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the fire station in Grantham, sat down on the wall and wondered what I was going to do with my life. I was with my best mate Simon – ‘Bear’, as I called him. He asked me what the next step was, and I remember saying to him, ‘I don’t know. I’ll just keep riding my bike, I guess.’ I was fortunate that Richard, my brother, had his own businesses: a recruitment agency and a track-day company, where you go around racing circuits in fancy cars – a Ferrari and so on. He’s ambitious enough, and he said to me, ‘Why don’t you form a little company, base it around your cycling and set yourself up as a bike rider?’ I thought that was a good idea, so I moved into his house in Harlaxton, just outside Grantham. Richard put in a bit of money, so did I, and we called the company RJ Management, after him – Richard Jeffrey – as I didn’t want it to be named after me. We printed up some brochures, and I went down to the dole office. Again I got lucky. I’d never signed on; I hated it but I knew I was doing it for a reason. I sat down opposite the dole officer, and he said, ‘Are you Rod Ellingworth the cyclist?’ He knew of me because of the involvement I’d had with the council since way back when. So I explained what I was doing, that I didn’t want to go for a job, and he said I could just come in, collect the dole money and get on with what I was doing.
    Richard and I had a whole list of companies to approach – food, health, travel – that I thought might like to be involved in cycling. Unlike today, nobody knew much about the sport. We sent out the brochures, did follow-up calls. What I’d done with the council in the past began to kick in, and so did the work – school visits and so on – that I’d done with Ambrosia when they’d sponsored me. The council were really getting behind pushing cycling; they had a meeting every few weeks about developing it – bike paths and so on. I came up with a plan for school visits, I organised National Bike to Work Day and National Bike Week with them, kids’ routes, stuff like that, and they would get me in and use me to see if this or that would work.
    I wasn’t making a lot of money. I think in a year I’d bring in about eight to ten grand – nothing really, but enough just to get by. I had a car from the council and I used my contacts to get everything I could for free: I was still involved with Raleigh, and they got my bikes and so on; and Impsport – a local company from Lincoln – sponsored me with clothing. And I was still racing at the time, so I’d pick up a few hundred quid in the criteriums. I picked up some work on a couple of television programmes on the Disney Channel and the BBC – there was one BBC kids’ programme about aerodynamics with me talking to a puppet which still gets shown – and I did cycling-proficiency and road-safety videos, that kind of stuff, little bits here and there. I was just getting by, with no idea where it would take me.
    It was about then that Simon Jones, who was the Great Britain head coach, approached me about riding for the national team. It was just before the Sydney Olympics in summer 2000, andthey were looking ahead to the next Olympic cycle, trying to bring in all the riders who in the past had ridden in the team pursuit at either senior or junior level, to assess their potential for Athens. That opened the doors again. Jenny Gretton, who was the East Midlands coach for the Talent Team – the Great Britain under-16 cycling programme that aimed to ‘uncover’ the next generation of Olympians – knew I was doing all these little things and was looking for what they called ‘an expert rider’ to come along to team camps at weekends, so I started doing that as well. That was the first time I experienced coaching from the other side – as a coach, not a rider – and I thought, ‘Bloody hell, I actually quite like this.’ I did a few weekends and days with them over that period and really got into