Racing Hard

by William Fotheringham

  Like Sir Clive Woodward’s long march to Sydney in 2003, the 2011 world road title owed much to one coach and his obsessive hunt for a single goal over several years, with immense attention to every last detail. Cavendish’s mentor, Rod Ellingworth, was the man in the Woodward role, but with a twist. The target is actually more long-term: the London Olympics.

  In September 2008, Ellingworth, a no-nonsense 36-year-old from Lincolnshire, had forged a reputation by building the Great Britain cycling academy when he was asked to come up with a plan to win the road race title in the London Games. Working back from August 2012, he identified the key landmark along the way as Copenhagen, September 2011. It was clear in 2008, after Cavendish had won four stages of the Tour de France, that he would be the leader. “I felt we had the riders, so the question was: how do we do it?” Ellingworth recalls.

  The world road race championship is unique in the cycling calendar in being contested by national selections of riders from trade teams. Cyclists who race against each other all year come together for one day in pursuit of a single goal, which may bring them no immediate benefit: the winner within a national team may be a rider from a different trade squad. Ellingworth identified one key issue from day one: getting the riders to buy in.

  To start with, Ellingworth made a point of getting to know each of the 15 potential team members. “Over dinner or something, I talked through the project, told them what I wanted.” At their first get-together in June 2009, he played them archive footage of Tom Simpson’s road race victory in 1965 then asked the riders: “How are we going to win the rainbow jersey again? What does it take? How are we going to come together as a team?”

  Famously, Simpson’s rainbow jersey was unveiled in front of the team, with a video clip of each of the riders. The message was: you can be part of this. As well as training camps, newsletters kept the riders in touch with each other, outlining performances in the races that decided Great Britain’s place in the world rankings. This in turn dictated how many riders eventually made up the team. In the end, a last-gasp push in the final qualifying event secured an extra two rider places for the team. Those numbers mattered on the day.

  In June this year, at the last training camp, the riders were split into groups and asked to detail what tactics they would use to ensure a bunch sprint would happen for Cavendish. “When I put up the tactical plan on the Friday before the race, it wasn’t my tactic, it was theirs,” Ellingworth says. “That drove the selection: they said they needed these riders, to do this job.”

  The riders were given a DVD of the route in June, and a guide to the entire world championship was issued in August, “in massive detail. The idea was that there should be no excuse for them not to know anything.”

  The experienced David Millar was appointed road captain, with the job of deciding when the team had to begin chasing the day’s escape; another veteran, Jeremy Hunt, was made Cavendish’s personal minder. On each of the 21 laps, when the race hit the one climb, Cavendish would change to a low gear and slip back through the bunch rather than using energy fighting to keep his place; Hunt then guided him back to the head of affairs.

  To keep the riders informed during the race, two boards were displayed in a spot on the course that had been carefully selected. “It was about seven or eight kilometres to go, so that if something was happening on the last lap, they would have time to act if need be. It had to be on a quiet bit of the course, where they could see it from a distance.” One board had information about the race situation, the other a brief instruction.

  Three days before the race, the riders looked over the course as a group, accompanied by Ellingworth on a motorbike, which enabled the coach to discuss the final details with them: lines to take through each corner, which side of traffic islands to ride, narrow sections in the road. “On that Thursday evening Cav said he was super-confident, that he would have to be eighth or 10th out of the last corner, he knew he would have to be let loose from behind the leaders at the end.”

  But if there was one key moment when Ellingworth knew he had succeeded in his mission to pull the team together, it came at the pre-race briefing, when he asked the riders to go through various worst case scenarios. Cavendish said he would be in trouble if he punctured late on, at which Bradley Wiggins replied: “if you puncture at 600m to go, we are all waiting for you.” The message was simple: no one would be racing for himself.

  What of London? Cavendish will again be the team leader, the challenge an even sterner one. “It will be harder to control because the course is so difficult, teams smaller, communication will be harder because the roads on the circuit are narrow, and we don’t know how easy it will be to support the riders.

