Ed Clancy has been there, won it and got the Olympic gold medals.
Clancy forged a reputation as the best team pursuit specialist in the world, through a career that spanned four Olympic Games. At three of them – Beijing 2008, London 2012 and Rio 2016 – he won gold in the team pursuit as part of a Team GB squad that has dominated the past two decades of track cycling.
Alongside the likes of Sir Chris Hoy, Laura Kenny and Jason Kenny, Clancy has been one of Great Britain’s leading lights on the track. He’s a rider who has had the full British Cycling experience, having been talent-spotted as a 15-year-old, before graduating from the Academy programme, securing a haul of gold medals and world records that few can match, and ending his career in 2021.
Clancy lived and breathed British Cycling’s marginal gains philosophy as the only ever-present member of the team pursuit squad that won back-to-back-to-back Olympic titles from 2008 to 2016. He’s also a rider who describes himself as “mad for it” and was happy to be used as a “guinea pig” when it came to testing and adopting the tech that made him as fast as possible on the track.
With the Paris 2024 track cycling programme starting today (Monday 5 August) at the Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines velodrome, we caught up with Clancy for an episode of the BikeRadar Podcast, to learn more about the tech story that underpinned the 39-year-old’s career. From the world’s best aerodynamic expertise to space-age bike design, tech innovations helped British Cycling set the pace for others to follow for much of Clancy’s career.
Clancy talked us through his early relationship with British Cycling’s now-famous Secret Squirrel Club. He shed some light on the conveyor belt of tech that helped him get faster with each Olympic gold medal, some of the equipment frustrations that surfaced later in his career, the impact of the change in leadership at British Cycling, and how the team pursuit – and the tech behind it – has evolved in the build-up to Paris.
Early adopter
Clancy’s journey started when his potential was spotted as a teenager in 2000, after completing a fitness test on a stationary bike as part of the National Lottery-funded Talent Team initiative. However, one of his earliest sporting memories was watching Chris Boardman win individual pursuit gold at the Barcelona 1992 Olympics, riding the radical Lotus Type 108.
By the time Clancy was part of British Cycling’s elite track programme, Boardman was leading the national governing body’s so-called Secret Squirrel Club – a covert research and development task force set up to eke out a technical advantage for British riders on the track. Clancy quickly bought into the idea of working with Boardman.
“I was aware that I was never going to produce epic power numbers, at least in terms of my threshold, compared to Geraint [Thomas] and Brad [Wiggins], so if there was any way, once I got up to speed, that I could make it easier, and travel faster for the same amount of power, then I was all over it,” Clancy tells BikeRadar.
Clancy remembers being in the wind tunnel with Boardman in 2006, having won the first of six World Championship titles a year earlier in 2005. “My ears pricked up when they said, on position alone, and only after a couple of hours of testing, that I could probably find three to four per cent improvement,” says Clancy, who retired shortly after the Tokyo Olympics, where Great Britain finished seventh with a young squad.
“They could see that I was engaged – that I was mad for it – so they kept getting me back as a guinea pig. I knew that a day in the wind tunnel would be much more valuable than, say, two or three days of missed training.”
Even as an aspiring Olympic athlete, Clancy says he knew the bikes and equipment he used would “be a huge part of winning and losing”.
A winning habit
Clancy quickly made a habit of winning, claiming his first Olympic title in the team pursuit in Beijing with Bradley Wiggins, Geraint Thomas and Paul Manning, as part of a gold rush that saw British riders stand on the top step of the velodrome podium seven times.
The efforts of Boardman and co behind the scenes were already paying dividends, Clancy says. While Australia arrived in Beijing as defending champions, having won the title in Athens four years earlier, Clancy knew the British team had an ace up their sleeves, in the form of a new skinsuit.
“I knew the kit we were rocking was going to make us two or three seconds faster than our World Championship time,” says Clancy.
