Project Rainbow (16 page)

I deal with him in a similar way when he’s ill. He doesn’t cope with that too well. When he’s not winning, he struggles to come to terms with it. There are times, when he’s ill or it’s not happening in the bike races, when you have to bring him back to basics: ‘Right, what’s going to make the difference? How are you going to do this? What are you going to do tomorrow?’ He’ll have the answers, although you have to guide him: ‘I need to go and speak to the doctor. I need some medication because I’m sick.’ ‘What does that mean?’ ‘I can’t train too hard.’ ‘Right, let’s not train too hard; let’s be patient.’ That’s the sort of stuff he needs, not the ‘Go and do twenty efforts of this, or ride at this intensity.’ It’s more quite basic life stuff with Cav.

Other people could coach Mark Cavendish and get the
same results; if ten other coaches had begun coaching him at the same time I did, at least nine of them would have ended up with something similar. It was about me being in the right place at the right time. In terms of coaching his cycling, I’ve never made a massive difference to anything he would have done; it’s the coaching around his bike, keeping him on the straight and narrow when he was younger, getting him organised, pulling him back to focusing on certain things. Mark constantly has ideas; he’s always thinking about what’s next – he finishes one thing and is straight on to the next before he’s even taken breath. Sometimes you have to say, ‘Hang on, let’s look at what you did. Why did that happen?’ I don’t think he’s a great reviewer of occasions when things have gone wrong. He looks to blame other factors quite a lot. It’s at those times that you say, ‘Hang on, did you do this? Did you look at that?’ If it was other people telling him to do that, he might tell them to piss off, but that was where my relationship with him had grown, to a point where he wouldn’t. So sometimes I’d suggest things, and he’d say he didn’t agree, and occasionally I’d be right.

One thing I’ve learnt massively with Cav is this: don’t tell him what to do. The skill is to get him to say what he is going to do off his own bat. Sometimes it will take two or three months for him to come round to telling you what you were thinking about. Then you think, ‘Bingo, you’re on it. We’re there.’ Sometimes I’ve been six months or so ahead of Cav, putting little ideas into his head here and there, so that he will then say, ‘I’m on this one, I’ve thought about this.’ If you were an ego-driven person, you’d be in trouble; you’ve got to be prepared to sit back and say, ‘OK, guys, this is your programme.’ That was
the way I approached the road Worlds, but it was something I always did with Cav.

With Cav one example would be when he first rode the Tour de France. I thought he was ready to ride it, but I wouldn’t actually say, ‘You’re ready to do the Tour’; it was a matter of getting him to tell me, ‘I’m ready.’

Then I could ask, ‘Why? How come you’re able to?’

‘I know I’ve got this. I was training well here. I was going up these climbs faster than I’ve ever done before, so I can cope with the climbing. I’m definitely working the sprints out better than before. I’m definitely more consistent.’

Those are the answers I’d be looking for.

We’ve had our share of funny moments. The amount of crashes he had at the academy was horrendous, unbelievable, but sometimes they were just hilarious. We were over in Cronulla in Australia just before he won the World Madison championship in 2005; it was just after Gee had had his bad accident and lost his spleen, so my nerves were a bit on edge. The lads would go out at six in the morning to do three hours or so, while I’d be sat in my room. One morning there was a knock on the door. It was a guy I didn’t know from Adam with one of our bikes, but straight away I recognised it: it was Cav’s. He said, ‘Are you Rod?’ He was in cycling kit, a local Aussie bike rider, and he said Mark had told him where I was – he’d been knocked off his bike and taken to hospital.

I thought, ‘Shit’, and raced to the hospital, thinking it was going to be really bad. What had happened was that a car had pulled out in front of them, and Cav had ploughed into the side of it and gone over the bonnet. I was quite concerned after
the business with Gee, so I went racing through this hospital, asking people where he was. As I got closer and closer to the ward all I could hear was Cav going, ‘Quack, quack, quack,’ and laughing and joking. Straight away I was pissed off: I’d come racing down there in a panic, and all I could hear was Cav giving it large. I drew the curtains back, and there he was, with this nurse talking to him. He was in clover.

‘Are you all right?’

‘Yeah, there’s nothing wrong with me, but they insisted on putting me in the ambulance.’

‘Come on, let’s go home.’

He was full of it – ‘I had a great time in the hospital, all these lovely nurses looking after me’ – and I was so pissed off. Now I just laugh about it.

