In Rod We Trust
Rod Ellingworth, the man credited with much of the success of Team Sky, has a new job heading up a new team: BahrainMclaren. Cyclist finds out his plans for Tour de France success, and what role he has for Mark Cavendish
Why Rod Ellingworth has gone from behind the scenes at Team Ineos to behind the wheel at the newly rebranded Bahrain-mclaren team
It’s too easy to describe the Mclaren Technology Centre as space age. A circular, modern building just outside Woking, all glass and metal and designed by renowned architect Norman Foster, it is set in vast, wellmaintained grounds, with a lake lapping at its edges.
It’s certainly an arresting sight – and yes, space age. But on reflection what it most closely resembles is the headquarters of a Formula 1 team. Which is precisely what it is – mainly.
Around 1,000 of the 3,000 people employed in this building work on the Mclaren F1 team. This swallows up £350 million a year. Another 2,000 people work on the commercial vehicles that are designed and engineered here, which are then sold for anything from £150,000 (‘usually £200,000 with extras’) to £750,000 in the case of the Mclaren Senna. Only 10 Sennas were sold worldwide in the second half of last year
Ellingworth gained a reputation as a strict disciplinarian. At times it wasn’t clear if he was running a cycling team or an army unit but the commercial side of the business is nonetheless growing rapidly.
For the past few months this building has also been the base for Rod Ellingworth, who at 47 is the newly appointed man in charge of the Bahrain-merida team – or BahrainMclaren as they will be known in 2020.
New faces, old friends
Ellingworth meets me at the entrance and introduces me to some of his colleagues, one of whom gives us a tour of what must be the most expensively assembled collection of cars in the world. The display represents the history of the company, from Bruce Mclaren’s first racing car, an Austin 7, through to the F1 vehicles they have developed since their entry to motorsport in 1963, including cars driven by world champions Ayrton Senna, James Hunt, Alain Prost, Emerson Fittipaldi and Lewis Hamilton.
Confessing that he isn’t much of an F1 aficionado, Ellingworth then leads me past the workshops with frosted glass windows (where engineers beaver away in secrecy on the 2020 F1 car) into a meeting room deep in the bowels of the building.
In one respect, Ellingworth is an odd fit in his polo shirt and trainers while everyone else is in smart suits. While everything about Mclaren seems to exude money, power and precision engineering, Ellingworth’s reputation is founded on a down-to-earth, roll your sleeves up and get your hands dirty kind of approach. Flash is not a word you’d ever use to describe Ellingworth – and no, he confirms, he does not have a Mclaren car.
But precision can also mean detailed planning and this is certainly one of Ellingworth’s strengths, developed over his years at the British Cycling Academy and the last decade at Team Sky.
Planning is exactly what he’s been doing in the period between stepping down at Team Ineos and starting his new job. He’s also been overseeing the acquisition of new riders, among them Mikel Landa, Wout Poels and Mark Cavendish.
The signing of Cavendish is at the same time bold and not in the least surprising. Ellingworth and Cavendish go back to 2003, when the then 17-year-old was one of the initial intake of six riders to the British Cycling Academy.
Ellingworth was in charge and gained a reputation as a strict disciplinarian: at times it wasn’t clear whether he was running a cycling team or an army unit. If one rider was late for a training session they were punished as a group, washing the staff cars or riding around the top of the velodrome for hours on end.
Cavendish was one of the youngsters who responded well, and Ellingworth continued to coach him to his major successes in the early part of his professional career. When he won the Road Race World Championships title in Copenhagen in 2011, it owed a lot to a British team that had been unusually united and effective in setting up the finish: a team managed by Ellingworth.
Yet it wouldn’t be entirely accurate to say that Ellingworth is bullish about reigniting Cavendish’s flame after three seasons of health problems and apparent decline.
‘There’s nothing to say he cannot win,’ Ellingworth says. ‘He may be at a point where he won’t win any more but we’re going to damn well try, and what if he does win again? It would be a shame to not take that gamble. He’s 34, he’s not old.
‘We had a conference call a couple of days ago and I said, “Mate, you’re a bike rider, that’s all you do – that’s your part in this organisation. You’re paid to win or to support a teammate trying to win. You’re not involved in the business or anything else.”
‘If we didn’t think he could win again he wouldn’t be here,’ Ellingworth adds.
‘This isn’t a meal ticket. To be fair to him, he said he didn’t want it to be a meal ticket.’
It could in any case be a fairly low-risk gamble. Ellingworth suggests that the deal is bonus-heavy, admitting that Cavendish is on a salary commensurate with a rider with his results over the past couple of years (in other words, not many).
Meet the new boss
Bahrain-mclaren are certainly not a team that will be built around, or dependent on, Cavendish. Ellingworth has a three-year plan and wants to win the Tour de France – but doesn’t everyone?
Could they win it next year with Landa? Although Ellingworth thinks the course suits his Basque climber, victory looks a long shot. But Landa will at least give them a clear focus in the 2020 race. It seems more likely that, with a lot of riders inherited by Ellingworth, the team will only truly evolve into his own over the 2021 and 2022 seasons as riders move on and new ones arrive.
There were riders he wanted for next year but wasn’t able to get. Remco Evenepoel is rumoured to be one – Ellingworth admits they spoke – while Julian Alaphilippe is another. Rohan Dennis is the one that got away, however. He effectively ceased to be a Bahrain-merida rider during Stage 12 of the Tour de France when he dramatically climbed off mid-stage.
