Project Rainbow (25 page)

So while we had Bradley Wiggins in yellow in Paris – the first Briton ever to do it – my objective, my job, was to get everyone on the evening flight to London. That was hard going – while the rest of the team went on the lap of honour around the Champs-Élysées, Carsten and I were at the bus and the truck looking after all the kit to make sure no one ran off with anything and going through it all: what’s going where? Who’s where? What time is the bus coming to pick us up? It was straight back into the logistics I’d been doing for the last three and a half weeks. They all had their photo up by the race finish, and you think, ‘Bloody hell, I missed that moment.’

I felt a bit piggy-in-the-middle on the whole of that Tour. As we went further into the race, Brad took the lead, and the yellow jersey took over everything. Cav was feeling, ‘Flipping heck, I could win more stages here,’ and in hindsight he could have. We could have done things differently, but at that moment it was all about the yellow jersey. I don’t think we did anything wrong, but we didn’t quite appreciate how Mark was feeling in terms of what winning meant to him. Even I didn’t understand what that meant for him, after all those years together.

During that Tour we went through the biggest disagreements
we’ve had in our time together. He said he thought the team would be going for the green jersey; in fact, he had sat in a room and said to me he thought we should go with Brad, and the green jersey wasn’t the focus. It wasn’t difficult to work out, because it was obvious this was the moment for Brad. Cav had even said to me that if Brad didn’t win in 2012, he would never win.

The discord began when we were looking at the team line-up for the Tour and which of the riders was going to be there to help Mark out in the sprints. He wanted Juan Antonio Flecha, as well as Bernie Eisel; we went with just Bernie. I think Cav was a bit upset about that. It was a slap in the face for him, but you couldn’t get away from the fact that we were going to have to put a lot of eggs into Brad’s basket and not Mark’s.

Maybe at the time Mark couldn’t tell us how he truly felt. I think he was saying the right things, but in his heart he wanted something else. He understood that the Olympics were a massive focus, and if anything, the Tour would take second place as a goal. I definitely think in his head he knew the Olympic road race was his objective, and Brad had to win the Tour. But once in the heart of the race, when he was getting into those sprints, he couldn’t help thinking differently. And when he started going for the intermediate sprints in the first few days, that was the moment when I thought, ‘Shit, we’re in trouble here. He’s actually chasing the green jersey.’ That’s when I knew it wasn’t going to happen. There’s nothing you can do in that situation as a coach. As far as I was concerned, we’d had the conversation about it beforehand, said back in June that this was how it was going to be. It wasn’t a nice situation for me. I felt very responsible for Mark’s position at Team Sky because I’d been very much in favour of him joining. I felt I’d let both
him and the team down because I wanted to see the best for both of them.

That was when I understood Mark a little bit more and realised how much winning means to him. I look back now and wonder why I never noticed. I think it’s because we are two totally different people. I’m not a winner in the same sense. I don’t have the same drive as Cav to cross that line first. I was convinced we could win yellow and green in the Tour in the same year with two British bike riders from a British team – I think it’s very realistic, hard but realistic – but I never said it was going to be done in the first year. And that’s where I disagree with people when they said it was all about 2012. I said it would be the second year, and I told Mark that early on. I think all of us misunderstood him. We were looking at team goals – Brad winning the Tour and Mark winning the green jersey, and being the best team in the world. But Mark needs to win and he needs to be the one performing – that’s what I got wrong.

The one part of the Tour I was able to savour was the last time trial in Chartres before they rode into Paris. Everything was done and I had a bit of down time at the finish with my mate Glenn Holmes – the guy I went to Belgium with back in the early 1990s – his wife and another friend, Mark. We sat on a grass verge about 500 metres from the time-trial finish, and though we couldn’t see the riders, I could hear them going past. We sat there for a few hours and I got out of the bubble for the first time. The time trial finished and we realised, ‘Shit, Brad’s won the Tour.’ It was carnage around the team at the finish. I was staying at an overflow hotel in the town and the next morning I was supposed to drive into Paris, but I decided to go that night instead so I could have a lie-in.

