Free Project Rainbow by Rod Ellingworth

even wanted them in different clothing, but we couldn’t do it because when they raced, it had to be in GB kit. I wanted themto have only one road bike; that would mean they would have to learn to look after it and not take it for granted. If they had specific race bikes and a training bike, their training bikes would be treated like shit, left in a right state, whereas if they had only one, they would have to look after it because it might let them down in a race if it wasn’t well maintained. The idea was to make them feel, ‘I’m here, but I’ve got to go up to there. I’ve got to get somewhere, earn my right to be in that top group.’
    Money was an issue. I felt they got too much, and they weren’t having to pay their way. I wanted them to come and live in Manchester instead of living at home, which was a massive shift. That came from watching riders at coach-led racing weekends and the Talent Team weeks. At those training camps a coach could be a massive influence on the group. To get them working in our way, we needed them there all the time. We could have made it happen without using the riders’ money, but I wanted them to feel that they were investing in their future. So I took half their funding off them. They were getting £6,000 a year; I took £3,000 off them towards their accommodation. UK Sport may have had their doubts at first, but once we explained how it worked and what the money went towards, it was fine.
    That left the riders with £58 a week to live on, which I thought was just enough; from that, all they had to do was buy food. Everything else was provided. Taking them away from home was in turn going to create the whole question of how you learn to live as a bike racer: how do you look after yourself? How do you feed yourself? How do you stay healthy? If they wanted to be top professional cyclists, they might well have to live abroad – in that event, what do you cook? How does it fit in with the nutrition side of things? How do you look afteryour clothes and your cycling equipment?
    To be a pro, you have to learn how to look after yourself and how to be around other people. In a pro team on the road you have to share a room with someone, maybe for three weeks on a Grand Tour. So how do you live in close quarters with people you don’t know? To take three of the riders who shared a house in the first year of the academy, Bruce Edgar, Cav and Ed Clancy, there was plenty of discord between them: Cav was so particular about things, Ed wasn’t so fussy, and Bruce would leave stuff everywhere. They were such different characters, and you had to manage that – the different ways they had been brought up, the different things they thought were acceptable. It was a big life experience for them as well.
    The academy weeded out people who weren’t going to fit in with the group. The riders only had four to six weeks away from each other in the whole year. It was intense. That was where it was slightly flawed. I think Ed Clancy suffered early on; Alex Dowsett suffered later. Ed did get through OK, though, and went on to win gold medals at the Beijing and London Olympic Games. I’m confident it made him into a better bike rider. He wasn’t massively sociable at the beginning, but he learnt to be because he is such a good guy. I think it helped him develop and taught him how to work within a team, how to accept people. But it wasn’t perfect, because you might have a talented individual who struggles in that team environment twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
    The whole thing was about setting the riders up to fend for themselves. Take race entries. I had had that initial exchange with Kieran Page, when he said, ‘If you don’t enter me for a race, I don’t do it.’ I had asked what he meant: ‘Who does enteryou guys for races?’ It was somebody in the office at British Cycling, but we changed that. We used to do it on a monthly rota: one of the riders would have the responsibility of