The 'rubberised' Beijing skinsuit – developed by British Cycling and UK Sport, and made by Adidas – was later banned by the UCI. However, Clancy believes this wasn’t because of the fabric or aero ‘trips’ on the sleeves, but because the suit was viewed as being compressive. “It wasn’t [compressive], and it wasn’t comfy – it was incredibly hot – so I think the riders were quite happy when it went,” he says.
Not every idea that came out of the Secret Squirrel Club was adopted, of course. Clancy goes as far as describing some of the experiments as “outrageous”, with outside experts drafted in alongside Boardman and British Cycling’s in-house team, to offer a fresh perspective.
“There’s a picture of me in the wind tunnel with a massive cone on my head,” says Clancy.
“We did all sorts of wacky things, [without any] preconceived ideas about what a helmet should look like or what position on the bike should look like.
“But then the ex-cycling guys like Chris Boardman would say, ‘Well, hang on a minute, we’ve got to pedal these bikes. We can’t just negate all thought of power production or to see where you’re going’.
“It was a nice marriage of innovation, knowledge of the UCI rules and an understanding that you’ve got to pedal these things as well.”
All eyes on London 2012
London 2012 saw Team GB dominate once again, this time at a home Games and with another seven gold medals on the track. With the new skinsuit for London, the focus was on making the suit as consistent in its performance as possible.
“The Beijing skinsuit was very, very sensitive to positioning,” says Clancy. “On the big day, when you're covered in sweat, if the [aero] trip wasn't perfectly where it should be, it didn't really work at all. What we found in London was a suit that was much more repeatable.”
Fast forward to 2024 and Clancy says “specificity is the name of the game” when it comes to skinsuit technology. “There’s an operating window,” he adds. “Some suits are faster at road speeds, 35-45kph, and then some suits will come into their operating window at time-trial speeds.
“The key for the Olympic track teams, and probably the pro road teams, is in making sure they get suits that work for their riders and for their type of events.
“If they haven't already got it, they'll start getting to a point where there'll be a suit for [sprinter] Jasper Philipsen, that works at 72kph, and there will be a suit for [climber] Jonas Vingegaard that works at 32kph. If they haven't already got there, that's where they'll be going.”
“A lifetime’s work”
Brailsford’s philosophy focused on the aggregation of marginal gains, but the eventual advantage gained from technical innovation was far from marginal, Clancy says – not least at a time when Great Britain had a head-start on rivals when it came to innovation.
“Five, six, seven per cent might not sound like an awful lot to the untrained ear but, for a guy who spent 20 years trying to put three, four, five per cent on his threshold, it was huge,” says Clancy. “If you’ve got a threshold of 400 watts, trying to add 20 watts to that is a lifetime’s work.
“The whole idea of marginal gains is that it's like an aggregate total. Find all these small incremental gains here, there and everywhere, add it up, and it becomes something big.
“I won't quite say it was like a game changer – it's not like we had a typewriter, threw it out of the window and replaced it with the laptop – but we had a bit of a step change there.
“For me, it's what makes it the best sport in the world. And not just track cycling, but road cycling as well. There's this beautiful marriage of technology, aerodynamics, biomechanics, and also human physical performance, sleep hygiene, nutrition, power production, all of that.”
The hunter becomes the hunted
Clancy describes British Cycling’s tech advancements as a “dark art” up until London 2012 and believes the British team held an advantage until 2014. “Then I think it’s fair to say the rest of the world caught up,” he says. “By the time we got to Rio [in 2016], I don’t think we really had a significant advantage.”
Other nations had been forced to respond to Britain’s dominance on the track. Previously, only a handful of riders and British Cycling staff were truly let into the “circle of trust” and kept abreast of the intricacies of the Secret Squirrel Club’s work, Clancy says, but, once the tech was out there for the world to see, the early mover’s advantage quickly receded.
“In motorsports technology, it’s always easier to copy and replicate something that already exists,” Clancy says, adding that every sports scientist and aerodynamicist on the British team had a “big green tick” on their CV after London 2012.
