Mattie Dodd journal: playing chicken at the Nationals

In the second of two journal entries, Rayner Foundation-supported rider Mattie Dodd heads to Wales for the National Road Championships — fifth in the time trial, then a long game of bluff in the road race that settled the under-23 jersey.

I don’t write anything for months then two come in quick succession (insert something about buses). Reason behind it is fairly simple — I got carried away and quite quickly realised I’d written way too much in one article for modern society’s shrinking attention span. I’ve got two more races’ worth of stories to regale you with. Off to Wales — country, not the animal, for anyone unfortunate enough to have this read to them.

The dusty, sometimes muddy, verges that create a layer of muck on the underside of your frame during winter, in a way that I’m yet to see reproduced elsewhere on the planet

The course for the National TT Championships in deepest, darkest Northwest Wales could have literally been anywhere on the island and it wouldn’t look out of place. You know the kind of thing I mean, those country lanes with hedgerows that spit out little twigs at their feet. The dusty, sometimes muddy, verges that create a layer of muck on the underside of your frame during winter, in a way that I’m yet to see reproduced elsewhere on the planet. Not necessarily bad roads, in the pothole sense, but a long way from good. The tarmac that seems to have been created with the sole purpose of maximum grip, regardless of the effect on vehicle efficiency or road longevity. You all know what I mean — “the lanes”. Not exactly a course for riding with head tucked into hands, put it that way.

I put my fifth place entirely down to caffeine. I’d felt awful the day before, having taken two days without riding after the Giro, but with enough caffeine, I managed to somewhat resurrect myself. Or at the very least, convince my legs that fatigue is just a mindset.

It’s basically just war from the start, with the natural rhythm of a UCI race suddenly completely forgotten and the entire bunch racing like juniors

The road race was the same course as last year, road-wise at least. Only difference was the big lap was in the other direction, which meant there was something substantial enough to be classed as a climb on each of the five loops. I’m going to be honest, I can’t actually remember very much about the race. That may be more indicative of what Nationals is really like than a blow-by-blow account. It’s basically just war from the start, with the natural rhythm of a UCI race suddenly completely forgotten and the entire bunch racing like juniors who’ve seemingly forgotten the race is four and a half hours, not 20 minutes.

The advice we were given by Connor Swift was “active, not reactive”, which ran through my head all day. We had to take the initiative and make sure we were never comfortable, always trying to get ahead of the race and be on the front foot, not chasing to get back into the race.

Mattie Dodd (Ineos Grenadiers Racing Academy). Image: Alex Whitehead/SWpix.com

I’d like to think I did that fairly well, being part of the five-rider group from which the winners of both the U23 and elite titles would come. You can all watch the race back, so I won’t just give a written commentary, I want to try and give an insight into what I imagine many people reading watched live.

He’d be great at poker if cycling doesn’t work out for him, because I spent the last two laps trying to call his bluff and he didn’t flinch once

Having those two races in one made for a pretty strange dynamic and I’ll say now that it was as cagey as it looked. The group finally split on the final climb. The strange thing was, that split wasn’t entirely down to physical ability. Connor was the one to attack, Fred Wright and Lewis Askey both following. Despite being in different kit, we are part of the same team structure, so I wasn’t going to be the one to close down his attack — I wanted to make Elliot Rowe do it. I tell you what, he’d be great at poker if cycling doesn’t work out for him, because I spent the last two laps trying to call his bluff and he didn’t flinch once. In the process of playing chicken, we’d let the three WorldTour riders go up the road. The two races within the one race now splitting into two groups from the once single group did at least make things cleaner to watch.

This is where I found myself in a bit of a conundrum. I had no idea what the gap was behind, we hadn’t been told in half an hour. I had a teammate up the road who I could chase and close attacks down for, but at the same time I’d be bringing a rider with a good sprint back into the fold. I then had to think about the U23 title, and how to get rid of Elliot because I didn’t back myself to win the sprint. This is all while my brain has about the same capacity for thought as my dog, and she’s the thickest animal you’ve ever met.

My decision in the end was to start riding, try and get back to Connor on the climb where the draft for Elliot behind would have less of an effect. As I closed on Connor, I could see him looking around. Once, twice, a third time. I took that as a signal (which he confirmed afterwards) that he didn’t want me to bring more rivals back into the fold. I’d told Connor not to take beating him in a sprint for granted when asked who the Visma guy was, hence his concern. So I eased up. I tried to keep the distance between the groups so that Elliot would have to use his own matches to get across.

The distance grew again to the front three, and I tried to keep them within sight, but not so close we could accidentally stumble into the back of them. We nearly came back to them again inside the final kilometre as they started to play games, so I eased up again, though I suspect we wouldn’t have caught them anyway since Connor attacked soon after. Elliot and I played our own games in the final kilometre, but I ended up with second in that sprint — the expected outcome, hence what I had wanted to avoid. Chapeau to him is all I can say.

The last thing I want to do is make excuses here, or sound like I’m being cocky or anything vaguely similar

I want to just caveat that the last thing I want to do is make excuses here, or sound like I’m being cocky or anything vaguely similar. Had I tried to follow Connor’s initial attack with Fred and Lewis, maybe I would have blown up and dropped like a stone. If I’d got close to coming back to the front, they could have easily accelerated and grown the gap again without me easing up — they weren’t riding full gas at that stage anyway. All I’m trying to do is give my glycogen-depleted, oxygen-deprived, caffeine-stimulated account of a race that many people will have seen from the live stream in a way that might give context to what the race looked like to a spectator. So I hope you find it interesting, because that’s certainly one way to describe it from the inside.

All tactical rocks and hard places aside, there was a continuation of the theme of prizes reinforcing national stereotypes. This time in the form of a cuddly toy sheep. Once again, I lost it. Though this time to my dog, he’s got a minor obsession with fluffy animals, so I was happy to take the hit on this one. That said, I think the five kilos of pasta now somewhere in central Italy would have gone down equally well with two food-obsessed Labradors.