The coaches looked at each other. Rod later told me that the precise words flashing through his head at this point were 'What the fuck have we got here?'
The joy of six. Somehow, I don't think whoever coined that phrase was thinking of us at the time. The least you could say about us was that we would have made interesting raw material for a sociological experiment: me and Brammy – the scallies and wannabe alpha-males; Bruce Edgar from Cambridge – big, dopey Bruce, a domestic disaster area but smooth as silk on a bike; Varley, my old training partner from the Isle of Man who'd got a place after all; Tom White – decent rider but a bit of an outsider by virtue of the fact that he'd grown up in a plush area of south London, while most of us were from the North; and then redhead Ed Clancy, who sometimes seemed to have come from another planet and had the extraterrestrial strength to match, but had actually grown up in Holmfirth in Yorkshire. It was the kind of line-up that the producers of Big Brother would probably have rejected on the grounds that the mix was too volatile.
For us there was no secret location, no diary room, just two, fairly ordinary houses – one in Fallowfield, a nice end-terrace, but in a rough area – and one a semi near the university campus, near a lot of the popular student bars and restaurants. I wanted to live with Brammy, but the coaches weren't stupid; the British Cycling Federation Performance Director Dave Brailsford said that he was going to allocate the houses, and we could draw lots for the rooms. One scally per household was apparently the limit: I ended up in Fallowfield with Bruce Edgar and Ed Clancy, while Brammeier was kept at a safe distance, a couple of miles away, with Varley and Tom White.
In that first year of the Academy, we would learn a hell of a lot about bike-racing, but more about ourselves and, I suppose, even more about life in general. We'd all been living at home up until then, and, for all my supposed tidiness, I'm the first one to admit that I'd happily leave my plate on the table for my mum to clean up. When we joined the Academy, though, I knew straight away that no one would do that for us, and I couldn't figure out why some of the others didn't get it. The concept of basic hygiene seemed totally alien to Ed and Bruce.
One of the questions you're often asked as a professional sportsman is whether you feel you've 'missed out' on being a student. Boozing, drug-taking, living in a crappy single room in a tower block they like to call a 'Hall of Residence' – I don't exactly know what it is that you're supposed to have 'missed out' on, but that's what everyone seems to think.
If university life was about booze and drugs and skipping lectures then, yeah, I'd missed out. If it was about having a laugh and living with two mates who cooked bad food and turned the place into a shithole on a daily basis then, no, I think life with Bruce and Ed was a fairly decent substitute.
Five years on, someone might look back on those first few weeks we spent at the Academy and see them as a landmark in the all-conquering recent history of the British Cycling Federation, but to us they were just the equivalent of your average eighteen-year-old's first term at university – right down to the shopping trips to IKEA to buy cheap furniture. In the past, any British youngster who aspired to turn pro had relied on contacts and their own initiative; they'd had to overcome homesickness, loneliness and often a language barrier, not to mention the bias foreign teams usually show towards their own riders. A few, really resilient souls had even made it, but they'd done so in spite of, rather than because of, the system. Or perhaps not – because according to one school of thought, the likes of Sean Yates, Robert Millar and Graham Jones had arrived then thrived on the continent because the very lack of any formal support was the best possible quality control – 'naturally selecting' only those with the requisite physical and mental toughness.
Rod might tell you that I would have made it even without the Academy. That's certainly my view, but then I'm also the first one to admit that, if the Academy was a kind of Top Gun for the best young cyclists in Britain, then the memorable quote directed at Tom Cruise's character 'Maverick' – 'Your ego's writing cheques your body can't cash' – was equally applicable to a certain Mark Cavendish.
ONE DAY from those first few weeks in Manchester will forever be lodged in my memory and Rod's. It must have been the end of February or beginning of March – a typical, damp, cold, late winter's day. We set off towards the Peak District – the six of us, with Rod following in the car – and soon, the first climb had claimed its first casualty. Whoever named that narrow, gnarly stairway to my private hell at least had a sense of humour, because they'd called it Gun Hill, and I was shot straight out of the back.
