British Cycling

And what the seam between the two creates is a tiny bit of friction in the wind.

So what are the frictions in the system that are basically stopping you performing at your best, which are hidden, that no one sees? And can you uncover them? Anyway, that was my attempt at taking the British cycling marginal gain theory into business.

I think

that's incredible.

They were really keen to help us and really get us started.

And also Lee Day, who are a law firm and work with British Cycling, and they deal with people who've had the accident, people who've been knocked off.

So they were very keen to help us because they go, well, if it means there's one less person for us to deal with, we're really up for that as a journey.

So that started...

fun we do we do the parliamentary stuff where we go on the parliamentary bike ride and you do you do get some we do some stuff with lizzie diegman i don't know if you you guys

know who lizzie absolutely sure we do

Yeah, so we did an event with Rafa, with Lizzie, just before she was announced as the new lead on the Tour de France Grand Part and all the other things that, you know, taking the lead on British Cycling's road team and...

And all of those things that now make her seem like, you know, we got very lucky getting her when we got her kind of thing just before all of those announcements.

Uh, I, I'm an avid cyclist, and so the world of cycling, you know, there's so many parallels to entrepreneurship and business.

But the British Cycling team was one of the worst in the world, right?

Mm.

They were ranked near the bottom.

So in 2003, the British professional cycling team was, well, they were basically just a catastrophic laughing stock.

Yeah, completely.

Like it was so bad that one of the top European bike manufacturers literally refused to sell them gear.

Because they were just terrified of the bad PR.

Right.

They genuinely thought that if other professionals saw the British team riding their bikes, the whole world would just assume the equipment was garbage because the riders were performing so poorly.

Exactly.

I mean, over 100 years, this team had won exactly one single gold medal at the Olympic Games.

So I think it's gonna be a really interesting development.

It's something that's rolling out across the Football Association, and Team GB, and British Cycling, all these major organizations, and they're gonna embed it all into their training.

It's also, you know, gonna be used at grassroots level.

So volunteers with local clubs can go and access this information and find out how to support people who might need it, and I think that's a really, really brilliant idea.

We didn't have the indoor velodrome in Manchester.

We didn't have the British cycling program.

There wasn't a thing.

Did you come over the line like Matt Brennan, like going three? Like, did you go three, three like that? Yeah.

yeah so so a lot of the people so you were involved in 12 hour 24 hour mountain bike racing predominantly is that that's sort of your that's your racing background

yeah well i started cross country i mean probably not far off from what you did you know local grassroots stuff uh cycled across not so much track and road but i did do a bit of road but yeah i'm head kicked in and then i ended up on the um the british cycling talent team in like when i was a junior like first last year youth first year junior which was kind of like the that that it was just introduced um yeah so that was when like the academy first started so it was like geraint thomas cavendish people like that when they were like kids basically and i was a younger kid than them and um and i'm no way put myself on the same level of talent as them but i end up in the program It got expanded and you did like a ramp test on a set of SRMs on a turbo and they deemed me either A, strong enough or B, enthusiastic enough to do this.

And we used to go around the country each month, do a camp somewhere.

So you'd have like a cyclocross camp.