DOUBLING UP
I love track racing. It’s pure racing, and I think I’m more suited to it than to road racing in terms of physiology. Taking part in both benefits me, and here’s why. MC
At the end of the 2015 season Mark Cavendish entered the equivalent of boot camp. Instead of migrating south in search of winter heat and sunshine he packed up the car and drove north, to Manchester. He would spend the off-season in an apartment and long days in the airless National Cycling Centre, where it all began for him more than a decade earlier with the British Cycling Academy.
Cavendish was training for the omnium at the Olympic Games the following year. The winter boot camp worked: he went on to win a silver medal in Rio. But there were other spin-offs. He also had one of his best years on the road, from winning the Tour of Qatar in February to his four stage wins at the Tour de France – his biggest haul since 2011 – where he also wore the yellow jersey for the first time.
“I don’t think enough has been written or said about the athletic challenge Mark took on and what he achieved that year,” says Rod Ellingworth, Cavendish’s coach when he started out at the Academy in 2004. “And but for tiny margins,
and small decisions, it could have been even better. “Look at what he did,” continues Ellingworth. “He won the madison world title [with Bradley Wiggins] in March, he wore yellow and won all those stages at the Tour de France in July, he went very close to becoming Olympic champion in August and then in October – people forget this – he was second to Sagan in the World Road Race Championship. He could have won that.”
Despite all that, Ellingworth says he is surprised that this article, on how riders combine track and road racing, was suggested by Cavendish
in his role as guest editor. Yet it is a pertinent subject after a season in which two of the three grand tours were won by riders with strong track pedigrees. Tour de France winner Geraint Thomas is a former Olympic and world champion in the velodrome and Simon Yates, the Vuelta a España winner, won the points race at the Worlds in 2013.
Then there is one of Cavendish’s main sprint rivals, Elia Viviani, who combines track and road with great success, taking 18 race wins on the road in 2018 then winning the Gent Six Day with his Quick-Step teammate, Iljo Keisse, in November.
Still, Ellingworth is surprised. “Cav suggested this feature, did he?” he asks. We’re speaking on the phone so I can’t see his expression, but I imagine an arched eyebrow. “That’s funny, cos in 2016 I said to him that it was his work on the track that really helped him. I said, ‘Cav, it gave you the leg speed: you were fast, you were sharp,’ but he wasn’t having any of it. He just said, ‘No, Rod, it’s because I was on it across the board – it wasn’t just the track.’
“But if you ask me,” Ellingworth adds, “I think it was the track.”
In conversation, it’s difficult to imagine a stronger advocate for why road riders should race on the track than Ellingworth’s former protégé. “For me, every kid should do track racing,” says Cavendish. “It’s pure. There are no elements. No brakes, one gear. Pure racing. It teaches bike handling, how to see gaps, spatial awareness, distance awareness. You learn what 10 or 20 metres really is. And speed – you know how you can go, and how to gauge your power over a certain distance.”
He mentions two of his sprint rivals on the road, Viviani and Fernando Gaviria, and notes that they all have track racing in common and gifts that come from the track. “Gaviria, for example, can go long,” says Cavendish. “All three of us can go long in a sprint, if you’ve noticed. We can all go from 300 metres. That comes from the track.”
“Every kid should do track racing. It’s pure. There are no elements. It teaches you bike handling, how to see gaps, spatial awareness, distance and speed” MARK CAVENDISH, DIMENSION DATA
Then there is the tactical dimension. Viviani and Gaviria, he goes on, are “not lucky. They’re not like freaks strength-wise. They are racers. They’ve earned their wins.” You win a track race, explains Cavendish, through tactics. “Reacting. For me the madison encompasses every part of cycling. Speed, endurance, skill, strength, power, teamwork, technical ability, tactical ability, observational skills. It’s got everything. Track cycling was built on the madison.”
If he could overhear this hymn to madison racing, his old coach would be nodding sagely, perhaps only adding one qualification – that not just track cycling but all bike racing is built on madison racing. When they were teenagers, Ellingworth fed Cavendish and his fellow Academy riders a diet of madison racing. It was quite unorthodox. One of the Academy’s principal aims, after all, was to produce results on the road.
This focus on the track cost the Academy at least two road stars of the future. “The one that stands out for me,” says Ellingworth, “is Dan Martin. At the end of 2004, just after Geraint had come into the Academy, I had a meeting with Dan and his dad, Neil. I told them that in my longterm plans we’d go abroad and that there’d be a big road element. But all he could see was the short-term track focus and he wasn’t prepared to wait.”
If Martin was one who slipped through the net, another was Adam Yates. Yates’s twin, Simon, who did join the Academy, was clearly more comfortable with the emphasis on track training and racing.
It’s worth scrolling back and asking why Ellingworth’s emphasis on track work might have deterred the likes of Martin and Adam Yates.
One explanation is tradition. For the best part of a century the structure and rhythm to the cycling year was as immutable as granite. The road season ended in midOctober and was followed by a period of hibernation – broken perhaps by running, circuit training, maybe some cyclo-cross – before training resumed on the road in December or even January for the racing season to kick off in early March.
