Project Rainbow (17 page)

The quality that has made Cav special over the years hasn’t left him. Even now, when he earns good money, he’s still as passionate about winning races as he was when I first met him. It’s not money that drives him. He likes earning it – and why shouldn’t he? – but if he was earning £10 a week he’d still have the same drive to win bike races. That’s just how he is. He constantly wants to win, and he gets frustrated when he doesn’t. It’s not that he’s selfish. When he wins, he sees it as winning for the team – he’s very genuine when he says thanks to his teammates. He’s always been like that – he would always be very opinionated on how they were going to win races. In the early days of the academy, I remember it got to a point when I began to think, ‘Bloody hell, he actually does know how to race. This guy has got a good racing head on him.’ We didn’t always agree on race tactics, but I always tried to encourage the lads to speak up, because they won’t go to the line understanding what they’re doing if they don’t discuss it first. Mark would always come up with pretty good ideas for how to win races.

The other thing I’ve learnt with Mark is that what you see is what you get. When you hear him being interviewed after a stage of the Tour, he will come out with something, and you know that’s really him saying it. It’s not a front. I agree when Brian Holm says, ‘I like him talking’ – and Bob Stapleton said the same thing in the HTC days. But when Mark was at Team Sky I think people were trying to control him and what he
was saying, and I didn’t like that. It became a bit robotic. You can’t squash Mark Cavendish. You can’t keep him in a box. He needs to be a bit more flamboyant, be himself, not just give the regular answers.

Cav has more ambition than any cyclist I’ve ever known. He certainly has more than Brad, but in a completely different way – comparing those two is like comparing Usain Bolt to Mo Farah. It’s a different mental attitude. I think Cav is really good for Brad – Brad feeds off Cav’s desire to win in a very positive way. The ambition is not in Brad in the same way. He wants it badly enough, but he’s not this outspoken character saying, ‘Right, we’re going to get out there and win today.’ But when Cav is alongside him he really believes in him, and Cav believes in Brad. There is a good balance there. Cav has never changed. He is his own person: always streetwise, always ahead of the game in his thinking. I’ve only rarely got on the phone with him and found him down. He had a few problems with his girlfriend in the past, some real down moments, but those are about the only times when he wouldn’t be talking to me about ideas, about moving forward, about the next thing and the one after that. Normally, you get him into a cycling conversation, and it’s ‘I want to do this, I’m looking at that, do you think I could win this race?’ He’s always thinking ahead.

A key part of drawing up that world championships plan was getting Cav involved right from the very start. I guided him through every step of it, because he was the managing director, the boss. It was through him that the other riders would get involved. I had to point out to him, ‘Listen, Cav, you can’t miss a trick here. Every single training camp, every single time
you talk to these riders, you’ve got to be talking to them about the Worlds.’ And Cav was chipping in with ideas, particularly about who he wanted to be involved. For example, he was very much behind having Jeremy Hunt in there.

By the start of 2009 we had begun working on the next step in the process: if he wanted to win the Worlds as a stepping stone to the Olympics, he would have to win that year’s Milan–San Remo as part of the build-up to the Worlds. To win it he would have to move to Italy; at the back end of 2007 he’d made the move. When Milan–San Remo was on, I was in the velodrome at Manchester getting ready to travel to the track Worlds. I watched the race in the office and ended up on the phone to Matt Parker – who’d already arrived in Poland and had called in – shouting at the telly. I couldn’t fucking believe it when he won that race, just millimetres in it from Heinrich Haussler, who led the sprint out.

It was a massive shock: ‘Has Mark just won Milan–San Remo? Oh my God, he has.’ I texted him, as I always do when he wins: ‘Well done, good job.’ That night I was over the moon. I thought over and over again, ‘Wow, the world championship is really on now.’ I was a little worried, though. Cav had committed to ride the world track championships with Peter Kennaugh – he had been talking about how he wanted to win the Madison for the third time – and now he had just won Milan–San Remo – were he and the whole team going to go out on the piss? I was staying in the Holiday Inn in Manchester, due to fly out the next morning, and it was about eleven thirty at night when I got the phone call. It was Cav.

‘Hey up, Cav, how are you? Well done. Where are you?’

‘Oh, I’m in Gatwick. I’m on my own.’

