How British cycling got so good and what other sports could learn from it

They used to dig for coal on the site of the National Cycling Centre in Manchester. Now they pan for precious metal and the bigger prize of maintaining the momentum of the sport's golden summer.

After another valedictory night at the BBC Sports Personality of the Year awards, where Bradley Wiggins strutted to the main prize and the performance director Dave Brailsford was named coach of the year, back at HQ eyes are firmly on the next four years.

The sprawling site, encompassing the velodrome where Sir Chris Hoy, Laura Trott and the rest put in endless hours of training as well as the national governing body's HQ and a new indoor BMX track, was built on the site of a former mine.

Now British Cycling executives are hopeful that unparalleled success in winning medals can be translated into further grassroots growth for the sport, that will allow them to continue riding a wave of success fuelled by public money.

On Monday Sport England confirmed that success in increasing the number of people cycling once a week by 200,000 over the past year had been rewarded with a grassroots funding boost from £24.7m to £32m over a four-year period. On Tuesday, UK Sport will confirm that cycling remains among the top tier of funded sports and is expected to reward continued success in London with a modest increase on the £26m it provided between 2009 and 2013.

It is easy to forget that for the first three years of its life the Manchester Velodrome was seen as something of a white elephant, marooned on the edge of the city. Dave Cockram, British Cycling's national facilities manager and father-in-law to one Bradley Wiggins, recalls that taxis wouldn't drop you there in its early days.

But with the advent of lottery funding, then the Commonwealth Games of 2002 and the subsequent arrival of Manchester City a few hundred yards away, it became an engine of the success of the elite Olympic team that excelled in Beijing and London and the catalyst for the creation of Team Sky, the wild scenes on the Champs-Elysées last summer and an attendant growth in the grassroots popularity of the sport.

The governing body is rare in marrying elite success with participation growth. It is helped by the fact cycling is as much a recreational activity or commuting practicality as a sport, but has seized the opportunity through enlightened governance and a dash of good fortune.

Since the lottery funding tap was turned on in 1997, Great Britain has come to dominate elite cycling. A decision by the Labour government in 2008 to funnel £120m of Sport England lottery and exchequer funding a year into the grassroots through governing bodies has attempted to repeat the trick in the more multilayered world of community sport.

As such cycling has become something of a talisman for the government as it searches for evidence that London 2012 can do something no previous Olympics has achieved and inspire more people to take up sport.

The picture remains mixed but recent Sport England figures show the number of people playing sport at least once a week grew by 750,000 in the past year. Cycling has powered that growth.

Ian Drake, British Cycling chief executive since 2009, has spent the four months since Great Britain ruled the velodrome in London not basking in glory but in finalising bids for more than £60m of public money, at a time when the prevailing economic climate is less than healthy.

You do not have to travel very far to see where the cuts that Manchester City Council, which perhaps more than any other has tried to use sport as a lever for redevelopment, is having to make are likely to bite.

Against that backdrop, Drake says that making the case for the money from UK Sport, to fund its elite athletes, and from Sport England, to invest in driving participation figures, has been the hardest job of his time in charge.

"I've got quite a simple view of sport," he says. "Cycling was here for a long time before me and its going to be for hundreds of years after me. So the simplest way of looking at a sport is to say you're only looking after it for a short period. You're just a custodian for a very limited period of time and you've got to leave it in a better state than you found it."

Drake was involved in 1998 in putting together the first "playground to podium" talent pathway that identified the best riders but also catalysed interest in the sport.

"In 2004, we knew that pathway was going to work," he says. "We had Ed Clancey and Lizzie Armitstead in the system but we knew we were doing it in isolation from the rest of the sport. I was increasingly uncomfortable with the fact that membership was static, we had declining events and yet we were on this trajectory to smash the world. I was worried that we'd sit there in 2008 and 2012 with boxfuls of medals but the sport stuck where it was 10 years ago."

That has changed since Beijing, in particular. Membership of British Cycling stands at more than 62,000 – it has trebled in eight years - and it has used the increased profile of Wiggins, Hoy and Victoria Pendelton to drive the growth of the sport. This has been pulled off partly thanks to a partnership with Sky and techniques honed to target specific parts of the population – be they women turned off by the idea of riding with men, schoolchildren without a bike at home, or commuters who want to take the first step into riding competitively.

The Breeze network, for example, has targeted women with intially easy recreational rides in a social atmosphere that are organised online.

"When Sky got involved, we knew it wasn't the cash that made the difference but the reach," says Stewart Kellett, British Cycling's director of recreation and partnerships. "The way we spoke to cyclists in 2006 was that you had to be a bloke, you had to be in lycra, you had to be fit and and you had to win races. That was relevant to 0.1% of the population. We had to change the image and the way we talked about cycling."

It has also meant taking a wider lobbying role on cycling safety issues. "Every time we have a death or accident on the roads it sets us back 20,000 people," he estimates. As cycling becomes "normalised" and more popular with a broader cross section of the population, the hope is that it will foster a greater level of understanding between riders and motorists.

The sport has benefited from engaging with recreational cyclists, in a way that athletics has historically failed to do – leaving an alternative industry to grow up around fun running and marathon running rather than embracing it.

"Just like you need a talent pathway, you need a participation pathway that can hold somebody's hand until the point where they can either ride socially on their own or have found a group or found a club," says Drake.

For all the talk of systems, talent pathways and aggregation of marginal gains Drake, a former PE teacher, acknowledges that it is those on the front line who make the difference. "It's that magic moment, the first 10 minutes," he says. "It's the people who make or break sporting habits for life.

