Free Project Rainbow by Rod Ellingworth Page B

the weekend. That in turn meant that through the winter they weren’t going ages without racing. Every month there would be kids doing track league on a Tuesday, riding a Revolution, track league again, then coach-led racing.
    I pulled together the under-23 squad, the national junior squad and two from each of the regions around the UK – about twenty-five riders – and put together a basic timetable: points race, scratch, team pursuit, Madison. Nothing else. Short sharp races over the two days. To make it a proper camp I got lots of different jerseys and split the riders into four- or five-man teams. The idea was that you would give them a little job to do: here’s a task, how do they deliver that as a team? Because what you are looking for in a team is people who will follow instructions rather than go off and follow their own agenda. If you’re riding the Tour de France, it’s stage fifteen and you’ve got to do a job for the team, that’s what you have to do.
    You want people sticking to the plan, not thinking they can just drift off and do something else. For every single race I had a slip of paper for each team: ‘You nominate one leader, you keep the race together and lead it out’; ‘It doesn’t matter how, but you have to split this field up, so keep attacking’; anotherteam would be told, ‘You have to counter-attack when the bunch comes up to any breaks.’ These kids were all guns blazing. I’d film everything, and we’d sit down after every race – it was all timetabled – and do feedback. I’d pick each team and we’d rewind it – ‘Tell me, Joe, what were you thinking here?’ – and go over little technical parts – a Madison change, an attack. So I got the kids talking, saying what they were thinking, and so on.
    It was at one of these sessions that I first became aware of Mark Cavendish. He was invited with the junior team at the back end of 2003; what I remember is that he had a sprinter’s bike – steep angles, round steel handlebars – and it was hard to figure out whether he was a sprinter or an endurance rider. He didn’t stand out particularly from a physical point of view. He wasn’t chopsy; I didn’t have to tell him to quieten down. What I do remember was that I was packing up afterwards in the car park, and he came out and said, ‘Please can you invite me to the next one? That’s the best thing I’ve ever done. Thank you very much.’ I thought that was pretty interesting, for someone that age to appreciate what was going on around him.
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    I had been constantly running ideas past fellow coaches like John Herety, Simon Jones, Dave Brailsford and Peter Keen, as well as Simon Lillistone. David Millar also played a part. Throughout 2003 he was around Manchester, and in and out of the velodrome. Millar is pretty much the last of the old-school British pros in Europe, the ones who’d gone out there and done it on their own. He was part of the decision to put the academy riders in two houses in Fallowfield, right in the middle of Manchester’s university district. The area was full ofyoung girls floating around, and heaved with students out on the piss, down the nightclubs, with everything open all hours. It’s all going on; it’s exciting for a young kid, and these lads were moving out of home for the first time. They were like any other student. Dave said, ‘Bloody hell, the worst thing you can do is stop these kids from going out. When it’s really time to press on the pedals later in their careers, they need to have worked through all that young-lad stuff.’ We took that on board and thought we would bung them in there, then if they wanted to go out, they could. If people are good enough, they’ll go training because they love cycling more than going out. And if they’ve trained hard enough, they’ll be too knackered to go out anyway. We weren’t scared, but it was quite a brave move.
    I always had four British professional bike riders in the back of my