Longlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award
Simon Timson and Chelsea Warr were the Performance Directors of UK Sport, tasked with the outrageous objective of delivering even greater success to Team GB and ParalympicsGB at Rio than in 2012. Something no other host nation had ever achieved in the next Games.
In The Talent Lab, Owen Slot brings unique access to Team GB’s intelligence, sharing for the first time the incredible breakthroughs and insights they discovered that often extend way beyond sport. Using lessons from organisations as far afield as the Yehudi Menuhin School of Music, the NFL Draft, the Royal College of Surgeons and the SAS, it shows how talent can be discovered, created, shaped and sustained.
Charting the success of the likes of Chris Hoy, Max Whitlock, Adam Peaty, Ed Clancy, Lizzy Yarnold, Dave Henson, Tom Daley, Jessica Ennis-Hill, Katherine Grainger, the Brownlee Brothers, Helen Glover, Anthony Joshua and the women’s hockey team, The Talent Lab tells just how it was done and how any team, business or individual might learn from it.
Owen Slot (Author)
Owen Slot is the Chief Rugby Correspondent for The Times. He has covered six summer Olympics and three winter Olympics. He has three times won Sports Reporter of the Year and three times won Sports Feature Writer of the Year. He has written five books: two romantic comedies, two children’s novels, and was ghost-writer of Jonny, the autobiography of Jonny Wilkinson.
Simon Timson (Author)
Simon Timson led the successful development and delivery of Team GB’s performance strategy throughout the Rio cycle, as Director of Performance at UK Sport. He has since become Performance Director for the LTA/British Tennis. Previously, Simon was Head of the England Cricket Development Programme when England became the No1 ranked nation, and Performance Director of British Skeleton, leading two medal-winning Olympic campaigns.
Chelsea Warr (Author)
Chelsea Warr is the Director of Performance at UK Sport. She pioneered Team GB’s talent identification and development programme, that discovered Olympic champions like Helen Glover, Tom Daley and Lizzy Yarnold. She joined UK Sport in 2005, before which she was a physiologist with the Australian Institute of Sport and then Talent ID manager for British Swimming.
‘A brilliant book. A must read for anyone involved in any high performance business. The Talent Lab is a fascinating insight into the success of Team GB in London 2012 and Rio 2016. Owen Slot gets to go behind the scenes to show emphatically “what, why and how” this was achieved. There is no doubt this will be a bestseller in the UK but also worldwide as the rest try to find the secret to Team GB’s amazing turnaround.’
– Sir Clive Woodward
‘A fascinating insight into how Britain became a big player in Olympic and Paralympic sport.’
– Sir Chris Hoy
‘Fascinating and essential reading for any sports fan or anyone seeking self-improvement.’
– Clare Balding
‘Engaging’
– Economist
‘Read this book. If you want learn about the science and the stories behind Britain’s rise as an Olympic power, this is how it happened.’
– Michael Atherton
‘The Talent Lab is insightful, impactful, inspirational and unique – and the first guide that I have ever come across that gets to the core of how to identify and transform talent, and how to create a sustainable high-performance environment and winning culture that are critical to transforming any business.’
– Douglas Rosefsky, Adjunct Professor, INSEAD
‘Essential reading for business people who need to identify and nurture high achievers.’
– Lord Bamford, Chairman of JCB
To the great athletes – past, present and future – who pass through the Talent Lab. You inspire us.
The war-room for the GB Olympic campaign for Rio is an office in Loughborough. It doesn’t look much until you slide back the panels that stretch across the whole of one wall to reveal, behind them, staring at you, the exact health of GB’s Olympic medal offensive. When a government official from the Department of Culture, Media and Sport saw it, he asked if there was any concern that the Chinese might fly a drone up to the window to take a look.
What you see behind the panels is the Medal Tracker Board. There are 200 individual names or names of teams up on the board. If you get your name up here, you are considered to have a chance of winning a medal. There is such an intricate patchwork of colour-coded information written next to each name, it looks as much like a Jackson Pollock painting as it does a sporting masterplan.
Medal Tracker meetings are convened quarterly and I have been invited to this one, four-and-a-half months before the start of the Rio Games. On the board, you can quickly identify the most crucial piece of information because, of all the detail here, the one that you really want by your name is an H. H stands for ‘high’ as in high-confidence medal hope. Today there are 44 Hs. There are also 27 Ms. M stands for medium-confidence medal hope.
There are not enough Hs or Ms in front of us. Thus, the tone is set at the start of the day by our group leader who tells us, ‘This meeting is myopically focused on what we are going to do in the next four months to get those numbers up.’
The number upon which there has been a myopic focus is 66. Sixty-six has been the target for nearly four years. For four years, though, no one really thought it was possible.