“As our personnel got poached, not just within cycling but every sport under the sun, that knowledge spread like wildfire,” he adds.
Turning point
The Olympic cycle between London 2012 and Rio 2016 marked a turning point for British Cycling. “In my opinion, we didn't try to progress as quickly as we could and should have done, between London and Rio. And Tokyo. I don’t know if that’s slightly controversial, but it’s clearly an area that’s [continuously] worth heavily investing in,” says Clancy.
Clancy points to a change of leadership within British Cycling, with Dave Brailsford stepping down in 2014 to focus on his work with Team Ineos-Grenadiers (then Team Sky), as having a significant impact on the organisation’s agility.
“It took time for big decisions to be made and that allowed the rest of the world to catch up,” says Clancy. “The problem with British Cycling at that time is that we were like a big oil tanker. Big organisation, big sponsors, big commercial partners. Trying to make quick changes on suppliers, equipment and so on was a thing that took years.”
An upstart such as the Huub-Wattbike team, founded in 2018 and led by Dan Bigham, now part of the British team pursuit squad, could take the opposite approach. Despite operating as an independent track trade team, without the commercial backing of the national governing body, Huub-Wattbike’s riders broke records and won medals.
“You saw when there was a small operation that knew what they were doing, with an aerodynamicist and four keen lads, they were like a London taxi,” says Clancy, referring to the team's agile approach.
“For those guys, it was as easy as checking themselves into a wind tunnel, finding a couple of key sponsors and partners, and being very quick to make decisions on whatever it is they wanted to use. Quite quickly, they showed the way for the rest of the world.”
It proved to be a frustrating time in Clancy’s career.
“You do everything and anything to be the best you can possibly be,” he says. “You forgo weddings, funerals, Christmas and so on, to make sure you go around the big wooden track as fast as you can. And if any rider did feel like they had a bit of an air brake on, for whatever bit of kit we’re talking about, it was an incredibly frustrating thing.”
Changing demands
The team pursuit is faster than ever and aerodynamic advancements have come hand-in-hand with the evolving physiological requirements to ride and be successful in the event. What Clancy describes as once being a “very intermittent effort”, now requires a huge engine throughout the four minutes.
“You used to literally recover in the wheels,” says Clancy. “It seems like such an alien concept now. The faster bikes, the faster suits, the faster helmets all work very well in clean air, but what we’ve found is that with the increase in speeds, the power in the wheels has gone up in a very linear manner.
“It’s become much more of an endurance event, suited to a road pro with a big functional threshold power. The fastest team pursuit now seems to be three WorldTour guys and someone at the front who can start. Back in my day, it was very much a sprint on the front and recover in the wheels.”
Clancy says the dynamics of the event have “completely changed”. Reflecting on his frustrations as a rider in the build-up to Rio 2016, he says, as a result of the changing physiological demands, the team pursuit squad should have been using its fastest equipment in training, and not saving the Sunday best for race day, as had been the previous strategy.
“We should have been using the fast kit in training months if not years out, in order to build a strategy using the knowledge and information that you collect in the training efforts,” he says.
“On race day, we weren't prepared for how easy it was on the front and how hard it was in the wheels, and we very nearly lost. It was scrappy, we were pushed really hard in the Olympics for the first time and we very nearly fell apart and lost it all. We won by a tenth of a second after all that, but we could have made it a lot easier for ourselves.”
Internal frustrations
Clancy voiced his frustration internally within British Cycling, and, he recalls, the message got through. “British Cycling does have very, very competitive kit now, for World Championships and, dare I say it, the Olympics, they’ll still have the best kit out there,” he says.
He describes the Hope-Lotus bike developed for the Tokyo Games, and refined for Paris 2024, as a “decent step forward”. Previously, Team GB had used UK Sport-designed bikes for London 2012 and Cervélo bikes for Rio 2016. Kalas has made British Cycling’s skinsuits since 2017 and Lazer supplies the helmets.
