Study for a degree in cycling
It’s now possible to study for a degree in cycling. Yes, you read that right — an actual degree. CW visits Writtle College to find out more
t’s always surprising — even awe-inspiring — when you find out that a cyclist you admire is also a high-achiever academically; the names Emma Pooley (PHD in geotechnical engineering), Domenico Pozzovivo (degree in economics), Chris Hoy (BSC in applied sports science) and Tiesj Benoot (studying for a degree in applied economics while bagging two top-10 finishes at this year’s Tour de France) all spring to mind. It’s testament to these riders’ levels of resolve that they managed to achieve at the highest level of cycling while also prospering in higher education. How did they find the mental energy, and why did they bother, given their sporting talent?
Generally, if you want to turn pro, you’re obliged to devote yourself to it full-time, and doing so can leave you with nothing to fall back on if something goes wrong (you can’t help wondering if Jonathan Tiernan-locke wishes he’d finished his degree in product design now he has extra time on his hands). Pinning all your career hopes on cycling is seriously risky; success is far from guaranteed and, even if you’re lucky enough to win a pro contract, there is scant job security, and you face enforced retirement by the age of 40. Writtle College aims to change how education and cycling fit together.
The Essex-based institution is offering a two-year foundation degree (Fdsc) in Cycling Performance. The course is run by Mark Walker, a coach best known for his work with multiple British and European cyclo-cross champion Helen
Wyman, and for helping Alex Dowsett prepare for his successful Hour record attempt in 2015. Once the two years are completed, graduates have the option of ‘topping up’ with another year’s study to obtain a Sports and Exercise Performance degree (BSC Hons).
“What we’re trying to do is to give cyclists a plan B,” says Walker. “If they don’t get into professional cycling, which is pretty tough, then they can go into coaching or cycling development, or they could work for cycling charities.”
Walker wants to ensure that aspiring pros have fall-back options.
“Particularly with younger cyclists, they see someone in an interesting field and they think, ‘How on earth do you get into that?’ School careers officers don’t give you details on what you have to do to become a cycling photographer, but we’ve had [photographer] Balint Hamvas in to teach them about it. We’ve had Andy Barratt, chairman of Ford UK, come in and give a talk on marketing and sports sponsorship and how to put sponsorship deals together. The students learn about other avenues they can pursue while still doing their training.”
This doesn’t mean compromising on training — the degree course is about practicality, not pessimism. Believing that ambitious riders might need another string to their bow doesn’t equate to undermining their primary goal, that is, to turn pro — an aim shared by many of the students at Writtle. Even for the talented, injury can intervene — as graduate Lana Redgewell and occasional guest speaker Johnny Bellis can testify.
“There are some students out there where you can see that they’ve got an enormous amount of natural talent,” Walker continues, “but that’s not always enough. There’s that realisation for some of them that, although they’re very good, their career isn’t going to be as a professional cyclist.”
It is to these young cyclists that the Writtle course aims to provide alternative career paths. “They can look at some other aspect of cycling that they can develop as a degree, or even go on to do the full bachelor of sciences degree that we offer, and pursue a career as a sports scientist. They have transferable skills as well — they do leadership development, they have improved mathematics and computing skills, all of those broad ranges of skills that can be used in other industries.”
It isn’t only for youngsters; Writtle enrols mature students who’ve had careers in cycling or other fields and who regard cycling as a business option.
“We’ve got a student on the course who’s interested in cycle tourism, so he’s looking to set up a business in France with a more knowledgeable, better informed coaching service than is usually offered, so that he can cater for cyclists in full-time training who need something more specific.”
Specificity is what separates the degree in Cycling Performance from a traditional sports science degree. While the course uses many of the same lab facilities as Writtle’s long-established Sports Science degree, and while some of the lecture areas cross over naturally, the degree in Cycling Performance
“The course is run by Mark Walker, who has coached Helen Wyman”
has been designed to be more than just a sports science degree with a cycling module bolted on.
“I’ve done bike-fitting, I’ve done physiotherapy, a bit of retail; I’ve done coaching and facilities management at the velodrome,” explains Andrew Ross, a mature student on the course. “We cover technology in some of the lectures — the science of Garmins and sports watches. We talked a lot about critical power using data released by Thibaut Pinot, and it’s made me pursue the relationship between power and ergonomics, specifically bike-fit, for my dissertation.”
Walker clarifies the detail: “A quarter of the degree is work-based learning. That can be going out racing, it can be working in retail; we’ve got students who shadow bike-fitters and coaches. With all the work, in the exams, the classroom or with teams or shadowing people, it’s all assessed.”
The aim of the course is to give the exciting part — cycling itself — a critical and theoretical underpinning.
