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CHAPTER 2

THE ACADEMY

‘I didn’t want them sitting on their fat backsides with a PlayStation or drinking coffee, because this is a job.’

Rod Ellingworth

Quarrata, Italy, April 2010

Hidden away on a street that lies off the main road in the tiny Tuscan town of Quarrata sits what looks like a family home, indistinguishable from all the other family homes that surround it. Apart from one thing. In the drive, semi-hidden from the street and running down the side of the two-storey building, sit two vehicles: a silver estate car and a van, both decorated in swirling red, white and blue, and the words, ‘Great Britain Cycling Team’.

Entering the house via the drive and through a side door, you come into a large workshop. A row of Pinarello bikes hang by their front wheels from hooks on the wall, and a mechanic breaks off from working on a time trial machine that appears to be suspended in mid-air – actually it’s fitted to a bike stand – to point silently to an adjoining door. This leads into a living room dominated by an enormous flat-screen TV showing MTV, with the sound muted. And in the corner is a desk, behind which, with his back to us, sits Max Sciandri, in a scruffy navy sweatshirt and jeans, tapping into a Mac laptop, a huge and messy-looking year planner on the wall above.

The Anglo-Italian – born in Derby, raised in Tuscany – is coach to the British Cycling Academy, based in this house in Quarrata. Sciandri also lives in Quarrata, in a much larger house on the outskirts of the town. ‘It’s a great house,’ says the retired professional – of his own sprawling place, not this more modest one. ‘Lance [Armstrong] came with Sheryl Crow,’ says Sciandri, quickly overcoming any reluctance to name-check one of his former teammates. ‘Sheryl loved my house. And she must have seen some houses …’

Today, Sciandri has sent the five Academy riders on a two-hour recovery ride. He conducts a tour of the house. ‘I’ll show you some rooms, hopefully they’re clean.’ But after climbing the stairs, and before we come to the shared bedrooms, we are confronted by a mural. ‘Swifty [Ben Swift] started the wall,’ says Sciandri as we pause in awed admiration before it.

‘The wall’ is the extraordinary legacy of the riders who have now been through the British Cycling Academy; a collage of cycling photographs cut from magazines. It contains hundreds, possibly thousands, of images, mainly featuring the stars of the current peloton, though with some old-timers in there – even, if you look hard, Sciandri himself. ‘Yeah,’ he laughs dismissively. ‘But they’re too young to remember my career. I don’t talk about it.’

Sciandri, in his strong Italian accent (which has more to do with the cadence of his speech than his pronunciation), explains how the Quarrata base came about. ‘I called Dave [Brailsford] at the end of 2005 and I said, “Dave …”’ Then he stops himself. ‘You could see that British Cycling had so much potential,’ he tells me. ‘It was just bursting, waiting to grow. It’s like a tree – you can’t put it in a pot. It was bursting out of its pot; it didn’t have anywhere to go. It needs to go on a hill, you know? So I said to Dave, “Let’s do something in Italy.” I wasn’t ready to be a team director. Cycling had been my life, I’d done my years and I needed to step back, but I knew I wanted to be involved somehow.

‘Rod [Ellingworth] was appointed as the coach to the Academy, so I stepped back a bit. But I helped them set up here in Quarrata; I helped them get into races, because it’s not that easy in Italy – you need to have been around a bit; you need to know the right people, you know?’

While Sciandri is talking he is interrupted by a clip-clopping sound. The riders have returned and are walking across the hard floor of the workshop in their cleated cycling shoes. ‘Luke, Tim … Chris, Erick, Andy,’ says Sciandri as they file in with their GB cycling kit, peeling gloves from freezing hands and, at Sciandri’s prompting, extending them to shake.

‘We got caught in a bit of snow and turned around,’ one of them tells Sciandri.

‘Turned round straight away,’ says another.