He was booked on a flight in there before flying out to Poland. He had won Milan–San Remo and there were people desperate for him to stay and go out to celebrate, but instead he was thinking about the Track Worlds. It reminded me of what had happened when he won the scratch-race gold medal at the Commonwealth Games in 2006: his attitude wasn’t that he’d made it, but that he’d moved on. Immediately after that medal, he was thinking about the road race, and this time he was already moving on to the world track championships.

We both knew that this was a defining moment, but it wasn’t the end result that mattered; it was the bigger picture. It was very powerful. I had told everybody that he needed to win Milan–San Remo before 2011. It was a key part of winning over the other riders, who would think, ‘Oh my God, it’s really on.’ It wasn’t just them: suddenly, we were getting even more backing from within British Cycling than before; people could start to see what we were doing as a team and how it was building. As for how strongly Mark felt about it, the first thing he said to me when I picked up the phone that Saturday night in the Holiday Inn was: ‘I can win the Worlds now. I am going to be world champion one day.’ When he eventually got to Poland, he could hardly get his head through the door, but he had every reason to be so pleased with himself.

That evening in late June 2009, in the Holiday Inn in Cwmbran, we hung up the jersey in a picture frame, in a corner of the meeting room. It wasn’t just any jersey. This was
the
jersey, Tom Simpson’s jersey, nearly forty-four years old, the only one won by any British professional in the road Worlds: thick wool, rainbow stripes on the chest and the neck a little faded now against the white fabric, a small handwritten plaque on one side of the frame.

This was the first time the riders who might make up the team for the 2011 world championships would be together, and I wanted to make a bit of an impact. I needed something that would get the project truly under way, that would pull the lads together. What could be better than this piece of cycling history? It was so long since Simpson had outsprinted Rudi Altig to win that jersey in San Sebastián: just seeing it there, a real rainbow jersey rather than just a photograph, would make the riders understand the historic scale of what we were trying to achieve.

I wanted to get the riders under one roof three times in 2009; this was the first camp, forty-eight hours before the national road race championships in Abergavenny. I like the idea of everyone in a team being in a room together, so that you can explain in one fell swoop exactly what you are aiming to do. It’s about going to the start line and being so clear
about your job, so clear about your form, so clear about what your mate is doing next to you that there are no discussions; you just have the same understanding. It all comes back to the Steve Peters principle: ‘Get in a room and tell them.’ I had to get them to understand, bring up the challenges and the things that might hold us back. I had done quite a lot of my stuff with Steve beforehand, so I felt quite confident. I knew this was going to work. If bringing this group together was the pinnacle of my cycling career so far, I’d done my apprenticeship at the academy. And that’s where I was fortunate: I had worked with 80 per cent of the group, so they believed in what I was doing. Steve would say, ‘Target one guy and get him to buy in, because he will lead the others.’ While Cav was the obvious leader, the one I felt I had to win over was David Millar. Dave’s a bit of a talker; he lobbies for things. He had the perfect credentials as road captain, the guy who would orchestrate tactics on the road: he was massively experienced, very articulate and not afraid to stick his neck out and say what he thought.

What I wanted to do here was to kick-start the entire project. I had to make sure Dave Brailsford was at the meeting because he gives an event like this that stamp of authority which he has. I also wanted something more than that, something that would capture the imagination of all the lads. It was Tom Simpson’s nephew, the writer Chris Sidwells, who went and got the jersey out of the museum. I kept everybody out of the room beforehand, and when they came in, the jersey was hanging in the corner. I didn’t say anything; they didn’t look at it. All I said was, ‘Welcome, guys,’ then – bang! – the lights went off and I played the archive footage from the 1965 Worlds of Simpson and Rudi Altig fighting it out in the sprint finish and Simpson
pulling on the jersey on the podium, with David Saunders’s commentary playing flat out on the big speakers I’d put in the room.

Chris White at the English Institute of Sport had found a short video clip of every single rider who was going to be at the meeting, and up they came, one by one: Dave Millar, Ben Swift, Ian Stannard, Geraint Thomas, Roger Hammond, Jeremy Hunt, Chris Froome, Brad – actually he wasn’t at the meeting because he didn’t turn up – and Cav. Some of the clips weren’t great, but that didn’t matter: I really wasn’t interested in the flashy side, in it looking all showbiz. It was just plain and simple, a roll-your-sleeves-up-and-go presentation. Then I wanted to go straight to the heart of it: right, how are we going to win the rainbow jersey again?

