By John Portch

“I’m the most decorated female freeskier in history. I think that’s an answer in and of itself,” said Eileen Gu.

The Chinese-American star, who had just won silver medals in the slopestyle and big air at the Milano Cortina Olympics, had been asked at a press conference if she saw those medals as “silvers earned” or “golds lost”.

She chastised the journalist for his “ridiculous perspective” but her wider comments were more telling.

“How do I say this? Winning a medal at the Olympics is a life-changing experience for every athlete. Doing it five times is exponentially harder because every medal is equally hard for me, but everybody else’s expectations rise, right?” she said.

“I’m showcasing my best skiing. I’m doing things that quite literally have never been done before. So, I think that is more than good enough, but thank you.”

It called to mind the Milwaukee Bucks’ Giannis Antetokounmpo, who was similarly exasperated in a press conference when he was asked about the Bucks’ ‘failure’ upon their elimination from the 2023 NBA Playoffs.

“There’s no failure in sports,” he responded. “There’s good days, bad days, so days you are able to be successful — some days you’re not. Some days it’s your turn, some days it’s not your turn. That’s what sports is about. You don’t always win — so other people are going to win, simple as that. We’re going to come back next year, try to be better, try to build good habits, try to play better.”

Gu, it must be said, won gold in the halfpipe just days later (making it three golds and three silvers in two Olympics) but she and Antetokounmpo (who won the NBA Cup with the Bucks in 2024) hinted at how unhelpful it is to frame high performance as anything less than first place or a gold medal.

Setbacks are inevitable, but as Gu and Antetokounmpo show, athletes, coaches and programmes can choose how they meet the moment. Those that prepare smartly, with the right focus and guidance, can give themselves improved chances of success.

These ideas came up time and again at the Leaders Performance Institute in February. Here is a flavour of what was said.

Insight of the month

The Winter Olympics are on the agenda across the Performance Hub, with high-performance specialist Richard Young telling us what happens when teams stray from their mission:

As the event approached, small adjustments began to appear. Plans were refined again. Extra conversations were added. Senior leaders checked in more frequently. None of it seemed dramatic, yet the clarity that had carried them started to dilute. The athletes felt it before anyone articulated it. The system became busy, and when the moment came the performances were close but the medals did not follow.

The issue was not effort; it was the absence of a shared and protected standard. When everything feels important, the essential things lose their edge. The debrief circled around marginal gains, yet the real margin had slipped much earlier.  At some point the team stopped asking whether each decision truly met gold medal quality.

Read more here.

Quote of the month

This month its Peter Hodgkinson, who wrote of his time working as Build Operations Manager for the INEOS Britannia sailing team during the 37^th America’s Cup.

Given the youth and inexperience of his build team, psychological safety and intent-based leadership were the order of the day. He wrote:

Surprises are for birthdays and Christmas, in my book. I wanted this young team under pressure to speak up. I wanted them to feel that it was wrong not to say something if they were concerned about a part or a process or were having a problem. I wanted to hear what they had to say, I was desperate to hear what they were thinking, and it was important that I responded productively when they did bring me bad news. 

INEOS Britannia in action at the 37th America’s Cup. Photo: Getty Images/Fiona Goodall

Good to know

Pressure doesn’t make you better, but it does reveal what is already here.

That is according to high-performance specialist Rachel Vickery, who led a virtual roundtable for members looking at how they can reduce their athletes and coaches’ allostatic load – that is the cumulative ‘stacking’ of stressors over time that erode the amount of physiological ‘space’ an athlete has between their current arousal level and their personal stress threshold.

The stressors in question can be personal (e.g. a lack of sleep), organisational (e.g. misalignment), performance-based (e.g. being outside your comfort zone), or physiological (e.g. reduced ability to hear or absorb information).

Crucially, as Vickery explained, “as long as your arousal state stays below your threshold, your negative performance will not show up.”

Read more here.

Coach wellbeing

Though often neglected, members of the Leaders Performance Institute gathered to share ideas on how they can better support their coaches.

In one particular World Cup-winning environment, when athletes wanted specialist help, they were asked to book appointments. There was no 24/7 service.

This, their former manager explained, not only developed the self-reliance of the players, but also served to protect coaches and staff members who were all too ready to put themselves out, whether for out-of-hours appointments or “2am emails”.

Read more here.

Aussie rules

In early February we welcomed many of you to Brisbane for Leaders Meet: Australia, where organisations including the Brisbane Lions, Cricket Australia and World Rugby tackled the challenges of the day.

Chief amongst those was the ever-pressing need for alignment.

The Lions’ Senior Coach Chris Fagan favoured strong relationships with senior management; Australian all-rounder Ellyse Perry espoused the value of psychological safety in cricket; and World Rugby Chair Brett Robinson, as an executive, emphasised trust built on clarity from the top.

We picked out five elements for your consideration.

Chris Fagan (centre) in conversation with Michael Maguire (right) and moderator Rachel Vickery. Photo: Albert Perez

One you might have missed

Ben Ashdown and Dr Mustafa Sarkar of Nottingham Trent University pondered the behavioural elements of resilience in young players at football academies in this exclusive interview.

Their research has identified six resilience behaviours:

Their hope is to use these six to fashion a tool to help academy staff identify and develop resilience behaviours in their young athletes.

Read more here.

What’s coming up for members

Leaders Meet: The Art of Strategy

By James Thomas

Strategy does not have a great reputation in high-performance sport.

Often the word elicits a raised eyebrow amidst busy training and competition schedules or it alludes to scarce downtime for coaches and practitioners.

It is also associated with corporate language, long documents and theoretical discussions that feel disconnected from the daily reality of training, selection and competition. In high-pressure environments, planning (reviewing and learning) can be seen as a luxury, something to revisit once results improve or uncertainty settles.

My experience has been the opposite. I’m passionate about helping raise awareness of the importance and performance impact of great strategic planning.

Strategy: a precursor to performance

After more than two decades working across Olympic and professional sport, I have come to believe that performance strategy and planning are not distractions from performance, they are precursors to it. In environments often defined by pressure, volatility and constant change, strategy provides something invaluable: direction, connection and a level of continuity.

High-performance sport is inherently unstable. Calendars shift, athletes get injured, form fluctuates, staff move on, leaders change and external demands arrive without warning. In that context, the absence of a clear performance strategy does not create freedom. It creates noise. Decisions become reactive, alignment erodes, and short-term fixes quietly undermine decision-making rooted in the agreed long-term ambition.

The organisations that perform most consistently are not those that plan less. They are those that build solid foundations, plan with intent, adapt with discipline and continue to stay rooted to the agreed values and behaviours when circumstances change.

Planned Olympic success

One of the clearest demonstrations of the value of performance strategy in my career came during my time as Performance Director at British Gymnastics in the build-up to, and during, the delayed Tokyo Olympic Games in 2021.

This period was defined by disruption. The global COVID-19 pandemic fundamentally altered how athletes trained, competed and lived. Lockdowns restricted facility access. Competition schedules collapsed and re-emerged unpredictably. Athlete preparation was fragmented, and long-term planning was constantly challenged.

At the same time, the organisation was navigating a significant cultural crisis. The Whyte Review had been co-commissioned by UK Sport and Sport England in 2020 following allegations of abuse and mistreatment within gymnastics in Britain. Trust had been damaged, scrutiny was intense and the responsibility to rebuild confidence, both internally and externally, sat alongside the imperative to perform on the world’s biggest stage, the Olympic Games.

In that environment, strategy became an anchor.

It provided stability when circumstances were anything but stable. Performance strategy gave athletes, coaches and staff a clear sense of direction at a time when certainty was scarce. It reminded us of our five principles of high performance, our data informed team strategies for qualifications and finals, and created a shared understanding of what mattered most, even as day-to-day plans shifted repeatedly. This anchor also supported me during really challenging times when key staff behaviours or direction of travel didn’t align to our beliefs and approach. It gave me confidence to hold the line and make the tough decisions that leaders are so often faced with.

Rather than attempting to predict an uncertain future, the strategy focused on the team, the people, the data and practitioner-informed principles that we talked about for over three years. It established how decisions would be made, what trade-offs we were prepared to accept and those ‘what if’ scenarios that can always catch you off guard. One of these being the Head Coach breaking their leg 48 hours before heading to Tokyo. We actually had a plan for this!

This allowed the system to adapt without losing its identity.

That experience was one of the most challenging of my career, but always hugely exciting and rewarding. Three planned, but hard-earned medals secured for Team GB reinforced a core belief: strategy is not about certainty. It is about people, collaboration and coherence.