  “Copenhagen was a box to tick going to London, but a huge box. You wonder if anything can be as big again, but once you’re in that Olympic bubble, it will be huge. It’s a matter of doing it again. We can do it again, I’m sure.”

  Cavendish’s world title was the towering cycling achievement of 2011 and he was justly awarded that Sports Personality trophy. What intrigued here was the way that Ellingworth looked to cover every detail; this was probably his finest hour as a coach after playing that key role setting up the GB academy, and this was certainly the best example of the marginal gains approach being brought to road racing. Note that David Millar makes an appearance; he raced for Great Britain as soon as his ban was finished in 2006 and went on to be an integral part of the team for Copenhagen and the London Olympics. Hunt retired at the end of 2012.

  Kenny and Hoy step up their “beautiful” battle for single Olympic sprint spot

  16 February 2012

  The contest between Jason Kenny and Sir Chris Hoy for the single slot available in the match sprint at the London Olympics is pure sporting soap opera, one subplot following another as each of them pursues the ultimate prize. It is, however, getting increasingly serious as the final goal approaches: this weekend’s World Cup at the Olympic velodrome promises yet more twists in the tale.

  Having the defending Olympic champion and silver medallist competing for one slot “is a beautiful situation to be in”, said the GB head coach, Shane Sutton. The fact that – since the Frenchman Gregory Bauge’s demotion for a doping offence – Kenny is the defending world champion and Hoy the silver medallist merely adds to the lustre.

  It is a rivalry built on a backdrop of co-operation: they are usually room-mates – and are again this week in their Docklands hotel – which is another neat subplot. They are also the key elements in Great Britain’s team sprint, both gold medallists in the discipline in Beijing and now the two men around whom the GB lineup for the three-man, three-lap time-trial is being built.

  Sunday’s sprint tournament on the London velodrome is another chance for the pair to match up: Kenny, after his defeat of Hoy at the Revolution meeting, has reversed the advantage the older man gained in the autumn when the Lancastrian admitted he was “just going rubbish”. Both cyclists are adamant that they try not to pay too much attention to their personal battle.

  “It’s like racing anyone else,” says Kenny, “no different from racing the French boys or the Aussies.” “There are so many riders out there you can’t afford to think about anyone else, that would be detrimental,” says Hoy. Such pressures are actually nothing new to the triple Beijing gold medallist, who has had to fight for his place since his early days in the squad in the 1990s.

  “Power versus speed” is Sutton’s summary. The Great Britain sprint coach, Iain Dyer, describes a battle between a young man with sharper instincts and speed out of the blocks and a more powerful, older athlete. Hoy needs to dominate his opponent through the power and sustained speed he acquired over years of riding the kilometre time-trial; Kenny relies more on tactical awareness, looking for an opening where he can use his ability to change speed in a split-second.

  “Jason has the edge in acceleration,” says Dyer. “The lower the speed they accelerate from, the greater Jason’s advantage – if they are rolling fr
om a higher speed that advantage is annulled. You see a slightly higher top speed from Chris if he runs his own race which is a good weapon. They are both “long” riders – it’s a question of whether Jason’s acceleration can tell in the race or if Chris can get to the top speed he wants to.”

  The added twist is that Kenny – who is exactly 12 years younger than Hoy – is more experienced as a sprinter, having begun as a teenager while Hoy did not begin match sprinting until he was over 30. It might not have looked that way but, as Hoy points out, when he dominated Kenny in the final in Beijing, he was “more of a novice than Jason”.

  “Chris has only recently focused on match sprinting so he has had to do all his learning in a public place at 75km per hour,” says Dyer. “When you are racing at a younger age it all happens more slowly so it’s a different learning environment.”

  Hoy himself has spoken of the need to sharpen up his tactics but the variety of strategies opponents adopt to beat him – notably the attack in the opening yards from the German Robert Forstemann that lost him the second round in the 2010 world championships – is testament to the fact that his skill set is so complete.