As to why Mark crashed so often, technically I don’t think he’s that good. He’s not always super-balanced on the bike. To be in there to win those sprints you have to put yourself on the edge at times, and he’s not scared. He would never hold back. He would always push to win. Until recently, he’d very rarely actually crashed in a sprint – it had always happened while he was getting there. He would take risks, race really hard; he gets away with it because when he does have a collision, he has so much speed that he stays upright half the time. Even when he’s not going well, he still races as if he’s at his best; sometimes he doesn’t quite have the condition, and when you’re on the edge you’re likely to get into trouble.

The funniest one I had ever had with Cav was when he got a splinter. It’s one we all still talk about now, partly because for Cav and the other lads the academy was such a massive shared experience. They still say things like, ‘You didn’t have it
as hard as I did,’ ‘Yeah, but you did this,’ ‘Yeah, but Rod was super-hard on us,’ and so on. We were doing a Madison session behind the motorbike, practising changes; it was Ross Sander who I was worried about, because he was just coming back from a broken wrist. I’d been looking at the track by the start and finish line and thinking, ‘Oh my God, it’s all broken up where they wheel the start gate up and down time after time.’ The wood was all worn; you could feel the splinters standing out as you rubbed your fingers along the boards. I had a clear view in the wing mirror. I spotted Ross coming down the track for a change, and my gut feeling was, ‘Whoa, they’ve got this wrong.’ We were going at a decent rate of knots when Ross and Cav got hold of each other, touched their front wheels and flew over the bars. And they both fell straight onto their chests on that bit of track at over 50 kilometres per hour and slid along.

I was worried, but as always on the motorbike I didn’t come to a sudden stop because I had the other riders lined up behind me. By the time I realised what had happened I had gone round the next two turns on the opposite side of the track. Ross was up, Cav was rolling around a bit, and they were both a bit shaken. They both got back on their bikes and said they thought they were OK, so I said to ride round for a little while – ‘Good for them that they got back on their bikes,’ I felt. The next thing Cav rolled off the track, and he was looking at me, quite concerned. He parked up, and I finished the session and went to stand on the green part in the middle of the track. Cav had his skinsuit on and he was walking a bit bent over, a bit awkward. He had this face on him, laughing slightly but in pain. He opened his skinsuit and there were splinters all over his chest. There were a couple of long ones, not in very
deep, so he was pulling them out. He said, ‘But that’s not the worst thing,’ and he pulled his skinsuit down and there was this splinter right through his penis. I’m dead squeamish about anything like that, so I sent him off to our then doctor, Roger Palfreeman. Twenty minutes or so later Cav came bounding into the track centre with the splinter in a little bag, waving it proudly in the air. I’ve no idea what he did with it.

He had another accident in 2004, a few days before we were going to race the amateur criterium at the last stage of the Tour of Britain in London, with £1,000 on the line. Cav had won a good few races by this time, and the academy lads had really started to knit together as a little unit. The race was on the Sunday, and on the Wednesday or Thursday they were out training around Manchester way when I got a phone call. They were panicking like mad: ‘Cav’s in hospital, he’s smashed up big time.’ He and Tom White were out near Hatton Park and had tangled their handlebars when they were messing around. They went down, and Cav fell straight on his face. I went to pick him up. They thought he might have broken his cheek – he had massive cuts to his face, a ripped lip and was really bruised. He was in a right state. Roger Palfreeman was adamant: ‘This guy can’t race at the weekend.’ We were all massively disappointed, because these guys were all set to do well for themselves and they wanted to earn a bit of cash.

Cav was pleading with me: ‘Rod, you’ve got to let me race, you’ve got to let me race.’ It was one of those moments when I did go against the doctor’s orders. I was looking at him and thinking, ‘He’s absolutely fine,’ but Roger’s issue was that if he fell again on his face, he would be in trouble. I ended up saying, ‘He’ll be all right, he’s a tough lad.’ So Cav won the race. But
what struck me at this one wasn’t his determination to race; it was his recall in the sprint. Afterwards he went through the entire final kilometre with me as if he’d been going at fifteen kilometres per hour: ‘I came up here. I noticed the lads skipping up a drain cover here, so as I was going up the gutter I went slightly to the left of it. I sensed someone coming here, so I just moved a little bit this way. I pressed on at this moment, with 100 metres to go.’

