the window, see that it’s raining, and think, oh well, I might go out at 10.30. The Academy, in Rod’s mind, would be like a school. It would be structured, and riders would have to buy in, or the whole group would be penalised.’
Expanding on what he means by the potential of a track programme to produce top road riders, Herety explains: ‘It’s the skills that you get from track racing, which you don’t really develop – or not so easily – on the road.’ He is talking about bike-handling and race craft, and more generally the kind of skills you can only hone by riding in a fast-moving group of riders, on a steeply-banked track, on a bike with no brakes, no gears, and nothing except your own skill, balance and nerve to keep you upright and out of trouble. ‘If you were really fast on the road you could maybe get away with the skills deficit you’d have from not riding the track, but it would limit you,’ says Herety. ‘So the skills acquisition side was really important. And Rod was really big on that.’
Yet Herety also argues that track training and racing on its own couldn’t produce the complete rider. It might equip a rider with skills and speed, as well as lending structure and fostering discipline, but it didn’t involve enduring five or six hours in the saddle, in all weather conditions. ‘To be honest, our lads needed toughening up,’ says Herety. ‘The track was giving them the skills and the speed, but it wasn’t making them really tough. Even if they did three sessions a day, they still needed the depth of endurance that you only get from spending hours in the saddle. Rod was a big believer in that, too.’
Herety continues: ‘When the Academy was set up, the emphasis appeared to be on track racing. It was sold to the bosses [the lottery distributors at UK Sport] that way; but, in a way, it was sold to the riders as something else.’
Why might it be sold to the riders as something other than a track-focused programme? As I noted in the last chapter, track cycling has its limitations. There is no track equivalent of the Tour de France, or Paris-Roubaix, or any of the other events that fire the imagination of so many young cyclists. To attract the best and most ambitious young male endurance cyclists it had to offer more than points races and madison races on the track; it had to offer road racing opportunities, and perhaps even a route, however indirect, to professional racing on the continent.
Its title, the ‘Olympic Academy’, was misleading – perhaps deliberately so. Not that it mattered to Ellingworth, whose focus was very simple. For him, it didn’t matter whether it was a track racing or a road racing academy. ‘What I loved about Rod,’ says Herety, ‘was his enthusiasm. He kept it dead simple, talking about “bike racing”. He’d say, “Come on, let’s race our push bikes, lads.” It was basic, but it allowed him to really connect with the riders. Sometimes we over-complicate things. Rod kept it really simple.’
When it came to the interviews for the first applicants to the Academy, Herety was asked to sit on the panel, alongside Ellingworth and another rider-turned-coach, Simon Lillistone. Herety was there as an observer, he says, ‘making sure they followed the protocols laid down by Peter Keen.’
One of the first interviewees presented them with a dilemma. Based on a strict interpretation of Keen’s criteria, the candidate in question fell short. ‘They weren’t going to take him on,’ says Herety. He wasn’t hitting the ‘numbers’ in the physiological tests; his scores in tests on stationary bikes were not up to scratch. Performing well in a laboratory was not his forte.
‘But he’s the only guy who’s won 20 races,’ Herety told Ellingworth and Lillistone. ‘You’re only saying “no” to him because he doesn’t fit the criteria – but maybe the criteria are wrong.’ Ellingworth and Lillistone appealed to Keen, who agreed in this case to apply some flexibility and that the young rider from the Isle of Man should be accepted to the Academy. Herety won the argument: Mark Cavendish was in.
‘The first time I met him properly,’ says the red-haired, freckled and youthful Ellingworth of his introduction to Cavendish, ‘I was stood outside the [Manchester] Velodrome in the car park, and I heard this car hurtling towards me. It was a gold Corsa; it had a “007” number plate and “Goldfinger” written along the top [of the windscreen], and bald tyres. I just thought, Oh my god …’
In fact, Ellingworth had encountered Cavendish previously, at his coach-led racing weekend the year before. Cavendish was there because he was on the national junior squad. ‘All I remembered from that time was that he was this barrel-shaped guy,’ says Ellingworth. ‘He had a sprinter’s position, on this yellow bike, but his set-up was all wrong. He didn’t shine. But what I do remember was that he came up to me in the car park afterwards, and said: “That’s the best few days I’ve ever had on the bike. Can I come along to the next one?”’
Ellingworth met Cavendish again when he applied to join the Academy. Eight applicants were invited to be interviewed for the initial six places. ‘There was one sneaky question,’ says Ellingworth. ‘We asked, “How did you get here today?” I thought it would tell us if they’d been paying attention; and some of them, who’d been driven by their parents or a mate, didn’t have a clue. But Cav was good; he could name every road.
‘The thing about him was that, while a lot of guys were telling us what they thought we wanted to hear, Cav said things with more passion, and he was dead upfront. He’d been working in a bank and hadn’t been doing much training. He’d put on a bit of weight and he was struggling to get it off – he was upfront about all that.
‘I remember ringing him afterwards, telling him he’d made the cut. He said, “I promise I’ll never let you down.” I said, “I just need you to work really hard.”’
A priority for Ellingworth, landed with a squad of six boys barely out of adolescence – Cavendish, Matt Brammeier, Ed Clancy, Bruce Edgar, Christian Varley and Tom White – was to establish some early principles. ‘I wasn’t too bothered about the bike riders,’ Ellingworth says. ‘My view was that we had to get the structure in place.’
That structure involved a daily routine, which, in year one, and on a typical day in Manchester, where they were based, went as follows: 7.30am, report to velodrome; 8–11.30am, road training; midday, lunch; 1–3pm, French class; 3–6pm, track training; 6pm, home.
Then there was the racing. ‘I pitched it high when we worked out the racing programme, in terms of its intensity,’ says Ellingworth. ‘It was just a gut feeling, but I was thinking that they had to do at least 80, 90 races a year, whether track or road. It didn’t matter which it was. I just wanted them to be thinking, and talking, about bike racing. So they’d be coming home in the car, talking about the bike race. Cav in particular: he’d be dissecting it. “Did you see that attack? Did you see that guy fall?” But that, for me, was them learning. The previous year they’d only done 22, 23 days of racing. That was only 22, 23 days of learning. It wasn’t enough.’
In this sense, Ellingworth’s principles derived from road racing, where a diet of regular racing is de rigueur. ‘It was track and road all year round,’ he explains. ‘We’d mix and match. But the main emphasis was skills and drills. I wanted to get their skill levels so high; because no one else in the world was working on those things in this way, in a training academy type environment.’
It wasn’t just cycling. ‘As well as the French lessons they did nutrition courses,’ says Ellingworth. ‘I used to set them homework, too – little essays. A thousand words on life in the Academy, or a thousand words on [Australian professional] Stuart O’Grady, or whatever. Most of them did those on a computer, which was good – it gives you the word count straight away.
‘Cav wrote his out by hand,’ Ellingworth continues, smiling knowingly. ‘I thought: he’s going to think I’m not going to count how many words he’s done.
‘Well,
