Early in my career, I was involved in the following exchange in an interview:
Q: Cycling is still a minority sport in the UK,
despite the good performance by British riders on road and track in the past
few years. Does that bother you?
A: No, not really. You are not going to get British people doing it
because it is just too hard. If you go to schools you just see loads of
overweight kids walking around. British people are just eating bad food and
turning into blobs. If you want them to go out and do a sport where they have
got to flog themselves for 200 kilometres, they are not going to do it. So it
is not going to get bigger. It is not going to become a big sport,
unfortunately.
- - -
What can I say about
the World Road Race Championships? Just unbelievable, at one point I actually
felt like I had fallen into a coma years ago and I had been dreaming this all
up. It was a sight that I don't think I'll ever really get used to, the British
team dominating from the very start and finishing off the job, delivering on
the biggest stage of one day cycling.
I rode six World
Championships in all, from Junior in Verona to Professional in Verona and
Madrid. I started at a time when there had admittedly been some stirrings of
change in the British camp. In 1999 the team certainly had money, but it still
didn't have a chance. In the 46 years between the rainbow jersey of Tom Simpson
to that of Cavendish, I believe more has changed in the last 5 years than in
the 41 before that. In the last short period of time, the riders have simply
started to believe.
The British team was
always the scruffy underdog. Apparently when Max Sciandri changed nationality
Sean Yates told him that the British team would give him 'A bag of Mars bars and a jersey, and wish you luck'. This was a
fairly accurate comment at the time; I was told by one of the junior riders
that in 1997 he had to return his racing jersey from the World Championships
because someone else would have to use it later in the competition.
Things started to
change in 1998 when the National Lottery injected money into the sport, but for
a long time all that really changed was British Cycling had lots of money, and
still no bike riders or any real clue what it was doing.
We were all paid, we
all had bikes and no expense needed to be spared, it was good but I think that
a lot of people were so used to being the broke amateurish British squad that
this was enough for them. They didn't really trust that the money would stay,
nor in fact that we would get any better, but for the time being having money
was nice. I was one of these people too (as my interview clearly shows) I didn't
have any bad thoughts towards the nation, but I just couldn't believe that we
could get from there to here. It may have been short-sightedness; it may have
been that the hangover of so many years of being bad meant we just didn't know
what to do.
There can be no
possible way that another European nation of people can be so much more
physically suited to cycling than another. Yet when I rode most of my Worlds
the Italians were just on another planet. They were like a force of nature,
from the Juniors to the Pros, they were unbelievable. Their now manager Paolo
Bettini was part of an Italian 1-2-3-4 in the Under-23 road race, something
that on paper should be pretty much impossible.
Italian, or Italian-schooled
riders, won every single amateur World Championships I rode. Cunego, Petrov,
Chicci and Lagutin. They were organised, they were prepared and they made us
look so amateurish. It seemed like cycling coursed through their veins in a way
that it never would or could ours. I was
always a confident rider, I spent every second I could racing internationally
as a kid, and I really believed that one day, if circumstances went right, I or
one of my colleagues could do something at the World Championships. But I could
never have conceived that it would be the British team that would dominate the
championships so impressively.
That is why I have to
take my hat off to guys like senior endurance coach Rod Ellingworth, who rode
for GB when they were the shambolic underdog, and knew how it felt to go to the
Worlds feeling like you were an uninvited guest at someone else's party. And
yet Rod has always unflinchingly believed that last Sunday was possible. I
personally think that the man is nothing short of a genius. It has taken a lot
to make the British team what it is; people have come in and helped the British
team rise from pretty much scratch. But for Rod (and anyone else who rode for
GB) it must have felt like he has seen it rise from somewhere much lower down
than scratch. Rod knew and understood the odds, and yet he still made it
happen.
I'm not only talking
about the Pro race either, the British team were the best across the board at
the Championships, and that is what is so amazing to me. This strength in depth
shows that what I couldn't possibly conceive happening only a few years ago has
happened. The school kids are getting
on their bikes and racing them and I would imagine that now, in the wake of Mark
Cavendish's win, and Lucy Garner's win, and the medals from Bradley Wiggins, Andy
Fenn, Emma Pooley and Elinor Barker that the sport can only grow. I have to
admit I am happy to have been wrong.
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