Authors: Rod Ellingworth
I would estimate that 80 per cent of the practices we have now were put in place that winter, after that first year of learning. In terms of performance we went back to the old principle: ‘Let’s do the simple things really, really well.’ By ‘simple things’ I mean hydration, logistics, fuelling, training, communication with the riders. We had to make sure they turned up at a race
and knew what their role was. If they receive a performance plan a week before and, for example, one guy doesn’t want to sit on the front and work because he feels he’s ready to go for the win, he can ring up and say, ‘Listen, I want my opportunity.’ Whatever the outcome, at least he’s got the chance to speak his mind. And the egos settled down; there were no issues in terms of who did what in the system – we all accept Dave as the boss, the man with the ultimate say. He is all over everything.
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Team Sky wasn’t really at the forefront of my mind once we got through the winter and the 2011 season got under way. By then I was almost completely focused on the world championships, trying to build the momentum for the riders without it being energy-sapping over the course of the season. I had to make them gradually more and more aware of what we were getting into, and at the same time be wary of the end-of-season blues. The time that really mattered was the last week in September; there is a lot of racing before then, so my focus on Cav was quite intense. I didn’t want Mark to switch off in any way, but there was a lot going on with him which could potentially take his mind off one of the biggest goals of his career. He was falling out with his team, and there was immense speculation about whether he would end up at Team Sky. There was a constant dialogue with him all year, and I was the go-between, stuck in the middle: Cav would talk to me, I’d talk to Dave, Dave would talk to me, I’d go back to Cav.
The riders were given a DVD of the 2011 Worlds route at our last training camp, the national road race championships in north-east England in June. There the riders were split into groups and asked to detail what tactics they would use to ensure
a bunch sprint would happen for Cav. I wanted to nail down how we would race. Cav was vocal about two things: he wanted the team to take on the race, and he wanted to be kept out of trouble, with someone to shepherd him all day. Mark’s view was that if a team takes control on his behalf, it puts pressure on him to deliver, and that is how he likes it. That was how the team would have to ride, and that came through as what they all wanted at the meetings when we discussed ways of winning. When I put up the tactical plan on the Friday before the race, they weren’t my tactics, they were the riders’.
That in turn drove the selection: they said they needed certain riders to do this particular job. The biggest challenge was numbers. The best way to guarantee a win for Mark was by controlling the race. To control the race, we needed a big team; if we were in the same boat as in 2010, when we only qualified three, it would be tough: we’d be guessing about the outcome, hoping all day that the race would come back together for a bunch sprint rather than being able to make it happen. So we went through all their races from mid-July to the ranking cut-off date in mid-August – who was where and whether they might get a point or two. It wasn’t new; we were just making sure everyone knew what we were pushing for and where we were in terms of ranking and rider numbers.
Through July and early August I was constantly on to every rider in the squad about where Great Britain was sitting in the world rankings. The difference from 2010 was that the UCI had added a new rule: to get a full team of nine a nation needed to have at least nine riders scoring points, although you could select who you liked within your quota. We hadn’t got nine riders who had scored points; for most of the year it was five,
which was nail-biting. We were comfortably in the top ten in the world rankings, because although Brad had pulled out of the Tour, he had scored well by winning the Dauphiné; Cav had picked up lots of points as usual, Swifty had been winning races as well and David Millar had been scoring. But when it came down to the final qualifying event, the Tour of Poland, a week before the final deadline of 15 August, we were still looking at a team of five, because that was how many riders had scored points.
I had begun planning around five riders. It would have been flying by the seat of our pants, but we had to work around whatever we ended up with. But the lads did really well at the death: the final ones were Adam Blythe, who scored a point in the Tour of Poland, while Peter Kennaugh and Steve Cummings got high up overall. So all of a sudden we went from five to eight riders, which gave us a massive boost. Adam, Swifty and Pete didn’t even get to ride the Worlds, but their contribution in qualifying was massive.
