At Speed: My Life in the Fast Lane (20 page)

“It depends how you ride a Grand Tour,” Dave said. “It is possible to just cruise around …”

Hearing this, I glared at Dave, and a few of the other guys were shaking their heads.

“Cruise around?! Fucking hell, Dave, you might be able to do that, but we haven’t all got your talent.”

On issues like this, our individual preferences or opinions didn’t necessarily matter. Once again, the important thing was that we were thinking about every ingredient, looking at the problem from all angles. Dave Brailsford had famously coined the phrase “aggregation of marginal gains,” and there was some of that in here, but really all
we were doing was aggregating a lot of common sense and mixing in some passion, determination, and a bit of camaraderie.

Every month, Rod continued to send his e-mails, with updates on our position in the nations’ rankings, news on good recent results by our riders, and tidbits about the worlds courses. Over a year before the actual race would take place, he’d traveled to examine and film the 2010 course in Melbourne. Anything that Rod thought could give us a competitive advantage, he would note, brief us about, and ask us not to mention in conversations with riders of other nationalities or in interviews. On his Australian trip, Rod hadn’t just gone to look over the Melbourne course but also scouted out hotels and tested on himself the impact that different flight options had on jet lag. He had made the Melbourne trip almost exactly a year from the date of the worlds, which in itself had been insightful.

“It was bloody freezing, six to ten degrees with a lot of rain,” he wrote in one e-mail, meaning 40 to 50 degrees Fahrenheit. “I really feel that most nations think it is going to be a hot worlds and they will not be prepared for the shit weather. This is one area that we must not talk about. Let the others find out when they get there and it will be all too late.”

Not everything would give us an edge, but the only way to ensure that we weren’t caught out was by covering every base, trying to preempt every permutation. The world championships, like any other race, could hinge on the timing of a feed, a decent night’s sleep on the eve of the race, or the comfort of your team kit—which is why, incidentally, Rod would send us some GB team kit to train in and get used to weeks before the worlds. Because for all the planning, certain lessons and knowledge could only be picked up in an environment
like the one we’d find in Melbourne and then again in Copenhagen—a world championships race.

Therefore, although we didn’t think that we could win in Mendrisio, and although I wasn’t riding, Rod still viewed the 2009 worlds as essential testing ground. After years of going to world championships and riding around almost aimlessly—so much so that in 2005, two British riders, Tom Southam and Charly Wegelius, had infamously accepted money to ride in support of the Italian team—Rod wanted everyone in a GB jersey at Mendrisio to at least execute a preagreed task.

With certain riders, Rod had noticed something that I saw continually in my trade team: Because they perhaps lacked one single outstanding ability—they weren’t incredible sprinters, time trialists, or climbers—these riders could occasionally look a bit lost and directionless in races. If, however, you gave such riders a role or a function, they’d be transformed.

A great example of this was Danny Pate and Lars Bak at the 2011 Tour de France. Both were the kind of rider who, left to his own devices in a team with no prominent leader, might have slipped into one or two breakaways over the course of the three weeks but otherwise would have been fairly anonymous. But in my team, their job was vital every day. With this new responsibility, their motivation suddenly soared, and by the second week of the Tour, Lars and Danny were toying with the peloton—accelerating into corners to stretch it, then slowing down to squeeze it—playing it like a concertina.

Similarly, even though we had never been likely to contend for the medal positions in Mendrisio in 2009—and indeed our best-placed rider, Steve Cummings, finished in 52nd place, five minutes behind
the winner, Cadel Evans—the guys who represented us had at least all ridden with some sense of purpose.

Over the winter of 2009–10 and the following spring and summer, we continued to get a monthly e-mail from Rod updating us on plans for Melbourne. Team Sky had launched in January 2010 with Rod employed as its race coach, which had forced us to change our working relationship slightly. Bob Stapleton and all of the other staff at HTC-Highroad thought highly of Rod, so much so that it looked at one point in 2008 or 2009 as though he might join the team. When Rod went to Sky, Bob was too sensible to veto him remaining my coach, but the strength of our bond still put him on edge. As a concession to both Bob and Sky, Rod and I had agreed to impose boundaries on what we discussed and keep it strictly related to my coaching. If I ever wanted to call and vent to someone about other riders, staff members, or teams, now I either had to bite my tongue or save the bombardment for different ears.

