Free Project Rainbow by Rod Ellingworth Page A

entering the entire team into all the races for the next month; they would have to come into the velodrome, get the cheque from the administrator in the office, print off the entry forms, write all the forms out for the month and send them off.
    I wanted them to be able to organise themselves. If we were going off somewhere on a Sunday morning, I’d say to one of them on the Friday night, ‘Right, it’s your turn to organise the race. Ring me on Saturday. I want to know what time I am coming to pick you up, and I want to know how long it’s going to take us to get to the start. You need to have all the start sheets and the maps to get there.’ Some of them couldn’t read a map at first. I used to make them sit next to me in the front of the car, and they’d run the day – tell me where we were going, left here or right here, here’s the HQ. All I did was drive. They would clean the bikes at some stage races, particularly the British ones. We wouldn’t take a
soigneur
, so they’d have to make their own drinks, get their own food, and if stuff didn’t get put in the car, I didn’t put it in. I had to keep an eye on the staff to make sure they kept their hands off; instead, they would work with the riders, teach these kids how to make their race food. The idea was partly to make them self-reliant, but also to ensure they would appreciate the work the staff did.
    *
    I also wanted to join up the development programmes – Talent Team, juniors, under-23s. I started thinking about the junior programme, the classroom stuff we had had to do for the under-16 Talent Team, which I had just come from working on.The Talent Team was pretty structured; you couldn’t put much of an individual touch on it. I had nothing against Marshall Thomas, the junior coach at the time, or Simon Jones, but their way of coaching was all training programmes: Marshall would have the juniors on the track, but there was no oomph, no discipline, no hard work; it was all disc wheels and fancy stuff, no spokes, just go as fast as you can.
    That was when I came up with the concept of coach-led racing. That started from the question of how do you teach riders about bunch racing? You either do it through training sessions or you just race and give feedback afterwards. I was massively into the latter. But there wasn’t enough racing on the calendar, so we had to produce our own races. Having worked for the Talent Team, I knew it would link in well with that, because the riders need to see a pathway ahead of them. I knew that the regional Talent Teams could feed into a national structure, taking the two best riders from each area. We had a small budget with which to house twenty-five riders on a Saturday night in Manchester, bring them in early on Saturday, send them home late on Sunday. We needed someone to film every race, someone to drive the motorbike, someone to do the lap board – and there the idea was to use the national junior and Talent Team coaches so that they would learn from the weekend as well. I even put together a plan where you could have local coaches sitting up in the stands watching, then do questions and answers with them at the end. That’s the great coaching question: how do you put on a session for twenty-five kids? The point is, you need lots of coaches to cover the bottom level, and if you can educate them while running the sessions, you kill two birds with one stone. I did these about once amonth, and kept them going when the academy started.
    At the same time there was some discussion about the Revolutions – Saturday-evening track meets, very glitzy, at the Manchester velodrome through the winter. These were just getting going, and Face Partnership, the organisers, wanted to include youth racing, so we met them and said that what we wanted from the Revolutions was just kids’ racing. My idea was that they could ride a Revolution every month, then two weeks later they would be back on the track doing coach-led racing at