They disappear to the shower area (in one of the many modifications to the house, there are five shower cubicles in a large wash area). But 15 minutes later we are interrupted again, this time by the sound of a gun being fired: a computer game is in progress. It means that Sciandri has to raise his voice to be heard above the sounds of gunfire and violence.

‘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 down by Peter Keen.’

One of the first interviewees presented them with a dilemma. Based on a strict interpretation of Keen’s criteria, the candidate in question fell short. ‘They weren’t going to take him on,’ says Herety. He wasn’t hitting the ‘numbers’ in the physiological tests; his scores in tests on stationary bikes were not up to scratch. Performing well in a laboratory was not his forte.

‘But he’s the only guy who’s won 20 races,’ Herety told Ellingworth and Lillistone. ‘You’re only saying “no” to him because he doesn’t fit the criteria – but maybe the criteria are wrong.’ Ellingworth and Lillistone appealed to Keen, who agreed in this case to apply some flexibility and that the young rider from the Isle of Man should be accepted to the Academy. Herety won the argument: Mark Cavendish was in.

‘The first time I met him properly,’ says the red-haired, freckled and youthful Ellingworth of his introduction to Cavendish, ‘I was stood outside the [Manchester] Velodrome in the car park, and I heard this car hurtling towards me. It was a gold Corsa; it had a “007” number plate and “Goldfinger” written along the top [of the windscreen], and bald tyres. I just thought, Oh my god …’

In fact, Ellingworth had encountered Cavendish previously, at his coach-led racing weekend the year before. Cavendish was there because he was on the national junior squad. ‘All I remembered from that time was that he was this barrel-shaped guy,’ says Ellingworth. ‘He had a sprinter’s position, on this yellow bike, but his set-up was all wrong. He didn’t shine. But what I do remember was that he came up to me in the car park afterwards, and said: “That’s the best few days I’ve ever had on the bike. Can I come along to the next one?”’

Ellingworth met Cavendish again when he applied to join the Academy. Eight applicants were invited to be interviewed for the initial six places. ‘There was one sneaky question,’ says Ellingworth. ‘We asked, “How did you get here today?” I thought it would tell us if they’d been paying attention; and some of them, who’d been driven by their parents or a mate, didn’t have a clue. But Cav was good; he could name every road.

‘The thing about him was that, while a lot of guys were telling us what they thought we wanted to hear, Cav said things with more passion, and he was dead upfront. He’d been working in a bank and hadn’t been doing much training. He’d put on a bit of weight and he was struggling to get it off – he was upfront about all that.

‘I remember ringing him afterwards, telling him he’d made the cut. He said, “I promise I’ll never let you down.” I said, “I just need you to work really hard.”’

A priority for Ellingworth, landed with a squad of six boys barely out of adolescence – Cavendish, Matt Brammeier, Ed Clancy, Bruce Edgar, Christian Varley and Tom White – was to establish some early principles. ‘I wasn’t too bothered about the bike riders,’ Ellingworth says. ‘My view was that we had to get the structure in place.’

That structure involved a daily routine, which, in year one, and on a typical day in Manchester, where they were based, went as follows: 7.30am, report to velodrome; 8–11.30am, road training; midday, lunch; 1–3pm, French class; 3–6pm, track training; 6pm, home.

Then there was the racing. ‘I pitched it high when we worked out the racing programme, in terms of its intensity,’ says Ellingworth. ‘It was just a gut feeling, but I was thinking that they had to do at least 80, 90 races a year, whether track or road. It didn’t matter which it was. I just wanted them to be thinking, and talking, about bike racing. So they’d be coming home in the car, talking about the bike race. Cav in particular: he’d be dissecting it. “Did you see that attack? Did you see that guy fall?” But that, for me, was them learning. The previous year they’d only done 22, 23 days of racing. That was only 22, 23 days of learning. It wasn’t enough.’

In this sense, Ellingworth’s principles derived from road racing, where a diet of regular racing is de rigueur. ‘It was track and road all year round,’ he explains. ‘We’d mix and match. But the main emphasis was skills and drills. I wanted to get their skill levels so high; because no one else in the world was working on those things in this way, in a training academy type environment.’

