Project Rainbow

Most coaches in cycling are either ex-professionals or scientists. That means their approach is either all about numbers, or they try to do it like they did in the good old days. They tend to go from one extreme to the other. Rod Ellingworth isn’t like that. He has a unique ability to absorb you in what he is saying. He was a professional only at a domestic level in Britain, but he knows more about bike racing, its history, its tactics, than 90 per cent of the pros I’ve met. His love of cycling has always showed, throughout everything he’s done.

The first time I met Rod was when I was a junior, and he invited me along to some training sessions he was putting on. It was wicked, so different from what I’d done before: no stopwatch, no numbers, just bike racing. He made it so much fun. It was Rod who made me want to be on the British Cycling academy programme. I turned up in Manchester on 12 January 2004. I hadn’t been training all winter because I was working in a bank, and those early days were really hard. I was really unfit and was getting dropped all over the place. I didn’t really know this guy who was in charge of us, but what I did notice was that he was putting as much time into me as he was into the guys who were looking better on their bikes.

That was something no one had done with me before. It had been the same story all my life – the coaches would put more time and energy into the guys with better numbers than the
guys who were struggling. With Rod, it didn’t matter where you were from, how bad you were going; he’d always wait and encourage you, full on. I’ve told the story before about how we were training up Gun Hill in the Peak District, and I got off my bike and cried. He could have told me to fuck off home, but instead he said I just had to keep trying. A few weeks later I won my first race with him.

At the academy he was firm; he would punish us whenever we got out of hand. They were long days, hard training, and there were guys who resented it – the ones who’d been mothered, the ones who’d always been given what they wanted. But I bought in, because he was working harder than we were. If we had to get up at six thirty to go to the track, he would have to get up earlier to drive in, leaving his girlfriend behind. He would spend time away with us in Belgium, which can’t have been easy with a group of young guys, but it was all geared towards improving us as bike riders. Everything he did was aimed at that. That’s why we progressed faster than any group of cyclists from any country, ever.

As we grew as a group, I kept working with Rod. Over the years, he has become more than a coach: he’s a mentor and a friend. I improve most as a cyclist when he is working with me, hands-on. He’ll turn up on his scooter in the pissing rain; at least I’m pedalling to keep warm, but he’ll be just sitting there getting cold, for hour after hour. I complain about all the hours I have to spend in hotels because of my job, but I don’t know anyone who spends more time on the road than Rod. He’s a good man too; I like talking to him about normal things. He’s cool, has good taste in music and knows about life outside cycling.

Rod was never a big-time professional cyclist, but he’s never scared to tell me when I’ve fucked up, even though I’ve become one of the biggest riders on the planet. He’s honest, straight talking, and doesn’t believe he knows better than everyone else. He just knows what he thinks, and if you want to take it, you do. He has this way of getting everyone to buy in; if you make a mistake, he doesn’t kick off and make you feel small. Instead, it’s like the old cliché: he makes you feel disappointed in yourself. Rod has never been scared to learn from different areas – racing, science, psychology. He’s not afraid that he might get it wrong, or that someone might know better, or of telling it like it is. No one else I know coaches in the way he does – by looking at every different quality in a person. A lot of coaches don’t have social skills, but Rod knows how to read a person like no one else.

I always say that Rod is the most undervalued man in British Cycling. The current crop of riders who have come through the system he created and are doing big things – me, Ian Stannard, Alex Dowsett, Geraint Thomas, Peter Kennaugh – make up the biggest group of high-quality bike riders ever to come out of this country at the same time. No one else could or would have put the time and effort, the hours and hours of work, into building that system. No one else has done as much for cycling in Britain as Rod. All the other sides of the Olympic cycling programme use ideas taken from what he did with the academy.

It’s still unbelievable how Rod managed to put that world championship team together. It took incredible vision to get the money to get that project up and running. It was a three-year plan, first aiming for Australia in 2010, then Copenhagen
in 2011, and finally the Olympics in London in 2012. It’s different building something with the national team: you’re doing it for national pride, not for your professional sponsor. There are guys who have history with Great Britain. You need that buy-in, and Rod got it. At our first meeting he got all the riders together in a room, showed us something under a cover; it was Tom Simpson’s rainbow jersey from the 1965 world championship. Everyone got goosebumps. You could see them getting behind the idea there and then.

When handing out any presents or accolades after that world title, I made damned sure Rod was on the list, because he was probably the most important part of the project. He was the ninth guy in the team and probably worked harder than anyone else. There is no way in hell that any other coach could have built a team to win the world road race championship for Great Britain. He doesn’t do it for the accolades; he does it because he loves his country, he loves his sport and he wants the best for British cycling. He loves it and he wants it to succeed. If there is one person in British cycling who should have a knighthood, it’s Rod.