Different sports, same principles for high performance

The same principle holds true in professional football, albeit at a different scale.

During my time as Director of Performance Services at Manchester City, operating within the City Football Group, I saw first-hand how long-term strategic planning can drive sustained performance improvement across an entire ecosystem.

At Manchester City, consistent performance progression was not the product of isolated excellence or short-term cycles. It was anchored in a clear long-term plan that connected the Academy, Women’s and Men’s first teams through shared principles, aligned methodologies and a common performance language.

That plan did not seek to eliminate fluctuation. Ebb and flow were expected. Injuries, form, competition demands, squad evolution and commercial demands were all recognised as natural parts of elite sport. What mattered was that the long-term vision, the direction of travel remained consistent, even as tactics and personnel changed.

Crucially, this strategic clarity extended beyond a single team or season. It flowed across the wider City Football Group model, creating a level of coherence across clubs operating in different countries, cultures and competitive contexts. While local adaptation was encouraged, the underlying performance philosophy remained aligned.

The level of consistent on-pitch success at Manchester City over the last 5-7 years, in many ways, is unparalleled, from Academy player progression and sales to the Men’s first team treble in 2023. Long-term business and performance strategy has a lot to do with this, in my opinion.

Good performance strategy increases speed

Modern high-performance environments are defined by complexity. Multiple competitions, condensed calendars, overlapping priorities and increasingly specialised roles place constant strain on alignment. Planning in these environments is often misunderstood as control. In reality, it is the opposite.

When direction is clear, decisions decentralise. Coaches, athletes and staff can act with confidence because they understand the broader context. When strategy is absent, everything escalates upwards. Decisions slow, responsibility blurs and energy is wasted re-litigating the same conversations week after week.

The VMOST model

At this point, structures and frameworks matter.

One of the most effective ways I have seen performance strategy articulated in high-performance sport is through clear, simple models that translate long-term ambition into day-to-day action.

One such model is VMOST (Vision, Mission, Objectives, Strategy and Tactics).

VMOST was created by business strategist Rakesh Sondhi and first proposed in 1999 book Total Strategy. The framework provides a disciplined way of connecting the big picture of the future to the daily actions, tasks and deliverables required to get there.

The power of VMOST lies in its simplicity.

In high-performance environments, complexity is already high. Strategy models must reduce cognitive load, not add to it. VMOST creates line of sight. Individuals can see how their daily work connects all the way through to the long-term vision of the team and/or organisation. In my last two roles as a performance director, my VMOST strategy was etched onto a big wall, one which staff members and athletes walked passed regularly. And when curious conversations or even debates took place, we often found ourselves standing around the visual, challenging whether a new idea could really help us achieve a strategy or the mission, or was it something that could derail us and divert energy, with no clear route to helping us win. This is definitely something I am taking into my new role in professional cricket.

When applied well, this kind of structure does not constrain creativity. It enables it. People can feel empowered to adapt, innovate and solve problems within a clear strategic frame.

A new era in professional cricket

In cricket, this strategic clarity is particularly valuable and I’m living this right now as Performance Director at Warwickshire and the Birmingham Phoenix.

Across a single season, players move between formats that demand entirely different physical, technical and psychological outputs. Red-ball cricket rewards patience, control and endurance. Short-form formats demand clarity, aggression and adaptability. Players are selected for specific skill sets, yet all must contribute to a collective performance.

Without a clear strategic framework, these transitions become chaotic. Workloads conflict, roles blur and development stalls. With strategy, complexity becomes more manageable. Individuals understand their role, how it evolves across formats, and how their contribution supports the team’s wider ambition.

At its best, performance strategy connects people.

High-performance sport is full of specialists. Coaches, analysts, medics, strength staff and operations teams all operate in defined roles, and rightly so. The risk is not a lack of expertise, but fragmentation. Excellent work happening in isolation without a clear line of sight to the bigger picture, is one of the biggest risks leaders can face.

A well-articulated strategy creates connection. It allows people to see how their work links through to the final mission and vision of the organisation. Daily decisions gain meaning. Trade-offs become easier to navigate. Autonomy increases because intent is understood.

When people understand why their work matters, they can make better decisions.

Strategy also provides continuity in environments where turnover is inevitable.

Athletes move on. Coaches change. Support staff rotate. In some organisations, meaningful personnel change happens every season. Culture alone cannot carry performance identity through that level of churn.

Strategy creates continuity of thought.

It anchors philosophy, ambition and non-negotiable principles beyond any individual. It allows new people to arrive and quickly understand how performance is built, what standards matter and what success really means in that environment.

In my experience, the strongest systems are those where people can come and go without the performance identity being lost. That does not happen by accident. It happens because strategy has been made explicit, shared and lived.

This requires leadership discipline.

Performance strategy only creates connection and continuity if leaders reference it consistently, use it to explain decisions and hold themselves accountable to it under pressure. When strategy is visible in how leaders talk, select, invest and prioritise, it stops being a document and becomes a shared language.

That language matters when pressure rises.

Under stress, people revert to what they understand. Strategy provides a common frame of reference. It reduces anxiety, accelerates alignment and allows honest conversations about performance without personalising every decision.

Planning also helps organisations say ‘no’.

In elite sport, opportunity is constant. New competitions, new technologies, new interventions and new ideas arrive relentlessly. Without strategy, everything feels urgent, and every new opportunity feels like one we can’t miss out on. With strategy, priorities are clear. Resources are allocated intentionally. Energy is focused where it matters most.

Importantly, you need to find ways to stay flexible, and not become rigid, bound to a strategy you developed years ago.

The best strategies are not scripts. They are frameworks. They define principles, priorities and trade-offs rather than fixed answers. They allow adaptation without drift.

Good performance strategy answers simple but powerful questions:

1. What are we optimising for right now?
2. What are we willing to trade?
3. What will we not compromise on?

The human impact of planning is often underestimated.

Clear strategy can reduce uncertainty. It gives people confidence in decision-making. Applied well, it creates psychological safety by replacing ambiguity with intent. Athletes and staff perform better when they understand direction, expectations and how success is defined.

This is particularly important in high-performance environments where accountability is high and pressure is constant.

For leaders looking to build effective performance strategy, a few principles matter.

Competitive advantage

Across Olympic and professional sport, one belief has remained constant for me: strategy is a competitive advantage if organisations are willing to treat it as such and invest in the people who are delivering it.

In high-performance sport, change and uncertainty is guaranteed. Strategy does not eliminate it, but it determines whether change becomes a threat or can be used as an advantage.

When planning for performance connects people, aligns ambition, creates continuity and promotes curiosity, performance shifts from reactive winning to sustainable success.

James Thomas is the Performance Director at Warwickshire County Cricket Club and one of sport’s leading high performance experts. If you wish to speak to James, please contact a member of the Leaders Performance Institute team.

More from James Thomas

Olympic Champions Often Begin Their Journey in Modest Circumstances, But it’s Not About What Those Environments Lack – it’s About What they Have in Abundance

By Richard Young PhD

As we watch the Winter Olympics unfold, it’s easy to focus on the moments that seem to decide everything. A final run. A clean landing. A time on the clock. Those moments matter, but they’re not where medals are won.

What we’re watching was shaped long before now.

The medals being awarded at these Games were formed over months and years, through daily training sessions, ordinary conversations, and leadership decisions that rarely felt significant at the time. The podium is simply where all of that work becomes visible.

That’s why medals matter. Not as a destination, but as a standard that quietly shapes everything before the starting gate.

When a team commits to gold medal quality, the question changes. It is no longer “is this good enough?” It becomes “is this gold medal quality?” That shift sharpens judgment. It makes it easier to decide what stays and what goes. It creates the discipline to say no to additions that feel helpful but dilute the work.

Winter sport exposes this clearly. Conditions move quickly. Margins are tight. There is little room for correction. When athletes perform with clarity in that environment, it is rarely because of something added late. It is because gold medal quality guided training, recovery, and conversation long before they arrived.

The honesty of this standard matters. Gold medal quality does not guarantee the result, but there is no downside to holding it. It gives a team the best possible chance because the work has been measured against something that counts. And whatever happens on the day, you can walk away knowing the system reflected your best thinking and your best effort over time.

That is important because the Games have a way of revealing the truth. They do not create pressure; they concentrate it. They do not build your system; they expose it. Under that intensity, whatever has been repeated, clarified, and aligned over months and years becomes visible. What has been protected holds. What has been left loose shows itself.

I have seen this pattern many times and have helped teams address what is almost inevitable in the lead up to major events. Good intentions turn into noise. Leaders want to help, coaches want to protect, support staff want to add value. Meetings increase, plans are revisited, reporting expands. Activity rises while alignment begins to thin. Without a shared standard, every addition can be defended. With one, decisions become easier because there is something solid to measure them against.