It wasn’t just cycling. ‘As well as the French lessons they did nutrition courses,’ says Ellingworth. ‘I used to set them homework, too – little essays. A thousand words on life in the Academy, or a thousand words on [Australian professional] Stuart O’Grady, or whatever. Most of them did those on a computer, which was good – it gives you the word count straight away.

‘Cav wrote his out by hand,’ Ellingworth continues, smiling knowingly. ‘I thought: he’s going to think I’m not going to count how many words he’s done.

‘Well, the thing was,’ Ellingworth adds, ‘I wasn’t interested in the content. All I was interested in was that they’d followed instructions and organised themselves to do what I’d asked them to do. They could’ve written “blah-de-blah” as far as I was concerned, as long as they wrote it a thousand times. Routine, discipline, and organising your time: that’s what I was looking for. It’s like a bike race. You don’t come and say: “I’m going to start riding now.” It’s when I say; not when you feel like it.

‘So I counted how many words Cav had written: 853. Did I let him have it. I made him do it again. To be fair, he laughed. He said he knew it wasn’t a thousand.’

In the first year of the Academy, 2005, the racing programme was primarily in the UK, with the Academy riders – who raced under the Persil banner, the washing powder company being a British Cycling sponsor – fed a diet of Premier Calendar road races. The elite Premier Calendar series included a long-established event, the Girvan Three-Day over the Easter weekend, and Ellingworth’s team made a strong early impression by winning stage one, courtesy of Cavendish.

For Ellingworth, though, the education extended beyond racing; it covered attitude, too, and conduct. Cycling – road racing especially – is riddled with little acts that are officially outlawed, but often subject to officials and other teams turning a blind eye. If, for example, a rider is off the back of the peloton – after a puncture or crash – then he will often regain contact by tucking in and sheltering behind the cars that form the convoy behind. That was okay in Ellingworth’s book, as long as it was for a legitimate reason, such as a puncture or crash. ‘There was to be no cheating,’ says Ellingworth. ‘No getting in the cars if you’d been dropped; and definitely no holding on to the car. If you got dropped, you got dropped.’

The weekend of the Girvan Three-Day also underlined, for Ellingworth’s squad, their mentor’s work ethic. ‘The Girvan finished on the Monday, and on the Tuesday I had them back on the track,’ he says. ‘I took them to Belgium soon after that. We did 10 days of ‘kermesses’ [kermesses being road races on circuits typically 5–15km in length, covered numerous times, of which there can be several a day in Belgium at the peak of the season] and I got them doing a kermesse one day, a rest day the next, then another kermesse, another rest day, and so on. But the rest days would be three to four hours on the bike – nice and easy, with a café stop at the end, but that time on the bike was important.

‘There was one day in Belgium when I told them: “I want you to do three hours non-stop, then have a café stop at the end of your three hours and tootle back.” I usually followed them in the car but on that day I stayed back to do a bit of work.

‘About four-and-a-half hours later they appeared back. That seemed fine: they’d done their three hours, they told me, then stopped at a café. But later, as we were all having dinner, Cav had a camera, and he was showing all these pictures. And I happened to catch sight of one of the pictures. It showed them sitting in a café in a town centre. Well, I recognised the town and it wasn’t anywhere near where we were staying.

‘I was furious. I told them, “Don’t bullshit me.” And I made them get changed and go out and do another four hours hard. At night, with me following in the car.’

The next month, when they went to ride in a round of the British Under-23 series in Cornwall, Ellingworth issued his riders with their instructions at the start. As the riders representing the Academy – supposedly the cream of the Under-23s – they were expected to dictate the race. And Ellingworth wanted them to do exactly that; or at least try to.

‘I do not want a break to go clear in the first part of this race without one of us in it,’ Ellingworth told them. ‘If a break goes in a tough section, and we’re not good enough to go with it, that’s okay. But if it goes and we miss it because we’re not concentrating – that’s different.’