“It was great that we signed up some quality partners that were keen to move the game forward as well,” he says.
Clancy was once again recruited as a guinea pig during the development of the Hope-Lotus bike, seeing early prototypes of the frame, with its radically wide-stanced fork and seatstays, in the wind tunnel.
“The whole idea is that a longer object, with the same frontal area, is generally speaking faster,” he says. “You have the front fork, your legs, and the rear stays somewhat in a vague line then, in a very simplistic manner, it makes it a long object and, for most riders, it was faster.”
In terms of current and future tech development, Clancy expects to see more bikes in the vein of the Hope-Lotus. Indeed, Japan’s V-IZU TCM2 is another example of a track bike with a radically wide fork design.
“People are starting to cotton on that you can use bikes as fairings,” he says. “The Hope-Lotus bike won’t be the only bike that’s a bit different.”
Elsewhere, Clancy highlights shortening crank lengths (he started his career on 175mm cranks and now uses 165mm cranks on his road bike), and the need for a rider to balance aerodynamics and power production to be as fast as possible, as key trends.
“In hindsight, I think a few guys, including myself, got very obsessed with aerodynamics,” he says, referring to the importance of finding a position that’s aero but that also allows for the consistent – and comfortable – production of power through the pedals.
“Of course, it's not aerodynamic riders that win races, it’s the power-to-drag equation.”
Speaking about the trend for time trial specialists to adopt a slightly higher position, Clancy says: “It’s like a lot of leading riders have clocked that you can’t just get crazy-aero, only think about your frontal area, and forgo threshold and power. But it’s a very difficult question to say, 'Well, what is the perfect position?' I don't think anyone's nailed it right now."
All eyes on Paris
Dan Bigham, Ethan Hayter, Charlie Tanfield, Ethan Vernon, Ollie Wood and Mark Stewart have travelled to Paris 2024 as Great Britain’s track endurance squad.
The team pursuit record will, in all likelihood, be broken again. Clancy helped Great Britain set a world record of 3:53.314 minutes in Beijing, before lowering this to 3:51.659 minutes in London and 3:50.265 in Rio. Italy dropped the mark again to an astonishing 3:42.032 minutes – the current world record – in Tokyo.
Clancy says tech developments have been a “massive” factor in records tumbling, while acknowledging that the “riders are better, the coaching is better” and the event “requires a different type of athlete”.
He adds: “I don’t want to detract anything from the riders. For a decent period of time, I was considered the best team pursuiter in the world, but those days were gone by the time I had finished. I was a bit over the hill, perhaps, but there were some amazing talents rocking up and moving the game on.
“There was a changing of the guard through Coronavirus. I saw that through my own eyes. It gave the youngsters the opportunity to just crack on with it and develop. The older guys came back where they left off and realised there had been a step-change in talent. There’s some epic talents.”
Team GB will start the team pursuit in Paris as second favourites behind defending champions Italy – a match-up Clancy describes as “an exciting showdown”, but who’s he backing?
“If I was going to put my money down, I’d put it on the Brits,” he says, before quickly following up with, “that’s not me being biased.”
“They’ve got Ollie Wood, who can start as fast as anyone else, then we’ve got Vernon, Hayter, Bigham, Charlie Tanfield as well, who’s potentially going to be part of the starting four as well, from what I understand.
“That’s an amazing team. I know the Italians have got the legendary [Filippo] Ganna at the back, but the Brits have shown they can beat them and I think it’s fair to say they’ll have better kit to come.”
Ed Clancy was speaking to BikeRadar as part of his week-long residency at Club Med Alpe d'Huez. Want to ride some of the most iconic climbs in the Alps? A seven-night all-inclusive stay at Club Med Alpe d'Huez, France, costs from £1,125 per adult (based on dual occupancy). Price based on departure date of 24 August 2024. Book now at www.clubmed.co.uk/r/alpe-d-huez/s or call 03453676767.
