Faith Hope & Gravity

 

Snapshots from a month in the pre-season of the GB Mountain Bike Team

Words & Pics: Phil Ingham

 

Over the last month or so I've dropped in on the GB Team's mountain bikers on a couple of occasions, and seen them preparing for an important season in two totally contrasting and fascinatingly contrasting situations.

Turn the clock back a month and the scene is a car park outside a large former textile mill in the small Lancashire town of Barnoldswick. A GB team van has just arrived and it disgorges a group of young and not so young men in GB team adidas leisure clothing and they head up a modern steel stairway which leads into a door, above which is the logo of "Hope", the well-known cycle component manufacturer.

left: GB mechanic Peter Wright fits a bottom bracket - right: Phil Dixon (left) with Hope's Paul Oldham

A mixed group of riders and support staff from the GB Mountain Bike team are on a mission to collect equipment and knowledge which will serve them well during the season: the equipment is a selection of Hope's finest components, which will be used to finish off their new team-issue Trek mountain bikes; the knowledge is, simply, how to fit, maintain and get the best out of these trick bits.

Once in the building, the team's Coach, Phil Dixon is the focal point of activity as he divides the group into two: the riders head off for expert tuition in how to use and look after their new stuff; the remainder of, including three mechanics and yours truly are meanwhile treated to a tour of the factory.

Pretty things!

It's an eye-opener for all of us as we walk round the large mill viewing the complex and impressive operation that Hope runs. We watch as brakes are assembled and bled, as solid lumps of aluminium are magically machined into brakes, hub and levers and as discs are lasered out of sheets of steel and hardened, polished and packed for shipping out.

Phil Dixon admires a couple of the wheels Hope have supplied the team

Trays of glistening mountain bike jewellery lie everywhere and the hiss and buzz of giant machines is pervasive as the multitudinous processes, which go into the manufacture of hundreds of different items, go on all around.

Tour over, we return to find the riders have finished their induction into the world of Hope and they are dispatched to grab some lunch, whilst we watch the mechanics begin to fit the Hope brakes and bearings which mark the start of the assembly process. Under the watchful eye of the Hope staff, the blingy mint-green components are carefully fitted: it's care invested in late winter which will hopefully bear fruit on some foreign hillside later in the year.

But for now, my morning with the team is over and I depart, having agreed to meet up again in a couple of week's time to watch the bikes being put through their paces at a training camp.

Nice! The Trek framed and Shimano and Hope equipped XC bikes are classy!

Now join me as I jump forward just over a week to a brilliant sunny Manchester morning (honest, just look at the pics) and I pop into the mechanics' room at the Team's HQ and inquire as to the progress of the new bikes. "Nice timing" comes the reply and I'm led over to a gleaming and obviously complete mountain bike. A few minutes later and I'm back with a camera and am snapping away outside under a perfect blue sky. The bike is a thing of genuine beauty, pearl white, with that mint-green Hope kit providing an understated and contrasting glint of class.

Beautiful minimalist Hubs

Jump on another week and things couldn't be different. I'm on a Welsh hillside with the mist wrapping its moist fingers round my ears and dribbling a thin drizzle which is doing its best to infiltrate my waterproof jacket. I'm at the Cwmcarn trail centre, near Newport, where I've agreed to meet up with Phil and the team to watch the new bikes being put through their paces.

I've been here all morning and done a lap of the trails - for a review of them on our sister site everydaycycling.com - but now I have to grab some shots of the bikes doing what they've been designed for. Problem is, I've not seen Phil or any of the lads all morning and, with mobile reception no-existent, I've only got rough directions as to where I'll find them. Apparently they are working on their descending skills on the venue's fearsome downhill course.

I wander higher into the mist and suddenly find a figure leaning against a fence post - it turns out to be downhill coach Rob Jarman who is brandishing a stopwatch and looking eagerly up the hillside. A brief chat reveals that the riders have just started timed runs down the hill. More "nice timing" if I can get into position to takes some pics in time!

