‘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 a better rider if he’s been through a track programme,’ Herety continues. ‘It’s the discipline: the twice-daily training sessions; and the structure. If they had a track session at 9am, they had to be there at 9am. Too many road riders from my era would get up at 9.30, look out 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