When the lights came back on, I pointed out the jersey in its picture frame in the corner: ‘This is the prize we are all going for; this is the jersey we are trying to win.’ They couldn’t believe that they were seeing the jersey, the one worn by the legendary Tommy himself. All of them were open-mouthed, but I got the best reactions out of Cav and Dave Millar, the two guys I was particularly looking to tie in. We were on our way.

The difference between trying to win the Worlds and running the academy was that before I had been working with athletes at a formative stage in their sporting lives. For the Worlds I was dealing with mature athletes, most of them in their physical prime, and most of them hugely experienced. It called for a different approach. The academy was very much a regime; some people called it a dictatorship. It was a matter of ‘do or don’t do’; do and survive, or don’t do and don’t survive. Dave
Brailsford had said to me, ‘Look, Rod, you’ve got to change your coaching philosophy’; obviously I appreciated him telling me, but I was aware of it. All of a sudden I would have to be in a support role, the guy behind the riders rather than the guy telling them what to do.

What I had learnt from the academy was this: how to get athletes to buy into an idea. What counted was getting the riders to work towards one goal and getting the message across to them. And even if I didn’t have an intimate knowledge of the professional cycling world, I was fortunate that I did have respect from a lot of the riders for the hard work I did. They understood that we were pushing hard to win something big and they knew I would support them. When we began talking about the whole project, there was no question with Cav: he knew I was going to bust my balls to make this happen. He knew that even in his darkest hours – when he was ill or had crashed or whatever – I would always be behind him and supporting him. And all the other lads knew that as well. They knew I was always going to be there.

I didn’t have any sophisticated objectives for this get-together. These guys aren’t used to sitting in classrooms, listening to people lecturing them. This was completely new; there was nothing from the past to go on. A road team always went to the Worlds every year and to the Olympics every four years, but there was no real drive, there was no clarity of vision, and there was no leadership in terms of getting a group together and making it a focused programme. So I had a clean slate to work from. I wanted to get the lads feeling, ‘Here we go, this is the project.’ I wanted them to come up with their own selection criteria, and now they needed to start talking about how we would win
– what would the whole strategy look like? The idea was to understand where we were, to put together some general ideas about what we were trying to do and how we could make it work. I also wanted to set out our standards and principles.

The official programme targets were: 2009 Worlds, top ten; 2010 Worlds, top ten; 2011 Worlds, top three; 2012 Olympic Games, top three. But in fact the goal was simple: to win the professional world road race championship in 2011. Note that: to win it. In spite of those official goals, there was no ‘Let’s try and get on the podium,’ no ‘Medal or nothing,’ which was the Olympic track team principle; this was about the gold medal and the rainbow jersey, and nothing else. When you’ve got someone like Cav, you’ve just got to win. He was never happy with second or third, so why should we be? We had to win. And we never took our eyes off that objective, which was symbolised by that jersey hanging in the corner.

During the rest of the meeting, I made a big point of looking time and again at that jersey, to make sure that the riders’ eyes would be directed to those rainbow stripes. I made a huge thing of something else: each time I said the phrase ‘to
win
the world road race championship’, I would pause after I’d said it and leave a gap of four or five seconds before I moved on to the next point. I would look at each and every single one of the riders, right in the eye. And every single one of them was listening.

I had been quite nervous about this meeting; putting a team together in this way for the road Worlds was a completely new thing for Britain. I had taken a couple of ideas from Sir Clive Woodward – my girlfriend Jane had bought an audiobook about his campaign to win the Rugby World Cup in 2003 – and one aspect that was helpful was the way he had broken
the whole thing down into different parts. Another was injury prevention: injuries can cripple a team, so what we did before and after training and racing would be important. Another inspiration was a British Lions DVD I’d been given by Richard Wooles, a GB
soigneur
who ended up running Canada’s track programme; that got us talking about team building and what a team stands for. Someone else put me onto Gordon Ramsay’s
Kitchen Nightmares
– where that helped was in finding out the good and bad characters to have in a close-knit body of people.