The number is rooted in the London Olympics, four years previously, which had been an astonishing tale of victory for British Olympians. It had delivered the biggest haul of GB medals for over a century, and it was so overwhelming it had sportspeople – competitors, fans, ticket holders, media – shaking heads in disbelief. It was a triumph on a preposterous, rather un-British scale. Great Britain won 65 medals at those Games; they even had the temerity to get into a fight in the medal table with Russia. GB versus an Olympic super-power – and GB won.
Yet it was what followed that was so intriguing. At pretty much the first opportunity, the people who run Olympic sport in the United Kingdom got up and said: ‘We’re not done yet. At the next Olympics, we’re going to win 66.’
They didn’t need to do that.
In fact, their pitch was even ballsier than that. A month after the London Olympics, GB finished third on the medal table in the Paralympic Games with 120 medals. And so what did they say they’d do next time round? They said they’d win 121.
The questions, for me, were: how can you know? How can you even have any confidence that you can find 66 potential Olympic or 121 potential Paralympic medallists? How can you be so sure that you can help these people become the top one, two or three in the world? You have just punched massively above your weight, so what makes you think you can win a fight like that again? Success at this level is so unusual, what is it that makes you believe that you can sustain it? Because there is history here: Olympic hosts tend to do well, they tend to peak at their own Games, but after hitting the heights at home, every single host in the modern era has then dipped. That is why the figure, 66, would represent an unprecedented achievement. Why should it be GB that sets the precedent?
And so I asked them these questions and the reply was: ‘Come inside and find out.’
That is what this book is about. This is the inside story of how Great Britain became an Olympic super-power.
Twenty years earlier, at the Atlanta Olympics, two British athletes – they were on the diving team – set up shop on the streets of the Olympic city. They had finished competing, they hadn’t won a medal, they hadn’t been expected to; between them they hadn’t actually reached a final, but they were virtually broke and they wanted to raise some money by f logging their GB kit to shoppers passing by. Their pop-up shop quickly made it into the newspapers and it did not go down well with GB team management. Nevertheless, it symbolised rather effectively the fact that GB were paupers in the Olympic world. Success was not the norm. Great Britain finished 36th in the Atlanta medal table, behind the likes of Nigeria, Ireland and North Korea; they were minnows in the Olympic pond.
Any appreciation of the rise of GB as an Olympic power has to be tagged back to those streets of Atlanta. That is why the target of 66 and 121 seemed such a long shot.
The body at the centre of all this is called UK Sport. UK Sport is the funding body – an investment enterprise, if you like. A business. It receives its own income from two sources, the National Lottery and the government, and it invests that money into the sports and athletes it believes can win medals. It then rides those investments hard. So this is a story, too, of how business principles took Olympic and Paralympic sports management to new heights.
It was UK Sport that set the target of 66 and 121. This was the Big, Hairy, Audacious Goal, or BHAG – an acronym well enough established in business to have its own Wikipedia entry; it is a goal that is, by design, so challenging and risky that it stimulates progress. That was exactly what UK Sport wanted to achieve. That was why the numbers 65 and 120 were hung, large, on the wall of the reception of the UK Sport offices. That was the target to beat and the intention was that those numbers, in reception, would drive the organisation’s focus every day. Yet, in the lead-up to Rio, those figures looked a long way off.
One of the constant commentaries throughout the build-up to every Olympic Games comes from Holland where a company called Infostrada Sports is based. Infostrada (which later became Gracenote Sports) is arguably the world’s leading authority in sports data and analytics and it publishes a regular forecast of how all the Olympic nations are expected to do at the next Olympic Games. Its 500-days-to-go forecast pre-Rio was not a happy one for the GB investors. ‘Bad news,’ claimed the Infostrada head of analysis. ‘GB is not going to perform anything like it did in London. This drop-off – as it stands – is quite large.’ The Infostrada forecast had GB to finish in tenth place on the medal table with 45 medals.
Over the middle weekend of the Rio Olympics, though, Infostrada and every other doubter out there started to be proved wrong. That weekend was phenomenally successful for Britain: across seven different sports, British athletes won nine gold medals. Never before in the 120-year history of the Olympic Games had a Briton won a gold medal in gymnastics, yet Max Whitlock won two in two hours. By that Sunday night, GB had gone above not only Russia in the medal table again but China too.
At that point, the rest of the world really took notice. ‘Remember the good old days when we used to have fun teasing the Brits about how we beat them in the medal count at the Olympics? Well you can forget it, because those days have gone.’ That was how it read in The Courier-Mail in Brisbane, Australia. ‘We’ve got four TVs covering four different sports at once in our office and it seems like at least one of them is playing “God Save the Queen” at any given time.’
How have GB done it? What is the secret? That was what the opposition suddenly wanted to know. How do you take on China and beat them? That is what this book is about.
