STRESS & ANXIETY
“I’d get near a race and have this complete personality shift, and physically I’d tighten up, my arms were tight, the blood wasn’t going through my body”
Iwould say that probably 99 per cent of the guys in the WorldTour peloton could be in the front of those biggest races with mental help, working with a really good mental coach,” says Tom Danielson, former racer turned coach who admits to struggling with psychological issues throughout his career. “Look at the peloton, there are guys that don’t have crazy physical talent but can win all the time. There are guys that are top three in the grand tours who don’t have anywhere near the talent of the guys that are 15th to 25th. They just have to flip that switch mentally and then they’re there.”
Anxiety plagued Danielson’s racing career, with stress levels that helped him hit top form in training spiralling out of control in races. He only truly identified the problem after he’d stopped racing himself and noticed it in the riders he was coaching. “I’d get near a race and have this complete personality shift, and physically I’d tighten up, my arms were tight, the blood wasn’t going through my body, my chest was tight,” he says. “My numbers were always way lower in races compared to training.”
Stress is more common than you might think, and the flipside is that racers can struggle to get fired up for training without the buzz of competition. When racing, Danielson felt remote from the kick he got pushing himself to his limits rather than battling opponents. His decision to dope (he served two anti-doping bans, though he denies the second, for testosterone, was intentional) only worsened the crises of confidence brought on by disappointing results. Riders like Chris Froome, Peter Sagan and Dan Martin, he says, readily connect with the internal drive that sits at the core of why they are in the sport. They see no difference between the biggest races and the simple fun they have riding their bikes. You see no stress on their faces because there is none there to hide.
“If anyone out there was wondering how they could become a champion I’d say the number one thing they can do is put that ‘why’ at the front and centre, every single day of their life,” he says. “If someone had helped me identify that - that there was no difference between what I was doing in racing and training - then I wouldn’t have had that fear of failure, because my ‘why’ was to get the most out of myself.”