Seb Coe

He would need specialist skills around the table.

Not that those skills weren't, he wasn't capable of delivering himself, but he wanted to be the head coach.

He wanted to create the coaching environment.

And really, I was the first athlete.

I mean, it's now sort of bread and butter.

Everybody talks about the backroom team and the hub and the spokes and all that.

I was really the first athlete to have that.

And he literally went out and recruited the world's best physiologist he could find, the best nutritionists, the best conditioning coaches.

And they all worked in synthesis.

So I had a backroom team of about four or five.

And they were all Americans because at the time, physiology was a rather dull profession.

I'm probably going to upset a few here, but it was a rather dull academic subject that you probably studied at Cambridge, and it was Krebs cycles and all sorts of things.

The Americans were the first to take that science and make it practically applicable to how do you make, yeah, okay, you know that science.

How do you make the boat go quicker?

How do you get more revolutions out of the cycle?

How do you get people to run quicker?

And that I think was the difference.

And a lot of that coaching orthodoxy that is now accepted was very new.

So he, in a way, ripped up the playbook of most of what was being coached before he came on the scene.

And I like to think