One quick answer is money. Lots of it. The rise of ‘Team GB’ was mirrored closely by the rise in its funding. For Rio, £274,465,541 was spent over four years on funding and preparing the Olympic team and £72,786,652 was spent on the Paralympic team. Did they just buy their way up the medal table?
Well, not exactly. The Americans, who invest mainly through their college sports system, spend infinitely more than the UK, and investment in Russia and China is completely off the graph. Analysts say that China pumped US$1billion into their elite end for their home Olympics in 2008. The Association for Asian Research (2004) estimated that in the four years up to the Athens Games in 2004, China invested US$2.4billion in the China General Administration of Sport. These numbers are astonishing.
This is an arms race and, yes, it is one that many do not believe is worth fighting. The way that GB fights the race, though, is by making its money go further than much of the opposition. For the build-up to the London Games, South Korea and Japan each spent between three and four times more than GB, yet GB’s medal haul pretty much matched theirs put together. For the Rio Games, GB outspent Australia by 37 per cent and beat them on the medal table by 131 per cent. New Zealand run a tight, very targeted programme that sees their money go further, but in cycling, for instance, where GB invests heavily, the cost of success in Rio was £2.5million per British medal, which is around three times a better return than you get for your Kiwi dollar.
So, no, GB did not just buy their way up the table.
The penultimate day at the Rio Games was warm, muggy and overcast. For GB, the day started early with Liam Heath, a 31-year-old from Guildford, winning gold in the canoe sprint. The focus then switched to the women’s triathlon and a thrilling, desperate head-to-head final sprint for the bronze medal between Vicky Holland, from Gloucester, and her friend and flatmate Non Stanford, from Swansea. Holland won it; the medal was GB’s sixty-second.
The 66-medal mark was looming ever closer. Nicola Adams, the boxer from Leeds, took gold in the afternoon and then Bianca Walkden, from Liverpool, won taekwondo bronze in the early evening. That was 63 and 64. The great Mo Farah, in the 5,000m, was the sixty-fifth. And then, shortly after 10pm, in the athletics stadium, in the women’s 4x400m relay, the gold was won by the US, silver by Jamaica and in third place, fighting off the challenge of Canada and Ukraine, was GB. That was the sixty-sixth. Just to ram it home, the next day, Joe Joyce, the super-heavyweight from London, took boxing silver.
These people are the talent pool; these are the names that went through the Talent Lab, up onto the Medal Tracker board in Loughborough and then, in Rio, into history.
ADAM PEATY
On 5 August 2013, Fran Halsall, a 23-year-old Merseysider, stood on the block above lane six of the Palau Sant Jordi swimming pool in Barcelona. It was the last day of the World Swimming Championships and Halsall, in the 50 metre freestyle, was Great Britain’s final hope. Weighing down upon her in lane six was a double mission. The first was her own ambition: this was a gold medal she thought she could win. The second was to save the GB team from complete humiliation, because when Halsall was standing on that block, that was probably the very moment when British swimming, in the modern, professional era, was at its all-time low.
The Olympics, in London, the previous summer, had been disastrous enough for British swimmers, but Barcelona had now taken them to new depths. At the London Games, it had seemed that GB athletes everywhere, in every sport, rose to the occasion – everyone bar the swimmers, that is. Swimming was GB’s embarrassment sport, a single group of athletes who strangely, serially underperformed; they were the black sheep in water-wings. In London, though, they had at least scraped together three medals. Here in Barcelona, before Halsall hit the water, they had won none.
There is a wide assumption in Olympic sports that money equals medals, that if you douse your Olympians in enough funding cash, then the investment will be rewarded, but for over more than a decade the GB swim team had collectively been proving this wrong. If the money-equals-medals equation was so straightforward, then the £52million that had been invested in GB swimmers over the three Olympics up to London would have had them bathing in gold because, by any measure, a £52m Olympic investment is huge. Yet from the Athens Olympics in 2004, to Beijing in 2008 and London in 2012, £52m had bought swimming only 11 medals. There was one genuine, major superstar in the team, Rebecca Adlington, and if you took her out of the equation, then you would have lost four of the 11 and both of the golds. Adlington had single-handedly kept afloat the reputation of the GB swim team. Now, though the baton had been handed to her friend, Fran Halsall, in lane six, the evidence was overwhelming and the swimmers knew it.
If you look at which sports provided the most bang for their buck at London 2012, the GB boxers were top. Do the maths: pounds invested over the four years per medal won and the boxers delivered a medal for every £1.9million of investment. Cycling was second (£2.1m), followed by taekwondo (£2.4m). Bottom was hockey (£15m) – though that is an unfair comparison because you need to fund two full teams to compete for only two available (gold) medals. Swimming, where there are 34 medal events, was the next off the bottom. Each swimming medal had taken funding of £8.4m.
