Looking ahead to Tokyo 2020
As riders enter the crucial few months before Tokyo, Chris Marshall-bell asks them about their pre-games build-up
CHOOSING who you want on your football five-a-side team always leaves those picked last disheartened. Just imagine if that was how selection for the Olympic Games was decided. “Let’s just say that preparation for 1996 was shocking. It was non-existent,” Rob Hayles remembers. “They even asked us to select the team. It was like, ‘Really?’”
Olympics, local kick-about with your mates. Same thing, right? “Talk about taking the pressure off the coaches,” Hayles adds. “We were at a training camp somewhere and we were all sat around when Doug Dailey [former national coach at British Cycling] walked in and said, ‘Right, you guys decide.’ Each rider wrote down their own list of who should go and then they counted the names up and said, ‘This is the team you have selected.’ It was decided on that day and that was the team going to Atlanta.”
Hayles was one of the 20 lucky GB cyclists who had secured a flight to the American city, but any hope that there’d be more professionalism and structure prior to the Games quickly disappeared. “We had three-to-five track specific days as preparation,” Hayles says, who was part of the team pursuit squad that finished
10th in the qualifying round in Atlanta, Britain’s worst modern Games across all
sports. “We had a lot of road work, the odd camp here and there, but specific work was really minimal. There was absolutely nothing. We only had the outdoor track in Leicester and my dad would drive me up to a roller session in the rain and then drive me back.”
Eight years previously, in the run-up to the Seoul 1988 Olympics, Colin Sturgess ran into similar issues with the cash-strapped national federation. Despite being rated as a possible medallist, equipment funding for Sturgess was limited to a one-off £500 payment. He had to get creative. “If I wanted to have the best chance, I had to be selffunded,” he says. “My parents ran the track league at the Leicester velodrome and with the help of a councillor they put together a proposal to the local council to help me to buy three disc wheels, two groupsets and some tyres. Within a month they’d given me a grant of around £4,000.”
The advent of lottery funding, introduced in 1997, changed the nature of preparing for an Olympics forever. Now, Britain enjoys almost guaranteed success across track, road and BMX at the Olympics, with athletes supported with world-class coaching and preparation in between Olympic cycles. Talking to those who have done it, the road into an Olympics is always marked with stress and excitement in equal measure whichever year it is, but life for British riders is a little less precarious than in Hayles and Sturgess’s heydays.
That system has led to the Manchester velodrome being dubbed ‘the medal factory’, but it is a different velodrome in Wales that athletes credit most of their fine-tuning success to.
Beautiful Newport
“You hear Newport is this special place, where Team GB go before the Olympics and everyone talks it up about how special it is. It has such a buzz,” Katy Marchant, who is preparing for her second successive Games, says. Local boy Owain Doull adds: “It doesn’t sound that good considering it’s Newport – I’m Welsh but even I know Newport isn’t the nicest place in the world – but that whole feeling of getting the coach down wearing the Olympic kit for the first time with everyone else, staying at Celtic Manor, there is a buzz in the air.”
Taking place in the immediate weeks before travelling to the Games, all of GB’S track cycling squads come together for the final preparation. “It was a bizarre thing sitting down at a dinner,” Doull, who in Rio won gold as part of the men’s team pursuit quartet, continues, “as you’d ask the girls how their training session went and they’d say, ‘Oh, it went well, we broke a world record today.’ And I’d respond: ‘Oh, funny that, so did we!’ It’s a bizarre feeling knowing that is the point where all the work comes together. The magic of the holding camp is the confidence you take from it. We were all going to the Games knowing we had been breaking world records in conditions worse than they would in the Games. We had been doing training that would win in the Games.”
Smashing records isn’t the only order of the day though. “On the suite in the top floor of the Celtic Manor hotel we had a load of silly things,” Marchant reveals. “There were colouring books, card games, jigsaws, board games, you name it. Doing stuff like that with the team was great, but it really isn’t safe to be in a card game with other GB athletes because everyone is really competitive.”
“It really isn’t safe to be in a card game with other GB athletes because everyone is really, really competitive”
Marchant, who went on to win a bronze medal in the individual sprint at Rio, was just 23 at the time. “When I say we were living the dream, I mean it. It was amazing. Newport was such a surreal feeling and talking about it now gives me goosebumps and makes me want to go back to the camp in Newport. You can’t describe it.”
Sturgess was ahead of his time in his preparation for Seoul. “I did a lot of selfstudy of sports psychology, visualising, relating and imagery,” he says, 31 years after he finished fourth in the individual pursuit. “I don’t ever remember feeling nervous in a negative way, because I used that nervous energy positively. It was a daily process after my day’s training to do my mental imagery and mental training, so that when I was on the startline I didn’t notice the crowd or other things. I was only looking at those three lines down the velodrome and nothing else mattered or bothered me.”
By 2004, the operation within British Cycling had dramatically improved, and Hayles was on a mission to get his weight appropriate for the forthcoming heat in Athens. But then came magical Newport when Hayles’s sweet tooth
was reacquainted with its one true love. “The first day at Newport, the desserts came around but I was good and stuck to fruit,” he remembers. “One day though, there were these chocolate swirls and I put a little bit on the top of my bowl and it exploded in my mouth. I had become so desensitised to sugar that this little bit just hit me. ‘Oh my God, that’s what chocolate tastes like!’”
All athletes speak about the requirement to do something else from their chosen sport to cope with the pressure and expectation. Usually, that means nights binge-watching TV. Not for Marchant. “I’m the anomaly when it comes to Netflix: I hate watching TV,” she laughs. “People ask me if I have seen this series or this one and I’m like, ‘Nope, nor that one, never heard of it.’”
So how does she relax? “Before Rio
I was still living on my parents’ arable farm,” she says. “I’d get home at five and having been indoors at the track all day, I’d need to get outside. I’d go for a walk or I’d sit in the tractor and help out. If it was harvesting season, sometimes I’d be out driving the tractor until 10pm.”
Five years on, Marchant now lives on her fiancé’s farm and is preparing for the delayed Tokyo Games in the same manner. “I found that when I got home, I couldn’t switch off from training, but being outside helps. I come to training happier, feeling more comfortable because I love my home and I have a work-farm life balance.”
If the crops don’t need tending to, Marchant has a secondary method that most sports psychologists working with Olympians wouldn’t think of prescribing. “My parents like equestrian so we have horses and I’ll ride them now and again,” she says. “I’ve ridden them since I was two so it’s second nature to me. It could be dangerous but it’s dangerous to drive down the M62, too.”
As the number of training sessions left before the big day arrives ticks down into single digits, and tapering takes hold, one of the final appointments is press day. And it’s when preparation mode begins its switch to competition mode. Doull remembers: “That’s the first day when we’re all together in the Olympic kit and we’re doing photos, videos and interviews with the Union Jack behind us. That is when you feel that this is really happening now: we’re going to the Olympics.”
“It could be dangerous but it’s dangerous to drive down the M62, too”