To someone who's never raced bikes, it's hard to convey the agony of blowing up on a climb, compounded by the horror of seeing your opponents or – even worse – your mates, disappearing up the road. Just take my word for it when I say that there aren't many more humbling experiences. The climb can't have been more than a mile or so long – maybe three minutes of riding in normal circumstances – but I later realised that Rod had told the others to stop waiting and press on at the top because he was worried they'd catch cold. I finally lurched up the last ramp, zigzagging from one side of the road to the other to take some of the sting out of the gradient, maroon-faced, wheezing like a dodgy exhaust. I noticed Rod's car parked up on the side of the road, made one final lunge to grab the back bumper and in doing so toppled sideways into the grass verge. The car door swung open. Rod walked round the side of the car and found me sprawled on the tarmac, pity in his eyes and tears in mine.
'I'm so sorry Rod,' I blubbed. 'I'm trying my best but I'm not getting any better. I don't know what I can do. I'm so sorry. I won't let you down. I promise I won't let you down. I'm so sorry ...'
Most, even experienced coaches wouldn't have known how to respond, but Rod's a master psychologist – cycling's answer to Brian Clough. Now, as I sat weeping, he knew exactly what to say and how to say it. 'What are you doing to improve? Riding your bike, and sticking to a good routine? Okay, you're already doing that, so there's no need to apologise,' he urged. 'Just stick at it and eventually it'll come. Now get back on your bike and let's carry on working ...'
Revived by the pep-talk, I somehow finished the ride that day and, sure enough, within a couple of weeks, without my even noticing, my body had started to undergo a slow, subtle transformation. The first big race of the season was over Easter weekend – the Girvan, a three-day stage race up in south-west Scotland with bags of history and all of the top UK-based pros competing. In theory, all of the Academy lads were eligible to ride for the main Great Britain national team, but in practice only Varley was picked. Brammy, Bruce and I were farmed out to what was effectively the Great Britain 'B' team, sponsored by Persil.
Five kilometres into the first stage, I went for an intermediate sprint prize – basically a race within a race, with the first three over the line getting a few quid in prize money and points towards the sprint or points jersey. I crossed the line first and after a few seconds instinctively looked around and saw a group starting to form behind me, and behind them, a widening gap to the main field. That was the last we'd see of them all day.
I was dropped on every climb and clawed my way back on every descent, the last of which came down within a few kilometres of the finish. My chain in my biggest gear, my legs and lungs screaming, I wove my way through the following team cars and on to the back of the breakaway group with about five kilometres to go. I was just catching my breath when one of the riders on the main GB team, Tony Gibb, rode alongside me; he said he wanted me to lead him out in the sprint.
It was my first big race since joining the Academy, so I didn't protest. Instead, I moved up the side of the group with around two kilometres to go and starting cranking up the pace, ready to launch Gibby around 250 metres from the line. I kept pushing, accelerating, and waiting for someone or something to appear out of the corner of my eye ... except they never did. I raised my arms as I crossed the line, half in jubilation, half in confusion. It took a few seconds to register: I'd only gone and bloo
dy won.
I couldn't keep the leader's jersey over the next two days, but that didn't matter. Those dark days in February and March, the doubts and the question marks, had been banished in one afternoon. Well, almost. Our next big race was also our first on the continent – the deceptively leisurely-sounding Triptyque des Monts et Châteaux in southern Belgium. I was like the proverbial kid in the candy shop; I hadn't been a big one for heroes and idols growing up, but one guy who had inspired me was the Belgian Johan Museeuw, who'd forged his reputation on the kind of bone-jangling, teeth-chattering cobbled roads that we rode in training in the couple of days leading up to the race. It was my first time on the legendary 'pavé' or cobbles – and even on a gentle training ride, the fearsome, fang-like stones were also my cue to unleash hell. Behind, in the team-car, a different coach or team manager might have wondered why I was wasting energy in a training session; instead, Rod told me later, he'd just turned to the mechanic in the car and chuckled, 'I bloody knew Cavendish would attack there ...'
