the outskirts of the town. ‘It’s a great house,’ says the retired professional – of his own sprawling place, not this more modest one. ‘Lance [Armstrong] came with Sheryl Crow,’ says Sciandri, quickly overcoming any reluctance to name-check one of his former teammates. ‘Sheryl loved my house. And she must have seen some houses …’
Today, Sciandri has sent the five Academy riders on a two-hour recovery ride. He conducts a tour of the house. ‘I’ll show you some rooms, hopefully they’re clean.’ But after climbing the stairs, and before we come to the shared bedrooms, we are confronted by a mural. ‘Swifty [Ben Swift] started the wall,’ says Sciandri as we pause in awed admiration before it.
‘The wall’ is the extraordinary legacy of the riders who have now been through the British Cycling Academy; a collage of cycling photographs cut from magazines. It contains hundreds, possibly thousands, of images, mainly featuring the stars of the current peloton, though with some old-timers in there – even, if you look hard, Sciandri himself. ‘Yeah,’ he laughs dismissively. ‘But they’re too young to remember my career. I don’t talk about it.’
Sciandri, in his strong Italian accent (which has more to do with the cadence of his speech than his pronunciation), explains how the Quarrata base came about. ‘I called Dave [Brailsford] at the end of 2005 and I said, “Dave …”’ Then he stops himself. ‘You could see that British Cycling had so much potential,’ he tells me. ‘It was just bursting, waiting to grow. It’s like a tree – you can’t put it in a pot. It was bursting out of its pot; it didn’t have anywhere to go. It needs to go on a hill, you know? So I said to Dave, “Let’s do something in Italy.” I wasn’t ready to be a team director. Cycling had been my life, I’d done my years and I needed to step back, but I knew I wanted to be involved somehow.
‘Rod [Ellingworth] was appointed as the coach to the Academy, so I stepped back a bit. But I helped them set up here in Quarrata; I helped them get into races, because it’s not that easy in Italy – you need to have been around a bit; you need to know the right people, you know?’
While Sciandri is talking he is interrupted by a clip-clopping sound. The riders have returned and are walking across the hard floor of the workshop in their cleated cycling shoes. ‘Luke, Tim … Chris, Erick, Andy,’ says Sciandri as they file in with their GB cycling kit, peeling gloves from freezing hands and, at Sciandri’s prompting, extending them to shake.
‘We got caught in a bit of snow and turned around,’ one of them tells Sciandri.
‘Turned round straight away,’ says another.
They disappear to the shower area (in one of the many modifications to the house, there are five shower cubicles in a large wash area). But 15 minutes later we are interrupted again, this time by the sound of a gun being fired: a computer game is in progress. It means that Sciandri has to raise his voice to be heard above the sounds of gunfire and violence.
‘You don’t know who’s going to make it when they come here,’ Sciandri is saying above the din, ‘but everyone gives you something right away, you know? Cycling’s hard, and a lot of these boys are really young, and they change a lot physically.’ Almost paternally, he adds: ‘You see them when they get here; they’re little kids, their legs are not formed yet, and then they start doing four to five hour rides, stage races of eight days, and they change. They grow up.’
The following advert appeared in late 2003:
‘Wanted: ambitious Under-23 male endurance cyclists to join residential Olympic Academy. The Academy will be full time and based in Manchester. Academy members will have the opportunity to be selected for [track] World Cups, six-day and other international track competitions. To survive and/or progress young riders will need to live and breathe cycling and devote their next years to the achievement of challenging goals. Strong work ethic required. Apply to British Cycling, The Velodrome, Manchester.’
The man charged with setting up the new Olympic Academy was a former professional rider, Rod Ellingworth. Ellingworth had raced for an amateur club in France, but his dreams of turning professional with a continental team didn’t materialise. He returned to the UK and joined a domestic team, sponsored by Ambrosia creamed rice. But after retiring, in 2002, he seemed to discover his true vocation, embarking on a career as a coach with one of British Cycling’s satellite talent schemes for young riders. In March 2002 he was appointed coach to the south-east of England Talent Team.
The next winter, 2002–03, Ellingworth organised a weekend event for the talent teams – representing Scotland, Wales, two from the north of England, the Midlands and two from the South of England – at the Manchester Velodrome. ‘I called it coach-led racing,’ explains Ellingworth. ‘I asked each of the talent teams to send their best two riders; I also had the national junior squad there, and the Under-23 team. So we had the entire development group in the one room. And we did three days of bike racing: a big warm-up session then scratch, points and madison racing on the track. But for each race I’d give them specific jobs to do; different jobs. I’d tell ’em: “Your job is to rip this bike race up.” “Your job is to control the bike race.” “Your job is to wait for a sprint finish.”
‘We filmed every race,’ adds Ellingworth. ‘Then they watched it on a cinema screen – that was good. But for each race I’d be trackside, controlling the bike race. That’s what I mean by coach-led.’
Ellingworth’s approach caught the eye of Peter Keen and Dave Brailsford, who by then were working on a plan to establish a school, or academy, to spot and nurture talent at a younger age. (Or potential: ‘We look for potential, not talent,’ as one of the British Cycling coaches told me.) It was a project that would move the British cycling revolution into its second phase, creating a conveyor belt of young talent to feed into the senior teams. Although it was set up to accommodate Under-23 riders, it was decided that it should be pitched at riders who’d recently turned senior, the 18–20-year-olds; an age at which riders are especially vulnerable to giving up, lured by competing attractions such as alcohol and the opposite sex.
John Herety, a former professional road cyclist who had acted as Britain’s road manager since 1997, approved of Ellingworth’s appointment. ‘Rod was someone I knew very well from when he raced,’ says Herety. ‘He perhaps didn’t have the engine to make it at the very highest level, but he knew how to race, and he was one of these riders who maximised what he had. He was extremely knowledgeable about racing, on track and road. He was very strong on tactics. And he had a very strong work ethic.
‘When Rod was asked to set up this new Under-23 Olympic Academy, he asked for ideas, but that was typical Rod: he was constantly asking questions,’ continues Herety. ‘He had clear ideas himself about how the Academy should be run; he was of the opinion that we needed total control over the riders. He looked at the Australian model and decided the only way to do it was to get hold of them very young, then break down all the component parts of being a professional, and try to equip them with the necessary skills. He was very, very hands on. Almost 24/7; it was extreme, certainly compared to what we’d been used to. I couldn’t have done it like that. But he had a plan, a vision. He knew where he wanted the Academy riders to be in a year’s time.’
The vision for the Academy was that it would be a talent school – a hothouse – for male track endurance riders. The fact that it was prefixed by ‘Olympic’ underlined where its priorities lay. However, even if the official focus was on track racing, the Academy had the potential – as Herety and indeed Ellingworth well knew – to produce talented road riders. Herety even goes as far as to suggest that this was its main, though not explicit, objective: that road success was the secret agenda. ‘It’s a fact,’ says Herety, ‘that track endurance racing, if you look at history, produces great road riders.
‘You get