As I pulled my car up outside the hotel in Chartres, there were all these lads there chanting away – ‘Wiggo, Wiggo,’ that kind of thing. I thought, ‘Oh God, here we go.’ It was about half ten at night and they were banging on the car windows. I wound mine down and asked, ‘Are you all right, lads?’ ‘You’re not going to Paris tonight, are you?’ I looked at them. ‘Why, what’s up?’ There were four of them, they were staying in Paris, the last train had left hours ago and they were looking for a lift. ‘Well, lads, you’re in luck. Give me five minutes and I’ll be back.’ They were newly into cycling and had just come over on the spur of the moment: ‘Shit, Brad’s winning the Tour, let’s go over and look at it.’ So they’d booked their tickets the day before and had had a great day.

We’d got about fifteen minutes down the motorway when I had a call from the Jaguar mechanic – we have one of their mechanics with the team on the big Tours just to look after the cars – saying he’d left his bag in the back of my car, with his passport in it. So I had to go back, with these lads sitting there a bit pissed and hoping they were going to get to Paris. I pulled up outside the team hotel and said, ‘Right, lads, I’ve got to get out of the car for a minute. Stay here and don’t make nuisances of yourselves.’ They couldn’t believe what they were seeing: all the team vehicles were having the yellow stickers put on them – and these guys were just wetting themselves. I gave them a lift all the way into Paris, and they couldn’t get their heads round the fact that they’d asked someone from Sky, of all people, for a lift.

I woke up the next morning in Paris. It was incredible watching our team come into the circuit with a British guy in the yellow jersey and another Brit in the world champion’s jersey.
We were all parked up on the Place de la Concorde, where they come out from the left, then go through the right-hander up onto the Champs-Élysées. We had the big screen in front of us and we could see Brad leading Cav out. It was an amazing sight: yellow jersey leading out rainbow jersey, both of them British, and it was a fantastic way for Brad to thank Cav, when Brad could have been expected just to sit there and savour his big moment, like most Tour winners do as they ride up the Champs-Élysées for the last time.

I was thinking, ‘Cav is going to piss this.’ Cav winning there with his world champion’s jersey on meant so much to him – that was a massive win. We were all given T-shirts with ‘Sky’ on the front in yellow and all the staff’s names down the back. It was a great thing to be part of; it was incredible how big it was. That definitely made the lows of 2010 worth enduring. It was a long way from chasing rats in Tim Harris’s house in Belgium. Back then I’d never even imagined myself working in cycling, let alone being part of a team that had won the Tour de France.

The transition from the Tour to the Olympics was one of the things I had looked at in particular detail. The issue is that five days from your objective, you’re finishing the biggest bike race in the world. You can do everything right, then at the very last moment anything can happen. You have to hand it to the riders: they saw the Tour and Olympics as one big bike race lasting five weeks, or five and a half for Brad. The trick in this situation is to keep everyone aware of what’s going on, tell them what’s going to happen in plenty of time. That in turn means that you have to be very much ahead of the game in your planning.

The riders knew a year before the Games that we were
planning on going to Foxhills the night after the Tour. I gave the lads two options: they could come in on the Sunday night or the Wednesday. That meant the riders who had done the Tour could go home or come in with their wives or girlfriends, but the key thing was that we would be one team from 7 p.m. on Wednesday night. These lads had been on the road for four weeks already without seeing their families, so I said to everyone that this could be an obstacle for us if we just put the riders in a hotel in Surrey, with their wives and families somewhere else.

That planning is a key part of getting people to buy in – they need to know what those five days will look like and how much work they will have to do. As it worked out, David Millar, Cav and Froomie came in on the Sunday night. They brought their families and had a nice chilled-out couple of days; whether they rode their bikes or not was not an issue, but they did a little ride every day. Brad and Ian Stannard came in on the Wednesday, at which point we became a team and the families had to go elsewhere.