There was precious little to laugh about over the next few days, at least not at the time. 'Baptism of fire' hardly did it justice. On the first stage, half of the peloton came down on wet tram tracks; I avoided those but promptly wiped out into a trailer on the left-hand side of the road a few kilometres later. Typical Bruce, when he noticed me lying half dead in the gutter as he shot past at 50 kilometres an hour, he looked half appalled, half excited to see me. 'How are you, Cav?' were, I think, his exact words.
I eventually staggered to my feet, climbed back on my bike, and started grinding on the pedals. My arm was in such pain that I couldn't hold the handlebars, couldn't brake, yet I was still catching people. One of the stragglers looked like Bruce – well, if you could imagine what Bruce would look like after he'd been eaten by a shark. There was blood and lycra everywhere. We later found out that a lorry had pulled out on to the course, Bruce had swerved into a ditch to avoid it and ended up scraping his whole body and bike along a barbed-wire fence. When the other Academy lads and I tell that story now, we piss ourselves laughing. At the time it was anything but comic.
I was the one who'd actually end up worst off. Rod took me to the hospital for X-rays that night and it turned out I had a badly bruised collarbone. I looked dolefully at Rod; the next day was the cobblestones. I couldn't lift my arm, but I told him I wanted to ride. He was probably half delighted that I was determined, and half resigned to the fact that it was pointless arguing. He said I could ride.
We were like the Andrex puppies – bouncing left and right, falling down, getting up and going back for more. The next day it was Ed. I'd started the stage with my shoulder strapped and just trying to stay out of trouble, which was what I was doing, tucked in behind Ed's wheel, until suddenly I saw Ed stubbing his foot on someone else's pedal crank, his bike go flying, his head plunge towards the road, his glasses smash and, finally, the side of his face sandpapering along the tarmac. It was horrific. If the previous day Bruce looked as though he'd spent the afternoon on the set of Jaws, the way Ed was walking down the road now, dragging his bike behind him, staring into space, half of his cheek hanging off, he was like Mel Gibson in The Man without a Face, or the Phantom of the Opera minus the mask. 'What am I doing? Why am I here ...?' he kept saying.
We were shockingly out of our depth. The Dutch equivalent of our Academy, the Rabobank Under 23 team, were cleaning up, and there we were in the last stage, reduced to me and Matt Brammeier. That day, both of us were dropped and in the back group, the so-called gruppetto, yet Rod still wanted us pulling on the front. The foreigners couldn't fathom it; usually, in cycle racing, there has to be a sound tactical reason for using up valuable energy and leading a chase, but Rod wanted to see us competing and fighting, purely for the experience. When the Belgians began ranting at us, Matt and I shrugged and gestured in the general direction of Rod in our team car. Rod later told us that one or two of the Belgies had ridden alongside the driver's door and started tapping on the window, mouthing insults in English. Cool as you like, Rod had wound down the window. 'Oh, you understand English, then? In that case, you'll understand this: fuck off!'
I loved that about Rod: he was always the first to defend us if someone was trying to intimidate us. And he was equally quick to let us know when we weren't keeping our part of the bargain. There was a good example one day on that trip, after the Triptyque des Monts et Châteaux, when Rod told us we could have an 'easy' training day and 'only' do three hours with a café stop near the end of the ride. He trusted us, so he was going to stay at the hotel and get on with some work. Our mistake, or rather Brammeier's, was bringing his digital camera to the dinner table that night and showing the lads some of our snaps from earlier in the day. Rod happened to catch a glimpse of one of the photos. Straight away, I could see his expression changing.
'Er, lads, did I say three hours with a café at the end of the ride?' he asked. 'I did, okay? And did you tell me when you got back today that's what you'd done? Right, so why, in this photo, are you sitting drinking coffee in the centre of a town I recognise, and which is nowhere bloody near here?'