It was the day before the time-trial that was his key objective for the Tour, but Dennis was said to be unhappy with the clothing, equipment and technical support from the team. Ellingworth met with Dennis, who is now a double World Time-trial champion having defended his title in Yorkshire last September, and would have liked him to stay, but realised it was a lost cause and preferred that the Australian move on than to remain and be unhappy. Dennis has since signed with Ineos.
In everything he does, clarity is the key for Ellingworth. Everyone must know their role, and their role must be clearly defined. ‘Keep it simple’ is his mantra.
In late October he called the whole team – staff and riders – to Woking for two days at the Mclaren Technology Centre. In a subterranean circular room the riders were shown a presentation video on large screens running around the perimeter. They were introduced to the new jersey, which is quite a departure from the red and blue worn by Bahrain-merida in their first three seasons. Then Ellingworth rose to deliver a speech that he’d been working on for weeks.
At Team Sky, this task – an end-ofyear debrief as well as a rallying cry for the following season – always fell to Dave Brailsford. Ellingworth wanted to do it his own way, but mainly he wanted to bring across his vision of a team in which the riders feel ownership.
‘You don’t just ride for this team,’ he told them. ‘It’s your team – you own it.’
Many were surprised when the news was announced that Ellingworth was leaving Team Ineos, so integral was he to the Sky project since day one. There were push and pull factors at play. With Sky announcing ahead of last season that 2019 would be their last year, the winter and early season were uncertain.
At the same time, John Allert, joint managing director of Bahrain-mclaren, had been advised to speak to Ellingworth about stepping up their involvement in the sport – not to recruit him, but as part of an intelligence-gathering exercise.
‘He was generous with his advice,’ says Allert. ‘We spoke a few times and there was an interesting turning point when it went from Rod saying, “You should think about this” to “We should think about this.”’
By the time Ineos confirmed it was taking over from Sky as title sponsor of his old team, Ellingworth was seriously considering taking on a major new challenge.
‘At first I wasn’t looking for any opportunity,’ he says. ‘I’ve had a few offers over the years but this was different. I guess the stars were aligned. Sky pulled out and Ineos came in. It got me thinking. There’s a real focus here on creating something new, which I like.’
Man with a plan
Brailsford was not happy about the loss of a key member of his team. While initially Ellingworth was going to serve his notice with Ineos and leave after the Tour de France, he was pushed out the door before the race.
He watched the 2019 Tour on television,
‘There was an interesting turning point when it went from Rod saying, “You should think about this” to “We should think about this”’
admitting that he followed it far more closely than in previous years, when he had usually been in a car, feeding back course information. He did some gardening. He didn’t learn Italian, as he had planned to. Nor did he ride his bike much. Mainly he thought about his new job, and started planning.
‘I love planning,’ says Ellingworth. Having been a hands-on coach with the academy, his role as performance manager at Sky was more about preparation and logistics. ‘I was at the heart of planning for the Grand Tours, collecting all the information,’ he says. ‘It was very hands on, being out on the road and being the focal point.’
But it was a background role. Brailsford was front and centre while Ellingworth was hidden away, generally too busy to do interviews. At his new team he will be spokesman as well as commander, which, given his straightforward style of communication, shouldn’t be a problem. He does admit to some apprehension, though.
He has had to be versatile in his coaching and management career, morphing from the old-school disciplinarian at the academy to the number-crunching boffin at Team Sky. A consistent thread, however, is Ellingworth’s ability to understand and work with people, and get the best from them.
It’s why the image of him at the British Cycling Academy – of a coach wielding a big stick and never putting an arm around the shoulder – isn’t quite accurate.
As he embarks on the biggest challenge of his career, it is perhaps most beneficial to reflect on his time at the academy. It was new, it was ambitious, and it treated young, inexperienced riders as professionals. It also represented a huge investment in these riders, particularly on a personal level from Ellingworth himself.
Part of its legacy could be seen at the
2018 Tour de France. Stage 11 to La Rosière was won by one of Ellingworth’s protégés, Geraint Thomas, who also took the yellow jersey. There was an atmosphere of celebration in the Team Sky camp, of course, but Ellingworth was distracted, his attention diverted down the mountain, where Cavendish, riding for Dimension Data, was off the back and alone, as he had been for almost the entire stage.
Cavendish was determined to finish – something that was drilled into him, he said later, by Ellingworth during his academy days – even though he would be well outside the time limit.
While Cavendish toiled up the mountain Ellingworth left the Team Sky bus and made his way back to the finish line to wait for the arrival of his former protégé. ‘I just thought I should see Mark,’ he explained. Cavendish eventually finished more than an hour down on Thomas. The first person he saw was his old coach.
‘I can’t put into words just how much I appreciated him being there for me at that moment,’ said Cavendish a few days later. ‘He really cares for us lads.’
It’s a sentiment echoed by many of Ellingworth’s former academy pupils.
Now his challenge is to create something similar in a team of older riders from 12 different countries.
‘I feel liberated,’ he says. ‘I did feel like I was slightly going through the motions a bit, but this is different and I’m highly motivated and prepared to put everything into this.
‘This is what I love: taking a group of people, rolling your sleeves up, and working really hard to achieve something special.’ Richard Moore is a cycling journalist and author, former racer and co-founder of
The Cycling Podcast
‘I feel liberated. I did feel like I was slightly going through the motions a bit, but this is different and I’m highly motivated’