Britain’s next generation of champion cyclists, had produced its first major result.
When he reflects now on the early years of the Academy, Ellingworth can do so with understandable pride. He does admit to one or two regrets. It should have been more focused, he thinks – rather than doing everything, on the track and road, he thinks they could have prioritised certain events and excelled in them. But it’s a minor gripe. The hundreds of races were not just races, they were also ‘learning experiences’, after all.
With his full head of unruly red hair – sculpted by gel into a spiky style that seems reluctant to follow instructions – and his long, straggly sideburns, Ellingworth looks as youthful as he did when he began to lay down the rules that would govern life in the Academy. He explains: ‘One of the biggest ideas I had when I started the Academy was that if you could go through something together, you’d really feel that you’d achieved something; and a few years down the road, you’d come back together. And I can see that. There’s this connection. Even between the original Academy guys and the new ones. Cav, Gee and Swifty all go to the Academy house in Quarrata and tell ’em: “You don’t have it as hard as we had it.”
‘But that’s how I coach,’ Ellingworth adds. ‘It’s about groups, pulling together, learning together and from each other. I’m not a coach who likes to ram it down their necks.’
The question that Ellingworth cannot answer concerns where he picked up his ideas. Who influenced him? He shrugs. ‘I think it’s just stuff you do over time. Okay, I never had a top pro career, but you’re still racing your bike, you’re living out of a suitcase, you’re trying as hard as everyone else. You’re looking and you’re seeing. You understand what it takes.
‘No one ever helped me,’ Ellingworth continues. ‘It was not really people I was inspired by. There was nobody really. They were just ideas I had. And I looked at other models – the Australian Institute of Sport had a great model.’
Eventually, though, Ellingworth comes back to what seems to be his core belief – his central principle. ‘I was always interested in a group of people, and the question of what makes them real strong as a group.
‘If you have a group of people, what bonds them together, even if they’re from completely different parts of the world? When they’ve done something together and been through something together. I dunno, they could’ve walked across the country together. They don’t know each other at the start. They’ll argue; they’ll struggle. But they’ll be bonded at the end; they’ll be like a family; they’ll never forget that experience. That’s really powerful. And that’s what I wanted the Academy to be like.’
Inadvertently or not, accidentally or by design, Ellingworth’s British Cycling Academy also heralded a switch of focus and a change of direction for British cycling. If phase one of Peter Keen’s British cycling revolution had produced world-class track cyclists, phase two – symbolised by the Academy – seemed to set in motion a conveyor belt of talented young riders who might one day target success on the road, in the great races of Europe: Milan-San Remo, Paris-Roubaix, the Giro d’Italia, Tour de France, Vuelta a España …
Dave Brailsford’s dream of setting up a professional road team was a logical extension of that. It was phase three.
‘We’re the minions.’
Dave Brailsford
Celtic Manor, Newport, 24 July 2008
‘He’s done what?!’
Shane Sutton and Dave Brailsford were discussing Mark Cavendish. Though they found themselves in the sumptuous surroundings of Celtic Manor, the five-star golf resort in Newport, Wales, their minds were frequently in France. It was difficult for them not to be.
Cavendish, their prodigy, golden boy, natural-born winner, product of the British Cycling Academy and the rider around whom a British professional team would one day logically be constructed, had become the sensation of the Tour de France with four stage wins in his second attempt at the world’s biggest race. ‘I believe I’m the fastest sprinter in the world,’ he had said the day before the Tour started, and he had now proved it. Four times.
The cream of British Cycling thus occupied parallel universes for much of the month of July 2008. In Newport, holed up in Celtic Manor, was the British track team, now in ‘lock-down’ mode, and almost to a man and woman recording world-class times while training on the nearby Newport Velodrome, with the Olympics only weeks away. And in France was Mark Cavendish: the hottest property in world cycling.
Following stage 14, on 19 July, Cavendish abandoned the Tour in order to remain fresh and fit for the Olympics. He would ride the madison with Bradley Wiggins in Beijing, though at this point, and unknown to all but a few people, Wiggins’ participation in the Olympics was in doubt due to a virus that left him bed-bound for six days.
Brailsford and Sutton had a lot on their plate. The deal with Sky was done, and on 24 July the satellite broadcaster was announced as the new ‘principal partner’ of British Cycling. A five-year, ‘multi-million pound partnership’ encompassed every level of cycling, from encouraging participation to grassroots, to talent development, to elite; and every discipline, from BMX to mountain biking, track and road racing. The wider goal was to get Britain back on its bike – to continue a process that London’s 2007 Grand Départ may have started, of transforming the country’s cycling culture, and encouraging a million more people to ride bikes over the next five years. ‘I believe this partnership will create a step change for cycling,’ said Brailsford. ‘Working together, we can take elite cycling to new heights and get more people involved in the sport at all levels.’
The track sprinters Chris Hoy and Victoria Pendleton – both of whom would go on to win gold medals in Beijing, in Hoy’s case three – fronted the launch of the Sky partnership. There was no mention of the sponsorship extending to a professional road team.
But Brailsford and Sutton both knew – despite their later assertions to the contrary – that the partnership with Sky was a forerunner to a professional team. Wiggins knew. And Cavendish knew. All were clear, too, that Cavendish would be the leader, the talisman; the fulcrum of the new team, the plans for which Brailsford had brought forward. In Bourg-en-Bresse he identified 2013 as the likely launch date, following the London Olympics. Yet in May 2008, as negotiations progressed with Sky, Brailsford revised that: the team would hit the road in 2010, he said.
Cavendish’s four stage wins at the Tour, which followed two stage wins in the Giro d’Italia, confirmed the wisdom behind a plan that would see Britain’s first major league professional team led by the world’s best sprinter, and most prolific winner. One of Brailsford’s trump cards was Rod Ellingworth, Cavendish’s coach. Cavendish rode for Bob Stapleton’s Columbia-High Road team – a new team that Stapleton, the Californian millionaire, had salvaged from the ashes of the old T-Mobile outfit, later to become Columbia-HTC, then HTC-Columbia. But Ellingworth was still the man Cavendish turned to, still the big brother figure, who managed his training and gave him tactical coaching. Ellingworth was also the man who, when Cavendish was at the Academy, instilled in him the understanding that, in order to win, he had to lead; and that in order to lead, he had to act like a leader. It meant accepting the responsibility, and handling the pressure, of having eight teammates sacrifice their own chances for him. ‘There aren’t many who can take on that responsibility,’ says Ellingworth. ‘But Cav can.’
But
