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all good experience for coaching, but there was more. Over the years I realised there were things that didn’t work. For example, you would take the rides out and there would be riders spread all over the countryside. I said to Graham we could make it much more structured. Most people were coming out for a week at a time, so why not have seven set routes, seven main climbs for them to go over during the seven days? You could have all the groups setting off at once, splitting them up by ability when it got hard, and have them all followed by cars, so that if people had a problem they would know there was someone behind them. You could havea big map on the wall with the route for each day. I got totally into it and felt I really took responsibility. I didn’t realise it at the time, but all this was helping me learn to manage people out on the road.
    Gradually I was being drawn into the Great Britain set-up. Leading into 2001, Simon Jones asked if I would be interested in riding some stage races with the younger lads, guiding them a bit in the role of road captain, which meant giving orders to the team from inside the peloton as they raced. It’s a role often given to an older rider, as there are many times when a team can’t be in touch with the manager in the following car. Jonesy was looking ahead to the Commonwealth Games in 2002; he had a big group which he’d widened out after Sydney, and he was trying to whittle them down a bit. There were riders like me, Tim Buckle, who is now a coach at British Cycling himself, Phil West, who is still working in the sport on the promotion side, and Steve Cummings, who went on to ride for Team Sky and BMC.
    I was very much one of the guys on the periphery, but already I was beginning to ask questions about how they did certain things. For example, to qualify for Great Britain in those days you had to do a standing-start three-kilometre time trial and a flying kilometre on the track, and be within a certain time. That’s all it was, that was the standard – and that was all we would do at a track session, those bastard tests. It was horrible. It was demoralising, and limiting. If you had the talent, you could do it, but I never made it. I never really had the heart for it – it would just crack me – while others would waltz through it because they were so talented. The coaches would relate your time to your age, and also to the temperature at the track – thewarmer the air is, the faster you go – and would deduct a certain amount. The development riders – an eighteen-year-old lad, for example – could go a few seconds slower and still get funding, whereas my attitude was that even at eighteen or nineteen you should be trying to be the best in the world. They should be trying to win world championships, because this was track racing, not road racing, where endurance matters so much. All you need on the track is sheer guts and speed.
    In 2001 I started doing the training camps in Majorca with Great Britain, then the stage races which were used to build up the track riders’ foundation of fitness for their specific speed training: the Flèche du Sud in Luxembourg, the Cinturón in Majorca, the Route du Sud in France and the Tour of Rhodes. I roomed with Bradley Wiggins sometimes; out of the four stage races I did with GB that year, he won three of them, and was second in Rhodes to Fabian Cancellara, who was a prospect then but has now turned into the best Classics rider in the world. For a young lad Brad was already quite striking: he would be first up the hills, and first in the bunch sprints as well. He was just so talented, and he led off the bike too: he’d come round the team’s rooms in the evening and he’d be really behind us all, always saying, ‘Thanks for all the work you did today,’ and so on. Road captain was a role I really enjoyed, seeing all the young lads race and watching them progress. On one race, along with me, Tim and Brad, we had the