I can’t remember the exact details, but I remember what I thought: ‘Bloody hell.’ It was the first time I’d seen that in any bike racer: this guy could recall the sprint finish as if it was in slow motion. He could go through what happened on every corner; he knew which team was where and had such incredible awareness of what was going on around him. It goes back to the question of how he got to Manchester for the interview to enter the academy: ‘I took the M56 to this place, and then I got the number 10 bus going to somewhere else.’ His awareness of what he’s doing is quite special. It’s a skill that some people have. I don’t think it’s something that you learn.

In the same way, as a sprinter you either have that speed or you don’t. Has he worked on it? Perhaps as a young lad, but he’s just got that ability. I remember having conversations with him: ‘Have you always believed you could sprint?’ ‘Oh yeah, I’ve always known.’ ‘When did you realise?’ ‘When I was a little kid riding BMX. I was always fast.’ I remember him saying, ‘Even when I’m knackered I can sprint.’ And he always sprints home. Physically, he has so much going for him: you look at his muscle quality, how he lies over the bike when he’s sprinting – he’s small and much more aerodynamic than someone like André Greipel. Cav can always get himself into a good position
in the bunch, which may partly be down to his upbringing in bike racing. As a young lad he had relatively little strength and endurance; to compete he had to learn to scuttle around people. Ben Swift is exactly the same. Cav also has incredible leg speed when he is sprinting out of the saddle. In 2009 we did a complete analysis on all the sprinters: Cav was spinning on average at about 105 or 110 rpm when he was out of the saddle turning a 53 × 11 gear; most of his competitors were at about 90 rpm. If you assume they are mostly using the same gear, they’re not going to get anywhere near him because their legs simply don’t spin fast enough. Seated, Cav will turn the pedals comfortably at 130 rpm.

One year I managed to get hold of the overhead footage of all the stage finishes Cav went for in the Tour; with the shots from the helicopter you get a fantastic view of the movement in the bunch. We were looking at how other teams worked. At the time I was saying to Mark, ‘One day somebody else is going to challenge you here, so we need to start looking at other teams, what they are doing differently. Are any guys doing things that could work for you?’ What we noticed in the overhead footage was exactly how he moves. He’s skilful; he doesn’t sit right behind the rider who is in front of him. He’s not straight behind their back wheel; he sits slightly to one side. It’s as if he was riding an elimination race on the track, so he’s got room to move out. That means he creates space for himself all the time; he’s got room to come back and get onto the wheel if he knows it’s his teammate’s and he wants to get it; he can latch onto the wheel of a rival if he’s coming past, or he can just bluff by constantly moving from one side of the wheel to another.

For me, bike racing isn’t all about the scientific side, and
that’s one area where we saw eye to eye early on. Cav is the sort of guy who will say, ‘I don’t care if I can produce this number of watts in training if I can’t scratch my arse in the bike race or I can’t get over that climb.’ It wasn’t about the data you put out on your power meter or in rig tests, but that was what was drilled into him as a junior – the numbers, the numbers, the numbers. In the end his attitude was, ‘I just can’t be bothered about the numbers.’ We used to do rig tests and so on at the academy, and we’d use some numbers, but not in quite the same way as the rest of the GB team. I remember that he didn’t want to do his first rig test after joining the academy – it was a ramp test, where you constantly increase the power until you crack, and he said, ‘I don’t want to do it.’ My answer was, ‘Well, you don’t have a choice, you’re doing it.’ In the first year of the academy they did one every three months, and it was quite a key thing. I got him to come round to it by saying I didn’t care how he compared with Matt Brammeier or Ed Clancy; what I cared about was how Mark Cavendish on 1 January compared to Mark Cavendish on 1 April. What we wanted to know was whether he had moved on, whether he was fitter. When he understood that, he didn’t mind doing the test.

All the bike riders have different attitudes here. Geraint Thomas is half and half: he likes to use the numbers to train with, but sometimes likes just to ride his bike. Bradley Wiggins is about the numbers. Although he has all the cycling knowledge and history at his fingertips because of that amazing memory he has, he really buys into the numbers for training and racing. Cav got more into the numbers in the run-in to the London Olympics because he could see that, delivered in the right way, they can be useful. I would say to anybody that if
you’re having a conversation with Cav, you always have to finish with ‘in the bike race this is what happens’ – you always relate it back to bike racing, rather than just referring to data. If you don’t bring it back to the racing, you lose him.