Is bullying really the only way to win gold medals?
THE dentist is recalling her worst day as one of the world’s best cyclists. it was the day Wendy Houvenaghel was chewed up and spat out. ‘Horrible,’ she tells Sportsmail. ‘The way it happened was just awful. i had been told to warm up for the final and then, maybe 15 minutes before the start, the head coach shane sutton walks up and said something along the lines of “Pack up your things, you’re not racing”. no explanation, no reason, off he went. it was gone, just like that.’
Houvenaghel is talking about London 2012 and the gold that got away. More broadly, she is talking about the cold brutality of the medal business and the complex topic of athlete welfare that is here to stay.
she was 37 when her problems started, three times a world champion for Britain in the team pursuit and an olympic silver medallist in the individual pursuit at the previous Games.
But she insists she should have had more, claiming that the three-woman team was clocking 3min 11sec with her in it in training a week before the Games. Without her they won gold and broke the world record but were three seconds slower, she says.
That she wasn’t among those chosen, in her eyes, was the result of age discrimination.
British Cycling have told her it was about performance; she says it was ‘ageism’ and that their own data shows she was regularly faster than the younger riders.
There is also a claim, aired since she quit to return to dentistry, that sutton and sir David Brailsford oversaw a ‘ culture of fear’ in their time at British Cycling. she says questions of methods were not welcome, soft edges in man management did not exist. sutton, however, has always denied any wrongdoing.
it is a regime that was first laid bare by Jess Varnish’s revelations of ‘sexism’ by Sportsmail last year and it is a spreading scenario.
it spans the accusation by emily Taylor last June that Britain’s rowing coach Paul Thompson was a ‘ massive bully’ — he was later cleared — to the revelation last week that multiple Paralympians had complained of bullied by a swimming coach.
one parent told the BBC: ‘We were told elite sport was not about the welfare of athletes but the pursuit of medals.’
A tin- opener is hovering over a golden can of worms. WHEN does a culture off winning become a culture off fear and bullying? is one possible without bordering on the other?
Could sir Alex Fergusonn have bred the disciplinee needed for so much success s if he had not done things s such as smashing stevee Bruce’s ringing phone e against a dressing-room wall?
Bruce, as the tale goes, was waiting on a call from his wife in hospital.
Would seb Coe have won gold in the 1500m in 1980 had he not been told ‘you ran like a c***’ by his coach father after taking silver in the 800m days earlier?
Would Andre Agassi have won eight slams if his formidable father had not taped a ping pong bat to his hand as a baby and dangled a ball from a mobile?
some anecdotes are less troubling than others but combined they support the popular wisdom that extraordinary athletes, like diamonds, are best formed under great pressure.
in the case of sutton, a leaked draft review of British Cycling recognised him as possessing an ‘innate ability to coach riders to medal-winning performances’.
To those who know the sport, he is among the very best, a man to whom sir Chris Hoy attributes so much of his golden collection.
But criticisms big and small about his methods have been made by several cyclists. so how much should athletes be expected to withstand?
A formal review of British Cycling is out soon and another by Baroness Tanni GreyThompson, commissioned by the Department for Culture, Media and sport into the general subject of athlete welfare, is imminent. Baroness GreyThompson says: ‘We must prove we can win medals with a duty of care.’
But can you? T Toni MINICHIELLO is mullin ing it over. ‘it’s complicated,’ he s says. ‘not black and white.’
He operates from the perspect tive of a world-renowned coach wh who guided Jessica ennis-Hill to olympic gold and silver medals.
Sportsmail spoke to Minichiello and other elite coaches, athletes and a psychologist about a subject that exists in shades of grey. An essential component of the debate, says Minichiello, is the funding of Britain’s highly successful olympic programmes by UK sport.
Their distribution of lottery money — £347million in the Rio olympic cycle alone — is rightly held up as the cause of the many golden Games that followed the debacle of Atlanta in 1996.
The ruthless treatment of the sports that do not meet medal targets has been celebrated as a catalyst for the success.
But that same strict focus on targets is also, conceivably, at the root of the bullying allegations.
‘Have we got to that point with
funding where it is win at all costs? I think we have,’ says Minichiello. ‘Look at badminton. They hit their target in Rio and still lost their funding. If that doesn’t send a message to every sport then what does?
‘If the programmes and coaches don’t get enough medals, jobs go and mortgages have to be paid. It is that slightly Soviet culture that means the only thing that matters is the medal.’
If the finances set the climate, it still falls on coaches and performance directors to set the day-to- day weather. And it is reasonable to wonder how more authoritarian coaches will fare in future shake-ups.
A line has allegedly been crossed in some cases between what ranks as ‘old school’ cajoling and what amounts to discriminatory language and personal abuse, but it is interesting to wonder where the backlash will take us.
Discrimination is indefensible but forceful coaching has been around as long as sport itself. Minichiello paints a picture of a recurring scenario. ‘Sometimes you are running a lactic acid set, the athlete will be on the floor and I’ll say, “Do another run”. They’ll say they can’t. Well, to that I will say, “Get your a*** off the floor and run it again”. ‘An outsider might see it as bullying but as a coach it is down to you to take them to a place their instincts might not want to go, yet is still safe. Do you shout, do you cajole? You do all of that. ‘You don’t say, “Please, I would like you to run and vomit more”. That doesn’t work. ‘Being the best in the world is not meant to be easy.’ The view that hard words and environments prepare an athlete for the furnace of a final is one shared by Bill Sweetenham, one of swimming’s sharpest minds. He led three countries in five Olympic Games, including Britain from 2000-07, during which he was cleared of a bullying allegation. He says: ‘ You can stand on the blocks next to someone six inches taller. Or next to a Chinese or Russian who may have cheated to beat you. Your training environment must prepare you. You can make training as soft and calming as possible but at some point the athlete has to look the opposition in the face and believe, “This is mine”.
‘I have coached a lot of athletes onto the Olympic podium and I have never met an athlete who got there with carrots only.’
What appears superfluous are certain man-management failures. For example, is there any coaching benefit to overlooking an athlete without a consolation or a detailed explanation?
‘All athletes differ,’ Sweetenham says, ‘but you need to know their hearts and minds.’
A question that has arisen from the case of British Cycling surrounds the autonomy of coaches. Houvenaghel (below), for instance, complained of being allowed next to no say in training under Sutton, having previously flourished in an ‘ open and inclusive’ coaching relationship with Dan Hunt.
She says: ‘I didn’t need aggressive coaching. I was already very self-motivated and with Dan I found it worked really well when we would discuss options.’
Dr Emma Kavanagh, a lecturer in sports psychology and coaching sciences, conducted one of the few detailed studies into the subject of athlete welfare, speaking to elite international sportsmen and women from football to hockey.
Her research generally finds against domineering coaching and frequently she was told athletes wanted far ‘more empowerment’ in decision-making.
Perhaps most revealing, she also found the national governing bodies were saying ‘no problem here’ on the broader subject of athlete welfare ‘and then the athletes would say the complete opposite’.
If accurate, a greater storm could be brewing with even more complaints and investigations. It remains to be seen where it will end — or if golden summers will be a thing of the past.