Read Online Project Rainbow by Rod Ellingworth - Free Book Online Page B

reason why we couldn’t be good enough at under-23.
    Right from the outset I wanted to set the bar high. I believed they should be competitive at their age. That was why I was so set on making it an exclusively under-23 programme and why the road Worlds and the European track championships werealways two of our big hits: they are age related, so a rider couldn’t say, ‘Oh yeah, that rider who beat me is older and has got more experience.’ We still weren’t competing that well on the road, but I thought to myself, ‘There’s no reason why we can’t make these guys good enough on the track.’ We’d never done anything in the under-23 road Worlds – Yanto Barker was fifteenth in 1998, and that was as good as it got – and so we didn’t set our targets massively high on that side. I certainly did on the track, though, because ultimately our aim was to win Olympic and world championship gold medals. That’s our business. About that time, the track calendar, and the track Worlds, moved to the winter, but the Olympic Games was still a summer event, so the riders would have to get used to coming off the back of stage races to prepare for the Games; that meant that the Europeans, which were also in summer, were really good for their development.
    For the first year we started in January, and the programme was a mix of road and track, all thrown in together. It didn’t work in terms of the riders producing great performances, because they were doing too much of everything. We were doing two or three track sessions every week, even if they’d got a big road-race objective a week or two later; I just wanted to throw them into anything and everything. These guys had to put as many numbers on their backs as they possibly could in a year, so there were seventy-five to eighty-odd days of racing: track, time trials, Premier Calendars, internationals, World Cup stage races.
    In the second year we changed it to a template that we pretty much stuck to from then on. It was in two halves: from October to June it was mainly about the track; between October and February it was totally track, and we always had a track World Cup as an objective – conveniently, at the time the ManchesterWorld Cup was often in February. Then we’d go on the road and prepare as if it was an Olympic year, aiming for the under-23 European track championships, which were in June. After that they’d have a holiday, a week at home – I didn’t want to give them too much – and then it was all about the under-23 road Worlds at the end of September, after which they’d go away again for a couple of weeks. The next year’s academy would then start in late October or early November.
    The racing side had to be about competing as many times as we could, and getting the riders to experience all that comes with racing. In the plan I even explained that you don’t just do sixty days of racing; you’ve got sixty days plus the travel back home talking about the race, buzzing with this and that – ‘I nearly crashed there’, ‘Did you see so-and-so do this or that?’ – so if you only do twenty days, you only get a third of that. That discussion is when the rider naturally reviews their race – talking to their dad, talking to their mate who’s taken them there, talking to the coach who’s driving them rather than sitting with their headphones on. That became a massive thing in the academy – we always talked about the racing afterwards. It was bike race, bike race, bike race, next bike race, next bike race, next bike race. It wasn’t about who was going to be prime minister.
    Simon Lillistone put together the budget – about £110–120,000 to run it for the entire year. Equipment was something I looked at in a different way: I didn’t want them on the top-of-the-range Shimano Dura-Ace bikes used by the seniors, so they started on Ultegra kit, which is one step down in the hierarchy. I wanted the riders to feel the academy was a stepping stone. I