The only other bit of that conversation I remember is 'Right, go upstairs and get your fucking kit on, because you're doing four more hours.'
The next day we were due to ride a hard, one-day circuit race, what the Belgians call a kermesse, but Rod didn't care; how could he trust us to carry out instructions in races if we were telling him lies about where we'd stopped for cappuccino? We then almost compounded the damage by fiddling with the settings on our cyclo-computers – changing the wheel circumference, so we'd get back and Rod would think we'd clocked up more kilometres than was the case. We were still giggling to ourselves when, just as we were leaving, we heard the sound of a growling motor and turned around to see Rod, revving up and ready to follow us in his car.
He was wasting his own free time that night, barking orders at us from behind a steering wheel when he could have had his feet up in the hotel, yet he did it because it was in our best interests. Rod had once been a lot like I was now – nineteen years old, passionate and ambitious. He'd ridden as a pro for the UK-based Ambrosia team in the mid-1990s, but quickly realised that, partly due to a lack of opportunity, partly due to a lack of the kind of outstanding talent that would get him noticed by a top European team, and perhaps partly due to a lack of luck, his dreams of riding the Tour de France were destined to remain just that – dreams. Now, a decade on, his passion was still alive, and he also possessed the theoretical know-how to go with his own first-hand experience – the same first-hand experience that left him mortified by the idea of lads, who perhaps had more natural ability and certainly more opportunities than he'd had, not fulfilling their potential.
It was that same frustration – more for us than with us – that spilled over at a national Under 23 series event in Penzance later that spring. In theory, as the national Academy team, we were the best riders in the field that day, and Rod would tell you that we had the swagger to match. Rod never minded if we weren't physically strong enough to follow a breakaway, but he'd be fuming if we let one slip because we were distracted or lazy, and that day there was simply no excuse for the entire team missing out when a group escaped in the first fifteen minutes of the race. We spent the whole day chasing and Brammy ended up catching the last survivor from the breakaway five metres ... after the line. We'd blown it. While all of the other teams were packing away, swigging their energy drinks and comparing stories, Rod told us all to stop what we were doing and line up next to our minibus.
Poker-faced, he moved up the line asking every one of us the same questions: 'Did you see the break go?'; 'Were you tired at that point or were you not?' He didn't give a shit if someone started sniggering; all that mattered is that we knew he wasn't joking. He told us to pack up our stuff and not to say a single word from when we got in the car to when we got back to Manchester that night. Sure enough, the next time anyone opened their mouth was when we pulled up at half-eleven, and
that was Rod telling us to be at the velodrome at half-past eight the next morning ready for a long bike ride. The following day was as advertised – the training session from hell: five hours of 'through and off', in other words a revolving line where everyone takes it in turns to do short, savage bursts on the front, like in a team pursuit. Every now and again, we'd glance back and notice that Rod was no longer following in his car, at which point we'd think it was safe to ease off. We'd then hear a familiar voice, a familiar command to go 'Faster!', then, finally, see Rod's bristly red hair peeping over the top of a bush at the roadside.
The Academy was a test of survival, and some couldn't hack it. Christian Varley had been homesick and off the pace in most of the races and he went back to the Isle of Man for good after three or four months. The daily routine back in Manchester was no less punishing than the racing, sometimes more so. A typical day started with an alarm at half-six, breakfast at seven, then a slalom through the morning traffic to get to the velodrome by half-seven. Anyone who was late got sent home. In that first 2004 season, we'd often be out on our road bikes from eight o'clock, whereas in the second year we'd usually kick off with a twenty-minute warm-up on the rollers – the cycling equivalent of a treadmill – followed by an hour of team pursuit training, with everyone alternating fifteen-second sprints with forty-five seconds of spinning, just like you would on the track. At nine o'clock we'd get off the rollers and into track for another three hours – again, more often than not, team pursuit work.
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