When we did speak in 2010, as well as everything that I did on the bike in racing and training, there was one stand-out recurring theme: how much—or rather how little—I rested. Simply put, my hyperactivity drove Rod to distraction. Whenever he called and I wasn’t on my bike, I’d be with friends, out shopping, at a meeting—never only recovering. He had a point, and I did try, but he was fighting a losing battle. Occupying my mind with other things was how I rested and regenerated. Admittedly, in the first half of that 2010 season, a lot of things competing for my attention were also causing me a fair bit of stress. Moreover, at that time I lacked the shield of strong management to give me the peace and headspace that I probably would still have filled, but perhaps would have done so more constructively and restfully.

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s it turned out, my chances in Melbourne had been compromised even before we arrived. A combination of my poor start to the year, Brad’s disappointing Tour de France, and a slow first few months for Sky and their British riders left us badly short of points. We were in 15th place in the nations rankings, which would give us only three riders in Australia. As we’d discussed in that first meeting in Newport in June 2009, that was very unlikely to be enough.

Nonetheless, Melbourne would be a valuable and instructive experience. Rod had arranged another camp prior to the UK championships that June—this time in Burnley in Lancashire—that had helped to foster more of the team spirit and sense of a common goal that had taken root the previous year. And of course the race itself taught me that I needed to manage my form and handle it with care in the fortnight before the worlds, not bleed it dry until there was nothing left. Essentially, in Melbourne I’d had to learn to lose the worlds in order to understand how I was going to win it.

By the start of 2011, Rod and I had formed a clear picture of what it would take to execute Project Rainbow Jersey. In our favor, as well as the know-how we’d accumulated over the previous 18 months, we had a course that was far more conducive to the kind of race we wanted than Melbourne and certainly Mendrisio. While I’d had my problems with my weight and crashes early in 2011, it had also been a vast improvement on the previous year’s spring and early summer. I had finished every stage race that I’d started before the Tour, versus having completed just one, Tirreno–Adriatico, in 2010. At the same time, I had consciously avoided packing too many aims and too much pressure into the first six months of 2011, having seen in the past how that could leave me drained of physical and mental energy by the end of the Tour de France.

The 2011 camp before the UK championships was held at Foxhills in Surrey, which was also going to be our base before the 2012 Olympic road race. Jeremy Hunt, Russell Downing, Pete Kennaugh, Ben Swift, Ian Stannard, Alex Dowsett, Chris Froome, Roger Hammond, Adam Blythe, Daniel Lloyd, and I were there for all three days; Dave Millar was skipping the nationals to be with his heavily pregnant wife. Brad and Geraint Thomas were training with Sky and could only make it for a few hours.

Whether Dave and Brad could work together continued to be a concern, and it wasn’t helped by our inability to get them together in the same room and talking. Brad’s recent victory in the Critérium du Dauphiné and his impending one in the national championships brought the dilemma even more sharply into focus, having put us comfortably inside the top 10 in the UCI rankings. It was looking increasingly likely that we would have between five and nine riders in Copenhagen—five being the number that had already scored rankings points—and, on merit, Dave and Brad would be two of the first names on the team sheet.

A fortnight after the nationals, Brad was crashing out of the 2011 Tour in Châteauroux. A fortnight after that, I was leaving Paris with a green jersey and five stage wins to my name. The cloud, then, had a silver lining, although going into August we still didn’t know how many riders we would be taking to the worlds, or whether Brad was on board. As weekends went, the second one that month took a bit of beating: After Adam Blythe’s fifth-place finish on the third stage of the Tour of Poland (earning a single, but crucial, ranking point) and brilliant performances by Pete Kennaugh and Steve Cummings to finish in the top 10 overall in the same race, we were suddenly certain to qualify eight riders as of the cutoff date of August 15. Our
prospects in Copenhagen were now looking very good indeed, a fact underlined by my win in the Olympic test event over the Box Hill course the day before.