A break escaped within three miles of the race starting. The six Academy riders all missed it. What’s more, one member of that early break, the Scottish rider Evan Oliphant, held on to win. ‘We were chasing all day, because they thought they were too big, too good,’ says Ellingworth. ‘I was watching them off the line, and there they were: the Persil guys, the Academy boys, laughing and joking. And then they miss the break because they’re not paying attention. So at the finish, in full view of all the other riders who were packing up, I lined them up. And I asked each of them: “Did you see the break go?”

‘“Yes,” said the first one. I went along the whole line: “Did you see the break go?” “Yes.”

‘“Right,” I said, “why did you miss it?” They were quiet; said nothing.’

‘I said, “Get in the car; don’t say a fucking word to me all the way home.” And they didn’t.

‘We drove from Cornwall to Manchester, got back at 11.30 at night. They were unloading their bikes and I said, “Right all of you, 8.30 tomorrow morning be here and ready for a long bike ride.” They turned up and I made them do five hours of “through and off”’ – a style of riding that simulates a break in a road race, team time trial or team pursuit, where riders form an ever-rotating chain, taking turns at the front, keeping the speed high. ‘I said: “Come on guys, if you were in a pro team you’d lose your job for what happened yesterday. If your job is to get in the break and win the race and you don’t do it, you’ll lose your contract.”

‘I was just,’ adds Ellingworth almost forlornly, ‘trying to prepare ’em.’

Ellingworth has a bank of such stories, which paint him, inevitably, as a hard taskmaster and disciplinarian. With his red hair, you might imagine that he possesses a fiery temper, too. But that assumption would be incorrect. Mild mannered would be a more accurate description. Ellingworth’s approach, and his method, saw him deploy far more subtle – and far more effective – tactics than wielding a big stick. ‘I never got mad at ’em,’ he claims. ‘Never raised my voice.’

John Herety backs this up: ‘He didn’t shout and scream. He kept everything in-house. Rod had a bit of Alex Ferguson about him in that respect. You look at Ferguson – he’s supposedly a legendary disciplinarian, really tough. People talk about it; he has that reputation; but you don’t see it. From what I saw of Rod, he told them: “You will be there at this time.” I know he issued punishments – he’d have them cleaning the staff cars, or working with the mechanics for a day, or he’d make them do laps of a circuit near where I lived – but it was all done quietly and kept in-house; he didn’t get angry. He didn’t use a big stick. The way he instilled discipline was very clever.’

It was also consistent with the culture at British Cycling, particularly the culture that developed under Dave Brailsford when he took over from Peter Keen as performance director. Brailsford, who worked in the cycling industry, had answered a plea from Keen in the winter of 1997 for bikes and clothing, and then become involved in the business side of running Keen’s lottery-funded programme. ‘What Peter saw in Dave was someone very good with budgets, spreadsheets and all that kind of thing,’ says Herety. ‘Peter was bright – he could do spreadsheets – but he didn’t like them. Peter was also fantastic as a visionary, but he wasn’t brilliant in his relationships with people. Dave started working at the Manchester Velodrome [becoming operations director, effectively Keen’s number two], and he and Pete got closer. As time went on their desks got closer and closer.’

When Keen eventually decided to move on, in 2004, Brailsford stepped into his shoes. ‘It brought about a sea change,’ says Herety. ‘What changed completely was the way the staff interacted with the senior management team. Dave was a lot easier to talk to. Peter was quite distant and aloof. He hadn’t worked in business or with other people; he had been a scientist and a lecturer in a university, where he hadn’t had to listen to what other people said. But that’s what Dave was good at. And he’s good at empowering people.’

