Alex Dowsett’s Hour of blood, sweat and tears

Sport is a beautiful, brutal place to work. From the elite to the masses, every athlete who takes to the field, runs on the road, gets behind the wheel, has a story to tell.

In the case of Alex Dowsett, his is one of the most compelling stories I’ve encountered in more than 30 years of journalism and media production of one form or another and when the opportunity arose to work on his attempt to break the UCI Hour Record timed by TISSOT in Mexico, I didn’t hesitate to say yes.

Alex originally planned to tackle the record last December in Manchester but was forced to postpone a month beforehand when he contracted Covid. The fire within him continued to burn, driven by his motivation to use one of the toughest challenges in cycling to highlight haemophilia, the condition he was born with. To this day, he remains the only known elite sportsperson with haemophilia to compete in an able-bodied field.

And so it was that Alex, his partner Chanel, their 10-month-old daughter Juliette, his coach Dr Michael (Hutch) Hutchinson, nutritionist and Michelin-starred chef Alan (Murch) Murchison and I, found ourselves gathered in the echo chamber that was the Velodromo Bicentenario in Aguascalientes, Mexico, on the afternoon of Thursday, October 28, with preparations under way for the big event six days later.

This is the story of how we got there from a media and production perspective, with a few personal thoughts about our Central American adventure thrown in.

tell the world

Chanel was the driving force behind the project, the idea being to try to keep all the media and organisational pressures away from Alex, allowing him and Hutch to focus on the many performance elements that demanded their attention. My role had several parts:

• Create and distribute information to the media worldwide and co-ordinate requests for interviews with Alex

• Find and manage a production company in Mexico to deliver high-quality coverage of the live event that could be sent round the world

• Act as the Event Organiser in Mexico and oversee the delivery of the Hour Record attempt on the ground

Special mention has to be made of Simon Lillistone, who bore the task of managing the multitude of strands orbiting around the project as a whole. Simon is vastly experienced in organising track cycling events but other commitments meant he couldn’t travel to Mexico.

I got the “easy” part; implementing and overseeing the work he had done with cycling’s governing body, the UCI, and all the logistics of bringing together the Mexican Cycling Federation officials, Swiss Timing staff, anti-doping operation and more, into one place on the afternoon of Wednesday, November 3. Add to that all the on-track and perimeter branding which had to be produced, delivered and installed at the velodrome on time.

pre-event media build-up

We arranged a media afternoon on Friday, October 15, to coincide with Alex spending time in the wind tunnel at the Silverstone Sports Engineering Hub where he and Hutch were testing the aerodynamic properties of the new, custom Vorteq skinsuit he would be wearing and the Factor bike he would be riding in Mexico.

With respect to the cycling websites and publications, I knew it wouldn’t be hard to interest them so my focus was on trying to attract some more mainstream outlets. The key talking point was haemophilia - the condition, its impact on everyday life, the treatment and showing Alex to be the role model that he is, hoping to inspire other people to go beyond their limits and achieve more in life.

The BBC, ITV and the Press Association attended our media event in person where Alex also did a couple of interviews over the phone and several more over the next few days. The biggest of our pre-Mexico media hits came the following week when The Guardian’s Don McRae spent an hour on a Zoom call with Alex at home in Andorra. The resulting in-depth feature which went online and spanned two pages in the paper stands out as the defining piece of mainstream media coverage we secured. More to the point, it ticked every box for The Haemophilia Society, a key stakeholder in the Hour Record project.

On a personal note, it was a genuine pleasure to deal with Don and I sat in on the Zoom call, camera off and mic muted, to learn from a master of interviewing techniques (certainly not to “police” his questions).

The Silverstone media event also gave us an opportunity to bank content for ourselves through the brilliant work of video producer, editor and photographer, Sean Hardy. We shot interviews with Alex’s parents Phil and Jan and images of Alex, Chanel and Juliette (who was bestowed later with the title of “Head of Morale”).

All of these assets were destined to be used by Alex and Chanel on their increasingly successful social media network, for sharing with the media and for Sean to turn into elements of the live coverage from Mexico.

In addition, several weeks earlier while working in Italy, I interviewed the Belgian rider, Victor Campenaerts, who broke the Hour Record at the Aguascalientes Velodrome in 2019 and whose mark of 55.089km Alex was aiming to beat. Victor’s sign-off good luck message to Alex with a brilliantly cheeky wink at the end was a wonderful piece of friendly rivalry between the two men.

creating the live production

In parallel with pushing out media content, I set about locating a production company in Mexico which could meet our requirements. I made contact with Golazo, the Belgian company which organised Victor’s event in 2019. The lead they gave me didn’t work out but then I got one of those lucky breaks which make you think it’s also worth going out and putting on a lottery ticket.

I knew that INEOS Grenadiers, whom I deal with in my work for Velon, had filmed and photographed their rider Richard Carapaz while he was at home in Ecuador. At the same time as looking for a production company, I needed to source an event photographer. Could they provide any names? The team’s media officer, George Solomon, connected me with photographer Jesus Gonzalez, who is based in Ecuador, and suddenly the door flew open. The adage of “you can never know too many people” proved true yet again.

Jesus jumped at the chance to work with us and moreover, he knew someone in Mexico who might be able to deliver the live production. Enter Roberto Rubio, based in Monterrey, and whose company has a track record in producing live football and entertainment events online. We were off and running.

Roberto and his team were responsive, pro-active, thorough and a pleasure to deal with from start to finish. They took on the heavy lifting of providing an end-to-end solution and the more I worked with them, the more my confidence grew in our ability to mount a live production on the other side of the world.