Winter training involved long, steady miles. Riders would start the season overweight and relatively unfit, but the races would sort that out. The theory was that fitness was constructed like a pyramid. A solid and deep endurance base was necessary to achieve the peak of
form and fitness; and the bigger the base, the better for adding the sharpness and speed that would come with racing and interval training as the weather improved.
There were exceptions: riders who would take part in winter sixes on the track. These flat-out efforts in the dark, cold months did Eddy Merckx no harm: he even won 17 six-day races. But Merckx was Merckx. There were others: Peter Post (the winner of 65 sixes as well as Paris-Roubaix) combined track and road, as did Urs Freuler, Francesco Moser, Adriano Baffi and Rolf Aldag, Others dabbled: Stephen Roche, for example, and more recently, Stuart O’Grady. But most stuck to the established rhythm.
Ideas about training and physiology have evolved, and in the new orthodoxy, winter track work makes sense. Ellingworth, now the performance manager at Team Sky, says: “In the old-school days it was all about steady state progression: build up slowly. You got longer off, you’d progress very gradually towards racing, and wouldn’t start racing until March.
“Our theory now at Team Sky is to never leave the intensity out of training. We train ‘top’ and ‘bottom’ all the way through the season. You still have the build-up phase, with plenty of volume, but we include small acceleration blocks: high rev efforts, or torque work, or short explosive efforts.
“In the old days there was always a bit of that, but it was unstructured. On club runs you’d sprint for ‘30’ [speed limit] signs with your mates. You’d do four or five of those kinds of efforts in a four or five-hour ride, which would have the same effect.”
When he started the Academy and set out on the journey to produce some road stars, Ellingworth looked at the velodrome in Manchester as the training centre and coaching laboratory. “There were two reasons for that,” he says. “The first is that speed is everything in cycling, across any discipline. Two, for coaching, it’s
brilliant. When you’re in the middle of the track you can see everything. On the road it’s much harder. I used to get them doing drill after drill – drilling and skilling, I called it. There was one 8am session: four 10k efforts on 88-inch gears and spoked wheels. For another session I used to run during the winter, every week, we had the national U23 squad, the junior squad, and riders from the talent team regions – 25 to 30 riders – and we put them into four or five teams and got them racing each other with different coloured bibs on.
“We gave each team a different job. In a scratch race, one team would have to lead out their sprinter; one would be allowed one attack, so they had to make their move at the right moment; another team were told they didn’t have a sprinter, so they had to keep attacking. It was based on road racing, so it was all road tactics,” he says. “Every race was filmed and the key part – the most valuable part of the whole exercise – was sitting in the track centre talking about it afterwards. Everyone had to speak. I’d say, ‘Stannard, what were you thinking there?’”
He means Ian Stannard, who now rides for Sky and has twice won Omloop Het Nieuwsblad. “If you think about all those efforts he had to make and then the sprint he won the second time he won Het Nieuwsblad [in 2015, when the race-winning break comprised him and three Quick-Step riders], I look at that and think all the track work has stood him in good stead.”
Ellingworth remains a huge advocate of the track, even for riders whose main focus is grand tours. For riders who are starting out in the sport, it helps develop, as Cavendish says, bike handling, spatial awareness and other skills. For established riders, it can help develop the ingredient that Ellingworth still thinks is the essential one – speed. He mentions Thomas and says that it was his speed to win the stages at La Rosière and Alpe d’Huez that laid the foundations for his Tour victory.
“You need speed, whether it’s to close a gap, to go across to a group,
or to sprint at the top of a mountain – endurance will put you in the right place but it’s speed that wins you races. Geraint has good speed from his work on the track, but in my view he’d be an even better bike rider if he did more track work.
“Rigoberto Urán, when he was at Sky, would do two to three sessions a week behind the motorbike on the track, riding an hour at 52 to 54kph on a 52x15 gear. And before Mark won Milan-San Remo in 2009, all that winter we were doing double sessions two days a week, when he’d do three hours on the road and an hour on the track behind the motorbike: same thing, an hour sitting at 52 to 54kph, with a massive lead-out at the end where he’d go way over that. He’d
be riding 52x15, sitting at 130 revs a minute, tight behind the bike, not moving an inch.
“After he won San Remo, he flew to Poland for the World Track Championships. He phoned me from the airport and told me he was thinking about two things all race – one was how comfortable he was in the first two hours, which were really fast. It was about 50kph and he could see other people struggling but he said he was so comfortable. The second thing he was thinking was that he knew I’d be watching, and if I saw him move even an inch out of the slipstream, into the wind, I’d give him a bollocking.” In the final 300 metres of the 292km Classic, when Heinrich Haussler launched an early sprint, Cavendish was able to respond and use his speed to win.
Cavendish maintains that he is a more natural track than road rider, and can make the transition more easily than many of his peers. There has been talk of him returning to the boards at the Tokyo Olympics. Before he won the Tour, Thomas was also mentioned as a possible madison partner. But Cavendish isn’t a fan of the new rules, with points every 10 laps making it, in his view, more like a points race. “It’s a mess. They’ve f*cked it up. It angers me.”
Will he ride it in Tokyo? “If I can f*cking qualify, I’d like to.”
“If you think about all those efforts [Stannard] had to make and then the sprint when he won Het Nieuwsblad. I look at that and think all the track work stood him in good stead” ROD ELLINGWORTH, PERFORMANCE MANAGER, TEAM SKY