Featured article
The Equipment Problem Unique to Para Track Cycling
Track cycling already spends enormous resources making riders faster on bicycles. Para track can present a more fundamental engineering problem: establishing how an individual athlete can best interact with the machine before the familiar search for aerodynamic, mechanical and rolling-resistance gains even begins. The athlete may be individual, but the engineering available to them is increasingly shaped by the nation behind them.
Watch a C-class race at the Para Track World Championships and much of the equipment will look familiar.
Carbon track frames, disc wheels, large chainrings, aerodynamic helmets and increasingly aggressive riding positions belong to the same performance environment as an elite able-bodied World Championships. Side by side there would be little to identify which championship some bikes were being prepared for.
Look more closely at the rider and the engineering problem can be very different.
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High Performance
What Does ‘Toxic’ Actually Mean in Elite Sport?
British Cycling's latest culture survey has brought the word "toxic" back into the discussion around high-performance sport. Former British Cycling coach and Australian performance director Simon Jones asks where demanding standards end, where poor leadership begins, and what the people responsible for elite environments can do differently.
When British Cycling's latest culture survey came back with "toxic" as the second most common word riders used to describe their programme, I read it twice. Not because I doubt that people felt it. I don't.
But after more than 25 years in high-performance sport, across four Olympic Games, I want to ask what we actually mean when we use that word.
To be clear about what this post is not: it is not a challenge to the feelings of the people who were surveyed. I don't know their stories, and I won't pretend to. It is a conversation about a word, and about the expectations people now bring into elite environments, some of which may not be realistic if the goal is to win at the highest level.
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