I remember working with a winter sport programme that, from the outside, looked ready. The talent was there, the experience was there, and the resources were in place. As the event approached, small adjustments began to appear. Plans were refined again. Extra conversations were added. Senior leaders checked in more frequently. None of it seemed dramatic, yet the clarity that had carried them started to dilute. The athletes felt it before anyone articulated it. The system became busy, and when the moment came the performances were close but the medals did not follow.

The issue was not effort; it was the absence of a shared and protected standard. When everything feels important, the essential things lose their edge. The debrief circled around marginal gains, yet the real margin had slipped much earlier.  At some point the team stopped asking whether each decision truly met gold medal quality.

Watching these Olympics, you can see the difference. Some teams are not louder or more animated, they are settled. Athletes adjust to conditions without drama. Coaches stay with the plan rather than reacting to every moment. Leaders are present and steady, not adding extra layers or distraction. That composure was built well before the Games. It came from hundreds of choices where gold medal quality decided what stayed in the system and what was taken out.

Across five Olympic cycles of research, one pattern was consistent. The best at repeat performance were also the best at saying no. They said no to late additions. No to unnecessary meetings. No to changes that did not lift the standard. They protected the gold standard when others were tempted to add. Their edge was not intensity. It was discipline around what mattered.

This is where medals matter. Not as pressure, but as a reference point.

When a shared standard is clear, alignment is not forced. A physiotherapist knows whether an intervention adds value. A coach simplifies a session without feeling exposed. An athlete speaks up because the question is not personal, it is principled. Does this meet gold medal quality? If it does, it stays. If it does not, it goes.

High performing environments stay simple as the demands increase. Winter sport tests that. Conditions shift. Schedules tighten. Margins are small. Anything extra becomes a load. Teams without a protected standard arrive still discussing basics. Teams who have done the work arrive clear on who they are, how they operate, and what they trust.

And that clarity does not sit with one leader! It runs through the system.

In environments where performances are repeated and sustained, leadership is not a title. Athletes lead themselves. Coaches lead learning. Practitioners lead their craft. Senior leaders protect the conditions. It only works when there is a standard everyone understands and can apply. Gold medal quality becomes the shared reference point. It is how distributed leadership holds together.

When leadership is shared in this way, pressure does not destabilise the system. People know what matters, decisions move quickly and conversations stay anchored. Simplicity is protected because the standard keeps pulling the work back to what counts.

Medals reflect the health of the system that produced them. Ignoring them does not remove pressure. It removes the reference point. The issue is not caring about medals. It is misunderstanding what they represent.

When medals are treated as proof of effort, people push harder. When they are treated as proof of control, people tighten their grip. When they are understood as the outcome of sustained quality over time, leaders look at the system. They ask what met the standard and what did not, and they adjust accordingly.

Across the five Olympic cycles of research, the repeat performers did this better than the rest. They reviewed their environment against gold medal quality and made decisions early. What needs lifting. What needs shifting. What needs removing. Questions that were visible as part of the daily work.

As these Games unfold, the competition is extraordinary. The margins are tight, the stakes are high, and the performances are world class. It is compelling to watch. But there is added value if we look under the hood. Beyond the podium and the headlines, we can observe the systems that hold when the pressure rises.

You can hear it in the interviews. Athletes speak with clarity about their process, not just the outcome. You can see it in their body language at the start line and in the finish area. There is composure. You can see it around the competition environment, in how teams warm up, how staff interact, how little needs to be said. None of that is accidental.

What we are watching is not only talent meeting opportunity. It is preparation meeting pressure. It is standards held over time. The best in the world are showing us what it looks like when a system has been built properly and trusted fully.

Gold medal quality is a way of deciding, leading, and working. It asks a simple question each day and requires an honest answer.

Over time, when medals matter, that standard shapes what becomes possible.

Enjoy the Games!

Richard Young is an internationally renowned performance advisor. He has been involved with 11 Olympics as an athlete, coach, researcher, technologist, and leader working across more than 50 sports and seven countries focused on sustained high performance. He has won international gold medals and coached world champions. He founded international performance programmes including, the Technology & Innovation programmes for Great Britain and New Zealand, and a Performance Knowledge & Learning programme for the New Zealand Olympic, Winter Olympic and Paralympic teams. Across seven Olympic cycles he has researched the differences between medallists and non-medallists, their coaches, support staff, leaders and the system they are in to unlock the keys that separate them from the rest.

More from Richard Young

Meaning Does Not Guarantee Medals, But it Strengthens the Behaviours that Make Medals Possible

By John Portch

At Leaders Meet: Australia a pair of self-proclaimed “professional idiots” took to the stage.

The Shepmates – Australian identical twin brothers Archie and Miles Shepherd – have become internet stars due to their viral videos depicting their high-energy and comedic reinterpretations of dramatic moments of sports commentary.

“I’m not going to pretend like we probably should be offering you guys advice. You’re the best at what you guys do,” Miles told a room of Leaders Performance Institute members at Rivershed in Brisbane. “But hopefully we can inspire you guys, or you take something from our story.”

Their dedication to their art and their fans has taken them to places they never expected. “We’ve found ourselves in a pretty niche part of the internet,” said Archie.

On top of it all, the brothers’ obvious chemistry, as well as their ability to finish each other’s sentences, hinted at the theme of alignment that ran through both days down on the River Brisbane (and it’s a performance trend we’ve tracked for some time).

They were not alone. Others who took to the stage, including the Brisbane Lions, World Rugby and the Queensland Ambulance Service, spoke of their efforts to ensure everyone within their walls is on the same page.

Based on the insights shared onstage across both days, the Leaders Performance Institute highlights how alignment shows up in the work of high-performing teams in at least five ways.

1. Smart coaches who can manage up

In sporting terms, there has never been a better moment for the city of Brisbane, with the Lions defending their AFL premiership and the Broncos winning the NRL in 2025.

Lions Senior Coach Chris Fagan and Broncos Head Coach Michael Maguire have built winning machines in this corner of Queensland, and both were on hand to tell Leaders Performance Institute members how it was done.

Key to their approach is an ability to manage the executives within their organisations. As Fagan said, “I always said to myself, if I was going to be a head coach, that I would make sure I would manage up to that group of people.”

Over the past nine years, Fagan tried to dine once a week with Lions’ CEO Greg Matthews as well as the team’s senior-coach-turned-executive Leigh Matthews.

“It’s been incredibly invaluable because I’ve got two allies that have always been able to tell my story and tell the story of the team to those who needed to know it.”

Chris Fagan

Maguire has adopted a similar approach to prevent any noise or confusion emanating from above.

“When people above you understand the journey of where you’re going and what you’re trying to do then everyone is held to account because if they don’t agree upon things, get that flushed out… [and] if they don’t understand your goal they can sometimes make it up; and that’s why I say it always starts at the top.”

Michael Maguire

Chris Fagan (centre) in conversation with Michael Maguire (right) and moderator Rachel Vickery. Photo: Albert Perez

2. They seek ‘spine alignment’ too

While coaches can do what they can to ensure information is flowing in all directions, there is a role for both board members and heads of performance on the sports science side too.

Onstage, Peter Horne, the Performance Director at Rugby Australia, made the case for “spine alignment”, of which he said, “if we get true spine alignment of what we’re trying to achieve from a strategy, business and the deliverables [perspective] then we’re more likely to be able to execute.”

Crucially, as he admitted, it is not about agreement on every decision.

“I don’t always agree with the decisions, but ultimately if we all agree on the outcome where we’re heading, then we’re more likely to do that.”

Peter Horne

“For the spine to work, you need everyone operating at the right level,” said Brett Robinson, the Chair of World Rugby, who joined Horne for the session. He included himself in that assessment.

“You have to be trustworthy, empathetic, listen, communicate all the time and be systematic about it.”

Brett Robinson

Peter Horne (right) makes his point onstage with Brett Robinson (centre) and Leaders’ Laura McQueen. Photo: Albert Perez

3. They bring their frontline people onboard

Few individuals are as well placed to discuss the concept of a culture driven by a shared purpose than Dr Stephen Rashford, the Medical Director of the Queensland Ambulance Service.

He is proud of his team’s “no excuses” approach too. “When we do our audits, everyone’s in the room, and there’s no making fun of anyone, there’s no bullying. We have honest, open discussions because we all just want to get better.”

Critically, their culture starts with their paramedics.

“It actually starts as close to the patient as possible. If our ‘players’ don’t want to be involved, then there’s no point progressing because we actually need to get everyone bought-in.”