“In all of the things we do, we relate practice to theory: if students go out and race with a power meter, we expect them to pick that data apart. They need to look at the literature and find out what sort of outputs a good professional might achieve at a given point in a race. They have to ask, ‘Why might I have been dropped at a particular point, what physiological changes might have happened and what would be the most appropriate technique to address that?’”
In addition to using the course to validate their real-world experience, some of the students are lucky enough to find that the real world validates their studies. Mathias Barnet spent January training with Team Sky: “It was good to see what they were eating and what their mechanics and riders do behind the scenes from day-to-day,” he says. “It’s similar to what we’re doing here, except they’re not doing coursework!”
While mature student Ross is studying with the intention of starting his own business, Barnet is aiming to make it as a pro, as is Harry Paine. It’s made quite clear, however, that this is not some American teen movie in which athletic performance automatically opens doors — all students have to meet the entry requirements for the course and maintain academic standards.
“I think I initially underestimated how hard it would be to both complete your work, do all the reading around the modules, and then train,” says Paine. “But it gets easier when you’ve got everyone else at the college who’s a cyclist, so everyone’s going out together... you’re all training and studying for the same thing, even if you’re not all at the same level.”
One striking thing about Paine and Barnet is their camaraderie in the way they back each other up. When one stumbles over his words, the other steps in to help out; when describing the course, they glance at the other for confirmation. This sort of support and wordless communication is hardly surprising — they have team spirit
“This course isn’t about making elite riders — anyone with a passion for cycling can come”
because they are team-mates, literally. Writtle has an arrangement with the Onform cycling team that allows students to ride for the squad or its development team.
Onform’s manager and mainstay of the UK cycling scene, Simon Howes, has been a rider for nearly 30 years and a team manager for the last decade. It was during his spell as manager of the Ig-sigma Sport team that some of his riders became very successful — some even placing highly at the Worlds and riding for Protour teams.
“Watching that is what motivates me now,” he says. “We have a mixed junior squad, a boys’ development squad, and a women’s team who are racing nationally. It’s what makes us different to other teams out there — there are good junior teams, good development teams, but there’s no real squads set up to have all three. We’re like an academy. We’ve got a rider in the Tour Series at the moment [Anna Henderson] who in four or five years could be winning the Tour Series. Bringing riders on is what drives me.”
It’s an admirable plan, although it does bring us back to where we started: if the demands of training are hard to reconcile with the demands of academia, how much harder must it be to actually race for a team while studying?
“There’s no conflict within Onform,” says Walker. “Simon’s primary goal is to nurture younger riders, and part of that is ensuring that they’re able to pursue their education and balance all of their needs. If you want athletes who are successful, it’s not just about the physical side, it’s about their socialisation and their psychological attributes as well.”
The time schedule of the course is not altogether unhelpful either, as Walker explains.
“We’ve set up the academic year so that rather than have the students study from September through till May, what we do is intensively frontload some of the teaching and then, at the end of February they can go and do their work-based learning and their racing. The team has been very good about that and agrees not to organise stuff for those times.”
Howes agrees: “We’ve got a big squad, so we work around that, we rotate riders. We plan through the winter months to suit people’s time and availability. It’s about time management. We all know how important education is at age 17 or 18 — though there are times when I’d like to convince parents otherwise, when I need students to race, we all know it is.”
At times, far from creating conflicts, the academic side of the course has complemented the work that the students are doing with the team.
“We’ve had examples where students have taken numbers from a lab practical and used them to set up their training plan. Simon’s team gives them that real-world application, that bridge over the big gap from the theoretical sports science into the applied world.”
All the students, not just those who are riders, are able to do work experience with the team.
“We want something that’s inclusive to all,” says Walker. “This course isn’t about making elite riders — anyone who has a passion for cycling can come here. A good example is that we’re running a road race: the Onform Writtle College Road Race, and some of the students here as part of their work experience are organising the race.”
Walker’s philosophy about cycling and education grew out of personal experience: “I’m a keen cyclist, but I was never fast, but I’ve got a qualification in sports science and physiology and I’ve had some coaching successes as well. I’d like to think that somebody like me could come here and develop their skills find their place in cycling.”
Another interesting aspect of the course is the way in which staff and students discuss potential guest lecturers and the events of the weekend’s races. There is little evidence of a hierarchy; though there’s a distinction between staff, team members and students, it does not appear to be a divide — perhaps because, among cyclists, there’s less need for discipline.
Howes sums up the difference, as he sees it, between cyclist and ‘normal’ students: “Cyclists are a weird lot. We go to bed early, we don’t go out drinking; we do the opposite of what people expect students to do.”