We went through the Great Britain principles. It was quite straightforward: we don’t cheat. That meant in every way – no hanging onto cars, no doing anything that broke the rules. I made no bones about it: the riders had to agree to the GB anti-doping policy, and that was that. If anyone didn’t agree with it, they wouldn’t even be getting a start. They were all professional bike riders, riding for different teams for the rest of the year, but riding for GB means riding for GB. I had to make this a big point: they had to feel proud putting on a British jersey, they had to feel honoured – ‘Let’s not take this lightly, you are riding for your country.’

Honesty was another key thing I talked about; in the end, it was one of the key factors at the Worlds. Eventually, I was getting riders ringing me up during the selection process and telling me, ‘Don’t choose me because I’m not fit enough.’ Adam Blythe, Jeremy Hunt and Dan Lloyd were the three I remember very well at various times in the years the project ran – and I really appreciated their honesty. This wasn’t about any single individual; this was about a group of riders going to the start line and trying to win a bike race, and the example of those three really made that point. And when it came to the race,
they had to buy into the roles and responsibilities of the team – each and every single one of them.

There were other things, starting with the financial side. These guys were professional cyclists and they raced for a living. If we won, what did they want? What were people’s expectations? Dave Brailsford stood up to explain that Lottery funding was not going to cover all of them, but on the other hand we appreciated that the winner would do well out of it, so they would need to be rewarded. Getting Dave to stand up and explain gave it that gravitas: they were hearing it from the man at the top. And he had to explain a bit about Team Sky, because this was June of 2009 and it was very much in the making, and Dave and I were bloody busy at the time; it was full on throughout, so I was pretty knackered. So Dave stood up and gave a bit of an update on where Team Sky was, which wasn’t easy, given that not everybody in the room was going to be signed up to ride for them.

The gist of what I had to tell the riders was this: last year at the Worlds there had been no goal and no plan, and that had been the case in the years before. That was just how it was, but now that we had the riders, we could build the team together with a long-term plan. So I went through it, pushed the new ideas and looked at the detail. A major point I wanted to make was that the plan would be based on understanding the life of a pro cyclist. That was a big point that Dave Millar wanted to make – ‘Nobody understands what we do, how many days we spend on the road.’ So I gave this undertaking: no camp was compulsory. If someone didn’t turn up to one, he would not be ruled out. It was about putting the best nine riders on the road, and that was all. For example, Bradley Wiggins never came to
any of the camps, but I could tell he had been reading the information. He clearly understood the history of it and what we were trying to achieve. The only person who I said had to go to every single camp was Cav – he had to buy into every one we did. I made that clear to him before we even started. To make that work I had to fix the dates around him, because he was the key person in all of this.

I told the riders, ‘You’re the ones who can make this happen.’ They were a good mix of old and developing talent, established professionals like Cav and Dave Millar alongside younger team members who might come on board in future – the likes of Peter Kennaugh and Alex Dowsett. I went through the events we would ride in over the next few years – a hilly Worlds in Mendrisio, a rolling one in Melbourne, the Olympic test event in London, a mainly flat Worlds in Copenhagen and a pretty flat Olympic Games. I’d heard a little whisper that maybe the Worlds would be in Britain in 2013, so I added that in as a bit of a teaser.

We went through the potential riders for these events, what the team might look like, how many riders could qualify, possible team tactics. I’d also got them printouts of the qualification rules from the UCI: what do you have to do? What events count? How many riders need to qualify? That was pretty straightforward because it was there in black and white, but just explaining it in front of them helped, rather than letting the lads end up with their own interpretation. And they all seemed to sort of remember it. That was the key thing – they seemed to get into it a little bit.

I had looked at the Italians’ way of working, and all they seemed to do was have a race calendar that was quite helpful:
they go to a series of one-day races leading up to the Worlds, and the pros come together as a national team on a couple of those occasions. Whoever the manager was – Paolo Bettini at the time, Franco Ballerini before him – would go round those races, and you’d see pictures of them stood by the team cars with their shades on. What I thought was, ‘What are they actually doing?’ They were going round all the riders and selecting them for races, which is all fair enough, but I always thought to myself, ‘We can do a better job than that.’ One problem with the Italian system is that getting in the team is so important, so prestigious, that the riders fight all summer to get selected. You can’t help thinking there must be an element of ‘Phew, job done, I’ve got in the team,’ which actually damages the way they compete when the race itself comes around. They get so much publicity – even when they get in the Worlds, they have motorbikes following them with cameras and so on – but it seems to be all show.