Dr Stephen Rashford

Dr Stephen Rashford mid presentation. Photo: Albert Perez

4. They have leaders who give their people psychological safety

Australian all-rounder Ellyse Perry is one of the greatest female cricketers of all time (then there’s her career as an international football player to consider). Her career has been underpinned by psychological safety. “When there’s a lot of support around that and real alignment on wanting to grow and improve, that makes a big difference,” she said.

“Consistency in leadership and how the vision and what you’re trying to achieve is conveyed [is so important]. People know what they get, they’re not guessing today how you’re going to respond to something.”

Ellyse Perry

“No matter the position you hold, you don’t know everything, so be open-minded to learning,” said Anna Meares, the double Olympic gold medal-winning track cyclist who served as the Chef de Mission for the Australian Olympic Committee at the Paris Games. She spoke onstage alongside Perry and fellow Olympic gold medallist, the BMX cyclist Saya Sakakibara.

As Chef, Meares decided that open displays of vulnerability from early in the cycle would help to bring athletes and their coaches onboard.

“I had to go and learn from them because that information helps me set the environment and culture for when they come in.”

Anna Meares

Psychological safety is just as important in individual sports, as Sakakibara told the audience. The Red Bull athlete won gold in Paris but recounted the story of her awful crash three years earlier in Tokyo and how it encouraged her to start placing her trust in others.

“I started to rebuild my own support network and really started to believe in the systems rather than believing that I have to do everything.”

Saya Sakakibara

Anna Meares (second from left) makes her point to session moderator Fabio Serpiello in the company of Ellyse Perry (second from right) and Saya Sakakibara (first on the right). Photo: Albert Perez

5. They use process as a tool of alignment

In his presentation, Scott McLean, an associate professor at the University of the Sunshine Coast, explained that leaders must be aware of how things are connected in the complex systems of sports performance.

“If you want to intervene somewhere, just be aware it’s likely there’s going to be impacts elsewhere in the system.”

Scott McLean 

Scott McLean from stage right. Photo: Albert Perez

Interventions should be governed by the performance need rather than results, according to James Thomas, the Performance Director at Warwickshire CCC, who made this case when he spoke onstage.

“I go back to the process; what we’re trying to do as a team, what we’re trying to do in the short term, what we’re trying to do for the longer term, and some of the trade-offs we’re going to face on that journey and realistic expectations  too.”

James Thomas

James Thomas onsite at Leaders Meet: Australia. Photo: Albert Perez

Where we’re going next

Leaders Meet: The Art of Strategy

Main Photo: Airo

By Joe Lemire

Speedskating team pursuit debuted at the 2006 Olympics, with three-skater teams racing in sync, taking turns leading the pack to absorb the wind.

At times while looping the course, because the skates don’t have brakes, one athlete might incidentally bump a teammate from behind. Back in 2018, Shane Domer, US Speedskating Chief of Sport Performance, wondered if those pushes were beneficial and how to optimize the number of exchanges at the front of the line.

Domer contacted the Chair of the governing body’s Sports Science Commission, aerodynamics expert Ingmar Jungnickel, to build a projection around these ideas. Jungnickel concocted what he called a “napkin math kind of model” that immediately showed a savings of about a second and a half, Domer recalled.

A week later, however, Jungnickel called back and told Domer, “Shane, I think we’re doing this thing all wrong. What if we don’t exchange at all?”

Jungnickel proposed that the two trailing skaters, who benefit from the energy savings of drafting, use that to push the leader forward rather than take the time to sprint out in front, likening the concept to bump drafting in NASCAR.

“The model showed that pushing was so clearly advantageous that you shouldn’t sometimes push,” Jungnickel said. “You just should abandon taking turns at the front altogether, and this should replace the old strategy.”

After years of testing — both through advanced computational fluid dynamics models and on-ice training — that revolutionary technique has propelled the American men from also-rans to both the podium and the record books. The US, which finished eighth at the 2018 Olympics, won a bronze at the 2022 Games and gold at the 2025 world championships while setting the world record in the event.

Internally, it’s called Project Slippery Fish, but to the world, the technique has come to be called the American Push.

Jungnickel had worked with Olympic cyclists in his native Germany, as well as with Tour de France teams, but at the time of this discovery, he was leading an innovation team at Specialized bicycles. Given the success he had in speedskating, Mike Levine, USOPC Senior Director of Performance Pathways and Innovation, suggested he apply for a grant from the donor-backed Performance Innovation Fund.

That funding enabled Jungnickel to start a sports tech R&D consulting firm, Inspire Gold, which then built an AI-powered aerodynamics spinoff — Airo — that replicates a wind tunnel by creating digital twins of athletes that can be manipulated in 3D to determine the best posture and formations. US Speedskating was the first client, but Jungnickel said he has also worked with national teams in ski and snowboard, cycling, luge and triathlon.

Without the grant, Jungnickel said he likely would not have started the company. Now, the core IP remains proprietary to US Olympians, but related use cases are helping support Inspire Gold. Levine emphasized that many Olympic sports don’t have technological support because they lack a large enough commercial market.

“Airo is selling the technology to bike fitters and bike shops, but there’s a speedskating version and the ski version that we will never sell to anybody but the US Olympic Committee,” Jungnickel said. “That’s our core business model: Essentially develop technologies that help Team USA win, and then commercialize them and long-term fund these businesses.”

The 26-member Performance Innovation Advisory Committee is chaired by Apple’s Eddy Cue and includes members from disparate backgrounds, such as team executive (the Spurs’ RC Buford), athlete (NFL lineman Kelvin Beachum), investor (Goldman Sachs’ David Solomon), business analytics (KAGR’s Jessica Gelman) and medicine (Texas Children’s Dr Jeff Shilt). The fund has raised about $50 million to date.

“It’s really a talented and generous group who provides us this risk capital, strategic guidance and network connections to invest in and execute bold ideas that can create competitive advantages for Team USA and elevate the performance, health and wellbeing of Team USA athletes,” Levine said, adding that the scope is “agnostic. We’re not defining what lanes we’re playing in.”

Founding committee member Geoff Yang, the managing director of Redpoint Ventures, explained the goal in 2015 was to combine “data, applied technology and ingenuity” to support and identify talented Olympians and Paralympians.

“The United States is home to the most innovative technologies in the world,” Yang said, “and Team USA should be a leader in applying those technologies.”

There are four main allocations:

• An international competitive analysis that uses machine learning to develop medal expectancies, helping drive high-performance planning;
• Athlete 360, a custom management system available to NGBs for free;
• Monthly online forums and an annual performance innovation summit “to create the collisions and spark a shared learning and cultivation of ideas,” Levine said; and
• Grants, such as the one utilized by US Speedskating and VAMA, a motion capture technology used to great effect by USA Track and Field.

“Without the funding to get these projects going, we lose steam on the innovation side,” Domer said. “Some of them fail, and these guys are OK with that. And that’s awesome because that helps us create the lack of fear of failure that we’ve had in the past.”

The speedskating team happens to be full of engineers who understand the underlying concepts. One skater, Emery Lehman, even spent time as an intern with Airo’s athlete engineering project. The willingness to experiment from the athletes and coach Ryan Shimabukuro has been critical.

“I give him and our athletes a lot of credit because they didn’t know what the payoff would be,” Domer said, “and to commit to doing this thing — well, as a speedskater, you’re not taught to skate pushing someone. So it took a lot of work to get them to adopt the technique.”

This article was brought to you by SBJ Tech, a Leaders Group company. As a Leaders Performance Institute member, you are able to enjoy exclusive access to SBJ Tech content in the field of athletic performance.

By Paul Ford MBE

The Olympic Games environment is the worst possible place for trying to get people to peak and perform to the best of their capabilities.

Athletes are compacted into a brand-new village of more than 16,000 people who are all subject to a constrained competition schedule in what amounts to 52 world championships in 17 days, all in the same city.

It’s almost like they are being set up to fail when they’re expected to deliver the best performance of their lives.

However, we like to flip this as an opportunity.

At the British Olympic Association we feel if we educate and mentally prepare the team for what to expect it can bring a performance gain. We unite all the athletes competing as part of Team GB while giving them the platform to perform to the best of their ability.

It builds on the concept of ‘One Team GB’ as I wrote here.

A part of something bigger

‘One Team GB’ is the idea that while Team GB is made up of various national teams and individuals – and the last thing we want to do is remove that individuality – we are all there united under the same common goal as Team GB. To perform at our best and inspire our Nation!

