Kennaugh's young talent is the future of British cycling

Like Mark Cavendish, Kennaugh is a Manxman, with Scouse accent and matching attitude. He knows he has to be humble in such illustrious company but humility doesn’t come any more naturally to him than it does to the mighty Cav. If he thinks it, he tends to say it. Yet here, perched on a high stool at the dawn of his professional career, Kennaugh is circumspect, respectful, measured and, in the home of political spin, firmly on message.

“My job is to do the best I can, fit into the team, into the system and get the best out of myself for the team and for me,” he says. “I’ve been trying to develop a professional mentality since I was 16 so it all feels quite normal. Besides, I know a lot of the faces both in the team and among the backroom staff, which helps. I don’t think anyone is looking at me and saying, ‘What’s he doing in this team?’”

With Ben Swift, another graduate of British cycling’s development academy run by Rod Ellingworth and Max Sciandri in Tuscany, Kennaugh represents the future. He marked himself out as one of the most promising young riders in the peloton with a third in the Junior Giro d’Italia and fourth in the Under-23 world championships last season. Once Dave Brailsford’s idea for a Britishbased Pro Tour team became reality, there was little doubt Kennaugh would receive the call.

“It came after the national championships, I think,” he says casually. “I had ambitions to turn pro for this season anyway, with Sky or whoever, but it was really exciting to get on the team. I had an interview with all the sporting directors at one end of a table and me at the other. They wanted to know about my dreams when I was growing up and what sort of races I’d be interested in doing, how much feedback I wanted on my training and how I wanted the directors to work with me. Did I want to be told what to do or did I want to be given space? It wasn’t like a job interview because I knew most of the people. I just had to be myself. They’d know if I was bluffing."

It’s weird, awesome, but I feel like I should be here. I have worked for this for so long. It’s not just happened overnight

Kennaugh will make his debut in the GP Cycliste la Marseillaise at the end of the month and then support the team leader, Bradley Wiggins, in the Etoile de Besseges, a traditional season opener, in early February. In the autumn, Kennaugh is due to start his first grand tour, the Vuelta. Both Brailsford and Scott Sunderland, the team’s senior sporting director, will tread carefully with their precocious young talent, channelling his aggressive spirit in the right direction, letting Kennaugh find out for himself what sort of rider he wants to be.

“I’d say I’ll be able to stand up for myself,” he says. “I need the experience, I also need to be kept in line if I’m acting out of place. I don’t know what it is with us Manx lads but we do like to hold a grudge.”

In spirit at least, Kennaugh will be riding for one of those Manx lads, his friend Jonny Bellis, who was in a coma for two weeks after a motorbike accident in Italy last year. Bellis is back home and on the way to a full recovery, though the shock still reduces Kennaugh to disbelief. “It hasn’t sunk in,” he says. “It’s Jonny and you can never imagine anything bad happening to Jonny but I always felt positive about his recovery. He’s lost a lot of weight and muscle but he should be able to ride again.”

Now he has seen his kit and his new Pinarello bike, Kennaugh cannot wait to start. “Everyone, even the older lads in the team, are so excited about this,” he says. “It’s like, ‘Okay, let’s go racing’.” With Sunderland as team controller and tactician on the road and Sean Yates one of three assistants, Kennaugh’s future could not be in better hands. Sunderland’s vast experience as a rider allied to his recent managerial success in guiding the CSC team to victoryin the Paris-Roubaix and the Tour de France make him the ideal man to translate Team Sky’s rider-friendly, all-inclusive philosophy into results.

His knowledge of foreign riders has been invaluable in recruiting a multinational team of Italians, French, north Europeans and Britons and his own frustrating experiences of the despotic management culture in the peloton have made him one of the most imaginative and open-minded sporting directors in cycling.

Sunderland says he is simply practising what he wanted to preach so desperately in his riding days, asking the sort of questions of his new riders nobody ever bothered to ask him: How do you want to train? How do you want to race? What sort of races do you want to ride? What support do you need? Basic questions that few teams had ever thought to ask their riders before.

“I would love to have been a bike rider with a team like this,” he says. “When I became a pro I was disappointed. I’ve been disappointed nearly my whole career with the structure of teams I was with. “There was a lot of yelling and thumping on the table, scares and threats. ‘If you don’t do this, you won’t get selected for the next race’, that sort of stuff. It can work once or twice, but the third time the lights have gone out. They didn’t get the best out of me and I wasn’t getting the best out of them.”

Sunderland hopes that the team, led by Wiggins, fourth in last year’s Tour de France, will be largely self-motivating. Every rider has been given a personal schedule of races and training to follow and each one has been promised at least one chance to lead one of the two teams that will race different programmes all over the globe in the coming season. Mostly, they will be asked to harness their considerable talents to the good of the team. Egos will be left at the door. Team Sky have vowed to win the Tour de France for Britain within five years.

By then, Peter Kennaugh will be nearing his prime.