Project Rainbow by Rod Ellingworth

first stage, and he won it really well. He was at the back of the lead group going up the last climb and he didn’t get any help to come back up because we’d got some riders inthe break who didn’t wait for him; he came back through the cars and absolutely blasted it in the sprint. We had a GB senior team and a Persil team – they were the under-23s’ sponsor – in the race, and I was looking after both. On the radio, Tony Gibb, a GB rider who had a good sprint on him, was saying, ‘I want the lads to lead me out,’ but Cav was saying he was going to sprint for himself, so I left them to it. Cav absolutely floored all of them by lengths. The plan was that we were working for Gibby, but Mark said, ‘I want to win this race’ – and he knew he could, so fair play to him. If we hadn’t won, I’d have gone mental with him, but he pulled it off and it was one of his first big wins. At that stage, we didn’t know what the lads were capable of, so that was one of the first big moments.
    The next day Mark was in the yellow jersey, and the question then was: what are we trying to work on? I wasn’t expecting these young lads to win the race overall, but I was expecting them to work on their race tactics. So one of the plans for the next day was that we couldn’t afford to let a big break go – if there were any more than six or seven riders off the front of the bunch, we would have to close it down straight away. Well, flipping heck, twenty-five or so kilometres into the race there were twenty riders up the road and they’d gone. All the academy lads were sat there, and I was thinking, ‘What on earth are you doing?’ I said, ‘Right, guys, get on the front and ride’ – and that was including Mark, who was the race leader. They rode at the front of the bunch for the whole stage, until Cav went out the back and they all got dropped. Afterwards I made the point: ‘Guys, I don’t really care about the result at this stage. What I do care about is that you didn’t stick to the plan.’ They knew what happened if they didn’t close down a race at once:they were going to have to work a little bit harder, and a little bit longer.
    There was another moment like this on a trip to Belgium, when Simon Jones was with us. We did two or three trips to Belgium for the
kermis
racing, blocks of about ten days at a time, racing every other day. We used to stay at Tim Harris’s house – the same Tim Harris I’d stayed with during the ‘Ratty’ episode in my racing days. Tim loved the idea of what we were doing, and his partner Joscelyn would look after all the lads. Tim and Jos’s house was in Tielt-Winge, not far from where Eddy Merckx was born, which was a good story to tell the lads. It was an early stage of getting the lads to spend time abroad, and the Merckx connection was part of getting them into the culture of the sport.
    The riders had a recovery day, during which they rode for three hours. It was all about them getting as many kilometres in the bank as they could. They asked if they could have a cafe stop. I used to put in the programme whether they could have one or not, and if I heard about them having one when they weren’t supposed to, there’d be trouble. There were at least two hours of riding before the stop. In the great scheme of things it doesn’t make a big difference, but for me it was about listening to what was set out, obeying what you were meant to do. I didn’t give a monkey’s about anything else: if someone says, ‘Do this,’ you do it rather than whatever you want to do. A lot of people get it wrong: it’s not dictatorial, there’s a reason for it. If you stick to one thing you have agreed on, and you all believe in it, you will achieve more. If you’re thinking, ‘Oh, I’ll have a cafe stop after one hour, not two,’ and someone else thinks differently, your group is split.
    It was a rest day, so I hadn’t gone out with them, and what happened was that there were these other