‘For me personally,’ continues Thomas, ‘the Academy only reinforced the idea that this was what I wanted – to be a pro cyclist. If you do survive it, and come out of it well, it definitely sets you up nicely for pro bike riding. But there were others, who were forced to realise that it wasn’t for them.’
With his trademark wry smile and tendency towards understatement, Thomas adds: ‘’Cos it’s not an easy sport, is it?’
Like Cavendish, Thomas remains close to Ellingworth. Indeed – and without wishing to provoke gender confusion – there is something of Miss Jean Brodie (Muriel Spark’s creation, a charismatic teacher at a girls’ school in Edinburgh in the post-war years, and the star of her novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie) about Ellingworth. ‘Give me a girl at an impressionable age and she is mine for life,’ was Brodie’s mantra. To those riders whom Ellingworth guided through their early years, he seems to have had a similarly major influence; like the most memorable teachers, he was far more than mere teacher. ‘I am in the business of putting old heads on young shoulders’ was another Brodie-ism. (But just to be clear: Brodie’s fascist undertones are not evident in Ellingworth’s approach.)
Ellingworth’s greatest strength, says Thomas, is that ‘he took no shit really. He’d say, “Get out there and earn your pennies” – that was one of his favourite lines. To me he was like the boss. To Ed he was more of a father figure. To Cav I suppose he was kind of like an older brother. He’d adapt how he was, depending on the rider. He was hard. Sometimes he just kept pushing people and they did crack, but he was good at teaching you how to look after yourself. He was a teacher, really.’
Thomas joined the Academy in time for an extended training camp in Australia. It was the winter of 2004, leading up to the World Track Cycling Championships in Los Angeles in March 2005. The trip to Australia followed the European Under-23 Track Championships in Valencia in August 2004, which represented a low point for Ellingworth. ‘I was struggling with the group, they were getting a bit wild – which can happen if you don’t control them,’ says Ellingworth. It didn’t help, perhaps, that the Academy riders were joined by others, including the female squads. Parties, or ‘gatherings’, were as inevitable as the fact that Ellingworth would catch them. Cavendish’s recollection, in Boy Racer, of becoming aware of Ellingworth, sitting on the curb of the pavement below and watching them as they threw a party in one of the apartments, is almost enough to send a shiver down the spine. Ellingworth also recalls breaking up a night-time race – not a bike race, but a running race up the fire escape steps – arriving just in time to find Cavendish wheezing and panting up the last flight, while Matt Brammeier waited at the top with a stopwatch. ‘They weren’t giving me 100%,’ says Ellingworth. ‘And if they don’t give me 100% I get a bit pissed off.’
Australia represented an opportunity to re-introduce the boot camp elements to life in the Academy, particularly since they’d be there for two-and-a-half months. Shane Sutton, now working with the track sprinters, was also there, adding some authority, and helping to oversee the work of an initiative still, of course, in its infancy, and still to produce tangible results.
After being initially based in Sydney they travelled to Bendigo, the town close to Melbourne. ‘They flew,’ says Ellingworth. ‘I drove. It was a 14-hour drive. But when I arrived, not one of ’em asked me how I was doing, or how the trip was. They were so caught up in their own little world. I didn’t want them to know anything about me; I just wanted them to show respect. I almost ripped them to pieces for that.’
Things improved. They raced in the well-established Bendigo criteriums – Cavendish winning one – and trained as they’d never trained before. ‘They were doing 250, 260km a day on the bike,’ says Ellingworth, ‘a massive workload. They enjoyed it. And they never stepped out of line. Well, there were a couple of little issues, but nothing serious. They’d be out for three, four hours in the morning, going at 5.30, 6am, to miss the heat. Then they’d do three hours on the track in the afternoon. And then a crit’ in the evening! But they were in great form. Absolutely flying.’
But in February, just a month before the World Championships, there was an incident that Ellingworth says he ‘always dreaded’. ‘When they were out training as a group, without me following them in the car, you did worry a bit, because it’d be so easy to have a situation like the one with Amy Gillett.’ (Five months later, in July 2005, Gillett, the Australian track cyclist, was killed in Germany when the group she was riding in was hit by a car.)
They were out for a three-hour road ride, bowling along in a compact group on an unremarkable stretch of road, when one of the riders happened to go over a piece of metal lying in the road. The metal was tossed into the air by his tyre; and it flew into the front wheel of one of the riders behind. The rider was Geraint Thomas; his front wheel locked dead and he was tossed from his bike, crashing heavily, his chest landing on his handlebars. He was badly injured and taken to hospital, where internal bleeding was diagnosed. Thomas had ruptured his spleen, which had to be removed. He was quickly reassured that he’d make a full recovery, but he was out of the senior World Track Championships in Los Angeles, for which he had – surprising some – been selected to ride the madison, partnering the experienced Rob Hayles.
Cavendish replaced him, though he’d been ‘a bit shocked’ not to have been selected in the first place. Thomas, he said, ‘was the golden child’.
Thomas, who was off the bike for six weeks while he recovered from his injuries, travelled to Los Angeles with Cavendish. ‘I had a ticket,’ says Thomas. ‘I’d stayed in Oz with the Academy lads after the crash, and Shane [Sutton] told me to go and watch the World’s, to see what it was all about. When I got there I started to help the mechanics out, because I could move about a bit more, and I could take bikes back and forth for them. But after about two days, I thought: fuck this. If I’m able to carry bikes around I might as well get back on it – so I rode my rollers for half an hour, and didn’t help the mechanics any more.’
The event that first Thomas, then Cavendish, had been selected for was the madison, a two-man race in which one rider races while his teammate circles the top of the banking, waiting to be slung (by the hand of his teammate) back into the action. It is perhaps the toughest of the track endurance events, as well as one of the most difficult to follow, with bodies strewn everywhere. Consequently, it is also one of the most dangerous.
But madison training had been a staple of the diet Ellingworth fed his Academy charges. In their endless sessions at the Manchester Velodrome they were put in pairs to ride madison-style drills on an almost daily basis. As far as Ellingworth was concerned, for speed, skill and spatial awareness, there was nothing that could beat the madison. But John Herety was not alone in watching some of these sessions through the cracks in his fingers. ‘Rod loved the madison, because he knew that, from a skills point of view, anyone who can ride a madison is going to get it,’ says Herety. ‘But I was always a bit nervous watching them. The numbers were small, we didn’t have that many talented riders – the pool of talent wasn’t big – so to put them into madisons, well … it was quite dangerous.’
And it was dangerous. Ellingworth remembers one session of madison training in which Cavendish suffered a particularly heavy tumble. ‘Down he went, wallop! There were a few of ’em came off and slid down the banking. They all got back up, but Cav, who gets on his bike, rides towards me real slow. He was looking a bit funny. I asked him, “You alright?” He unzipped his jersey and he had all these splinters on his chest. Then he pulls down his shorts, and pulls his dick out. And he’s got a splinter through his dick! Luckily Doctor Rog [Roger Palfreeman, the British Cycling doctor] was in that day and he pulled it out. Cav took the splinter home in a bag.’
But the hundreds of hours of madison training stood Cavendish in good stead in LA. With the more experienced Rob Hayles – a bronze medallist in the madison with Bradley Wiggins at the previous year’s Olympics