Mark Cavendish
June 2013

Copenhagen, 25 September 2011

There were three of us in the Great Britain race car that day, for seven hours and seventeen laps of the circuit in Copenhagen. In the front with me was Brian Holm, Mark Cavendish’s
directeur sportif
at the HTC team; Diego Costa, a mechanic with Team Sky, was sitting behind us. Normally a team car in a professional bike race has a television in the back for the mechanic, as well as one in the front for the DS, but we had only one, so the thing that sticks in my mind is Diego’s hot breath down my neck as he looked over my shoulder at the screen, hour after hour, all the while clutching a pair of spare wheels in the back-seat space.

I’d thought long and hard about who to have with me in the car. Brian was there because being a
directeur sportif
isn’t my forte and he’s been full-time at it for over a decade in professional cycling. I had to drive the car because I was managing the team, but it made sense to have someone of his experience there. Brian is Danish but he does love Britain with a passion – that was why he had found common ground with Cav when he began working with him in his first full year as a pro. It made sense to have someone in the car in whom Cav had built so much trust over the years. Brian had won a lot more races sitting in a car directing Cav than I had, and there might be a moment when that made the difference. Plus we were in
Denmark, and Brian is a national hero in his native country. Cav was proud to have him in the car. There was a personal side to this for Brian as well: I knew Cav was going to be changing teams at the end of the season; for the first time in five years they would no longer be working together.

Brian hadn’t been part of the build-up to the Worlds, but his years of experience mattered. That shone through when we were talking through the tactics for the day, about when the team would start to ride hard behind the day’s main break, whenever that happened to form. They wouldn’t start chasing from a set point whatever happened, say fifty or sixty kilometres out; they would get down to it when the break had formed and had got a certain number of minutes ahead. We discussed it with the riders: it was to be about four or five minutes, and we knew it was going to be a big group. I had been a bit uneasy with that – I didn’t want to intervene as it was the riders’ decision – so on the morning of the race, when Brian said he thought it was about right and there should be no panic, I thought, ‘Perfect.’ That kind of thing really bolsters your confidence.

And then there was Diego, an Italian, from Piacenza. I’d chosen him because although we’ve got plenty of British mechanics, he’s the best I know in the race car. You have to think about it – what’s the mechanic’s job in the car? He’s got to study the race and help the two guys sitting in the front work out which riders are in which group. That’s down to listening to the short-wave race radio. Diego speaks perfect French, Italian and Spanish, and he’d learnt English in two years. He’s very particular about his work; not a great person in a team, but good on his own. And I’ve never seen anyone as fast at getting out of the car and fixing a puncture; just being very confident about it – no panic,
just gets it done. That alone could be the difference between winning and losing.

Diego was going through a rather particular time in his life. He had just got a new girlfriend and was constantly on the phone to her. So when we got in the car at the start of the race and I said, ‘OK, guys, unless there’s a major crisis, no phones now,’ he was pissed off and wouldn’t talk to me for the first two or three hours. I didn’t give a shit; he still did his job. That’s something I always do – I wouldn’t answer the phone to my wife when I’m in a race car unless it was an emergency. It’s our job to make that clear to our other halves. I remember years back I was in a race, on the radio to one of the riders, and he couldn’t hear me because someone in the car was on the phone. It makes a difference.

We’d thought about the telly as well. Chris White, the performance analyst who had been working with us since the start of the road Worlds project, had hired it and had made sure it was going to work. He’d done a load of checks around the course to see where the signal dipped in and out. So you would go under some trees and you’d know you were going to lose it. That in turn meant you didn’t start fiddling with the dials, because there was no panicking that you were going to lose the channel and how would you get it back? You’re ready for the picture to come back at a certain point, and then you’re straight back on it again. It all helps you keep calm.

We had good reason to be nervous. We’d been working towards this one day for the last three years, since I’d gone public with the idea that Great Britain could build a team with the aim of winning the elite world road race championship, the biggest one-day race in the sport, the one that rewards its
winner with the right to wear the rainbow-striped jersey for the next twelve months. Britain had only won it once, with Tom Simpson back in 1965, and had never looked like winning it since. This could be our once-in-a-lifetime chance: this might be the only time in Cav’s career that he would get the flat course that suited him. The build-up hadn’t been straightforward, but we knew he was ready, and that might not happen next time. We also knew the team had bought into the idea, in a way that no British team had done since the day that Simpson won it nearly half a century ago.