Brailsford’s journey to the top of British cycling had been circuitous: he went to race in France as a teenager, staying for four years in the St Etienne area, but achieving only modest results, failing in his dream of turning professional and one day riding the Tour de France, and returned to study for an MBA at Sheffield Business School. But he was keen to remain involved with cycling, and his path crossed Herety’s in 1993, when he answered another plea: to act as soigneur to a small professional team managed by Herety (and sponsored by a Rotherham nightclub).

Brailsford’s qualifications as a soigneur – the main responsibility being to massage the riders’ legs – were unclear, though Herety admits he adopted, by necessity, a beggars-can’t-be-choosers approach to staff recruitment. ‘If you had a massage table and a tub of baby oil, you were in,’ he jokes. But he must have made a good impression. Later that season, Brailsford was invited to act as soigneur to the British team at the World Championships in Norway.

Herety also recommended Brailsford for a job with an Essex-based bike manufacturer, Muddy Fox. ‘He went for an interview for the job of UK sales manager,’ says Herety. ‘And he walked out of that interview as European sales manager. I’m not sure they were even interviewing for that position. But Dave talked himself into it. And he went from there …’

As performance director at British Cycling, Brailsford strived to create a supportive environment, in which people – coaches, athletes – felt they could have a say, and influence decisions. That didn’t mean there were no rules or discipline; but his approach, he explained, was ‘more carrot than stick’. As he said in 2007: ‘I don’t believe in stick, but that doesn’t mean to say we’re soft. If our lads walk into training five minutes late, we say, “Sorry, thanks for coming but off you go, home.” But bawling at people creates a sense of fear and I don’t believe that brings the best out of people.’

The Academy, under Ellingworth’s stewardship, but with Brailsford taking a very close interest, was run along similar lines, though perhaps, as Ellingworth acknowledges, with a greater emphasis on ‘strong leadership’. He says that most of the riders thrived in an environment in which rules were rigidly applied. ‘Cav kind of liked it, I think,’ says Ellingworth. ‘Some are like that. It was a dictatorship style, that first year or two, I suppose. But I like that too. Look at my boss, Dave Brailsford. He can be a hard bastard; he can be real ruthless. But I like that sort of leadership, as long as you’re fair. As Brailsford said to me: our job as coaches is to make these guys better, not to eliminate them. But it had to be tough. It’s like being in the army; okay, they’re not going to war, but they’re out there racing flat out against every nation in the world, pushing and shoving and competing. You don’t want guys wimping out.

‘I was strict with some of the rules’, Ellingworth continues. ‘Punctuality was a big one. “The wheels are turning at 9am” is what I’d always say. If they were late, I said, “Right, you’re cleaning all the bikes after.” So after 160, 170km, they had to clean the bikes. The mechanics [whose normal job it was] loved it.’

In the early years of the Academy – before the setting up of the base in Quarrata – the riders were based in two houses in Manchester, one near the city’s university, the other in the grittier area of Fallowfield. As members of the Academy they had an allowance of £6,000, the money coming from lottery funding, but half went straight back to the governing body, to cover the rent on the houses. Managing their money – they lived on £58 a week – was part of the education, says Ellingworth.

As Cavendish wrote in his 2009 book, Boy Racer, the Academy provided a University of Life type experience: ‘In that first year we learned a hell of a lot about bike racing, but more about ourselves and, I suppose, even more about life in general.’ When asked if he feels he ‘missed out’ by not attending a proper university, Cavendish responds: ‘If university life was about booze and drugs and skipping lectures, then, yeah, I missed out. If it was about having a laugh and living with two mates who cooked bad food and turned the place into a shit-hole on a daily basis, then, no, I think life with Bruce and Ed [in the Fallowfield house] was a fairly decent substitute.’ (It’s unlikely that the rooms were as much of a ‘shit-hole’ as Cavendish claims. Ellingworth conducted random ‘room tests’: ‘I wanted them to learn that, if they’d been away racing, it was nicer to come back to a place that was neat and tidy.’)

