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it. What appealed was the fact that the kids actually listened and would then go and do something, such as a turbo-trainer session. You’d be explaining to them how to get the best out of themselves, and I enjoyed that.
    I applied for a job as British Cycling’s Talent Team coach for the north-east later on in 2000. I was training on the track under Simon Jones, staying in the top end of the Peak District with Tim Buckle, who was a couple of years younger than me and ended up going to the Commonwealth Games two years later. I didn’t hear a word back about the job and I was pretty pissed off when I learnt who they were taking on. I had nothing against the woman who did land the job, but I didn’t understand why they didn’t call me in to talk to them. Ian Drake was the Talent Team coordinator; he’s the chief executive now, but he was the guy who set it all up at the time. I didn’t know him from Adam, so I called his secretary and asked her to explain why I hadn’t got the interview. I was really pushy – ‘Listen, allI want to know is why I didn’t get it. I’m pretty up for this, so I want to have some idea.’
    Next thing, Ian Drake actually rang me himself. Although I didn’t know him, he clearly knew me. It turned out he was from round Nottingham way, so there was an East Midlands connection there. He explained that I had no qualifications, no experience in coaching, while the other people had been to university or had been coaching in part-time jobs. I asked him what I had to do. He said I needed a coaching certificate and some experience. He also told me there was a pot of money available for coaching within the East Midlands region, so I went to them and they paid me to do a course. Funnily enough, Simon Jones was doing the course with me – he was the head coach but he had to do his level-two coaching as well, for insurance reasons.
    I’d done nothing like this since I left school twelve years earlier and I felt the course was too scientific, but one of the last sessions was a practical day, when you had to run a session of your own. My subject was mounting and dismounting the bike. When you look at it, there all sorts of different ways you do that, depending on the discipline: cyclo-cross, track, road. (In cyclo-cross you are constantly getting on and off the bike; in a criterium you need to get away from a standing start at high speed; while on the track you have to be able to come down on your fixed-wheel bike, slow down and stop without falling off.) You had to go away for the evening, think about it and put your session together. ‘Brilliant,’ I thought, and I went into all the different ways of doing it. Ian Drake was one of the supervisors, and he said it was one of the best sessions he’d ever seen and I’d gone into areas he had never even thought about.I didn’t pass all my theory, but because I’d done so well on the practical side I got the coaching badge no problem.
    With that behind me, I started practical sessions to build up experience. Just then, after the Sydney Games, British Cycling was starting to bring in a series of tests aimed at filtering talented kids into the system. To give just one example, the coaches would spend a whole day at a school in Nottingham, a kind of open day for cycling in which different groups of kids could come in and do the tests. So I started helping them out, and a couple of other regions as well when they needed people. I threw myself at everything and anything the Talent Team could give me.
    Something else which bridged the gap from being a rider to being a coach was that from the mid-1990s I had been involved over the winters with a cycling-holiday company run from Yorkshire, Graham Baxter Sporting Tours. Graham would always bring out a pro or two to work on his training camps for amateur cyclists, to lead the rides and give advice and lend the whole thing a bit of glamour. The pros at the camps used to do talks in the evening as well, which was