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race in France and came home. I went into the fire station, with no interview set up, and spoke to the station officer. He turned me down there and then. He said they weren’t going to train up someone who had been swanning around the world for the last ten years. He said, ‘We’ll commit to you, and then you’ll go off again.’ I just thought, ‘This is great.’ I hadn’t been successful and I hadn’t made any money, but that hadn’t meant I wasn’t committed to what I was doing. And it didn’t mean that I wouldn’t be committed to the fire service if they let me join.
    I sat down on the wall outside the fire station in Grantham and wondered what on earth I was going to do.

2 : First Blood
    It was deadly quiet that morning in January 2003. I was sitting in an apartment in Bendigo, about thirty kilometres north of Melbourne. The Great Britain team had gone out early doors for an easy ride on yet another day of blinding heat, and I was sat in my room at my laptop. I’d been appointed as a GB coach a few months earlier and there was plenty to catch up on. We had a group of about ten riders at a two-month warm-weather training camp, among them the under-23 group that I was looking after.
    Then I heard the clip clop of cleated cycling shoes in the courtyard. One of the riders had come back early – too early, half an hour into what was supposed to be a three-hour ride. I jumped up, a bit concerned, and looked out of the window: Russell Anderson, one of my lads was out there. I couldn’t make out what was wrong; perhaps he would come and knock on the door. I sat back and waited. The knock came soon enough. Standing in the doorway, he was a bit white in the face as he held up his arm to show me his elbow. The cut was a deep one; the blood had dried where it had run down his arm, and I could see the thick red mark on the skin around the gash. He’d taken a nice chunk out of the joint.
    Straight away, the coaching instincts kicked in: ‘Let’s get you cleaned up, into the shower and then off to hospital to be stitched up.’ Russell was quite a tough lad and wasn’t particularlydisturbed by the cut. He wasn’t the type who talked much anyway; quite reserved, he tended to grunt in that Scottish way. It wasn’t easy to have a conversation with him at the best of times, let alone talk about any deep stuff.
    ‘Bloody hell, what happened?’
    ‘Tom White and me were messing about, locked our bars, and we both went down. Tom’s OK, but I thought I’d better get this sorted.’
    He was all apologetic, but I said, ‘It’s not a problem, you’ve not broken anything.’ I always say that if you fall off while racing and break something, that’s part of the game; if you fall off in training and it’s a silly accident and you break something, you’re cursed; but if you fall off and don’t break anything, there’s no harm done. And then, while I was cleaning up the wound, he said it: ‘It didn’t hurt as much as I thought it would do.’
    ‘What do you mean?’
    ‘It’s the first time I’ve ever fallen off on the road.’
    He had had a crash on the track, but I remember thinking, ‘How can you not have fallen off on the road?’ I asked him, ‘Have you never flown into a corner, busting a gut to get into it first, so that your wheels go from under you?’ It’s all about learning your limits, all about finding things out – ‘God these are crap tyres, but those work fine,’ that kind of thing.
    The thought passed quickly. He got cleaned up, they put some stitches in, and that was the day over. The lads were taking the piss out of him, as riders always do. But this was a moment when it suddenly came home to me that something wasn’t right. How can you get to nineteen, be wearing the Great Britain cycling jersey, getting paid full-time to ride your bike, when you’ve never experienced crashing onto tarmac?
    It made me think, ‘We’ve got to toughen these guys up.’ Cycling is a hard world, a sport