Though the first six Academy riders had been offered a two-year berth, not all survived. ‘One rider left because he wouldn’t listen to instructions,’ says Ellingworth. ‘It could be the smallest thing: handlebar tape dragging off his bars. I kept telling him: “Sort your bar tape out – you’re representing Britain, look neat and tidy.” He also punctured three or four times in a few days and never went to the velodrome to get new inner tubes. He’d get up in the morning, the ride would be going at 9am, and he’d be sorting it then.

‘Some didn’t make it, but that’s normal,’ continues Ellingworth breezily. ‘You’d expect that with a group of 19- or 20-year-olds. But I think that if someone stops at that age it proves they don’t want to be cyclists. If you really want to be a cyclist, if you really believe you can do it, you’ll keep at it. It’s not about money; it’s about whether they want to do it. And the guys who really want to make it can recognise a good opportunity when it comes along. Cav recognised it was a dream situation for him to be in, so he and I hit it off pretty soon. But I take my hat off to someone like Matt Brammeier, who has stuck at it.’ (Brammeier moved on from the Academy but continued racing until he suffered a horrific crash in 2007, when he was struck by a cement lorry and broke both legs. He returned to join a Belgian team, switched his allegiance to Ireland and completed a remarkable comeback by signing with Cavendish’s HTC team for the 2011 season.)

The Academy didn’t work for some, but, as Ellingworth notes, it worked spectacularly for Cavendish. Had it not existed then he would have taken the only possible road to a career as a professional road cyclist; the old road to Europe, as followed by such British luminaries as Brian Robinson, Tom Simpson, Barry Hoban, Graham Jones, Robert Millar and Sean Yates (a road that Ellingworth and Brailsford, when they were cyclists, also followed, with less spectacular results). Fully intending to take that road, Cavendish was working in Barclays Bank on the Isle of Man to save enough money to live abroad and pursue his dream of turning professional. ‘I’d always intended to leave Barclays at the end of 2003 to dedicate myself full-time to cycling, hoping that a pro contract would be waiting for me at the end of two or three seasons in the under-23 or amateur category,’ he writes in his book. ‘Belgium, Holland, Italy, France: they all had a sprawling network of amateur clubs, many with six-figure budgets, top-notch bikes and back-up, international race programmes and often feeder agreements with the best pro teams in the world.’

Cavendish knew how tough that would be: ‘In the past, any British youngster who aspired to turn pro had relied on contacts and their own initiative; they’d had to overcome homesickness, loneliness and a language barrier, not to mention the bias foreign teams usually show towards their own riders. A few, really resilient souls had even made it, but they’d done so in spite of, rather than because of, the system.’

With the inevitable turnover of riders there was a new Academy intake at the end of the first year, including a young Welshman, Geraint Thomas. And in year two, says Ellingworth, it became blindingly obvious to him which riders had the attributes to make it as professionals. ‘Cav, Gee [Thomas] and Ed [Clancy] were just different,’ he says. ‘They stood out.’

‘It was something I definitely could only do at that age,’ admits Geraint Thomas of life in the Academy. ‘I couldn’t do it now. But it gave me so much. It taught me about living away from home and looking after myself. It was as much about lifestyle, really. It wasn’t about results, it was about learning. Even the guys who didn’t make it – I still speak to some of them, and they say that it gave them so much, whatever they ended up doing. One rider, Ross Sander, packed in cycling and moved to America to be with his dad. But I still speak to him once in a while; he’ll say the same. We owe a lot to Rod and the Academy.’ (It’s interesting to note that Sander, like Brammeier, changed nationality, in his case taking out American citizenship. Another talented young rider who didn’t appear to fit in to the British system, Dan Martin, did the same, and now represents Ireland. It means that several talented young British riders have not flourished in the British system, rejected it, and are now lost to future British squads.)

‘For me personally,’ continues Thomas, ‘the Academy only reinforced the idea that this was what I wanted – to be a pro cyclist. If you do survive it, and come out of it well, it definitely sets you up nicely for pro bike riding. But there were others, who were forced to realise that it wasn’t for them.’

