British Cycling replaced all four track head coaches last year. With a home World Champs and then Olympics fast approaching, Tom Davidson finds out how they ’re getting on
Four times a week, on the forecourt of Buckingham Palace, one of the country’s oldest ceremonies takes place. It starts with the rattle of a snare drum. Then, to the tune of the bearskin-topped regimental band, a group of guards marches slowly into the royal grounds.
They move in perfect symmetry. Upon arrival, the captain of the Old Guard hands over the palace keys, and passes on the protective duty. The ceremony lasts no longer than 45 minutes. By lunchtime, the tourists have dispersed, and the New Guard stands proudly, as still as statues.
Last year, in the space of six months, British Cycling overhauled its fleet of senior track coaches. There was no pomp or pageantry, just a handful of press releases, as the New Guard took up their posts. In came Ben Greenwood and Cameron Meyer to head up the men’s and women’s endurance programmes, while Jason Kenny and Kaarle McCulloch did the same on the sprint side.
A few changes after an Olympic cycle is fairly typical, but for head coaches of all the senior squads to change is not. And with just three years separating the Tokyo and Paris Games this build-up is anything but typical.
Between them, the four coaches have 12 years of coaching experience, but consider that nine of them belong to Greenwood, the men’s endurance coach. Meyer, Kenny and McCulloch, all former world champions on the track, joined straight from retirement. The national federation took a gamble on them. And it seems to be paying off.
Hot pursuit
British Cycling’s success, at least in the public eye, has often come down to one simple metric: Olympic medals. Though Tokyo crowned new British champions in BMX and mountain biking, the track medal haul didn’t reach the squad’s high standards, with half as many golds won compared to Beijing, London and Rio. One of the titles that fell was the men’s team pursuit, an event they had won at each Games since Beijing 2008. “I’ve seen the ebbs and flows,” says Greenwood, who took over the role of men’s endurance coach in March last year. “I’ve seen us be top of the world in the team pursuit, and then seen it slightly drift away, after 2018. Your primary focus is the team pursuit to start with, as endurance coach, that’s the one you build your squad around. There’s a pressure to perform, but it’s just about breaking it down into its component parts. It’s overwhelming otherwise.”
Himself a BC academy rider, albeit briefly as he focused on the road rather than track, claiming an under-23 national title, Greenwood transitioned to coaching in 2014 and rose through the ranks from BC’s junior squads. A glance across at
