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 in Athens – the British pair won the race. At 19, Cavendish was a world champion and he, and the Academy, were on the map. Within a year of setting up, Ellingworth’s school of excellence, intended to build 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