An awesome colleague, Olympian Georgie Harland, conducted a project with the help of Owen Eastwood, during the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games cycle. They explored our Olympic heritage dating from the 1896 Athens Games. That process unearthed so many different stories, which say to today’s British Olympians: ‘you’re not the first to go to the Games, you won’t be the last either, but you are the next and you now have the opportunity to create your own story’.

More recently, our Athlete Services Manager, Olympic rhythmic gymnast Rachel Smith, evolved this with some exceptional work going into the 2024 Paris Games around generating a true sense of belonging for our future Olympians.

As a Sport team, we visit all the different sports in advance of the Games (our Games Ready roadshow) and talk about these stories going back 130 years and always bring it back to the idea that you have the opportunity to create your own story, leave your mark as an individual in your sport and inspire the nation and next generation.

We encourage athletes to think ‘you matter as an individual’ but also ‘you’re part of a collective effort, and most importantly, you belong here’. They have their individual focus, and being selfish is fine, but we recognise that we’re here as part of that greater common purpose. Bonded by the collective support of one another. This is hugely important when the pressure is so high. No one is on their own!

Looking forward, we will engage past Olympians to continue support this process because they can bring their own stories to life. The athletes of 2028 will recognise the stars of 1984 (when the Olympics were last in LA) such as Daley Thompson and Seb Coe. That peer-to-peer connection is so much better than me trying to tell the same stories alone third hand.

The Opening Ceremony: to go or not to go?

At an Olympic Games, there are certain things you can use as a performance boost. It might be attending the Opening Ceremony: if you walk behind the flag as part of Team GB it can be a massive ‘switch on’ moment ahead of going into competition. However, if you’re competing the next morning at 8:00am in the pool, attending the opening ceremony is not ideal preparation.

You must look at the opportunities afforded by the Games and tap into the bits that are going to build you up without compromising your preparation.

If it’s your first Games, it can be hard to understand just how these different experiences might affect you. You may be on your feet a lot more than normal, meaning your hydration may be lacking, as may your sleep, because you don’t necessarily go back to your room after training and you may stay up later than normal because of the Games ‘buzz’. You may well be looking at your phone and messaging people more so than normal in competition; all that blue light exposure may ruin your sleep quality.

We find that several first-time athletes will struggle to stick to their plan because they might see their role models or idols in other sports who are hugely successful doing something in the gym and they think to themselves ‘oh, maybe I should give that a go’. That’s a potential recipe for injury disaster.

We must prepare that message in advance and tell athletes that when the Games arrive, they must stick to their process because the performances will be there and the results will take care of themselves if they do so. Don’t deviate from the norm at the crucial moment!

When to land these discussions is the next question. Some sports, such as sailing and canoeing, will know their Olympians as early as September 2027; others, such as track and field, won’t select until May 2028. So the education journey we go on with the sailors and canoeists is long; we can plan out and get that right and drip feed it at the right times. Whereas the track and field athletes don’t want to hear anything about the Games because they’re not necessarily going. We must be smart in making the education bespoke and fit for purpose for each sport. Equally, some will want us to sit down and talk it through while others just want those short videos and podcasts. It’s finding out how the different cohort of athletes’ best digest information.

Athletes will already have their own coping strategies and, as with anything else that goes into the preparations, it’s about not trying new things at a Games. Their coping strategies shouldn’t be any different to what they normally are – it’s just that the amplitude of the noise is going to be greater than anything you’ve experienced before.

Our former Team GB psychology lead, Dr Kate Hays, in the build-up to Tokyo 2020, talked through ‘stress buckets’ and the ‘taps’ you place on that bucket are your coping strategies. Our thoughts remain the same: everyone’s release mechanisms will be different, but you need to know when to turn on those taps.

We encourage athletes, coaches and support staff to openly discuss their taps ahead of time so that they are both known and understood, and crucially, supported by their peers.

Blue days, white days

At the Games, we also arrange ‘blue days’ and ‘white days’ where athletes and staff wear Team GB attire of the corresponding colour.

It may sound autocratic, but it is deliberate – even if it’s harder at Winter Games because you’re in so many layers – and there is a rationale. If you walk into an unfamiliar space where you are unknown, it can be uncomfortable, particularly if you’re not from a team sport where the squads tend to move on mass. If you’re an individual fencer, archer or table tennis player, you might be there by yourself and it can be a lonely environment as mentioned – and the last place you want to be lonely is at an Olympic Games, stuck in your own head, when the pressure is mounting.

If you go into the dining hall on a ‘white day’, you’ll see the British athletes stand out against all the other national colours. It’s a safe and comfortable place for you to be part of; it says, ‘we’re all over here’. We tend to say where we’re going to sit each day but the blue and white does make it easier; and it’s not just in the dining hall but also when moving around the village. It’s a conversation-starter and you’ve broken down the barrier because you’re bonded by the kit.

In Paris, we also had our own barista in our Team GB Olympic block so that we could create this common space for people who are all there for the same reason together. You’re not forcing them out of their room but you’re offering it as an incentive.

Our role in performance preparation

We leave the technical work to the coaches, but we need to look at the whole performance picture: what does it take to maximise this and what facets can affect that? What can we tweak within the environment to facilitate comfort, safety, and ultimately enable people to be brave and thrive?

A fundamental part of how you prepare people to perform is as much about getting them mentally and emotionally ready of what to expect. Whilst the swimming pool at a Games is still 50m, and the athletics track is 400m long; it’s the bells and whistles around them that change. We help to prepare athletes and staff for what to expect of the ‘circus’ around them. Their belonging and sense of value to the team, and how by going into this together we can thrive when it matters most.

What to read next

Team GB always Strive to Create an Olympic Home from Home for Athletes and Staff – and the Performance Benefit Is Clear

By Richard Young PhD

High performance always comes with plans, systems and structure.

These hold the work together and give people a sense of direction, yet across numerous Olympic cycles and my work with teams in many countries, something deeper has shown up again and again. Repeat performers live by a small set of values that give their journey meaning, and that meaning becomes the story they return to when things get hard. Plans can organise a campaign, but meaning organises the person, and when the person is organised, behaviour aligns with purpose, decisions become cleaner, and responses under pressure strengthen.

Values are not abstract. They sit under the story people tell themselves about why the work matters. When performers are clear on their values, the story they live by gains weight and coherence. Meaning forms around those values, and behaviour follows the meaning. High performance at its core is high quality communication, and that communication begins with the internal dialogue that shapes how people approach their craft, their relationships and their response to the environment around them.

I learned this early in my work with an athlete who became a repeat performer. She spoke often about why she was doing the work, not in long speeches or motivational lines, but in a simple story grounded in a few clear values she believed in. Those values shaped how she behaved each day. She arrived ready because preparation mattered to her. She trained with intent because craft mattered to her. She kept close to people who steadied her because connection mattered to her. When she spoke with her coach she spoke with ownership because responsibility mattered to her. When we reviewed performance she measured herself against her values and her story rather than emotion or expectation. Her story filtered the noise and held her attention on what she could influence, and it stayed steady right through from her hardest performances to her best performances.

This pattern has repeated across many sports, campaigns and environments. The data I collect from repeat performers compared to the rest shows a consistent thread: they carry a story that fits their values and the meaning they bring to their journey, and they speak from that story in ways that guide their behaviour. Their story gives shape to their days and coherence to their choices. It grounds their relationships and helps them navigate difficulty. They are not waiting for meaning to arrive. They are building it and living inside it.

Those who are new or underperforming also care deeply and work hard, yet often do so without a clear set of values or a meaningful story that holds the work together. When values are unclear, meaning becomes vague, and when meaning is vague, behaviour loses structure. People get pulled by changing circumstances, shifting expectations and the noise around them. They work with effort but without consistent, clear direction, which slows their progress and creates friction in the system. This is not a comment on motivation or desire. It is a matter of clarity. Values anchor meaning. Meaning anchors story. Story anchors behaviour.

The power of distributed leadership

We know that the story in high performance environments is more than narrative. It is how people make sense of the path they are on and the role they play in it, and this is where distributed leadership becomes essential. In Amplify I wrote about leadership from the front, which is not the authority of the leader but the agency of the performer. When people are clear on their values and the meaning they bring, they contribute to the collective story of the team rather than waiting for the team to give them one. This alignment accelerates the group because each person brings their own clarity into the shared environment. When people are unclear, they wait for meaning to come from the outside, and that waiting creates misalignment and slows the group when pressure rises.

Distributed leadership grows when individuals write the story they want to live, then bring that story into the environment to help shape the story of the team. It is a form of contribution. It lifts the standard of communication. It clarifies the system. It allows people to act with confidence inside their role and in service of the whole. A team of people who know their own story and the story of the team has more alignment and more collective intelligence than a team with one story and many passive recipients. The power of meaning becomes a competitive advantage when everyone is an author rather than an audience.