  “He is a very strong, dominant physical presence, opponents know that he is fast, “long” and strong in the saddle, they can’t sprint against him as they would against a “normal” sprinter, so they have got to look for a chink in his armour, and so he is on the receiving end of some out-of-the-ordinary tactics,” says Dyer.

  Which of the pair races the sprint in London will be decided by a board of selectors chaired by the performance director, Dave Brailsford, with Sutton and a third party – probably the former professional Keith Reynolds – assisting, in July. “We will probably leave the final selection as late as possible,” said Sutton, conceding, however, that “whoever performs best at the world championships will have his foot in the door. It comes down to evidence. You remove the person from it. You don’t look at the person, you look at the numbers.” Whatever the evidence, it will be a huge call and will go down to the wire.

  KENNY V HOY

  Aug 2008: Hoy beats Kenny in the Olympic final

  Oct 2009: Hoy wins national sprint title in Manchester; Kenny takes bronze

  Mar 2010: Both eliminated in the quarter-finals at the world championships

  Sept 2010: Kenny beats Hoy in the semi-finals at the national championships

  Nov 2010: Hoy loses in the first round at European championships; Kenny takes the bronze medal

  Feb 2011: Kenny beats Hoy in two races at the semi-final at World Cup in Manchester; loses final to Kevin Sireau of France

  Mar 2011: Kenny beats Hoy in semi-final at the world championships in the Netherlands

  Sept 2011: Hoy overcomes Kenny in a semi-final, then beats David Daniell to win national title

  Jan 2012: Kenny beats Hoy in the semi-final at the Revolution meeting in Manchester

  This piece was written in the build-up to the London World Cup in February 2012, which acted as a test event for the Olympic track cycling the following August. The contest between Hoy and Kenny for the single place was a fascinating piece of soap opera, but it also underlined the craziness of having one rider per nation for the sprint and keirin in London. At least one other Frenchman, Briton, German and Australian would have been worthy of a place, meaning that the highest level of competition in sprinting in 2012 was in the world championships in April, which saw the fastest ever qualifying session for any match sprint ever.

  Pride comes after the fall for Pendleton

  7 April 2012

  Sporting rivalries occasionally move beyond the realms of hype into the domain of the sublime and surreal. This was the territory explored in the penultimate episode of the Victoria Pendleton versus Anna Meares saga [in Melbourne], which ended with the Briton taking her sixth world title, regaining the crown she surrendered to the Australian in Holland last year. For once, the pre-race polemic was upstaged by the main event, although among the war of words came this prescient comment from Meares: “All sportspeople push the limits. Sometimes the lines get crossed and the people who make the judgment on that are the commissaires.”

  As a summary of one evening’s race, it is hard to better. Limits were pushed by the Briton, the Australian and the eventual defeated finalist Simona Krupeckaite of Lithuania. Lines were crossed – rarely has the red sprinters lane played such a key role – and the commissaires tried to make sense of it all. Pendleton and Meares have three dates this year: in February in London they turned each other inside out in a three-round epic, round two here left honours even, with the prospect of a grand finale at the “Pringle” in London in August.

  At the start of the evening session, few would have given Pendleton a chance of regaining the title. She had been way behind in qualifying, looked sluggish in her first two rounds but appeared sharper in the quarter-final. History was against her as well: since taking the world title in 2010, Meares had taken their every encounter. In desperation, the coaches opted to increase Pendleton’s gear, hoping she could run Meares long and hard and wear her out. As she sat by the track beforehand, she had the look of a woman waiting for the gallows, lip atremble.

  The first match appeared to be going the way of Meares, who was overhauling Pendleton in the finish straight as the Briton veered to her right, losing control as she made contact with the Australian. Down she went on her right shoulder. “She hit hard, I saw it, I heard it, I felt it,” said Meares.

