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where you get hurt regularly. It wasn’t that you had to make the young riders crash, but you needed to put them into situations in training which would challenge them. I cast my mind back to club runs in the winter in the old days, when you’re going round a corner and the first few riders hit a patch of ice. Boom! Down they go, the guys behind hit their brakes, and in a second everyone is in a pile on the deck. Someone bends their bike (you hope there’s a bike shop in the nearest town where you can straighten it out with a hammer), and you hobble home and get in the bath to clean the raw burgers on your elbows and knees. These are all things you go through as a young lad. You’re constantly pushing yourself. Or you should be. But I didn’t see that in the lads I was looking after. They were so into their training efforts, so into doing things in such a structured way. Russell was symptomatic of the problem: he had a lot of talent, but wasn’t being taught right.
    There was another constant moan I had: the lack of discipline among the young guys. There was an incident that summed it up for me with Paul Manning. He is now a successful coach at British Cycling, but even then, as a medallist in the Sydney Olympic Games in the team pursuit, he was a leader, an elder statesman. He didn’t earn that status by shouting at the top of his voice but because he was well organised, always clean and tidy, and rode his bike so well. And critically, he was always on time. The riders would go out training early in the morning because of the heat, and Paul would be there at ten to six if they were going out at six. I’d be there early too, and there was one morning – it would be at one or two minutes past six – whenPaul said to me in that dry Black Country drawl of his, ‘Rod, I don’t think it’s fair that I have to wait for these young lads.’
    ‘Paul, you’re right. What’s going on?’
    That was another moment that took me to the core of the problem. These lads were swanning around on ten grand a year, couldn’t even ride their bikes, couldn’t position themselves correctly in a race, and they couldn’t even come down on time for training. What the hell was going on?
    I thought, ‘Something has to change here.’ But ironically, Paul was the opposite of what I was aiming for. He was a fantastic athlete, but he was an athlete rather than an all-round bike rider. In a team pursuit – and this was the key discipline as far as we were concerned – he was always sitting a wheel’s length off the back of the other riders and looking round the rider in front. His success came out of a structured approach and from his physical qualities as an athlete. I always wondered how much better he might be if he could sit closer to a wheel, if he was a more complete bike racer.
    I believed you had to have a passion for cycling above all else. The young lads I had to coach didn’t really seem to enjoy it, but I’d loved cycling as a teenager, really loved it. You had to know about the sport, and you had to have a thirst for every bit of information you could get. To take another example, none of the young lads we had knew how to stick on a tubular tyre. I said, ‘How can you not know that? Did no one ever teach you?’ I knew that John Herety, the former top professional who was the road team manager, was just as frustrated, but he had to spend so much time with the older riders that he never really had the chance to think about how to turn the younger ones into better cyclists. Not that anyone had said I had to do it.My brief was to coach them and to learn from our head coach, Simon Jones. The objective was to turn the riders into Olympic medallists. My idea was to go back to basics: develop the lads into good bike riders first and then turn them into athletes. And there was something else you could do: develop them as young people at the same time.
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    A couple of years had passed since the afternoon when I had walked out of