With his trademark wry smile and tendency towards understatement, Thomas adds: ‘’Cos it’s not an easy sport, is it?’

Like Cavendish, Thomas remains close to Ellingworth. Indeed – and without wishing to provoke gender confusion – there is something of Miss Jean Brodie (Muriel Spark’s creation, a charismatic teacher at a girls’ school in Edinburgh in the post-war years, and the star of her novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie) about Ellingworth. ‘Give me a girl at an impressionable age and she is mine for life,’ was Brodie’s mantra. To those riders whom Ellingworth guided through their early years, he seems to have had a similarly major influence; like the most memorable teachers, he was far more than mere teacher. ‘I am in the business of putting old heads on young shoulders’ was another Brodie-ism. (But just to be clear: Brodie’s fascist undertones are not evident in Ellingworth’s approach.)

Ellingworth’s greatest strength, says Thomas, is that ‘he took no shit really. He’d say, “Get out there and earn your pennies” – that was one of his favourite lines. To me he was like the boss. To Ed he was more of a father figure. To Cav I suppose he was kind of like an older brother. He’d adapt how he was, depending on the rider. He was hard. Sometimes he just kept pushing people and they did crack, but he was good at teaching you how to look after yourself. He was a teacher, really.’

Thomas joined the Academy in time for an extended training camp in Australia. It was the winter of 2004, leading up to the World Track Cycling Championships in Los Angeles in March 2005. The trip to Australia followed the European Under-23 Track Championships in Valencia in August 2004, which represented a low point for Ellingworth. ‘I was struggling with the group, they were getting a bit wild – which can happen if you don’t control them,’ says Ellingworth. It didn’t help, perhaps, that the Academy riders were joined by others, including the female squads. Parties, or ‘gatherings’, were as inevitable as the fact that Ellingworth would catch them. Cavendish’s recollection, in Boy Racer, of becoming aware of Ellingworth, sitting on the curb of the pavement below and watching them as they threw a party in one of the apartments, is almost enough to send a shiver down the spine. Ellingworth also recalls breaking up a night-time race – not a bike race, but a running race up the fire escape steps – arriving just in time to find Cavendish wheezing and panting up the last flight, while Matt Brammeier waited at the top with a stopwatch. ‘They weren’t giving me 100%,’ says Ellingworth. ‘And if they don’t give me 100% I get a bit pissed off.’

Australia represented an opportunity to re-introduce the boot camp elements to life in the Academy, particularly since they’d be there for two-and-a-half months. Shane Sutton, now working with the track sprinters, was also there, adding some authority, and helping to oversee the work of an initiative still, of course, in its infancy, and still to produce tangible results.

After being initially based in Sydney they travelled to Bendigo, the town close to Melbourne. ‘They flew,’ says Ellingworth. ‘I drove. It was a 14-hour drive. But when I arrived, not one of ’em asked me how I was doing, or how the trip was. They were so caught up in their own little world. I didn’t want them to know anything about me; I just wanted them to show respect. I almost ripped them to pieces for that.’

Things improved. They raced in the well-established Bendigo criteriums – Cavendish winning one – and trained as they’d never trained before. ‘They were doing 250, 260km a day on the bike,’ says Ellingworth, ‘a massive workload. They enjoyed it. And they never stepped out of line. Well, there were a couple of little issues, but nothing serious. They’d be out for three, four hours in the morning, going at 5.30, 6am, to miss the heat. Then they’d do three hours on the track in the afternoon. And then a crit’ in the evening! But they were in great form. Absolutely flying.’

But in February, just a month before the World Championships, there was an incident that Ellingworth says he ‘always dreaded’. ‘When they were out training as a group, without me following them in the car, you did worry a bit, because it’d be so easy to have a situation like the one with Amy Gillett.’ (Five months later, in July 2005, Gillett, the Australian track cyclist, was killed in Germany when the group she was riding in was hit by a car.)

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.