Cav was absolutely flying at the Olympics. He said he felt fantastic – the effort didn’t hurt him all day. Physically, he was perhaps in the best condition he’s ever been and he was so focused. I felt so sorry for him that it didn’t work out. Looking at that race now, we always knew that the maximum number of riders we could have was five. So there was the issue of how many riders we would qualify – it was taken from the 2011 results – and we always knew that with five it would be hard to control the race, given its style and the toughness of the course. Part of our strategy had to be that if other teams came to the race with sprinters, we would have to take a gamble that
they would help us – but gambles like that are part of road racing. The bet was that if it looked like a sprint finish, they would work for that. The plan was that we would control the race until the break was sitting there in front of the bunch. At that point, the other sprinters’ teams would think, ‘Bloody hell, we’ve only got to do this bit of work now to get the break back.’

I was on my own driving back to Surrey that night after the road race, where Cav finished twenty-ninth, not even winning the bunch sprint. I was pretty angry with the other nations because I got the impression that they felt it didn’t matter who won as long as we didn’t. Part of the upshot of that was that we had had an appalling outcome for the sport of cycling – the worst possible, it seemed to me – with Alexander Vinokourov winning, a former blood doper who had shown no contrition and no sense of the damage he’d done to his sport.

That day the Great Britain team was a victim of its own success: when you win so much, people do turn against you – and this was something which had been in the backs of our minds beforehand, though no one had actually said it. It’s not something you can account for: you can’t gamble by not winning races leading up to something big, just to make people think you aren’t in form. We did get some things wrong, though: looking back, the lads started riding at the front too early, and they started riding too fast. I wouldn’t change the tactics, but if we’d been using radios I’d have told the team to hold back a little bit – ‘Easy, easy, there’s a long way to go’ – but they started riding very early in the race. Froomie got it completely wrong by not taking enough drinks on board – and that was something I missed, the simple thing of saying, ‘Guys, look at hydration, how are we going to go about this?’ Cav has a pretty
sound nutrition strategy in a race – he feeds every fifteen to twenty minutes – so I took it a little bit for granted with the other guys, and Froomie was completely wasted. He couldn’t even get out of the saddle when he came off the circuit because he’d had only three bottles in all that time. The Olympic-issue skinsuits were quite thick, and that’s one thing I’d change because you get a bit warmer and need more liquid as a result.

There was a key moment on the last circuit of Box Hill, when Fabian Cancellara went across from the bunch to the front group. Cav went to go with him, but David Millar told him to stop. Dave was road captain, he made the call, and we stand by that, because if Cav had stopped trying to get across and the team had pulled the lead group back, we’d have said, ‘Thank God you told him to stop’; if he’d gone and won, we’d have said, ‘Thank God you went.’ It was Dave’s gut feeling at the time, and you never know whether it was the right call or not. Cav waited, so he must also have felt it was the right thing to do. I think he could have made it to that group with Cancellara, but he still wouldn’t have won, because people weren’t going to ride with him.

The gap to the break at the top of Box Hill the last time around was forty-three seconds. We’d said that if there was a small group ahead, we could afford to let them have as much as three minutes. It was at this point that we needed another team or two to step in, but the Germans and the Aussies still didn’t really get involved. The Germans tried but they were weak, didn’t have anything in their legs.

One of the big challenges for the Games was always going to be getting certain individuals on the line as fit as they could be, and we did a pretty good job there. The guys were on fire,
they had such good form – and they were totally keyed into it. Bradley Wiggins had just won the Tour de France, and he had the time trial coming up three days after the road race. That had been one of my concerns – how much would Brad buy into it? He still rode hard, all the way to about two kilometres from the line. Ian Stannard rode hard all the way to the finish, even though the race had gone. There was one final thing that didn’t go our way: as Cav came over the line, he came into the pits and said, ‘Feel my front wheel.’ I pressed it and it was soft. He heard it go with about a kilometre and a half to go. He said afterwards, ‘I’m gutted, because I wanted to win the bunch sprint at home – I was determined to do it.’ He wanted to show that if it had come down to a bunch sprint, he’d have pissed it. His words were, ‘It wasn’t meant to be.’