How long can you continue spending so much for so poor a return? How far, and over how many millions, could patience stretch? Investment in swimming wasn’t working; was it actually time, now, to start shutting it down? At the very highest level, with three years to go to the Rio Olympics, these were questions that were now being addressed. Over successive Olympiads, GB had consistently proved that it could not compete with the rest of the world. Was it time to start admitting defeat?
In the stands at the Palau Sant Jordi, then, on the last day of those Barcelona Worlds, British swimmers were supporting Halsall in their numbers, desperate for her, desperate for some face-saving success for the team. She was their last hope. It probably didn’t help that Halsall had a recent record as a so-near-yet-so-far performer in big events. In the Worlds in Shanghai in 2011, she finished fourth – twice. In the London Olympics, she got a fifth and a sixth. Here, she already had one fourth-place finish in the 50m butterfly. As a sprinter, she knew all too well that if you make one mistake, you will pay for it.
But this final started well for her. She was quick at the start and by the halfway mark she was ahead. With 10m to go, she was still ahead. At that point, though, she started spinning. In layman’s terms, spinning is what you do when you want to go faster but you are not catching the water properly. Halsall said later that it was when she realised she was at the front that she started spinning. In those last few yards of spinning, she went from first to third. Britain at least had a medal, but even this one came with a measure of disappointment.
Afterwards, Bill Furniss, the head coach, made himself available for media interviews but he was short in his responses. The Halsall bronze hardly registered as a consolation. Talking of the Barcelona campaign as a whole, he said: ‘This has been a huge disappointment. There is going to be a sea-change.’ Hard words, but there was no room for debate here. Halsall’s bronze was no saviour. Swimming was at a crossroads: sea-change or sink.
Barcelona was therefore the line in the sand. For the next three years, on the road to Rio, swimming would fastidiously pursue sea-change. Just as a failing business can be rescued by intelligent turn-around, swimming aimed to show that a failing sport can turn around too.
When you compete at an Olympics or a World Championships, or whatever is the biggest event of that year, you want to deliver your best performance of the year. Ideally it would be a PB – an all-time ‘personal best’ – but maybe that is asking too much; those are, by definition, rare occurrences. You cannot expect all competitors in every lane of a swimming final to produce the best swim of their lifetime every year. But if you can produce your best for that one year, then you are likely to be competitive. Producing a ‘year’s best’ on the most important day of the year is what any high-performance organisation would expect and they will normally get exactly that from around 60 per cent of their athletes. One of the reasons that GB swimmers had done so badly at the London 2012 Games was because the number who swam season’s best times was 20 per cent.
After London 2012, there was the predictable management clear-out: the two top dogs – the performance director and the head coach – both left their jobs. Indeed, there is a pattern here, there was a different PD and head coach for the Beijing Games and the Athens Games before that too. That’s three different PDs, three different head coaches all with different philosophies, in three consecutive Olympic cycles. No business would elect to run itself with such frequent regime change. Is it any wonder that swimming kept on lurching forward a bit and back a bit but never made concerted long-term improvement?
When British Swimming was looking for its new PD post-2012, one of the leading candidates, Chris Spice, started looking into the health of the sport. It was this stat, for season’s-best performances, that most interested him. How and why did they hit 20 per cent at their home Games?
Spice thought, ‘There is no point taking over a sport if you haven’t got the raw material. So first I had to assess whether there was talent there and my own research showed that there was. Twenty per cent swimming their season’s best at the Olympics themselves? That’s a gross underperformance. I would expect 65 per cent; even 50 would be acceptable. But 20? The point was this: it’s not that they couldn’t swim fast, it was that they weren’t swimming fast on the big occasion. They were capable of swimming fast, but not of doing it on the right day.’
Across a decade of underperformance, arguably the stand-out, most desperately sad case-study of a British swimmer failing to do it on the day was at the Athens Games in 2004 where Mel Marshall, a 22-year-old from Lincolnshire, was expected to be one of GB’s superstars. Before those Games, any newspaper of worth had Marshall down in their ‘ones to watch’ selection. The year before Athens, she had won the 200m freestyle gold in the European short course championships. In April 2004, at the British Olympic trials four months before the Games, she won the 200m with a PB of 1min57.85, a performance that sent ripples around the world. Anyone who can go under 1min58sec has to be taken very seriously; only three other women going to Athens had ever been under 1min58sec. Marshall would go to those Athens Games ranked number one in the world, the fastest of them all that year. And not only did she go to Athens ranked number one in the world, but she had the personality to match: effervescent, extrovert, when she won races, she would skip around on the pool deck, shadow-boxing in celebration. She used to say that when she eventually retired from the pool, she would be a firefighter. She wasn’t afraid of anything.
Athens, however, was a personal disaster.
