Ed Clancy Back on Track

 

5th of July, 2006

Ed Clancy is one of the country's top Team Pursuit riders and part of the 2005 World Championship winning team. The Team Sparkasse rider has been in Germany since returning from the Commonwealth Games in Australia early in the year and he has been helping his teammate Mark Cavendish in the German road races their team has been competing in. We caught up with him recently in Manchester at the National Cycling Centre.

 

 

Ed Clancy leads Ben Swift, Geraint Thomas and Ross Sander in Team Pursuit training this week as they start their preparation for the European Track Championships.

Ed was in Britain to prepare for the European Track Championships, where he joins up with fellow GB Olympic Academy riders to ride the Team Pursuit. Ed was one of the first riders to join the Olympic Academy Programme when it was launched a couple of years ago with the aim of developing riders in the Under-23 age bracket. He rode with this year's new intake of academy riders in the World Cup in Sydney earlier in the year, where they won a bronze medal in the Team Pursuit.

The Team Pursuit line-up for the upcoming European Championships in Athens is still to be decided, but the Under 23 Team Pursuit squad from which the four rider will be drawn is a mixture of experience and youth. Ed and Geraint Thomas have been riding the Team Pursuit for a few years now, whereas the others in the squad - Ian Stannard, Andy Tennant, Ross Sander and Ben Swift - are still only just out of the Junior ranks. 

Asked for his reaction to riding with the younger riders, Ed replied, "Ian and Andy have massive engines and there is real talent coming through now." He also admitted to feeling at home on the track, despite many months away on the road.

 

Talking about the build up to his current training block, where he gave up the chance of riding the National Road Race championship, to ride a series of circuit races in Germany, Ed said "the preparation in Germany has been very good and it appears I've come here with real good form. Since Sydney I have been on the road but I have always had these European Track Championships in mind. I have been training very differently to how I did over the winter: almost the complete opposite, in fact - in the winter, we worked on my weaknesses and now I am working on my strengths and it looks like this works".

On his return to Britain, like most of the Olympic Academy riders, Ed did a ramp test (i.e. fitness assesment) on the team's SRM machine and he reported a new personal best by quite a reasonable margin, which he naturally found very pleasing.

Talking about the track training session where we met up, Ed said that the team weren't doing full-on race efforts, but that they felt to be riding well. Asked if it's easy slotting into a Team Pursuit formation after such a long time away racing in the different environment of the road, he replied "I guess it is. That's all thanks to the hammering we got during the first year on the Academy when we may as well have lived here at the track. It really is pretty natural but we're still looking at new things, different lines on the track, different ways to change (i.e. swapping the lead as the 4 riders race around together), but we can now pretty much rock up and ride."

Looking back at the first half of the year in Germany, Ed explained that both he and Mark Cavendish had their share of problems, including crashes and injuries. He said it can also be hard being a "domestique" (i.e. support rider) when he has good form of his own. However, he also noted that in Germany the Road racing is of a type where Cav' can win a sprint or he, Ed, can look for breakaway opportunities: "Mark does get results for the team and he is always very grateful for the work you put in on his behalf, so that helps make it easier."

Ed has also found his German teammates very friendly and his German is improving - he says he now understands a lot of what is said but admits that he still finds it difficult to speak the language. As for his racing programme, he explained that he races when the team wants him to, which isn't always ideal: "Sometimes we'll do 3 or 4 single day races in a week but at other times we'll do nothing for 8 days."

Now that he has returned to Britain, there will be very little road work before he returns to Germany for a short while after the Euros. What happens during the second half of the year, isn't yet clear, but in the meantime, Ed is 100 per cent committed to the GB Team Pursuit squad and helping them go as far as they can in Athens. They do after all have some unfinished business from last year when a freak problem of a track sponge (used to mark the inner edge of the track) got stuck in a rider's wheel, preventing them from medalling. Our thanks go to Ed for his time.

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