One experience stands out to me from a world championships preparation phase. The team had come through a long training block. Performances were mixed, and the meetings were becoming heavier as the event approached. You could sense the pressure beginning to close in. To reset the group, we asked each athlete to tell the story of their season so far, not as a performance review but as an expression of the values they were trying to live and the meaning they brought to their work. One of the younger athletes spoke first. He said his season was about learning how to prepare in the right way and becoming someone who took responsibility for his craft. His values were clear. Growth. Responsibility. Trust. His story immediately shifted the tone in the room. Others followed with similar clarity. They spoke about identity, family, commitment, team and progress. Meaning returned to the group, and with meaning came direction. The environment lifted. And the team leaders connected the individual stories and values to the ambitious story of the team was creating together; people saw themselves first, then saw a clear and inspiring connection to the team story.  That shift carried through to their highest calibre performance due to their collective ability to respond and adapt under pressure.  They had triggered a conviction and belief in a story they had not experienced before.

Belonging: built from a shared sense of meaning

Meaning is one of the strongest levers of behaviour. When people know the values they stand on, their story gains structure. When their story has structure, their behaviour aligns in ways that support agency, transformation and performance. When teams share a sense of meaning built from individual values and stories, belonging grows. Belonging here is not sentiment. It is foundational to team performance.  It keeps the group connected when tension increases and when pressure and uncertainty lift; and helps people stay inside their ‘circle of importance’ rather than drift into the noise.

I often ask leaders and high performers a simple question: What is the story you want to be able to tell about yourself and this team or organisation at the end of this campaign, cycle or career? Their answer reveals their values, priorities and the meaning they bring to the work. It opens the door for the team to see the personal stories that sit underneath performance and the personal meanings that drive behaviour. Most importantly, it gives leaders the opportunity to connect these stories, deepen the shared meaning and align the group around something that feels true to everyone. This is where distributed leadership grows. When people speak from their own story, they lead from the front. They help shape the environment rather than wait for the environment to shape them.

The advantage of meaning follows a clear line. Values shape meaning. Meaning shapes story. Story shapes behaviour. Behaviour shapes performance. When each person knows what they value, understands the meaning behind their work and brings that meaning into the collective story of the team, the group strengthens. Performance lifts. Cohesion deepens. The system grows more resilient because leadership is no longer held by a few. It is carried by many. When people wait for meaning to come from outside, the system slows. Alignment weakens because the stories underneath the work are not visible or connected. Teams are transformed when personal meaning becomes shared meaning.

Meaning does not guarantee medals, yet it strengthens the behaviours that make medals possible. It brings clarity to decisions, alignment to relationships and consistency to daily work. It supports cleaner communication and steadier responses when pressure rises. When meaning is present, people move with intent, and when people move with intent, performance grows.

Medals matter, but meaning matters most.

Richard Young is an internationally renowned performance advisor. He has been involved with 11 Olympics as an athlete, coach, researcher, technologist, and leader working across more than 50 sports and seven countries focused on sustained high performance. He has won international gold medals and coached world champions. He founded international performance programmes including, the Technology & Innovation programmes for Great Britain and New Zealand, and a Performance Knowledge & Learning programme for the New Zealand Olympic, Winter Olympic and Paralympic teams. Across seven Olympic cycles he has researched the differences between medallists and non-medallists, their coaches, support staff, leaders and the system they are in to unlock the keys that separate them from the rest.

More from Richard Young

The Three Literacies of Repeat Medal-Winning Systems

By John Portch

In January, Indiana became college football’s first first-time national champion in 29 years.

It was a lesson to all sleeping giants. Here was a team with the most losses in the sport’s history and, over the course of their 16-0 season, had compiled more wins than between 2020 and 2023 in total.

Indiana Head Coach Curt Cignetti spoke of a “paradigm shift” in the aftermath of the Hoosiers’ 27-21 defeat of Miami.

“People can cling to an old way of thinking, categorising teams as this or that or conferences as this or that or they can adjust to the new world, the shift in the power dynamic in college football today,” he said.

Cignetti was brought in ahead of the 2024 season and transformed the mindset of a team that had been treading water for decades.

“There’s got to be a lot of like-minded individuals who come together for a common purpose, and sometimes that belief has to be a little bit irrational,” said Indiana centre Pat Coogan.

“Especially in a place that hasn’t had success like Indiana. I’ve seen it, and I’ve seen the way this place has been characterised, and when Coach Cig got here, he believed, and he got people to believe. Sometimes people laughed at him and thought he was crazy, but that’s irrational belief. You’ve got to get people to buy-in and believe in the mission.”

With a host of senior players set to graduate, success may not be replicable in the short term, but Cignetti is ready for whatever comes next.

“Perfection is impossible to attain on a consistent basis,” he said. “But we’ll continue to take it one day at a time, one meeting at a time, one practice at a time, and just keep improving and committing to the process and showing up prepared, trying to put it on the field, and see where it takes us.”

It was a powerful message to kick off the year in sports performance and one that underlined the importance of the fundamentals while refusing to stand still.

Which brings us nicely to the happenings at the Leaders Performance Institute these past four weeks.

Insight of the month

‘What underpins successful teams across formats is not uniformity, but clarity of individual responsibility within a collective framework. Team performance does not replace individual accountability; it depends on it.’

In a guest column, James Thomas, the Performance Director at Warwickshire CCC, spoke about facilities being a secondary concern until the leaders had created the right environment to enable athletes, whether they’re the Olympic champions with whom he has worked or Premier League and Champions League-winning footballers, being paramount.

Read more about why high performance is not something leaders should demand. It is something they should enable.

Britain’s Anthony Joshua on his way to winning gold at the 2012 London Olympics. (Scott Heavey/Getty Images)

Surprising insight of the month

Did you know that Team GB built its own hub within the London Olympic Village in 2012. This was very much a “host nation benefit” as Paul Ford MBE called it in another popular guest column last month.

The Head of Sport at the British Olympic Association wrote:

When we finished in London we looked and thought: ‘it’s not home advantage necessarily, we just need to be more creative’.

It provoked a question: how do we create an optimal physical way of uniting the team within the Games environment? Part of it was using our Olympic Village residential space smarter. But you can’t expect this of the local organising committee to do on our behalf, since their brief is so vast. Instead, we decided to take it out of their hands. And for each of the subsequent Summer Olympics we have found an out-of-village space exclusively for our use.

Read more about their approach here.

Team GB flag bearers Helen Glover and Tom Daley pose for a selfie outside the residence of the British Ambassador to France ahead of the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris. (Alex Pantling/Getty Images)

Best advice

Leaders Performance Institute members across the globe strive to encourage learning throughout their teams and while it will always be an important feature of any successful team, you should not waste your time on the wrong people.

As performance specialist Iain Brunnschweiler explained at a Leaders Virtual Roundtable:

“There’s definitely some people who, you can try as hard as you like to get them to learn and I think we have to be cognisant of our own energy as someone who’s seeking to help. It’s a bit like athletes, isn’t it? If you’re up for it, I’ll give you 150% of my energy. If you’re not, after a period of time, I’ll just go, ‘look, you crack on’. So I think we have to be accepting of that.”

Over the course of an hour, Brunnschweiler and a band of LPI members noted ten strategies for more effective learning.

One you might have missed

Jamie Taylor of Dublin City University and the CoEx|Lab made the case for evidence-informed as opposed to evidence-based practice.

He enlisted the help of students from DCU’s online doctorate and MSc programmes, which are aimed specifically at coaches and practitioners in high performance sport.

One such student is Eilish Ward, the Head of Player Development at the Ladies Gaelic Football Association.

As she told Taylor, you can’t simply drop research on top of a sports programme. It must be used critically, in conjunction with a coach’s own research, and applied in an informed manner.

“There’s not necessarily one solution,” she said. “There’s no one way to learn anything or to gain experience or expertise.”

The key for Ward in her work is to ensure she and her colleagues are “making as informed decisions as possible when we’re designing learning activities” because “not everything from research may be transferable into a practical environment and, equally, every practical environment is going to be hugely different.”

Read more about DCU’s programmes here.

Quote of the month

“We have to become diplomats, high‑level development people who can manage such diverse groups. Somewhere along the line, we need to start creating those development opportunities for everybody who’s on this call.”

These are the attention-grabbing words of a performance director working in India who spelled out the challenges in talent identification and development.

He and a host of LPI members listed five of the most common trends (and five opportunities) in that space.

