I wasn’t thinking of Jason … yet. I was thinking of my semi-final opponent, Bourgain.
Before any race, we watch videos of our opponent in action. So Jan got his computer out, and together we watched every sprint race I had ever ridden against Bourgain. We looked for potential weaknesses (his, but also mine). I’d watched all these videos numerous times before. But this, I suppose, was like looking over your notes before an exam. It’s probably not going to make much difference (‘if you don’t know it now, you’ll never know it,’ as the mantra used to go before exams), but, as in the anxious pre-exam wait, you think that you should be doing something. It feels better than doing nothing.
The videos for Beijing were prepared by our performance analysts: there were hours and hours of races on film, over 300 gigabytes’ worth; files and files, comprising a complete library, with every opponent racing and just about every scenario you could imagine. But the analysts’ work goes way beyond just having all this stuff on film. They’ve studied it and worked out things like, ‘If Bourgain is leading with half a lap to go there’s an 80 per cent chance he’ll win the race …’ or ‘When he’s behind his opponent with two laps to go, there’s a 30 per cent chance he’ll win.’ All these statistics and data (‘the numbers’, as we call them) have been prepared by the Great Britain team’s performance analysts – go to any World Cup meeting and you’ll see them sitting quietly at the back of the stand with a tripod, filming every single race.
The thing is, a head-to-head match sprint race will often come down to intuition and what we call track craft – the fast/slow feinting and cat-and-mouse tactics that you see between two riders – but it’s reassuring to have the statistics to back it all up; it can give you extra confidence in your game plan.
As Jan and I sat and watched the footage of my previous races against Bourgain, we focused on a couple in particular. One was at the same Laoshan Velodrome, at the Beijing World Cup the previous December. At that point, I was still taking my first, tentative steps as a sprinter. At 31, I was a bit old, really, to be trying something new – or so the accepted wisdom went. Match sprinting – since it demands the explosive acceleration of a Usain Bolt coupled with the quick reflexes and agility of an Olga Korbut – was seen as a young man’s game (and I’m no Olga Korbut). But having lost my specialist event, the kilometre, I was determined to add another string to my bow.
And that’s really all I was thinking back in December 2007, at that World Cup in Beijing. The team sprint remained my priority as I looked ahead to the Olympics, while the keirin, in which I was also a relative novice, and the sprint gave me other options. My thinking was that if I could do all three events, I’d increase my chances of being selected for the team sprint. But at that point the idea that I could challenge for a medal in all three seemed like a pipe dream. I was expecting to be competent and competitive, nothing more.
And I still had some distance to go, if my meeting with Bourgain in the quarter-final of the 2007 Beijing World Cup was anything to go by. He beat me in two straight rides. Both rides were quite close, as it happens, but the bare statistics don’t lie. Two-nil is a comprehensive beating. And it was to be expected: Bourgain, a 28-year-old Frenchman best described as a ‘pure sprinter,’ was certainly one of the top two or three in the world, having medalled in every world championship since 2004.
The other race Jan and I watched was from two months later, when I met Bourgain again, this time at the World Cup in Copenhagen. This was the race that offered the first sign that I might yet make it as a sprinter. Shane Sutton, in typically excitable and enthusiastic style, told me it was ‘the turning point – the moment you became a sprinter’. Reminiscing about it months later, he seemed even more convinced about this. ‘What was the critical race?’ he’ll ask – expecting whoever he is asking to reply that it was my defeat of reigning world champion Theo Bos, the Dutchman who dominated sprinting in recent seasons, in the quarter-final of the world championships in Manchester a few weeks after that Copenhagen World Cup.
He loves it if you respond: ‘Bos in Manchester.’ It allows him to counter with: ‘Nah, mate – Bourgain in Copenhagen.’
He’s right. I was riding in Copenhagen purely to try and qualify an extra British sprinter for the Olympics. My own ticket to Beijing rested on the keirin; I had to beat my old rival Arnaud Tournant, another Frenchman, to win the series, and thus qualify for Beijing.
The meeting had started on the Friday evening with the team sprint, and we had a terrible night, giving one of our worst performances in this event in recent years. While the French dominated, again, we could only qualify fourth, and then lost out to the Netherlands – led by Bos – in the ride for the bronze medal.
The next day was better: I reached the final of the keirin, which proved a bit of an epic. Tournant was just as keen to win, since that would guarantee him his Olympic place, and he and his team-mate, Grégory Baugé, both laid it on thick in the final, launching a series of attacks but ultimately failing to overake me, as I led from the front to win the race and the series, and secure my ticket to Beijing.
Competing in the sprint, on the third day, felt a bit like doing my duty for the team. Thanks to the keirin I was now guaranteed my Olympic place, which I was delighted about. But I didn’t know if I’d ride all three events in Beijing. To be honest, I didn’t know if I had it in me, and worried that I could spread myself a little too thinly by attempting such a full programme.
Added to this general uncertainty was the fact that there was a fourth event to do in Copenhagen: the lucrative Japanese invitational keirin, with its £10,000 first prize. I was doing that, too – well, that prize was quite an incentive – and I knew that by Sunday evening my legs would be in bits.
But first up in the morning was the 200-metre time trial that acts as the qualifier for the sprint, and determines the subsequent draw. I was third with 10.2 seconds, behind yet another of those fast Frenchmen, Kévin Sireau, with Bourgain second. I progressed fairly smoothly through a few rounds before my meeting with Bourgain in the semi-final.
In the first race I didn’t ride well. It was the same problem that I often encountered in these head-to-head races. Though I had the raw speed, my tactics were a bit dodgy. OK, I’m being kind to myself. Basically, I only had one strategy. All the decent rides I’d done so far had seen me going from the front, setting a fast pace, trying to take the sting out of my opponent’s tail, and then countering them when they made their move. It was a very one-dimensional way to ride, and it only worked if I could get to the front in the first place. And – not surprisingly, given that my opponents would have studied me in competition, just as I studied them – they were getting wise to it. So Bourgain beat me. One-nil.
I came off the track feeling pretty tired, and pretty discouraged. To add to my general dejection, I was then sick as I sat on the stationary rollers, keeping my legs spinning – and the lactic acid at bay – between races.
I could feel that something wasn’t right, and called Jan over, asking him to discreetly fetch a bucket, or some other water- (or vomit-) tight container. ‘But make sure no one can see what you’re doing,’ I told him; I didn’t want any of my opponents to see that I was suffering so badly. Jan carried out the task to perfection, providing and then dispensing with the container before anyone saw anything. I should point out that vomiting is not uncommon; the repeated sprint efforts create such high lactic acid concentrations that they can, literally, make you sick.
My little bout of sickness didn’t distract Jan from the mission that remained ahead of me: to beat Bourgain. ‘He knows you can do that,’ he said, referring to my one and only tactic. ‘You gotta go from the back!’
I had tried going from the back in previous sprint matches, but I found it difficult to commit. What would happen is that my opponent would stall, I would hold back a little, and then we’d both
