Inside Team Sky

by Walsh, David

  At that moment Vasil Kiryienka had already departed, G Thomas was struggling with his pelvis, López and Siutsou weren’t performing in the mountains, and with Mont Ventoux and three tough Alpine stages remaining, young Kennaugh was needed more than should ever have been the case. But Ellingworth was able to see beyond that and plan for an easier end-of-season campaign for him.

  Another evening – at dinner people were discussing the start of the 2014 Tour which takes place over two days in Yorkshire and one in the South-East. The British public would be turning up in their hundreds of thousands, it was said. Ellingworth saw this purely from a planning point of view: ‘It’s going to be particularly difficult for us, because many of our riders are British and their family members will come to Yorkshire and want to meet up with the guys. That’s natural and it’s not something you would discourage.

  ‘But we must plan for it and I thought Team GB’s Hospitality House worked really well during the London Olympics, and that “Nearest and Dearest” suite was a clever idea, a place where the athletes could meet their family and closest friends in private. We should really think about doing something similar in Yorkshire, close to where we’re staying, so we can control what’s going to be a crazy situation.’

  This was Ellingworth, the planner. Yet he’s more than that to this team.

  This is Rod Ellingworth. Busy.

  ‘How’s it going?’ you say.

  Rod Ellingworth always pauses and says, ‘Good, thank you.’

  Then he will inquire of your wellbeing. The day he stops doing that he won’t be Rod Ellingworth. He will never become a fat cat.

  Hush.

  A deathly still French morning. The heat laying everything to rest.

  And if you listened to Rod Ellingworth’s chest with a stethoscope, you’d catch the beat of a cycling man. Get your ear closer and you’ll hear the whirr the cranks make when turning, the clunk of the derailleur dropping chain on cassette, the muffled fizz of rubber tyres rolling on asphalt, the telling rhythm of a rider’s breath.

  I picture him sitting in a bar, sipping a coffee and shooting the breeze with two old Belgians on the morning of the Tour of Flanders. Rod is asking them about Roger De Vlaeminck and what made him so good. Their memories and their passion are music to his ears, for no matter the size of their love for this sport, it is not greater than his.

  We ended up spending a lot of time together, sharing many car journeys from race finish to the hotel. He reminded me of Belcher in Frank O’Connor’s compelling short story ‘Guests of the Nation’. A British soldier in Ireland, Belcher was captured by the IRA and taken to a safe house where he awaited his fate. His captors couldn’t stop themselves from liking him.

  It was a treat to see how Belcher got off with the old woman in the house where we were staying. She was a great warrant to scold, and cranky even with us, but before ever she had a chance of giving our guests, as I may call them, a lick of her tongue, Belcher had made her his friend for life. She was breaking sticks, and Belcher, who had not been more than ten minutes in the house, jumped up and went over to her.

  “Allow me, madam,” he said, smiling his queer little smile. “Please allow me,” and he took the hatchet from her. She was too surprised to speak, and after that, Belcher would be at her heels, carrying a bucket, a basket or a load of turf. As Noble said, he got into looking before she leapt, and hot water, or any little thing she wanted, Belcher would have ready for her.

  Ellingworth has the same straightforwardness, the same easy humility, the same readiness to help whoever he meets along the way. There is a perception abroad that the English are arrogant, and Team Sky, with their ‘veni vidi vici ’ mentality haven’t exactly dispelled the thought.

  But come around the back of the bus after a stage has ended, sidle up to Rod Ellingworth and ask him how the lads are. He will make as much time for you as he would for a BSkyB bigwig flown in for the event, and speak more frankly than you’d ever expect. Because if you love cycling you are his friend. No one spending a moment in his company would come away thinking Team Sky arrogant.

  On those car journeys we got to talking about anything and everything. He told me where he came from, born in Burnley in the industrial North-West, raised in Lincoln in the part of England that God forgot.

  Look.

