British Cycling

We now talk to World Athletics.

We talk to British Triathlon, to British Cycling.

It's where we go that we can have the biggest impact.

I love it.

So one of the things...

So I do some work for British Cycling with coaching riders on the kind of talent pathway.

And what is becoming apparent, not only there, but also as you see riders coming up into the pro peloton, as per the person we mentioned earlier...

There's a lower level of skills across the board.

But anyway, so...

I sometimes think, do we see – do we want these people to be Olympic sports style performance directors like Sir Dave Brailsford at British Cycling? He was the poster boy for that.

You gave these people loads of lottery money and they basically took this kind of conductor type role.

Everything from kind of how do I – do we have enough people – doing the thing.

But how you treat your clients, what you've promised them, your contracts, your word, that's got to be right from day one.

And this is where I love the story of Dave Browseford and British Cycling.

When Browseford took over as performance director, British Cycling wasn't winning much.

And his idea was something he called aggregation of marginal gains for every little thing that goes into riding a bike and make each one of the 1% better.

So they looked at the bike seats.

I mean, it can never be quite as open and just turn up and run as a part run.

but it's very inclusive it's very easy to get started you can ride any bike you can turn up on the day and enter an event and ride it and and we're trying to learn lessons from parkrun in the in terms of the amount of information that you get about your ride so even if you finish at the back of the race you know you can come to the west mids website and you can see how your race went where your your race position during the race your lap times how your season has gone in the league tables, what your average speed has been, what your pace, we've come up with something called pace grade, which is, again, I think we've learned a lesson from Parkrun where you can look at, they've got something like age grade, I think, where you can see how your performance equates to a worldwide average.

So our pace grade is your pace compared to the winner in your category.

And you can track that from event to event.

But, yeah, really excited about Glasgow.

I've got my ticket.

And they've actually just released 2,000 more tickets, so you can go on the Bridge Cycling website and still get a ticket for that.

And that's at the time of recording, so...

I didn't retire.

British Cycling forcefully made me quit.

And that was what never sat right with me.

I ended up having six operations on this shoulder and ended up having my collarbone taken out.

And it's called a latter J procedure done.

And British Cycling deemed me on the Friday out of nowhere dead.

that I was unfit to be an athlete to move forward.

I was classified as disabled.

Yeah.

protect and many don't protect the gold they fill it with you know i was involved with british cycling way back when it was the one percent marginal gain and that's been a that's been a distraction for so many sports out there and what many don't know um is that they had a system and so the one percent meant if it didn't work they come back home And if this doesn't work, come back home.

Just explain

that a bit again.

So what you're saying, see, British Cycling becomes famous for this 1% sort of mindset.

And so all these sports and I think businesses as well have gone down this 1% sort of idea, but have actually lacked the – there's an insight in the process, which I think, you know, the obvious and the lovely tagline about chasing the 1% is in all that type of thing.

But it lacked all of the complexity and all of that sort of stuff that, in fact, that was actually asking of them.

And Peter Keane, who helped set that up, he was here just a month ago for a few days traveling around New Zealand.