Good to know

Organisational values should be your carrot, not your stick.

That’s according to Emma Keith, a Royal Air Force Group Captain, is the Commandant of the Tedder Academy of Leadership at the RAF. In 2015 she became the first woman to run RAF Officer Training.

In her appearance at the 2025 Leaders Sport Performance Summit in London, she spoke about how the RAF’s values, all contained within the prosaically titled Air Publication One document, had been used to browbeat good people.

“Actually 99% of my organisation are amazing, they really are, and I wanted a document that was aspirational for them, that they could believe in, that it was the organisation they wanted to be a part of. And we know from all the different behavioural models of change that it only happens when people want to change, not because it’s been forced on them.”

Again, the focus was learning strategies in an inspiring presentation.

The RAF’s Emma Keith onstage at the 2025 Leaders Sport Performance Summit in London. (Leaders)

What’s coming up for members

Virtual Learning

By Paul Ford MBE

As Team GB prepares to deliver a successful Winter Olympics in Milano Cortina, the British Olympic Association also has a firm focus on the future.

We have long since secured Stanford University as our main team preparation base for Los Angeles 2028. We did the groundwork starting in 2023, and planning is well underway with our sports to do warm weather camps there this year. Likewise, we are on the cusp of announcing our in-competition High Performance Centre in LA to support us at Games-time as well.

We believe that securing the best multi-sport facilities is an essential component of helping British Olympians to perform at their best, as I hope to explain below. And its importance is why we’re already underway on Brisbane 2032!

Creating a home from home

Much has been written and said about British athletes enjoying their tea, baked beans and tomato ketchup in Rio de Janeiro, Tokyo and Paris outside of the Olympic Village bubble within our Team GB exclusive Preparation Camp and in-competition High Performance Centres, but there is a clear performance benefit in having access to these bare necessities.

The media understandably focus on those elements because it forges a connection between the athletes and the public they represent. These may be highly skilled performers, but they are regular human beings too; and if people feel safe, happy and comfortable, they tend to perform better when it matters most. Support staff just as much as the athletes. Everyone on our team has a role to play, and we need them to all perform their best.

It dawned on us ahead of the 2012 London Games, where we, as hosts, were afforded a huge opportunity, but equally given a broader challenge too. We took 541 athletes, which was approximately two-thirds more than we would normally take. We had to find a way of uniting this extended team above and beyond what we would normally do.

One element is our belief that all our athletes and sports come together as ‘One Team GB’ (which conceptually we’ll explore in the second article). Another element is more structural: we needed to find a space where we could be exclusively just who we were: Team GB. Extending our normal multi-sport pre-Games Preparation Camp at Loughborough University was one thing, but we needed an exclusive in-competition hub as well beyond just our residential space in the Olympic Village during competition.

It is still largely unknown that we were able to build our own hub within the London Olympic Village (very much a host nation benefit) as we traded off space for our full bed allocation within the main accommodation blocks. So while we were able to pull strings with the Organising Committee (as all host nations do) when we finished in London we looked and thought: ‘it’s not home advantage necessarily, we just need to be more creative’.

It provoked a question: how do we create an optimal physical way of uniting the team within the Games environment? Part of it was using our Olympic Village residential space smarter. But you can’t expect this of the local organising committee to do on our behalf, since their brief is so vast. Instead, we decided to take it out of their hands. And for each of the subsequent Summer Olympics we have found an out-of-village space exclusively for our use.

The benefits are significant. When athletes arrive in the Olympic Village, they are greeted by chaos. With all those different nations in the same place at the same time, it is not conducive to rest and relaxation. Our in-competition High-Performance Centres in Rio, Tokyo and Paris provided a stress valve; a haven that removed British athletes from the chaos and the noise. Our ‘Performance Lodge’.

At each of those games we set up the Performance Lodge in local schools, near the Village. These are multi-purpose spaces that no-one is using in the periods in with the Games take place, as it’s the summer holidays. We can effectively go in and do a ‘DIY SOS’ for 72 hours and flip around several classrooms into, say, medical spaces, lounges or meeting areas for family and friends; we can build boxing rings in their sports gymnasium; we can install our own catering services for the team. It creates an in-competition environment to support performance readiness for GBR athletes and staff only. It complements and cultivates the team feel and supports optimal recovery & regeneration at the same time.

Nothing left to chance

We go by the name British Olympic Association most of the time as the National Olympic Committee for Great Britain & Northern Ireland, but when it comes to competition we flip into Team GB mode.

We know our place in the congested British sporting landscape: we are solely concerned with delivering the team to the Games. We try to take the other stakeholders on a journey, including the National Governing Bodies, UK Sport as the funding agency, the UK Sports Institute and home countries sports institutes. To ensure everyone is clear what the plan will be. Crucially, we aim for no surprises at the Games.

We plan and deliver nine Games and Youth Festivals every four years. As illuded to above, whilst we could just plan one at a time, in chronological order, we do it concurrently, as to achieve what we want to we need to work ahead of our competitors.

As mentioned, we have secured Stanford University as our primary preparation base for the 2028 Olympics. We believe this is a massive coup, again, because we’re going to be able to transition our athletes through the nine-hour time zone shift, get over the 12-hour flight fatigue, adapt to the California summer heat, and do final technical training in a world class environment. They’re going to be able to do that in our exclusive controlled bubble and be forged as a united team. Critically, they’ll be comfortable and familiar by the time they go into the Olympic Village with being around each other from other sports, which only happens once every four years. For many this, if not planned for, can be a massive derailer, a shock to the system, and scupper performance.

But for us to have confidence in that Preparation Camp, we must test it. We must run that Camp environment multiple times as best we can beforehand because we’re working with a university that has never hosted an Olympic team before and new hotels who have never had such an array of requirements. The Camp alone in 2028 will be a five-week performance operation. We’ll have individual sports go there this summer, and in 2027 where we’ll run a bespoke multisport camp too. We don’t leave anything to chance. We simulate and test. Hopefully we flush out as many things that could go wrong as possible. The east coast of Australia will get the same treatment ahead of 2032.

‘The most-local non-local team’

Yet things can and do go wrong, which is where our planning and diligent solutions-oriented mindset comes into its own. In Paris, there was, as widely publicised, some challenges with the athlete dining experience in the Olympic Village. It’s complicated to cater for ~16,000 people in one dining hall. Local Organising Committees are almost setup to break at points given the enormity of the task they are given. Yet it’s the most important moment for an Olympian to have everything just perfect. That’s where we must be solutions based and see the opportunities, have the Plan B and C ready. So, in Paris, when this became tricky, rather than just moaning and complaining, we went into action, and that’s where our Plan B came in. We worked with the affected sports and transported athletes to our Performance Lodge and double our services covers to supplement the affected athletes performance nutrition to aid recovery. It came at a significant additional cost to us, but we had to do it.

Though not the same issues, this was not a first. There is always a curve ball at a Games. And truth be told we like it. As we have always thrived in adversity and used it as a performance opportunity. In Tokyo, the obvious one, we had to manage the pandemic and layered COVID complications at the Games. It remains a point of pride that we were the only ‘big’ nation to get every athlete who travelled to the Games to make the start line of their event, and to perform. The results spoke for themselves.

As an example, there were restrictions on numbers in the Olympic Village, and a limitation on how early teams could bring athletes into the Olympic Village. For nations travelling across multiple time zones, from climates not like the intense heat and humidity of a Japanese summer this was a performance inhibitor. But we did get in early. That’s because of some solid groundwork and efforts with the locals in the years in advance. We achieved special dispensation and were able to bring the Team into country to acclimatise and prepare in our own unique bubble in the city of Yokohama, just south of Tokyo. It gave us, again, a massive performance advantage. It was not by chance (though we couldn’t predict the pandemic obviously), but we achieved this exemption because we had worked so hard in advance to win the hearts and minds of our hosts beforehand. They saw us as their local team.

In 2019, a year before the originally planned Tokyo Games, we held a series of community engagements at our Preparation Camp base in Yokohama, to test things, and connect with the locals. Swimmers Adam Peaty and Duncan Scott, for example, brought their medals from Rio and put them around kids’ necks at an open swim session. That was a ‘money can’t buy moment’. We are incredibly privileged with what we represent and are custodians of the Olympic values. Bringing it to the communities that the Games affect is so important. Yokohama city officials saw and truly felt this, which is why they were so supportive of us still going through the Preparation Camp in 2021, ahead of the rescheduled COVID Games. That’s not something we had planned for but was a consequence of undertaking that process properly.