  You can create a team like this, a team which lives in a black bus on the cold cutting edge of everything, but somewhere within the team you have to have a beating heart, a bloodline of warmth that sways back and forth like the Gulf Stream. Sometimes you need a down-to-earth man who talks tough and shoots straight but who loves what he does without a hint of scientific detachment. You need a Rod Ellingworth.

  Boy to man. The back story is modest and uncomplicated. After leaving Burnley, he settled in Margaret Thatcher’s Grantham and young Rod Ellingworth began riding for the Witham Wheelers when he was a boy. No matter what he has achieved in cycling in the years since, when the local papers write about Rod he is always ‘former Witham Wheelers rider Rod Ellingworth’. He likes that.

  He progressed to Cherry Valley RT and his life seemed like a journey from race to race, sometimes on the road, occasionally on grass, and every dream for the future had Rod making a living doing what he loved. He turned pro and rode with Team Ambrosia and later the French outfit UV Aube. And that was it folks, a couple of years as an honest pro in the late nineties. Nowt fancy.

  He fell into coaching naturally though, realising quickly that his hard-fisted rules could make tough road men out of soft BMX boys. His first serious project was a tough nut. An eighteen-year-old kid from the Isle of Man who came to the velodrome in Manchester one day for an informal interview about becoming part of the new wave. Mark Cavendish had a reputation for being mouthy and headstrong, and for losing races that he might have won due to scattiness or lack of concentration.

  He sat down and Ellingworth asked him merely to recount everything he remembered of the journey that day from the Isle of Man to Manchester. Cavendish did so in almost cinematic detail. Every turn, every diversion, every roundabout. He had a brain to match his talent and the awareness to match his brain. Ellingworth knew he could work with him and knew he could be the voice that told Cavendish what he was doing wrong, without being the ear that had to suffer the consequences.

  They had great times together. Eight years of success. When Cav moved on from Team Sky last year, he wanted Rod to go with him. Rod didn’t want to do it. He is a team man. He talks sometimes about the problems of soigneurs getting too close to top riders. It creates resentment among the other soigneurs. An accidental hierarchy. What happens if the rider drops out? Does his soigneur mope about having to lower himself to massage so-called lesser riders? Many problems.

  He loves Cav and there would have been more money in the move, but he decided to stay. ‘If Cav has a major crash, do I have a job? What’s the chances of him having a big crash? Fairly high. I’m with a team which is consistent and has a long future.’

  In a sport pedalled by big egos, Rod Ellingworth is happy to hew some wood and draw some water.

  There is a story I like about Rod and Cav. The story tells you where Rod’s heart is. The 2011 World Road Race Championships were held in Copenhagen in September of that year. Mark Cavendish won, adding another line to his palmarès. Rod had started planning this coup back in 2008. It was called ‘Project Rainbow’, and the plot to steal the World Championship had its beginning one quiet night when a few key figures were invited for a meeting.

  When they got there, an old woolly cycling jersey was hanging in the room, a jersey with the rainbow hoops of the World Champion. Feel the weight of it, how the poor bastards must have sweated wearing those things. Whose is it, Rod?

  It belonged to To m Simpson, who had been the last British rider to win the Worlds back in 1965, two years before his tragic death on Mont Ventoux. Rod had gone to the Simpson museum in Nottinghamshire to borrow the jersey for the evening. Tom Simpson was almost there in the room with
Rod, the man planning for a race years in the future by paying his respects to a ghost of the past. As Brailsford said, this planner does every hand on the clock, especially the hour hand.

  And this Tour, the British nook of it, is testimony to the quiet and relentless influence Rod has had over the past decade. Cav is here of course, though no longer with Team Sky, but so too are lads who came through the house in Tuscany during the same era: Pete Kennaugh, Geraint Thomas and Ian Stannard. They give a strong Ellingworth influence to Team Sky. They are the team’s transfusion of tough.

  And then there is Chris Froome. You argue that he came from nowhere, that he was teleported from obscurity to the yellow jersey by some alchemy? Hang on.

