At Speed: My Life in the Fast Lane (19 page)

There was confusion about that limit and whether Rolland’s time should have been rounded up to the nearest minute, as the rulebook seemed to state, but really it made no difference to what was now the key equation: Gilbert had made the time cut and avoided a points deduction at Alpe d’Huez, but he was now 50 points adrift and out of the hunt. It would be between me and Rojas, who remained 15 points behind. We had two stages left to ride, but one was a time trial in which neither of us was likely to gain or lose points. It would all therefore be decided in one final sprint showdown on the Champs Elysées.

While I respected Rojas and was in some ways surprised that he had never challenged for the green jersey before, as he seemed to
have all of the prerequisites, I didn’t particularly like him. The controversy over the “assistance” from fans and my team car that I had allegedly received in the Pyrenees had rumbled on throughout the race, and the press was suggesting that Rojas and his team were perpetuating it. The best way to silence them, of course, was by winning on the Champs.

As it transpired, I wouldn’t have needed to. With a break down the road, I took seventh place and nine points at the intermediate sprint—two more than Rojas. My lead was now 17. Avoid catastrophe—a puncture or a crash—and I’d be unassailable. As we hurtled through the Place de la Concorde and around the right-hander that brought us onto the Champs, Gossy led Renshaw, who led me, and Rojas and everyone watching knew the script from there.

At the exact moment when my 2011 Tour de France ended, hundredths of a second before anyone else’s, I brought my hands to my chest and rubbed the fabric between thumbs and forefingers. The Tour was Cadel Evans’s, but the green jersey was mine. Just as Mark Renshaw had said, we weren’t going home without it.

A few minutes later, as the team gathered for our ritual lap of honor around the Champs—the last one that we would ever do together—one of Movistar’s directeurs strolled toward Brian in the area behind the finish line.

“Hey, hombre,” he said, “I’m sorry about the business in the Pyrenees, with Cavendish. You know, saying he’d been pushed.”

Brian looked up, quizzically.

“Yeah,” the gentleman said. “No hard feelings. We were just trying to mess with Cavendish’s mind.”

a
bit like my green one before it, the 2011 world champion’s rainbow jersey would be won months—no, years—before I pinned on my race number.

One school of thought is that Project Rainbow Jersey, as it came to be known, dated back to a weekend in Manchester in 2003 when I’d bounded across the velodrome parking lot after my first meeting and training sessions with Rod Ellingworth and thanked him for “the best two days I’ve ever spent on my bike.” Another is that it originated a few months after that, when Rod presented his idea for an Under 23 British Cycling Academy to Dave Brailsford and other federation top brass in one of the meeting rooms in the same velodrome. Rod had asked for around £100,000—about $160,000—to get the plan up and running, and after some hesitation, he finally got the green light to start interviewing riders later that year.

I was in that first intake of six likely lads. In my interview, Rod had asked what I hoped to achieve in professional cycling. I’d said honestly that I dreamt of winning stages in the Tour de France, then told a strategic white lie about also wanting to win Olympic medals
on the track. Although I didn’t realize it at the time, both Rod and I regarded the track as a rite of passage on the way to where we really wanted to be: making waves on the elite road scene. Lottery funding was allocated in reward for Olympic and world championships medals, and it was much easier to obtain them (and consequently more funding to feed more success) in the velodrome.

Despite the initial track focus, Rod always had the same aim for me as I had for myself. I would turn pro with a major professional road team and one day compete in an attempt to win famous races: the classics, stages and jerseys in major tours and the world championships. In my first year as a professional I won 11 races. In my second I followed two stage wins at the Giro with four at the Tour, and in my third I put my name on my first “Monument,” Milan–San Remo. A world championship was the next milestone and, together with the green jersey, was the most prestigious accolade that a rider with my physical characteristics could win. Rod knew this too, and since the middle of 2008, he had been putting together an audacious plan to give Great Britain its first male world road race champion since Tom Simpson in 1965.

He’d called that plan—you guessed it—Project Rainbow Jersey. By this time, we knew the venues for the next three world championships and a bit about the courses. Mendrisio in Switzerland would host the 2009 race and looked too hilly for me to harbor any realistic hope, but after that were two world championships with somewhat less undulating terrain: Melbourne and Copenhagen. By 2010, I’d be 25 and about to enter what should be the most fertile years of my career.

On top of this, the overspill from Great Britain’s glories on the track were crystalizing into a British professional road team, for
which Dave Brailsford was already trying to secure sponsorship back in 2008. As far as Rod was concerned, the coincidence of these factors represented a perfect storm … and one at the end of which we’d hope to find a rainbow.

Even the first time Rod and I spoke about his idea, which at the time really was rather vague and fanciful-sounding, I already knew that there was no one better or more passionate, more thorough, more driven than Rod to take on the challenge. Whenever anyone talks to Brian Holm about the contribution he made to my development as a cyclist, Brian always smiles and thanks them for the compliment, but reminds them that it was Rod who had spotted my potential. It was Rod who had nurtured and molded it, at a time when other coaches even at British Cycling had dismissed me as a physiological mongrel who “didn’t hit the numbers” they wanted to see in fitness tests.

“Doctor Frankenstein,” Brian called Rod. Obviously, because he was the one who had created the monster.

Rod had ridden competitively in his youth but never at the very top level. Consequently, current or former professionals sometimes viewed him with a skepticism that, I can see now, was grounded in small-mindedness or insecurity. In the five years since I signed my first professional contract with T-Mobile, barely a week has passed without me putting into practice something that I’d learned with Rod, a basic skill or principle to which other riders were completely oblivious or had once learned and had since forgotten or neglected. In two years at the Academy, Rod had ingrained in us a kind of awareness—or mindfulness—that even a lot of top riders don’t possess.