I’d had a long-term strategy here, and it had worked. I’d kept chipping away at the riders since we began the project two years earlier. I’d kept the issue alive in their minds with the newsletters, constantly reminding them of the need to score, keeping their eyes on where they were. It was a big step on the way to Copenhagen, and it could have been the full nine: Ian Stannard finished sixth in the bunch sprint on the final stage in Poland, and if he had come in fifth, that would have been a single point, which would have given us nine points scorers. But Cav and I were happy with eight.
In mid-August we had a chance to try out the London Olympics road-race course, in the test event on the Box Hill
circuit, with the finish on the Mall. It was also a chance for me to put the riders in contention for the 2011 Worlds team through their paces. We stayed at the same hotel as we would for the Olympics, which was critical because the Games came so soon after the 2012 Tour de France. We already knew we were going to fly most of the Olympic team back to London on the night the Tour finished in Paris, and I wanted the lads to know the hotel they were going back to, and our staff needed to know it to ensure there would be no surprises. For the staff, it makes a difference if you don’t have to find out where you’re going, where you store stuff, where to park the cars, where you eat. If you know what issues you are going to have before you go into something, you can deal with them a lot better. When you are a cyclist coming off the back of the Tour, you are so tired that you just want to be able to go somewhere familiar. You can’t beat understanding and knowledge.
We had two teams of five riders in the test event, under the Great Britain and England banners, but they were one team as far as the Worlds were concerned. Beforehand, Cav didn’t want the stress of leading the team. He had just won the points jersey in the Tour and felt he had been under pressure for three weeks. The night before the race he was saying, ‘No, guys, don’t race for me,’ but almost the minute they rolled off the start line he changed his mind. After that it was a matter of controlling the race, then leading him out. As a Great Britain team, we’d never taken a race by the scruff of the neck and controlled it all the way. It ended up being a dry run for what we were going to do at the Worlds, but it wasn’t particularly planned like that. I was more interested in the way that the group had come together and that we had another weekend building the team.
What struck me over those few days in Surrey was the commitment from everyone. It’s like players coming together for the England soccer or rugby team after kicking seven bells out of each other in the Premiership week in, week out. All of a sudden they are having to shout to each other and work as a team; here we had riders from several different professional teams now having to work together as a unit. But that had been one of the key things when we were talking about the Worlds in the first place back in 2009, and having Team Sky was only going to ensure that the team would be closer anyway. A lot of the riders at the test event and at the Worlds were coming in from Sky, so working as a team wasn’t new for them.
Once we knew how many riders we had, the next question was selection. It was pretty simple: for what we wanted to do you need a good road captain and people to ride hard at the front of the bunch, big engines who are capable of doing the work. After that it was a matter of who was on form. Froomie and Brad were in pole position because they would have just come out of the Vuelta. I was a bit concerned about Brad. He had had a big year: he had been aiming for the Tour, which went belly up after his crash, but then he got himself back on the ball and went for the Vuelta. He had had a long, long season, and Sky had asked a lot of him. But he had turned himself around, complied with his training and been more cooperative with the media, and he was potentially a key character. Then again, he had never turned up to any of the training camps, so I had to ask myself, ‘Is he going to buy in?’ Against that, I knew that he and Cav have a really good relationship. I was banking on that.
On the other hand, Jeremy Hunt, Ian Stannard, David
Millar, Geraint Thomas and Steve Cummings had been totally in on the idea from the start. The selection was relatively easy, because younger riders like Ben Swift, Peter Kennaugh and Alex Dowsett hadn’t quite performed at that level of racing, or not to the extent that you could be certain they were still going to be there and doing the job after 250 kilometres of racing. One major thing right from the outset had been that there were never, ever going to be any development spots at these Worlds. It was only ever going to be the best team we could put on the line. We weren’t going to test anybody and we weren’t going to give anybody a bit of an opportunity. That had been a constant message. So that was quite an easy one to rule on when the time came.
