Former top pro winding down racing career at 49 years of age
Former Tour of Spain stage winner and points jersey victor Malcolm Elliott has spoken about his upcoming role as manager of the British Motorpoint team, saying that he feels it is a good time to back off on his racing and to instead help guide younger riders to success.
The 49 year old helped team manager Keith Lambert at the Tour of Britain and now with Lambert off to work with the Great Britain Academy, he is perfectly placed to take over. He’s got a huge amount of experience and once he settles in, should be of big help to those on the team.
“My plan had been to get into management, but not necessarily this soon,” he admitted in a article on the Motorpoint website. “But when it came up, I decided to step up and take the role. It’s only been a few days but already it feels quite natural. There is a lot to learn but I’ve had an extremely good mentor in Keith Lambert and if I can emulate his success, then I will be extremely happy.
“My time helping out Keith during the Tour of Britain has also stood me in good stead. I really enjoyed it. However, I am not kidding myself into thinking it won’t be hard – it will be. And, it will take time, but I am up for the challenge.”
Elliott had a fine first career, netting fifth alongside Sean Yates and Tony Doyle in the team pursuit at the Moscow Olympics some 30 years ago, then winning the road race and team time trial in the 1982 Commonwealth Games.
He turned pro with the British-based Raleigh-Weinmann team in 1984, then moved to the ANC Halfords team two years later. The squad had lofty aspirations and competed abroad, thus giving Elliott the platform to finish third in the 1987 Amstel Gold Race as a relative unknown. That helped earn the team an invite to the Tour de France: third on the stage to Bordeaux was the sprinter’s best performance.
His speed in races such as the Nissan Classic lead to a lot of attention and he moved to the bigger-budget Fagor team in 1988. Elliott won a stage in that year’s Vuelta and repeated that twelve months later with Teka, also earning the points jersey in the race.
The final years in his pro career were spent racing in the US. He signed for the Chevrolet–LA Sheriffs squad, winning the First Union Grand Prix, the Redlands Classic and a stage in the Tour DuPont.
Elliott retired at 36 years of age, but made a surprise comeback six years later with the Pinarello-Assos. He’s picked up some good wins in the years since then, including the Havant International GP, stages in the FBD Insurance Rás, the National Elite Circuit Series and the UCI masters road world championships.
Now, he’s moving on to another stage of his career. “When you are a rider, you have a very narrow focus. You are thinking solely about yourself,” the Sheffield man admitted. “Now that I am managing the team, I won’t be anything like as narrowly focused. I’ll still be as determined as I have always been, just in a different way,” he said
That determination will be channelled into getting up to speed at the helm of the team. He’s planning training camps in Lanzarote next month and Majorca in January, and has plenty of other organising to do. There are several other powerful squads in Great Britain such as Rapha Condor, and he will be focussed on beating those and their other rivals, as well as taking on foreign teams when they go overseas.
“We have extremely tough opposition in 2011 and we’ll need to step up once again,” he stated. “We were very much the underdogs this year and I think we’ll go into next year in the same position. But we showed what we were made of in the Halfords Tour Series and the Tour of Britain and with Ian Bibby, Jonny McEvoy, Pete Williams and now Marcin Bialoblocki, Will Bjergfelt and Tobyn Horton, I think we can be a match for the other teams.”
He’ll still compete at times, doing the Halfords Tour Series and possibly some other events. But he says his focus has changed and that he’ll get a bigger kick out of helping others to achieve big goals.
“Winning as a manager would exceed any of my achievements as a rider,” he insisted. “When I was younger, I didn’t really appreciate what I had done. Now I savour every moment and winning like we did in the Halfords Tour Series, means much, much more to me.”