  Once the Briton had been dusted off and her trackrash seen to, it was on to round two. Again Meares looked in control but as she held off Pendleton on the final banking, she jinked her back wheel upwards, going above the red line that decides whether a sprint is straight or not. Pendleton had to switch upwards to avoid her front wheel colliding with Meares’s rear wheel, and the relegation came. That made it one-all, Meares having thrown away a victory that looked assured.

  Round three was where Pendleton showed sheer bloody-minded grit. Meares had been rattled and showed it with a little kick of the back wheel as she dived at the bell; the Australian attacked, but left just enough of a gap for Pendleton to use her slipstream to inch her way past in the finish straight. “Anna panicked and went for home,” was the summary of the GB head coach, Shane Sutton.

  In the final, Pendleton was up against Krupeckaite, a seasoned campaigner with two world titles to her name but none of the psychological baggage Meares brings with her. She is no bogeywoman and match one went Pendleton’s way. Then came the final twist: a seemingly straightforward victory for Krupeckaite in match two, in which, having swung all the way up the track on the penultimate banking, she was disqualified for veering a little way outside the red on the back straight. Pendleton was warming up for the decider when she was told: the news took a good 10 seconds to register. Cue a sea of tears and a flood of hugs in the British pits.

  Her reward was massive: a sixth match sprint title putting her level with the recordholder, the Russian Galina Tsareva, an amateur of the Brezhnev era. Critically Pendleton goes on to London with what, for this most tortured of riders, might be dangerously close to peace of mind. “It’s the most significant of my titles,” she said. “It’s the last time I will do this, it means as much as my first [title] when I didn’t think I had the ability. It feels weird and iffy to win when you don’t cross the line first, but those are the rules.”

  While Ed Clancy followed up his team pursuit gold of Wednesday with an agonising near-miss – fourth, level on points, decided through countback – in the men’s omnium, and Laura Trott stands a good chance of winning a medal today in the women’s race, that was mere Mills and Boon compared with the blockbuster penned by Pendleton and Meares. The latter summed up: “It is a book that hasn’t finished being written.” Roll on the final chapter. Whatever its conclusion, one thing is certain: Pendleton will leave cycling as a world champion.

  This was one of the most extraordinary sprint contests I’ve ever witnessed, more interesting in my view than the Olympic
final in London. It was fantastic theatre, a reminder of the sheer brilliance of track cycling as a spectator sport. And in its bonkersness – the crash, the disqualifications – it was the perfect curtain-raiser for London.

  Meares braced to snatch the crown from Queen Victoria

  27 July 2012

  Be careful what you wish for. Anna Meares is “really sick” of meeting her perennial rival Victoria Pendleton at the semi-final stage of major competitions and would like to meet her in the Olympic final. That would be the only fitting conclusion to their nine years of shared personal history but it can only happen if Pendleton, usually a slow qualifier, finds the early speed that will guarantee her top seeding. There were indications from the team’s holding camp in Newport that “Queen Victoria” was setting personal best times, pointing to a possible repeat of the Olympic final of 2008.

  The national focus in the run-up to the pair’s last meeting will all be on “Our Vicky”, the British heroine who can bare all for a photoshoot or bare her soul for a television documentary or interview. She has kept little hidden from us in recent years: we know all there is to know of Pendleton, and mostly the British media and fans seem to like it. But what of her great rival? You would have to be a blinkered chauvinist not to appreciate Meares’s qualities as well: professionalism, an epic level of motivation, levelheadedness, and a very definite sense that there is life outside her sport. Pendleton speaks of her longing to discover a world outside cycling; Meares, you sense, has a fair idea of it already.

  The pair’s careers have run in parallel since 2002, when they met in the Commonwealth Games in Manchester and “it hasn’t changed too much since then”. Meares is 28 and took her first major title in 2004, Pendleton is 31 and made her breakthrough a year later. They could, perhaps should, have been friends: at the Stuttgart world championships in 2003, they were sharing a beer when someone spilled a drink on Meares’s jacket. Meares recalls warmly how Pendleton took her downstairs to the lavatory and helped to clean her up “so I could get back up there and have a good night”. Fate has decreed otherwise.