Adam Blythe took himself out of selection quite early on. I’d spoken about honesty, and this was a good example: he was saying, ‘Actually, Rod, if you had picked me, it would have been quite obvious you didn’t know what you were doing.’ Roger Hammond was a big call, because he so wanted to do it. I felt a bit sorry for him because he had really bought into it. He really did like the British angle I had been constantly pushing: ‘We are out there fighting, we are the British team and we are going to put a British team on the podium. It’s about us as a team pulling that jersey on and feeling proud.’ It was a really hard call, phoning him up and saying he had not been selected, but Roger didn’t have the form and he hadn’t been going that well all year. Daniel Lloyd was another hard one: he too was very much on side, and at the Tour of Britain he had really good form – he was in the top ten overall – but the thing with Dan was that he had only just hit that form.
We’d already gone through two selection cycles before this,
so the riders knew the criteria, and I never missed a beat in terms of phoning each and every single one of them on each of the selection dates so they would know exactly where they were. This was another benefit of coming in with a long-term plan: we’d nailed the administration side, all the nitty-gritty things where people had slipped up in the past. With selection dates, selection criteria, training camps and rider numbers fixed in people’s minds from day one, when the time came all we had to focus on was the performance side: getting the qualification points and deciding which riders we were going to put in.
It was so hard to leave any of them out, but Dan was our first reserve. One of the other things I had worked on over the previous two years was the need for the reserves to keep in form. I made a real plea to them: ‘Please keep training because twenty-four hours beforehand you could be called up if one of these guys crashes or is sick. Anything can happen, so keep yourselves on the ball, guys.’ To be fair to Dan, he kept himself going. The selection was quite easy; who was going to do what and when was left until the last few days.
By the end of August I had a pretty good idea of the team line-up and I’d issued a massively detailed guide to the entire world championships. The idea was that there should be no excuse for them not knowing something. With that in place, I set off for Colorado to negotiate the Colombian Sergio Henao’s transfer to Sky; I took Tim Harris with me, as he knew Sergio from spending time in Colombia, and he can speak good Spanish. We were in Brussels airport waiting for the flight to New York, when we caught sight of stage four of the Vuelta on a TV in the terminal. It was a hot and hilly stage through southern Spain, and the first thing we spotted was Cav, struggling at
the back of the peloton. By the time I got to the TV, Cav was already out of the back of the peloton; the group had just gone over this little climb towards the end of the stage, with a team driving on at the front. My first thought was that he must have punctured, but then I saw the way he was pedalling. He was in a right state. And so was I: ‘Flipping heck, we’ve got five weeks before the Worlds. Oh shit.’
There was nothing I could do. I had to get on the plane with Tim and sit there for five hours, not knowing what was up with Cav. To fray my nerves a little bit more, our landing in New York wasn’t a happy one. We were well into our descent to JFK, when the plane went back up again. We were circling around New York for ages before the captain came over the tannoy: ‘Hello, guys, we are really sorry to tell you we are unable to land at JFK; there’s been an earthquake in New York.’ People started getting a little concerned at that, but then the pilot added, ‘We’ve got a bit of a dilemma: we have only thirty minutes’ worth of fuel left, and they’re shutting all the airports on the east coast of America, so we may have to head for a military airbase. We need to make the decision soon or we won’t be able to make it.’ Then it was near panic: the other passengers started being sick around us. And all that time I was worrying about Cav, sitting there thinking, ‘Fuck it, I just want to get on the phone and ring people about Cav. He must be ill.’
When they did open the airport and we eventually landed at JFK, it was chaos because of all the flights coming in at once: people and bags everywhere, everyone trying to figure out where they were going. In the midst of all that, I finally got through to Cav, several hours after the event. He was in pieces, all over the place, with no idea what to do. On we went
to the Tour of Colorado to meet Sergio Henao, but though my business was in Aspen, my mind was back in Europe. I bumped into Brian Holm, and he told me the doctor had said there was nothing wrong with Cav, although another report said that the doctor’s view was that ‘He was so tired that he could sleep in the team car.’ At that I lost my temper: ‘What do you mean, there’s nothing wrong with the guy? Why on earth would he pull out of the Vuelta when he is meant to be going for the Worlds in five weeks’ time and he knows he needs to finish it to have the fitness?’