Cross-Country does Downhill - neat skills on show on Cwmcarn's DH course

I quickly whip out the camera, find a good angle under a massive drop off and fumble with the settings - apertures and F-stops are tricky at the best of times for an part-time snapper like myself - and in the nick of time I fire off a couple of test shots at passing downhillers before the distinctive clatter and skitter of a hardtail being ridden hard echoes through the mist and in the space of about five minutes half a dozen riders hurtle past me, each juddering and skipping over the cambered soil, before a brief moment of silence as they sail off the drop-off and then more chaotic fishtailing and clattering and skidding as they regain control in time for the next corner.

Suddenly it all goes quiet again and a couple of ravens honk evocatively from up on the invisible tree line. Rob Jarman expresses his satisfaction at the times being recorded and then Phil Dixon emerges down the course at a slightly more sedate pace. He too is happy and clearly enthused by the skill of his charges.

Alex Paton leads the way as the lads head up for more DH punishment

As I stumble down the lower reaches of the downhill I meet the lads again. They've missed the uplift van and are riding back up the hill in a group for more of the same. It's day two of four punishing days of fitness and technical training and, although mud-covered, morale looks good as they snake up the hillside and disappear once more into the mists. What a contrast their muddied bikes make to the immaculate machine I admired just a few days earlier!

Back in the warm and dry, writing this, I'm able to reflect on two brief meetings, snapshots on the lives of young athletes with some of the toughest jobs in British cycling. Next to the Track and Road successes the team has enjoyed this decade, the mountain bikers have struggled. Liam Killeen and Oli Beckingsale have preserved our credibility to an extent, but it's to the next generation everyone is now looking for riders to make a mark on the global stage.

And there is some good news. David Fletcher's bronze medal in the Junior Cross-Country at last year's Fort William worlds bodes well for the regime of Phil Dixon, a young man who brings an infectious blend of enthusiasm, knowledge and energy to the role of coach.

Breakthrough time - Dave Fletcher's bronze at Fort William was great news for the team

Can a bright future be divined from that single medal? Well, spin the clock back seven or eight years and Jason Queally's gold medal on the Track at the Sydney Olympics looks like a breakthrough result which gave a talented group of Jason's contemporaries the belief that they too could take on and beat the best in the world. Before that medal, success had been very scarce; after it we learnt how to win very quickly.

With a number of his peers very close to him in ability, David Fletcher too may well have opened the eyes of a few riders as to their potential. Time will of course tell if they become world beaters, but in the meantime, Phil Dixon's belief is encouraging: "There's a buzz about the Mountain Bike programme at the moment. My job is all about developing the riders and we're looking at their skills from every angle."

Certainly his introduction of downhill coaching and practice are innovative: the conventional wisdom is that Cross-Country is won and lost on the climbs, but Dixon rightly asserts that there are seconds to be made up on the descents as well. "Plus the lads were crashing too much last year and we wanted that to stop."

Dixon's formula is pretty simple. As a rider who has seen the national team programme from within and who has shadowed the other programmes since being appointed as a coach, he refers to "discipline and development as the two most important things to drum into young riders."

And although Fletcher's medal, in his words, "put the wheels in motion and perhaps more importantly for the programme gave us something to show for the investment in our mountain bikers" Phil was, significantly, equally pleased with the team's efforts at the 2007 European Championships. There, in blazing hot temperatures reaching 47 degrees, the riders all got into the top thirty places and "showed all the preparation we had done with them was worth it. They proved that they had listened to the advice we'd given them about cooling, hydration and nutrition."

So, like a lot of good coaches, for Phil results are only a part of the wider picture. It's clear that riders listening to and following advice and developing and improving as a result is equally satisfying to him. The era of the successful maverick winning alone are long gone and with Phil's help, the current crop of young riders looks set to benefit from the best thought out and resourced support that any GB mountain bikers have ever had.