After a discussion with Alex and Chanel, we settled on asking Matt Stephens and Adam Blythe to be our commentator and co-comm respectively. Even though Alex would be head down, flogging it for 60 minutes and unaware of what was being said in the live coverage, it was important that he felt comfortable with the choice of who was passing comment on his endeavours.

Matt and Adam were operating remotely from their homes in England and one of my concerns was that they could see the live pictures coming out of Mexico and that their commentary coming back was accurately synchronised in the output. Roberto and his team used a Skype-based system which worked perfectly, assisted by the two fibre-optic lines they installed into the velodrome for the event. The first was for primary use, the second as back-up.

We deployed five static cameras focused on the on-track action and one manual RF camera which moved around the centre of the velodrome and delivered a dynamic perspective of Alex while he was riding when it was held at track level. It also gave us the close-up shots of Alex, Chanel and others before, during and after the attempt then the interview I did with Alex in front of the media backdrop.

the media strategy

The objectives were clear. Alex and Chanel wanted their YouTube channel to be the primary source of viewing in order to maximise the overall investment in the project, which included a personal financial contribution. It also made sense because of the insight into their lives they had published there in the months and weeks leading up to the Hour Record attempt.

From a distribution point of view, I knew that securing a rights fee from anyone interested in showing the live event would be difficult. The best I could hope for was a contribution towards technical costs. Selling the live event on an exclusive basis was impossible because the UCI, which owns the Hour Record, stipulates that if live coverage is produced by the organiser, the signal has to be given to the UCI for it to show online free of charge.

Enter the BBC, who asked if they could show it live on the iPlayer and the BBC Sport website. Instinctively, I was keen for them to take it because of the promotion they would give it in the UK - where interest in Alex, from Essex, is highest - and also because of the halo effect it would have for sponsors. And therein lies the twist.

The BBC’s compliance rules are strict, as I know from my 18 years working there. Placing of logos on screen, in shot; mentions of sponsors in commentary and even the “promotion” of charities on air, are all subject to stringent rules which third party production companies have to adhere to.

The trade-off is: design a production which is somehow clear of “commercial” messages and yet works for your sponsors, versus the benefit of being shown on the BBC’s network which has the potential to deliver significant viewing figures.

The solution lay in creating a running order in two parts. The first, starting at 3.35pm on Wednesday, November 3, was filled with the sponsor elements. An interview with Alex thanking those companies and others who had supported the event, followed by two short videos where he promoted their products. That took us to 3.45pm where we created a junction for the BBC to join us (they had technical problems but we carried on as per the script and they came in a short time later).

The segment from 3.45pm to 4pm, when Alex set off, was “clean” of any sponsor messages. We included another part of the interview with Alex where he talked about his reasons for taking on the Hour Record, a compelling item produced by Sean Hardy from the interview with his parents where they talked about his childhood and later life, the interview with Victor and finally, a clip from 2015 when Alex broke the Hour Record in Manchester.

Matt and Adam added their knowledge of Alex and painted a vivid picture of what he and his body were about to undergo. The stage was set.

the hour record

What unfolded between just after 4pm and over the next 60 minutes will go down as one of the most tense, emotional, fraught and ultimately peaceful experiences of my life and, I suspect, others’ too.

The history books will show that Alex fell short of the record. 54.555km. What they won’t show in anything other than stark facts is that this was a triumph. The cause of haemophiliacs had been advanced exponentially. Alex’s standing as a cyclist, an athlete and a man, had grown in the eyes of the many thousands of people who had watched him give everything he had on the track.

A defining moment was seeing him collapsed on the bars, barely able to move and having to be helped off the bike by Chanel and Hutch and supported around the shoulders as he moved gingerly down the ramp towards our team area.

It was my job to conduct the “flash” interview. I had run a range of scenarios in my mind including the possibility of him abandoning the attempt and which I had discussed with him out of necessity in order to plan how to respond in the live coverage. Alex’s response had been to fix me in the eye and tell me: “I won’t be abandoning. It might be the slowest Hour Record attempt ever, but I’ll finish it.”

As a generalism, there are two types of interview. Either the interviewer has to work hard to get meaningful responses from their subject and they become part of the story, or they bring a gentle touch where the interviewee is given the room to talk. This interview would fall into the second category.

Alex asked if our Head of Morale could sit on his lap. Of course she could. It said everything about what mattered, a point made by Matt in the commentary. “Sport is a magnificent thing but your kids, well they’re the best.”

Alex talked emotionally, honestly, eloquently. All I had to do was ask two questions and just as well because the tears were burning my eyes and the lump in my throat was choking me.

“Everyone believed in me. I believed in me and that’s as far as I can go. I’m proud of myself. The biggest failure today would have been to have never tried and that’s the message to send out.” Read those words back to yourself the next time you face a hardship and take inspiration from them.

And then we were finished.

the wrap-up

That evening and night and the following day, Alex did several interviews where he reflected on the outcome. Perhaps surprisingly, I only once heard the question: “Will you have another go?” to which he replied: “The next time I come to Mexico, it’ll be for a holiday.” Take from that what you will.

There was a happy glow around the team on the Thursday evening when we settled into a street market style restaurant in the centre of Aguascalientes. There was beer, tacos and pizza.

The following day, with six bikes and a mountain of luggage, we left Aguascalientes for Mexico City and on to London. Mexico is a wonderful place with friendly, welcoming people. My memories of working with our small team and what we achieved, will live on.

As I write, Alex’s JustGiving page stands at £48,701. That’s 324% over its original target.

Job done.

in pictures: the hour record