How so? Now, over a decade on, she describes British Swimming, back then, as a ‘stressful industry rather than an enabling industry’. She says Athens and pre-Athens was ‘a stressful situation’ and that there was ‘no protection’ from it. ‘On top of the stress of being at an Olympic Games, there was a lot of unnecessary stress and that was all internalised. There was a lot of stress coming from the coaches which came down from the PD and then the national coach. That created a stressful environment for the athletes.’ This is her saddest and most shocking observation of all: ‘For me, it was game-over by the time I got to the Games. I was knackered, emotionally exhausted. Deep down, I probably knew it was over before I had even arrived in Athens.’
In the heats, she finished tenth overall, which was enough to get her into the semi-final. In the semi, though, she came in last. In neither of the semi-finals or the final did anyone dip below the 1min58sec threshold, but in that semi, Marshall was three seconds off it. ‘The biggest high in my career,’ she says, ‘was becoming the fastest woman in the world in Olympic year; the biggest low was not even making that Olympic final.’
Spice did indeed get the PD job and, eight years on from Athens, he was determined to establish the extent to which this environment, which had poisoned Marshall at the very high point of her career, still existed. He was appointed in March 2013, the same time that Bill Furniss was made head coach. Furniss had been Adlington’s coach, so he had proven credentials, but only with individuals, never across a whole programme. However, when they went to the Barcelona World Championships that summer they were so new to their roles that it was too late to have much influence on the outcome: their mission was more to find out what they had inherited.
Spice was not impressed. These are his impressions of how the GB team operated at Barcelona, and they mirror Marshall’s experiences a full nine years previously: ‘It was too stressful, the athletes were feeling the pressure, the leadership was putting pressure on them. The amount of over-coaching going on before a race was incredible. There were only one or two coaches that were calm under pressure. There wasn’t a relaxed, business-as-usual approach. I saw nervous, anxious athletes, anxious coaches, poor coaching, over-coaching during the meet itself. A grossly underperforming team. I said to the coaches: “How do you coach them to swim like that? How do you coach them to choke? Because your coaching is delivering that outcome.” They looked at me as if I had two heads. They were stressed, standing on the side of the pool yelling out instructions, white knuckles around their stopwatches, panicking. They thought they weren’t, but they were.’
So it was not just Furniss who wanted a sea-change but Spice too.
How do you deal with a failing sport? It was not just Spice and Furniss trying to find an answer, but the source of their funding, UK Sport. UK Sport is like an investment fund, but it is investing in businesses where the rewards are medals rather than dividends and share-price growth. After £52m invested over three Olympics, and such a poor return, any investment fund would be considering taking its money out and UK Sport was no different. After London 2012, it took a deep breath and invested another £21.4m in swimming for the next four years; another huge amount of money. Only four other sports had received more. But the Barcelona World Championships focused minds further: if swimming was simply not going to deliver medals, then maybe it was time to pull the money out for good and invest it in other sports that could.
When managing the investment in a failing sport, there are four options available. One: turn the lights out, pull the plug altogether, just say: ‘Thank you, swimming, you’ve had your go, but it’s all over.’ Two: cut investment, make life hard, refine the scope of where you are investing and say, for instance, ‘OK, we’ll cut the sprinting and butterfly programmes because they deliver the least return.’ Three: keep the investment as is. Or option four: decide that, to get a return, you actually need to invest more, but with heavy conditions. The fourth choice was never going to happen because there was no spare cash. The first choice, the Armageddon option, just didn’t make sense because when there are 34 gold medals, or 102 total medals available, there are just too many opportunities to get a return on your money to call it quits completely. The swimming fraternity was most worried that option two, serious cuts, was coming. In fact, what UK Sport finally decided upon was option three: keep the investment figure untouched. But it was not as simple as that.
UK Sport was hell-bent on finally making the money work. Above all, they were convinced they had been investing poorly. Over the previous decade, financial support had been given to 282 swimmers and only one of them delivered an Olympic gold. So they wanted answers to questions about how their money was being spent. They wanted to know, for instance: how do we know if we are investing in the right athletes? Do we really know who might win medals? At what point in their development should we know this? What is the peak age for a medal-winner in swimming, and not just in the sport, but for each of the different 34 events? And if we can really identify who we should be backing, how do we know if we have the right people coaching them?
Thus they undertook a full situational analysis of the sport. They seconded two specialists in the science of sports analytics, one from cricket and one from the English Institute of Sport, on a short-term consultancy deal, essentially locked them in a room together and told them not to come out until they had all the answers.
When they finally emerged, this is what they had found. The spread of medal-winners was hugely skewed towards two nations: over the previous ten years, at World Championships and Olympics, the United States and Australia had claimed 41 per cent of the medals. In other words, two nations were doing something very right and everyone else was not. GB’s own meagre share of the medal spoils over that time was 3.8 per cent. And of the (few) medals that GB had accounted for, women were outscoring the men by three to one.