As I’ve already said, bike riders devote a lot of time to training their legs but not a lot to an equally important muscle, the brain. From
the day I’d first screeched into the velodrome lot in my gold Vauxhall Corsa, with its 007 number plate and Goldfinger windshield sticker, Rod had stressed the importance of thinking about everything we did, from using the £3,000 annual allowance we received from the Federation to analyzing strategies and tactics before and after every race.

Project Rainbow Jersey was the fruit of this approach. Instead of just rocking up at world championships with a ragtag bunch from assorted trade teams and trying to improvise, or starting to plan only once the team had been selected (as most nations did), under Rod we expected to spend months, if not years, obsessing over the worlds and working out which variables we could control in order to improve our chances. The very act of identifying it as an objective and giving the project a name focused everyone’s minds. It instilled the kind of motivation that you could never take for granted in the worlds, the one race a year when riders were asked to compete against the guys who for the rest of the year were their teammates.

Fostering that sense of a common goal, then, was going to be crucial. Rod had been given his mandate in 2008, and by the end of that year he was already running structured, off-season training sessions in Manchester for the Academy lads and any British road pros who wanted to attend. In January 2009, I was one of 13 British riders in elite pro teams at the time to receive a group e-mail with the subject line “Pro Worlds Project” and a Word document attached. I opened the file and carefully read the three-page, bullet-pointed letter.

The key line, the one that made the hairs on my arms stand to attention, was at the top of the second page: “Basic outline performance targets for the road race will be, 2009 Mendrisio top 20, 2010 Melbourne top 10, 2011 Copenhagen first, London Olympic Games first.”

The rest of the document was typical Rod: a pomposity-, mumbo-jumbo-, and bullshit-free outline of the idea and the practicalities of what was going to happen next. Short training camps that trebled as team-building exercises, brainstorming sessions and opportunities to practice specific skills, such as leadouts, would be one central component of the process. Rod wanted the first one to take place the week before the National Road Race Championships in Abergavenny, Wales, at the end of June, a rare occasion in the season when the majority of us would be competing in the same place. A couple of months later, he gave us a date and a time to report to a Best Western hotel in Newport for the start of our first minicamp and meeting.

That evening in Newport, when we all shuffled off into a meeting room after dinner, I think we probably all expected a brief speech from Rod about the selection process, a quick discussion about the training we were going to do the next day, followed by an early night. But for all that he’s a straight-talking, no-frills northerner, Rod also knows how to inspire people—and that was clearly his intention here. When everyone was quiet, Rod formally welcomed us and then walked over to a chair draped with some kind of shawl or blanket in the middle of the room. After a pause for maximum dramatic effect, like a cheesy magician, he lifted the material to reveal a white silk cycling jersey. All eyes were immediately drawn to the horizontal rainbow stripes across the middle and around the sleeves. For those who hadn’t already guessed, the garment’s former owner was the late Tom Simpson, the only British rider ever to win the world championships road race. Rod then pressed play on a DVD player and gestured toward the grainy film footage rolling on a projector screen of Simpson’s winning ride in the 1965 worlds. Rod later told me that he had borrowed both the jersey and the video from a
British journalist who also happened to be Simpson’s nephew, Chris Sidwells. Rod knew that Chris had a DVD and the jersey, so he had contacted Chris and arranged to meet him at a junction off the M6 near Manchester on his way to Wales. This kind of attention to detail was typical of Rod.

Rod had also prepared a montage of clips showing all of us in action, after which he turned to us and put a hand back on Simpson’s jersey.

“So,” he said, “how do you fancy bringing one of these back here?”

“Fuck, yeah,” I think was my reply. Others might have put it more eloquently, but the sentiment was the same.

Rod reiterated what he’d said in his first group e-mail in January: Melbourne and Copenhagen could both end in bunch sprints, which would logically place me among the favorites.

Having established and agreed on that, he then wanted us to split up into groups of three or four and talk about what kind of team we’d need to ensure a bunch sprint, and what kind of riders and roles would be involved.

After a few minutes, we had all come to the same conclusion—it would take strength in numbers, which would mean scoring enough ranking points between us to put Great Britain in the top 10 on the UCI nations’ rankings. By doing this, we could enter up to nine men, or as many as had scored at least one ranking point in the qualification period. Of the possible nine, come race day, two might do the hard yards at the start or in the middle, three might be there to wind it up in the last 20 km, then a minimum of two, or preferably three, would be needed to shepherd and lead me out in the last couple of kilometers.

How we secured that many starting berths was another equally important conversation that we would have both that night and regularly over subsequent months. On paper it seemed straightforward—we all needed to collect as many rankings points as possible with good results in the counting events. The reality, though, was that a lot of the guys weren’t paid by their teams to finish at the sharp end of races and to do so would mean abandoning their duties to their trade team leader. They would therefore have to be, if not sneaky, then at least a little bit smart. As Rod said, “If you’re at the end of a race and you can’t win it, remember that fifth place is still a ranking point and could be useful for us.”

Wherever possible, we needed to marry our goals and our teams’ with what we were trying to achieve together. Another subject broached was how best to get ready for the worlds—whether the Vuelta, which usually ended a fortnight before, was the ideal place to get into top shape or, to use Dave Millar’s elegant expression, was a “form-fucker.”