"At the end of the day, we're trying to do two things – win medals and get more people playing the sport. As long as you do those two things, you get momentum and growth. That's been the journey for the last 14 years. Can we crack that international success but also make sure those medals deliver more than the sum of their parts?"

Far from basking in glory, Drake is determined to recalibrate the parameters of success. There is an unspoken acknowledgement that the high water mark of winning the Tour and huge Olympic success in the same year is unlikely to be repeated. "You can't justify this level of funding just on medal success alone," he says. "There's got to be more to it."

Kellett says that British Cycling has "sweated the medals more than any other sport". Overlooking the £23m indoor BMX track that opened in August of last year brings to mind the experience of BMX since the 1980s. In the grip of a fad for the sport in the mid-1980s, local authorities up and down the country built BMX tracks that fell into disrepair because they were not maintained properly and had no resident clubs or enthusiastic volunteers. Cockram says it is determined not to repeat those mistakes. In the bowels of the velodrome, which is shared roughly 60/40 between the public and training for the elite squads and which since the Olympics has seen waiting lists for "try out" sessions lengthen to weeks then months, lies the equivalent of the Quartermaster's Stores.

There, in a cramped space once inhabited by Brailsford and Shane Sutton as they plotted the route to Olympic success, is a reminder of the attention to detail that lies behind the glory. Row upon row of nutritional supplements, kit and – in a locked room at the back – the frames of the bikes that powered their riders to those medals in London. Charging endlessly around the track, the GB academy squad are following a derny ridden by a coach, Jon Norfolk. There are 10 riders in the sprint programme, all hoping to become the next Hoy or Jason Kenny, move to Manchester at 18 to British Cycling-owned apartments in the city and train full-time.

"The aim of the programme is the Olympic podium," Norfolk says. "These guys benefit from those who ploughed the furrow and created the pathway. Athletes like Chris Hoy, Jason Queally, Chris Boardman, they had to create this.

"They have done all the experiments and the making it up as you go along. Although the expectation is a lot higher on these athletes than an 18-year-old Chris Hoy, they get a lot more support."

A 20-minute drive from the National Centre, in the suburb of Tameside, Cockram shows off a mile-long off-road track that he proclaims as the future of cycling in Great Britain. It is not much to look at – a loop of tarmac that winds its way past an athletics track and a Football Foundation-funded project.

But he says investing in similar secure, floodlit closed-road circuits around the country, where local schools and clubs can train in a safe environment, is the key to the future development of the sport. Drake agrees: "Wherever we're building those, they're packed. What we're trying to build in every town and every city is a place to go where there's a secure environment."

There are around 20 such road racing circuits around the country and Cockram estimates that total will double in the next four years. "They are in the areas of big population and whole swathes of the country with no coverage at all. The trick is to make road racing circuits open to a wider percentage of the membership." In an attempt to attract youngsters, British Cycling's 11 regional managers and 30 Go Ride coaches will pitch up at schools with a van full of bikes and evangelise about cycling, with the aim of getting the children involved with a local club.

A British Cycling board member in the early 1990s, Cockram says he has seen the culture of the sport change to become more welcoming and outward facing. There have been growing pains along the way but the relentless self-analysis that has served Hoy et al so well has also sparked a culture change within the sport.

To illustrate the virtuous circle that they are aiming for, Drake reaches for Trott, the irrepressible double London gold medallist – one of the first riders to come all the way through the system since public money for participation matched that for the elite end.

"The point at which somebody sees Laura Trott and says 'I want to do that', you want to know the first time they go down to that club on a Tuesday night that their first 10 minutes is going to be fantastic; that they're going to go home and tell their Dad it's something they want to carry on doing. That's why we spend a lot of time on coach education, a lot of time on volunteers. At the end of the day, they will make or break whether that inspiration turns into participation and turns into future Olympic success."

Unlike other governing bodies at which the elite side of the sport remains disconnected from the grassroots, which are rarely discussed around the boardroom table unless there is a funding round coming up, at British Cycling the two sides appear genuinely integrated.

There is an irony in the fact that at the Football Association and the Rugby Football Union, for example, their councils are made up of venerable figures from the grassroots of the game. And yet the endless concern of them and their board tends to be the upper echelons and the England team. That is partly, of course, because they don't have to rely so heavily on public money. Football, tennis and rugby have their own cash cows in Wembley, Wimbledon and Twickenham to help drive their sport whereas 86% of British Cycling's revenue come from the public purse. Drake says he wants to alter that balance but believes it also makes them work harder to grow the sport as a whole.

Drake says other sports have been beating a path to his door to hear how cycling squared elite success with boosting participation. He says there is no silver bullet but that obsessive attention to detail, combined with hard work and restless curiosity, brings its own reward.

"There's no point one or two sports succeeding and everyone else failing. It's in our interest to make sure the system is delivering. At the end of the day, it's just people riding bikes."In an ante room at the ExCel Centre following a SPOTY show that has all but confirmed cycling as a new national sport Brailsford acclaims the shift in its profile, paying tribute to Wiggins, Hoy, Mark Cavendish and Pendleton for blazing the trail.

"My own personal experience growing up in north Wales was falling into a sport which just seemed like a very odd thing to be doing," he said. "All my friends thought it was an odd thing to be doing. When it came to the point where I wanted to try to do it seriously, the only way you could do it was to go and live abroad.

"To go from that, from what really was a minority sport with 10-mile time trials on a Tuesday night, to where the sport currently stands in British culture now is remarkable."

By Owen Gibson

Source: www.guardian.co.uk