The best news that day, though, wasn’t that I had held my form from the Tour de France but the text message I received in the evening from Brad. He wanted to forget and move past the tension between him and Dave Millar, he said. He wanted me to win the worlds, and he wanted to be part of the team, with Dave, that was going to do it. Everything, it seemed, was starting to fall into place. Well, as far as the worlds were concerned, anyway.

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or me personally, the period immediately after the Tour had been tinged with frustration. But I had to accept that there were certain things I just couldn’t control—as much as that aggrieved me sometimes. I’d expected my manager, Chris Evans-Pollard, to fully publicize and capitalize on my green jersey success, particularly after my ultimatum following the incident with the press pass and the VIP enclosure at the Giro. But a fortnight or so after stepping off the podium in Paris, I’d still not had a single new endorsement and hardly any high-profile media appearances. I was clued up enough to know that opportunities were being missed.

By this point, another incident had opened my eyes. After the Giro, I’d received an invitation to the Champions League Final at Wembley Stadium from my sponsor, Nike, and had a chance meeting there with Simon Bayliff, the agent for the England and Arsenal soccer star Jack Wilshere. Simon had introduced himself and talked to me about his and his dad’s love of cycling, and how they had spent summers following the Tour de France in a camper van when he was
a kid. I’d listened, intrigued, and then, when it was time to leave, Simon had handed me his business card.

I hadn’t done anything with it until one day at Peta’s house when my phone bleeped, and I looked down to see a text from Lance Armstrong: “Have you called Simon Bayliff yet?” It threw me slightly because Lance and I had barely spoken to each other since his second, definitive retirement at the end of 2010. I certainly hadn’t talked to him about Simon, and I didn’t know at the time that Simon’s agency and its founder, Casey Wasserman, had brokered the sponsorship deal between Lance’s final team and the electrical goods retailer RadioShack in 2010. As I stood, puzzled, rereading the message, Peta urged me to dial Simon’s number. When I finally called and Simon answered, he sounded pleasantly surprised, then asked whether I could come to his office in central London for a meeting in a few days’ time.

A week or so later, Simon was giving me a half-hour presentation detailing exactly what he could do for me, from the kind of endorsement deals that he could bring in to the way that he and the agency would help me manage my time. I was blown away and immediately agreed to sign. When my joining Wasserman was later reported in the media, I think most people assumed that the agency had made a timely move to get a slice of the contract that I was about to sign with Sky. In fact, I had kept them out of that deal. Which, with hindsight, was possibly a mistake.

In the short term, before I could put Simon to work, I had to let Chris Evans-Pollard know that he had run out of time. I’d said December, but if the green jersey hadn’t spurred him into action, I couldn’t see what a few more months were going to change. I called him to say, as politely as possible, that my warning after the Giro hadn’t had
the desired effect and that I wanted to call off the collaboration. To Chris’s credit, he magnanimously said that he understood and that we could stop there.

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espite this distraction, when I arrived at the Vuelta a España the week after the Olympic test event, I was growing more and more confident about the worlds. The Vuelta would start in Benidorm, as it had the previous year in Seville, with a team time trial.

Also as it had been in 2010, the heat was absolutely blistering. We set off from a start-ramp positioned on the beach, surrounded by frazzled and bemused British pensioners on their sun loungers. From there, the course pointed inland and straight up a hill; Matt Goss and I were immediately gasping for air so hot and uncomfortable that it exacerbated rather than alleviated the suffocation. Without us, our seven teammates pressed on to finish third, while we puffed and wheezed like a pair of geriatric chainsmokers to eventually cross the line nearly three minutes behind.

Gossy said that his stomach had been troubling him for a few days. He thought it might have been light food poisoning compounded by the heat, in which case I, as his roommate, shouldn’t have had any bother. I had felt nothing amiss in my stomach but also nothing at all—no strength whatsoever—in my legs. We crossed our fingers that it would pass, especially with stage 2 looking likely to yield the first bunch sprint of the race.