  Back in 2006, Rod was living in Tuscany running the Team GB Under-23 Team out of a modest house on the Via Madonna in Quarrata near Florence. As such, he had a special interest in the Giro delle Regioni. He had a few of his lads riding the race – Geraint Thomas, Ian Stannard, Ben Swift – all good riders and they didn’t win a single stage. But they were all curious and talkative about some guy from Kenya who had won two uphill finishes.

  ‘You don’t win them races and not be good. If you look at Joe Dombrowski, you look at Pete Kennaugh, you know they both were first and second, not in the same year, in the baby Giro. It’s like a rider who’s done well at the Tour de l’Avenir, they’ve got that quality. So it’s not like Chris has just gone, “Well here we go.” And while Under-23 he won some bloody good bike races.’

  And then one evening during the Regioni there was a knock on Rod’s door. There he was. The guy, this length of string from Kenya.

  ‘Hi, I’m Chris Froome.’

  Rod knew who he was talking to, of course. Not a sparrow falls . . . The guy just asked if he might have a chat. So he came in and he sat down, quiet and confident. They talked. What would happen if I did do this? Or that? All hypotheticals. How would it work within British cycling? Rod explained where he was with the Under-23 project in Italy and what was being done and the young guy nodded a lot and said yeah, yeah this is all good.

  ‘He could see what we were doing in 2006, so there was that group of young road riders; Cav was already kind of starting, wasn’t full pro then, but he was winning, we were winning races. We’d won a few races here and there. And it was building and I think he could see that.’

  When Froome left he continued to think. He kept in touch with Doug Dailey from British cycling. An acorn had been planted in Froome’s mind. Ellingworth would never claim the oak, though.

  Of all the people in this team, Rod is the most enjoyable perhaps to stop and spin a yarn with. He talks about people in a way that explains as much about himself as the subjects he describes:

  A guy he’s thinking might be a good staff member –

  ‘He is emotionally intelligent, great with people, as for the other stuff, the more technical bits, well the sort of planning we do, if I can do it, he can do it.’

  Pete Kennaugh and his diversions, as predicted, from Rod’s reduced post-Tour schedule –

  ‘I’ve started now texting him in big, bold letters, capital letters, “STOP, DON’T DO THIS. STICK TO THE PLAN, because . . .”

  A Sky rider who he worries might be taking defeat a little too much in his stride –

  ‘Yeah. Is there enough fight in him? Has he got that mean bastard about him? Which Pete Kennaugh has. Froomey has that edge, you know, as much as he’s a nice chap but bloody hell, can he let you have it when he wants to.’

  Within Team Sky, Rod is the flesh and blood counterbalance to the science and the technology. Tim Kerrison speaks of how important it is to rely not just on numbers but on the words and thoughts of the riders. Rod Ellingworth likes the science and sees the benefits, he likes and he appreciates a Kerrison or a Steve Peters, but like most great coaches he believes in a little of everything and not too much of anything.

  Chris Froome is going to win this Tour de France and it doesn’t surprise Rod Ellingworth greatly. He sees guys come and go, riders who get a lot of money quickly in this new cycling world and they are soft before they have won a thing. Froome, for all his politeness and manners, is a tough bastard underneath. Ellingworth knows the need for tough. The British boys have stories that will testify to that.

  Rod, with Team GB, was mulling over the team’s disappointing showing at the Athens Olympics. Ellingworth took a cold look at every aspect of the team’s preparation. He was starting the Under-23 operation in Tuscany with very specific goals in mind. Tuscany, he realised, may have sounded glamorous to some of the kids dreaming of breaking away to La Grande Boucle. Ellingworth took care of that notion first. He got everybody together and poured them some cups of reality.

  Young cyclists at the time received a flat annual grant of £10,000. Ellingworth cut it to £6000, requiring the kids to live on a budget of £58 a week. If they picked up ten or twenty pounds winning a bonus sprint on a Sunday morning, fine, they could buy their teammates a cup of coffee – but the life of the young cyclist didn’t involve much else than stoicism and self-denial.