Similarly in Rio, we set ourselves a challenge: when Brazil isn’t cheering for Brazil, how can we encourage Brazil to cheer for Team GB? Again, this was off the back of a Home Games and seeing the power of what having loud and enthused crowds could do for our athletes. We approached that in two ways. At our Preparation Camp in Belo Horizonte, one hour north of Rio, we invited local children to Athletics and Rugby 7s training sessions prior to the Games. It built that connection and was reported in the local media. We were seen as ‘the most local non-local team’. We also did a series of community engagements, including sending our boxing, judo and taekwondo athletes into favelas within the greater Rio area. It carried an element of risk, but we had the mindset of this work being the right thing to do. When adversity ensued in Rio as the system creaked during the Olympic Games, the locals supported us with whatever we needed.

And so, wherever Team GB athletes go, whenever they attend an Olympics, we plan, prepare and deliver an all-encompassing home from home model. Everything is centred on the athletes.

Through following the principles above, all the athletes need to do is arrive and execute their best performances when it matters most. The results take care of themselves.

Paul Ford is the Head of Sport at the British Olympic Association. If you would like to speak to Paul, please contact a member of the Leaders Performance Institute team.

By James Thomas

High performance is often discussed in the language of infrastructure, usually referencing world-class facilities, cutting-edge technology, expanding support teams and marginal gains.

These things do matter. But after more than two decades working across Olympic and professional sport, I’ve come to believe that high performance is fundamentally an environmental challenge, not exclusively a technical one.

We don’t build winning teams or successful athletes by simply stacking programmes on top of talent. We build them by creating environments that consistently allow people to do their best work, make good decisions under pressure, and grow over time. When environments are working, performance becomes more repeatable, more resilient and ultimately more sustainable.

Whether it’s the four-year Olympic focus or the daily spotlight on professional sports. We are operating under constant scrutiny. The margins between competitors are small, the pressure is relentless, and the temptation to chase quick fixes is ever present. In that context, leaders are often drawn towards visible interventions, new structures, new roles, new technology (I know I have been), but the organisations that thrive over time are not those with the most impressive facilities or the biggest performance teams. They are those that are deliberate, consistent and disciplined about the environment they are continually trying to create, especially when results fluctuate.

Lessons from the boxing ring

One of the most formative experiences of my career came during my time as a performance director in Olympic boxing, in the build-up to and during the London 2012 Games.

Many of our world class boxers developed and trained in local boxing gyms, cramped spaces, ageing equipment, minimal to no recovery provision and little separation between training, admin and daily life. These were not purpose-built high-performance centres. They were community gyms, often operating with limited budgets and shared resources.

Yet within those walls, Olympic and world champions were forged.

What struck me most was not what those environments lacked, but what they possessed in abundance. There was deep trust between coaches and athletes. There was absolute clarity around standards and an expectation to commit. And there was a shared belief in the work being done, even when conditions were far from ideal.

That experience challenged a common assumption in high-performance sport; that performance requires elite surroundings. It reinforced a lesson I’ve returned to repeatedly across different sports and systems: facilities and equipment are only part of the environment. People, behaviours and belief are the real performance differentiators.

Boxing also exposes a truth that can sometimes become diluted in team sports: the individual performer has ultimate accountability for their career and performance.

On competition day, a boxer steps into the ring alone. There are no substitutions, no tactical timeouts and no teammates to absorb pressure. Preparation, decision-making and performance are owned entirely by the athlete. That reality creates a powerful mindset.

In the most effective boxing environments I worked in, athletes did not outsource responsibility to coaches, support staff or systems. They understood that support existed to enable performance, not to carry it. Behind each boxer sat a committed group of coaches, physios and performance practitioners, but the roles were clear. The system provided expertise, challenge, support and yes, at the highest level, impressive facilities. But responsibility for improvement always remained with the athlete.

This ownership created cultures where preparation was a non-negotiable, excuses given no airtime and standards were self-imposed rather than enforced. Accountability was not contractual; it was woven into its culture.

While boxing is an individual sport, this principle has resonated with me and translates directly into team environments, particularly in modern professional sport, where complexity is the norm.

From the boxing ring to the crease

In my current role as Performance Director in professional cricket, players operate across multiple formats within a condensed competitive window. From April to October, athletes move between the tactical patience of red-ball cricket, the intensity and speed of T20, and the unique demands of short-form franchise competition, both domestically and internationally.

Cricket is a team sport, but performance within it is highly individualised. Players are often selected for specific skillsets. Some are chosen for endurance and control, others for explosive impact. Some anchor innings, others finish them. Some lead with the ball, whilst others support in the field.

What underpins successful teams across formats is not uniformity, but clarity of individual responsibility within a collective framework. Team performance does not replace individual accountability; it depends on it.

The most effective environments make it clear why each player is selected, what excellence looks like in their role, and how their performance enables others. When players understand their contribution to the collective, alignment improves, decision-making accelerates, and pressure becomes more manageable. Easy to say, but this is hard to get right consistently, especially we often have large squads of players, all looking for 1^st team selection. Individual Player Development Plans (IDPs) have been a useful tool to frame season and multi-year goals and how selection decisions can be woven into the discussions, that would otherwise be difficult to frame in a progressive manner.

Creating the space where performance can thrive

One of the most common traps in high-performance team sport is mistaking intensity for effectiveness. I have seen this a lot across all the sporting environments I have worked in. Long hours, relentless training loads and constant meetings can create an illusion of commitment. But without alignment, they often produce fatigue rather than progress. Effort becomes noise rather than momentum and time away from the environment, whether that’s for rest or self-development can be viewed as falling short. I’m calling this out!

Strong environments focus relentlessly on alignment. They establish a shared performance language. Coaching, data and performance teams work from the same principles. And leaders are clear about what the organisation is optimising for at any given moment.

When alignment is strong, intensity becomes purposeful. When it isn’t, that intensity becomes exhausting and I’d suggest the high levels of burnout we are commonly seeing in our system is in part down to this.

The environments that consistently outperform are those where honest conversations are encouraged, mistakes are reviewed and owned, with feedback flowing in all directions. Psychological safety is often talked about and often debated, but for me, this does not mean lowering standards or avoiding difficult conversations. In fact, it enables those conversations to happen earlier and more productively.

‘No spark without friction’ is a phrase I am always drawn to and I think it’s highly relevant in this context.

When I think of environments I have been part of, that have enabled this openness and safety, it has often come from understanding the players and staff in a more meaningful way. Learning about people, their goals, their strengths and areas for development can often help with those difficult conversations and decisions.

Why environment is a leadership choice, not a cultural outcome

Leaders set the tone here. How they respond to bad news, selection tension or performance dips sends a powerful signal about what the environment truly values.

We are also living through an unprecedented expansion of data, analytics and technology in sport. Used well, these tools enhance decision-making. Used poorly, they overwhelm and it starts and ends with the people using those tools.

High-performance environments succeed when data clarifies rather than complicates decisions, supports coaching judgement rather than replacing it, and is translated into simple, actionable insight. The most effective systems invest as much in people and interpretation as they do in platforms and tools.

If high performance is an environment rather than a programme, leadership attention must shift accordingly. The question is no longer “What initiatives should we launch?” but “What conditions must we consistently create?”

Final reflections: build what outlasts you

From my experience across Olympic and professional sport, leaders who build sustainable high-performance environments focus on four priorities.

First, they set a clear long-term performance direction. Ambition without direction creates noise. Leaders must articulate what the organisation is trying to become, what type of performers and people it wants to develop, and how success will be defined beyond short-term results.

Second, they are explicit about the environment they are creating. Every organisation has an environment, whether intentional or accidental. High-performing leaders are deliberate about behaviours, standards and expectations. Culture does not need to be complicated, but it must be visible and consistently reinforced.

Third, they obsess over daily performance habits. Performance is built in small, repeatable behaviours, quality of preparation, clarity of communication, ownership of recovery and willingness to review and adapt. What leaders notice and reinforce signals what truly matters.

Finally, they recruit people who take responsibility and can grow. People are the environment. The strongest systems are built by individuals who take ownership of their impact, are open to developing their technical and leadership skills, and understand how their role contributes to a collective effort.

Across Olympic gyms and professional stadiums, one principle has remained constant for me: high performance improves when clarity of direction, accountability of action and care for people are aligned.

Facilities matter. Data matters. Structure matters. But environments win or lose on the quality of people, the standards they live by and the habits they repeat every day.

High performance is not something leaders should demand. It is something they should enable.

James Thomas is the Performance Director at Warwickshire County Cricket Club and one of sport’s leading high performance experts. If you wish to speak to James, please contact a member of the Leaders Performance Institute team.