Just because you are good as a kid doesn’t mean you’ll be good as an adult. The transfer of junior medallists to senior is extraordinarily slim. Since 2000, the proportion of junior medallists who have won medals at senior level is just 6.9 per cent. Across the world, only 24 per cent of those who have won medals at senior level ever even finished in the top eight at junior world level. In the UK, though, the percentage of senior medallists who had been in junior finals was 63. This meant that either GB was far better than the world norm at transferring junior talent to senior success (an unconvincing argument), or it had simply been backing its top juniors too heavily and ignoring the claims of later developers (very convincing).
Other areas of GB performance were exposed. Only 13 per cent of GB medals in the previous decade came from the sprint events. They already knew that sprinting, especially freestyle, wasn’t a strength, but did it have to be such a weakness? Because if you don’t produce sprinters, then you don’t just miss out on the sprint events, you miss out on the sprint relay events too. And that is a trick missed because in relay events, by definition, you are not competing against two Americans and two Australians as you often are in the individuals, there’s just one of each. Further to that, while the world of swimming is getting ever more competitive, why not look at targeting one or two of the events where the depth of field of competition is not at its strongest, such as the men’s 200m freestyle?
The trends of the age-spread of medallists produced the most striking evidence. In some events, medallists were getting older; in others, younger. The golden age for male medallists was 23.7 and women were a good year younger. But a real concern was how many of the GB hopefuls were too far outside the golden age. Of the athletes funded to win medals (called Podium athletes), 61 per cent were not within the desired medal-winning age-spread for 2016. Of 22 Podium athletes, only 12 fitted the competitive profile of previous Olympic medallists; and the stats showed a 68 per cent likelihood that at least six of those 22 would not win a medal in Rio and 95 per cent certainty that at least two would not.
And if the GB wannabe medallists were the wrong age, they certainly were not helped by the fact that they were maybe being coached by the wrong coaches. Of the 24 coaches that put swimmers on the London 2012 Olympic team, only three had ever produced an Olympic medallist. And of those three, only one was still coaching. The question then arose: was GB actually outcoached before it even got to the pooldeck?
Now, you can get lost in a blizzard of stats like this, or you can demand absolute clarity, as UK Sport did from their two researchers. Clarity was what they asked for and this is what they got. When they funnelled all these numbers and all this info into one single filter, it became distilled into one very significant statistic. The number nine. There were nine athletes who fitted the profile of a medal winner at Rio. To a small group managing the funding of the sport, these now became known as The Nine Golden Children.
The Nine Golden Children confirmed UK Sport’s position that swimming was not a cadaver on life support that should be just switched off. The question was, how do you breathe new life into it? They applied the question to business: what achieves turnaround in a business? The answer is that you identify your main asset and plan from there. Swimming now knew its main asset – the Golden Nine – so everything then had to start with them. Focus resources, do more with fewer athletes.
So while the total investment into swimming was untouched, UK Sport insisted that the whole funding plan be reconfigured around the Nine and build from there. That was the easy decision. The harder one was from where to take the money away.
The biggest cut was Podium Potential athletes. These are the group below Podium, the group who you hope will make the step up. Once the situational analysis had been conducted, it was suddenly far clearer who really had potential and who did not. Overnight, their number was cut from 65 to 45. Again, do more with less.
The biggest statement, though, was the single cut to the 22 Podium athletes. Just one swimmer lost top-level funding. He had been Britain’s best male swimmer over the previous decade with two world titles to his name and four Commonwealth golds. He was still in the world’s top eight, but he would be 31 by the time he got to Rio, if he got there at all. All projections suggested that he was just too far away from a medal in Rio, so the brave call was made. Liam Tancock’s funding was down-graded; he appealed to British Swimming and lost.
The message was clear: British Swimming was to be more slimline and stronger for it, but turnaround was never going to be as simple as that. UK Sport wanted to manage their investment more proactively; they wrote 11 investment conditions into the new agreement and installed Phil Gallagher, formerly head of education at the Charlton Athletic academy, as UK Sport’s equivalent of a management consultant, to sit inside the sport and ensure they stuck to them. One of the key conditions was the streamlining of training centres – to have the best athletes and the best coaches working side by side rather than in different pools around the country. ‘Initially,’ Gallagher recalls, ‘there was a vision of UK Sport parking their tanks on their lawn – with me sitting in them.’ He started doing two or three days a week inside the programme. After a while, he was able to describe himself as swimming’s ‘critical friend’ rather than the man pointing his guns at them. Trust was established.
