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able to handle a Madison session, do a standing start … You could make a list of everything it takes. I was thinking that you’ve got to get these lads ready to compete. They need to be track competent – they know how to do every event on the track, but to get that good they may well need to do stage races, and in order to get the most out of that, they need to be able to look after themselves on the road.
    One big change would be that when it came to track training sessions, these lads needed to have their own designated times and not just piggyback on the seniors. We had to get back to absolute basics. I’d seen sessions where a coach would be on themotorbike with the young riders in a line behind him, and he’d be indicating when he wanted to come off the blue line, in the middle of the track, down to the black, at the bottom. It would be: ‘Moving down …’ My attitude was the opposite: ‘Put them on the fucking block, get them going flat out, get them hurting themselves.’ There was all this talk of progression, to get them up to a certain level. I just thought, ‘If they aren’t fit enough, hard luck. Let them get stuck in.’
    I began thinking about the education side. Around this time, the GB sprinters Vicky Pendleton and Ross Edgar had been to the college run by the Union Cycliste Internationale in Aigle, Switzerland. I got some ideas from Vicky, mainly about how the day was divided up between cycling and education. In terms of the latter, I wasn’t interested in someone going off and being at university, learning history or whatever. This was about cycling – their education in the sport. Learning foreign languages, particularly French, was an obvious one. We would also go into how to look after yourself: stretching, injury prevention, what you do when you have an injury, the medical side in terms of saddle sores, road rash. I got in touch with Jo Harrison from the English Institute of Sport – I was the first one of us to make proper contact with them – and got her involved. She’d been doing little bits sporadically, but this was the first time we evolved a real system. She ran the education side, and we used all the EIS facilities – they organised the language courses, for example, and a food-hygiene course at a college in Stockport.
    The racing side would be based in the UK to start off with. We had the idea of maybe going abroad one day, although we didn’t quite know how it was going to happen or where it wouldbe. The idea was to give the riders quite big goals: the European under-23 track championships and the under-23 world road championships. We were a million miles off winning those in 2003, but these were targets that were age-related, so there was no reason why we couldn’t aim to perform there. So initially it was a domestic programme – Premier Calendars, the national championships, and so on. But what I tried to do was to have at least one European trip every month.
    The rest of it was based around the European under-23 track championships and the under-23 world road race championships, and as many days racing as possible. I had a bit of an eye-opening moment in Moscow in 2003, when I took a team to the Europeans. We went with only six or seven junior and under-23 riders, which wasn’t very many considering that by 2003 we had become one of the leading nations on the track. There weren’t many nations as good as us at the elite level. I counted the riders from other countries, and the Germans or the Spanish had twenty or twenty-five across all the disciplines. We didn’t field riders for all the races, only certain ones, and I remember coming back and saying, ‘I don’t understand this – where were our juniors? Where were our points-race riders, our Madison riders?’ We had a budget; I took that and pushed massively for a change, to take big numbers, and from 2005 we started performing in the Europeans. We were one of the best nations at senior level, so there was no