit rate. The academy’s success has also inspired Britain’s Olympic coaches, led by performance director Dave Brailsford, to persuade Sky to sponsor a British-based professional team aiming at the Tour de France. Announcing the TV company’s five-year backing of 25–30 cyclists, at an estimated £35m – probably the richest deal in pro cycling in these straitened times – Brailsford said: “I’m convinced we have a core group [of Britons] who can perform at the highest level. You look at the academy, some of the guys coming through, and the youngsters behind them, and you can be confident they will develop into world-class road cyclists.”
One of the first riders to be signed up for Team Sky was Kennaugh, a dark-haired, intense youth, winner of two major Italian under-23 events in 2008. Other riders in the first intake included academy graduates Geraint Thomas and Ian Stannard. A racer since he was 10, Kennaugh says: “This is all I know. My aim has always been to turn pro, but I have to repeat what I did last year, and that’s the tough thing.” It may seem curious to have a lottery-funded programme to produce young cyclists who can race in the Tour de France for commercial sponsors but it is not without patriotic benefits. The toughest professional races just happen to be the best way for a pursuiter – team or individual – to gain the fitness needed to win an Olympic gold, as Giro and Tour regulars Bradley Wiggins and Geraint Thomas showed in Beijing.
“The academy is key to the future success of British cyclists on the professional road scene,” says Rod Ellingworth, the coach behind the concept and still Cavendish’s mentor. “It means that the British riders turning pro are of a certain quality. The feedback from teams who take our riders is that the British new pros aren’t having to learn basics, which matters, because as pros, they are left on their own.” Brailsford is certain British cycling can produce a potential Tour de France winner in the next five years.
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