The biggest area of attention, however, was in delivering big performances on the big day. That embarrassing figure from London 2012 – just 20 per cent of swimmers producing their best times of the year – had to be transformed. One of the few genuinely encouraging stats from the situational analysis was that, at London 2012, after the US and Australia, the nation with the most swimmers to qualify for a final was GB. All those finalists for just three medals? Surely that could be improved. Surely some of those finalists could be nudged up onto the podium. If Halsall was becoming a specialist at fourth, fifth, sixth and even disappointing thirds, then there must be a way of transforming fourth, fifth and sixth into bronze, silver and gold. Something had to be done to prevent the Golden Nine and other future stars becoming yet another nearly-but-not-quite generation.
This is how Spice saw it. ‘It’s nothing to do with the training,’ he said, ‘it’s their coaching. Where does training stop and coaching start? There’s the technical and tactical side and there’s what we call “arena skills”.’ This is a term for psychological weaponry – being able to arrive at poolside on an occasion like an Olympic final and give your best. ‘Our coaches didn’t deal with arena skills at all before,’ Spice said. ‘There was just an expectation that you could cope.’
Cope? How would the athletes cope if they were being coached by coaches who hadn’t produced champions before and therefore, by definition, did not know what ‘arena skills’ looked like? British swimmers were doing the opposite, arriving and choking.
Spice therefore had some tough talking to do with his coaches. ‘It was about getting them to understand this and embrace it, understand for some of them: “I am not good in that environment, I stress my athletes out.” That was the difficult discussion. I was saying to them: “You need to change these behaviours and we’ll help you. But if not, you’re on the scrap heap.”’
To help them, he made one very interesting hire. He employed a man who had never coached swimming before, never swum at the Olympics or World Championships, never swum competitively, never even tried. This was Nigel Redman, a former England rugby player.
Nigel Redman played 20 times for England between 1984 and 1997 in the second row, where the tallest, biggest players tend to play. Maybe more significant was the club he played for: Bath. He was there in the golden period spanning the late eighties and early nineties when Bath were the dominant team in the country. And they were not just notable for their success, but for creating a high-performance environment that they largely policed themselves – if you didn’t meet required standards, then the rest of the team would let you know about it quick.
Yet Redman happily tells you that he wasn’t very good. Despite all those England caps and those years with the super successful Bath, he is extraordinarily disparaging about his own natural gifts. Growing up, he says, he wasn’t much of a sportsman. He was the big guy who they stuck in goal in the football team. Only in his teens, when he discovered rugby union, did he make the following decision: I am a player of limited ability, therefore I will do everything I can think of that will make me better.
So he joined a basketball club to help his movement and ball skills. He started playing water polo because (a) that would force him to get used to handling a wet ball, and (b) in water polo, you need strength in the air when you are rising above the water for the ball and that would be a skill he could apply directly to jumping for a ball in the line-out. He also joined a boxing gym in order to work on his footwork, and he joined a wrestling gym to help with the parts of rugby where wrestling is, effectively, exactly what you are doing. In the wrestling gym, his work regime included sessions with Amir Eslami, an Iranian wrestler and former bodyguard to the Shah of Iran. At their most extreme, their work-outs involved Redman doing weights while Eslami was hitting him with cricket bats and medicine balls. This was intended to improve Redman’s resilience.
Eslami’s theory on developing athletes was simple: champions are not born, they are carved from stone. This is what Redman did; he chipped away at every possible facet of performance. In other words, he became an expert at personal development. So after he retired as a player, he was an obvious fit for coaching; and when British Swimming advertised for an Elite Coach Development Manager, it was Redman who got the job.
He was initially given a group of 24 coaches to work with, and he met them in groups of 12. He knew, of course, that they would be thinking: this is The Bloke Who Doesn’t Know Anything About Swimming. So he told them: it’s not about swimming, it’s about coaching, it’s about people. ‘I explained that I’m very open-minded about sport,’ he says. ‘I think, at the start, as much as anything, they were just curious.’
Most striking for Redman was how individualistic some of them were; there was no sense of them all driving towards the same goal. This is what he recalls from his first group session: ‘There was one coach who said, “I’m not sharing any information with any other coach in this room.” I said, “Wow! Does it ever occur to you that sharing and developing will enhance everybody?”’
As he did the rounds, he spoke to more coaches, then more swimmers and then more retired swimmers. This is what two retired swimmers said to him, on separate occasions, that really shocked him: ‘They said that, before going to a race at an Olympic Games, a coach on the team, who wasn’t their own coach, had said something to them that, on reflection, could only have been intended to derail them. I asked, “Why would they do that?” And the reply was, “The only thing I can think of is because my possible success would have reflected badly on them because they didn’t coach me.”’
Mel Marshall, who was by then a coach herself, was particularly can-did. ‘She thought about it for an awful long time and then she said, “Nige, I am an open, honest person and I’ve thought about this and I honestly think my coach stopped me winning.”’