  And before Tuscany? He instituted the Manchester boot camp. Up at 6am, boys, then work from 7am to 7pm. Six weeks of this before you felt one ray of Italian sun warm your face. The young lads had been tagged as elite riders. Ellingworth chalked them down to the more modest category of First. They got cheaper bikes. If they weren’t in the gym, on the road or on the track they were learning French or Italian and getting educated. They’d arrive back in the evenings too exhausted to move and would have to prepare their own evening meal. When they got to Tuscany it wasn’t much different. They learned that the life of the pro rider is many degrees different from that, say, of the pro footballer.

  Rod himself tells a story which, inadvertently I think, defines him. He is a key part of a team which does things differently. Team Sky do things differently in both small ways and in big conspicuous ways. They have a lack of self-consciousness which is sometimes frightening. Rod is old school. You imagine some part of the clockwork nature of Team Sky must run against his grain.

  He is speaking about the set-up which the team have used for several years before the World Team Time Trial Championships (the team time trials at the Worlds are not contested by nations but by pro teams). Team Sky like to put down some flooring, erect some clocks, place panelling around the area that they are allotted. Every other team just cordons off an area to work in and starts to get ready.

  So, from the very the first year, Team Sky were laughed at. People came by specifically to scoff. Rod jutted the jaw, though. He was adamant that they had to do it like this. ‘Ignore everybody,’ he would say as the wiseacres leaned over the panelling, asking if it came in a nice pine finish and where was the best place to put the sofa, etc.

  ‘We wanted flooring down so whether you were on a gravel car park or in a grass field or on the side of the road, the flooring gives it the same feel every single time. The surrounding around the rider is the same. There’s only one or two of the guys who will be getting into the zone. But it’s for them you are doing it.’

  Still, it’s not a nice job. Highly paid men crawling around on their hands and knees assembling this stuff until they are sweaty, clammy, dirty and red in the face. Tired of hearing the jokes coming at them.

  So one day they were setting up for another World Team Time Trial Championships. This time they were the first there. They got a jump putting the stuff together. Bobby Julich, the American coach, was working with Rod. In Team Sky there is no standing upon your rank or pay grade. If there is work to be done, roll up your sleeves, son.

  So Rod and Bobby got everything put together in record time.

  ‘There we were on the bus washing our hands and Bobby said, “Whoah, got away with it again, thank God for that.”

  Rod said, ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Nobody saw me.’

  ‘Nobody saw you what, Bobby?’

  ‘Nobody saw me down on my hands and knees.’

  ‘Bobby
, you should be proud that you got down on your hands and knees, you are rolling up your sleeves, showing the other people you are prepared to do the job. You shouldn’t worry what other people think. What does it matter what other people think?’

  That is Rod Ellingworth.

  It must be the upbringing, but he has a constant suspicion of glamour. No fat cat ever impresses him. In the morning of a rest day when the riders take a spin to stretch their limbs, it is often suggested to Rod that he go along with them. There are good reasons for it and it would make a nice snap or news clip: Rod Ellingworth, former Witham Wheeler, out between the superstars and the sunflowers yesterday . . .

  He stays behind, though. He feels part of his job is to be around; if there are ten things people need to know or twenty questions they need to ask, he will be around and the team’s day will move forward a little bit easier.

  ‘Anyway, I like to get down for breakfast with the mechanics and the carers, not every morning but most mornings, because if somebody from the management team isn’t there, it doesn’t send out the right message. They should see that you are doing just as much as they are.’

  One evening when we arrive at the team hotel they are three beds short for the Team Sky group. That’s three people who’ll have to drive half an hour up the road to get their kip and half an hour back at the crack of dawn. Rod is first to put his hand up.

  These days are long and he talks sometimes to Dave Brailsford about how much the team asks of everybody. Everybody here works harder than they would on any other team. Harder and longer. They are a young team but Rod knows so much is being asked that good people will start falling away, just burnt off the surface. He’s thinking about a way of making sure that Sky holds on to its best people.