The project had got under way in 2008, but it had been seven years since Mark Cavendish had first told me that he wanted to win the Worlds, back in 2004, when we started working together. It sounded unlikely then, but a few years later it had begun to look like it might be possible one day, as he’d landed his first big win – the Scheldeprijs – started his first Tour de France and won some smaller races. He’d ridden the 2007 Worlds just to get in amongst it, to feel it, to experience how the Italian and Spanish teams worked, how teams come together from their day jobs working for other outfits and have to race as a unit from scratch on that one day. That was the key to the whole project. Assembling a team for the Worlds is like English footballers playing together for their country in the World Cup after kicking the stuffing out of each other in the Premiership all season – you have to work hard to get it right.

It might not have crossed many other people’s minds, but it was clear to us back then that no one in cycling was faster than Mark Cavendish – and that made life a lot easier when it came to winning a one-day race like the Worlds – plus we knew the riders had the engines to ride as a unit and keep the
race together for him on a flat course. I felt we had the talent, so the question was: how do we do it? It helped that the bulk of those cyclists in the team that day had come up through the Great Britain academy which I had founded – riders like Ian Stannard, Geraint Thomas, Cav himself, of course – so they all understood how I worked and how Cav operated. And the older guys like Steve Cummings, Bradley Wiggins, Jeremy Hunt and David Millar were all smart and had always got the picture too.

Before the start of a one-day race there is a lottery for the car’s position in the convoy; we had been given a really bad draw – nineteenth – and were supposed to be sharing the car with the Irish, although Great Britain were in the top ten in the world rankings. I said there was no way we were going to share with Ireland if we were out to win the Worlds; I’ve got nothing against the Irish – I am half Irish myself – it was the pure principle of it. So Dave Brailsford, the GB Performance Director, protested against it, and did a bloody good job. He managed to get us moved up the order, but we were still well outside the first ten, which meant that if anyone needed a wheel change or a fresh bike, it would take us that little bit longer to get to them. For most of the race that wouldn’t matter, but at the end it could cost us everything.

We knew that even if Cav had a problem right up to the last five or six kilometres, he would still be on for the win; he could crash or puncture, and we could still bring him back, but if he did have a problem after that, there would be no use being car eleven or twelve. We’d have to be right there behind the bunch if something happened. It had taken a bit of planning to get round that one, but we had worked out that with a bit of front
we would be able to do at least half a lap as car number one in the convoy. This was where Brian had come into his own. Just before the end of the lap there was a right-hand corner, then the finish straight, and after that the road narrowed to go past the feed zone; no cars would be doing any overtaking there, and then there was a fast section where the peloton was flat out and the cars would all be split up.

Brian said to me, ‘Right, when I say “Go”, you go with all guns blazing, horn blaring, making a big noise – and time it so that the second you hit that right-hand corner before the finish straight, you’re car number one in the convoy.’ So we were flat out, screaming past the other team cars. I was hanging onto the wheel, Diego breathing down my neck all the time as he kept his eyes on the telly. And as we flew past the other team cars, everyone was looking at us, thinking, ‘What do they know that we don’t? Why are they moving up now?’

So we got to the front and stayed there through the narrow section, right up to the foot of the next climb. At that point there was a chance the other cars might try to push past us and put us back in our place right down the pecking order. But then Brian came into his own again: ‘Right, let’s go and talk to my mate in the doctor’s car.’ Being a legend of Danish bike racing, Brian knew the guy who was driving that car, which spent the race sitting right behind the peloton, ahead of car number one in the convoy – Italy or Spain. So we went and talked to him for ages, looking quite worried, as if we might actually have a reason for talking to the race doctor. I remember the Italian team manager Paolo Bettini coming past in his car at one point, and he was clearly thinking, ‘Oh yes, I know what you’re up to.’

We got to a certain point in the race – I think it would be with a good hour to go – and I said, ‘Right, guys, no stopping for a piss from now on.’ It’s hard to stop anyway at the Worlds: you’re on a circuit, it’s all barriers, and there are people everywhere. I was clenching and twisting my hands on the wheel all day. I was literally just watching that telly for seven hours. You’re not meant to watch it as you drive, but it’s hard not to. There’s nothing else you can do; you’re just sitting there, hoping.

I don’t think I’ve ever felt so nervous. I’d gone through the full gamut of emotions since I started working with Great Britain. You start out with the riders, you go to your first race with them, they’re starting to win … There had been nervous times – the Commonwealth Games in 2006, when Cav won the scratch race, and the world track championships in 2005, when he won the Madison, and in 2008 in Manchester, when he and Bradley Wiggins were taking a lap on the field in the same event and the whole stadium was on its feet cheering them on. This was way bigger than any of them, but there we were in Copenhagen in this little car, all on our own, not a sound apart from the race radio and the three of us yelling at that little screen.