Redman’s first real task was to work out the answer to the question: what does a good swimming coach actually look like? He knew he couldn’t try to make good swimming coaches until he knew what a good swimming coach actually is. So he spent six months going to all the high-performance programmes and watching; then, at the British championships in Glasgow in April 2014, he took the opportunity to interview as many swimmers and coaches as possible with this question in mind. At the same time, he found a document written by a group of people who were most likely to know the answer. A group of American and Australian swim coaches had collaborated in a study: what does high-performance swimming coaching look like?
This was like gold dust. The Aussie/American document was more about the coaching environment; his own findings were more about personal and emotional interaction. He filtered the two into one and established 20 competencies that he felt a top swimming coach required. Then he approached Ashridge Business School, in Hertfordshire, and asked for help. How can I best assess each of my coaches for these 20 competencies? Ashridge had done this kind of thing in business: how do you assess business managers, business leaders? There was not a vast amount of difference. Both swim coaches and business leaders are trying to employ best practice in order to foster high performance. Ashridge came up with five questions for each of the 20 competencies; some of the questions were so directly transferred from business appraisals that the wording merely shifted from ‘operative’ to ‘swimmer’.
Thus armed, Redman got to work with his 24 coaches. They had not done 360-degree appraisals before and they were encouraged to actively engage. They had to find swimmers, managers, support staff who would answer questions about them and thus complete the picture. Even this process, Redman says, started to raise self-awareness. By the time it was done, between the 24 coaches, over 330 respondents had given their views.
‘The idea,’ Redman explains, ‘was not to jump to conclusions but to start a conversation. One of the things that came out was that bottom of the list of 20 competencies were emotional control, emotional awareness, emotional intelligence.’
Redman, then, started a cultural shake-up: the process of re-educating the coaches. Initially it was a lot about holding up a mirror so they could recognise what he was telling them. He needed them to understand, for instance, how their stress levels worked so, during one competition, he hooked them all up to heart rate variance monitors. On another occasion, he wanted them to understand how performance levels and stress levels were related to tiredness, so he hooked them up again at the end of a heavy travel day. He told them that he wanted them to focus less on medals and more on the process by which they can influence medals. ‘The question,’ he explains, ‘which I think is really apt for coaches is: “Who do I choose to be today?” If you’re in your hotel room and you’re frustrated by something, when you step over the threshold, that door, you need to be somebody for your athlete, so you’ve got to leave all of your own shit behind and make sure you are the person your athlete needs. It’s the understanding of “I need to choose my own behaviour” rather than to start reacting to things which are around me.’
So he started running workshops for the coaches – on managing resilience, on managing stress, on managing themselves – and he brought in outside speakers to talk. He also made it his job to obliterate the culture of each coach out for themselves and replace it with one of sharing information, integrating, working as a team, becoming collectively stronger than the sum of their parts. And he tried to sharpen their technical knowledge too. He really wanted to work on starts, so he brought in coaches from cycling, athletics and sprint canoeing where, clearly, a fast start is a non-negotiable essential.
Redman was so intent that his coaches would be able to perform in Rio that on 10 December 2015, he decided to test them out. Only eight of the 24 coaches would go to Rio; those eight had been selected at the end of 2015 and, on 10 December, were to report to Loughborough for a day entitled a ‘performance learning experience’. They were going to simulate a day of the Rio Games, Redman told them on their arrival, and their behaviours were going to be assessed throughout. There were even actors on hand to play certain roles.
The scenario he created was this: It is Day Five in Rio. GB has had success on Day One but none since, so the pressure is growing. You are at the pool. Chris Spice and Bill Furniss, the PD and head coach, have been to a meeting and are stuck in traffic, so you are in charge. One issue of the day to be managed is dealing with an athlete who has not been selected for one of the relay teams. Then there is a breaking Sky News report: there’s been an issue with contaminated protein shakes. How do you deal with that?
The entire day was intended to create pressure and stress and to evaluate the coaches and how they responded as a group to crisis management. At the end of the day, there was in-depth feedback and individual assessment of their performance.
One of Redman’s best coaches was Mel Marshall. She had quit swimming in 2008 and gone straight into coaching. She was coaching in Derby the following year and remembers the day when a 14-year-old boy called Adam Peaty turned up at the pool for the first time. She knew instantly he was special.
‘Straight away,’ she says. ‘You just saw he had something. As you spent more time, you really knew. I have had that experience with others, but then you see more of them and you’d see capabilities and limitations; with Adam, there just didn’t ever seem to be any limitations. Instead there was fight, drive, competitiveness, attitude, skill, feel for the water, focus, technique, agility, speed, potential. He was a born racer. In any race, if anyone was alongside him, he couldn’t help himself. He has a killer instinct.’