A lesson learned from cycling, and how it helped my coaching

It was 2007, and I was working in a sports performance and physiotherapy centre in Dublin’s city centre. The clinic I was with had just secured a new contract with a group of Paralympic cyclists. The owner of the facility was a keen cyclist himself, so the partnership was an exciting and natural fit for all of us.

At the time, I had mostly been working with general population clients, so the opportunity to start learning about training actual athletes was hugely exciting. One cyclist in particular stood out—he was preparing for a track cycling event in a velodrome, though the exact distance escapes me now. He had previously retired from rugby and was now embarking on a new chapter in his athletic career. He’d already shown real promise, finishing somewhere in the top ten at a previous event.

When we landed the contract, the owner of the clinic called a short meeting with the full coaching team: the track coach, the strength and conditioning coach, the sports psychologist, and myself—a complete intern at the time, just eager to soak up anything I could.

That meeting has stuck with me ever since. It taught me one of the most powerful lessons I’ve ever learned in sport—and that’s what I want to share now.

The owner wrote the cyclist’s current best time on the whiteboard—the one that had earned him a respectable 12th place in his first event.

He proceeded to ask the cyclist a series of rapid-fire questions:
“Do you have an aero helmet?”
The cyclist replied, “No.”
“Okay, that’s a couple of tenths of a second right there.”
“Do you have an aerodynamic arm position?”
“No.”
“Do you have the best aero wheels?”
Again, “No.”
The head coach nodded. “That’s another few tenths.”

He went on—asking whether the cyclist had a nutritionist, a PowerTap (a tool to measure watts on the bike), an aero frame, and a host of other things that, in my mind at least, would undoubtedly shave time off his performance in the velodrome.

As a kind of fun (but telling) exercise, he started assigning theoretical tenths of a second off the cyclist’s time for each of these missing elements. By the end of the exercise, on paper at least, the cyclist was set to break the world record.

The entire meeting lasted no more than 40 minutes, and I doubt anyone else in that room even remembers it. But it has always stuck with me. That’s still how I try to approach coaching a team when I first get involved.

Of course, in team sports, it’s never quite that simple. But I still find myself asking similar questions:
“Do we have proper S&C?”
“Do we arrive to training on time and ready to go?”
“Are we coachable? Do we respect the coaching staff?”
“Do we have a great physio to keep our players on the field?”

And then there are a thousand other things—what Clive Woodward once called ‘critical non-essentials’—that can make the difference.

To this day, I still run that same exercise with any assistants I work with—or with head coaches who are open to the process (and not all are).

It can be a hugely powerful tool, often revealing big holes in the bucket that we might not have noticed otherwise.

I recently did this with my school’s rugby team. We ended up with a long list of things to amend and refine—and that work is still ongoing—but the exercise gave me real clarity on how to approach it.

That short meeting in 2008 probably meant little to most of the people in the room. But for me, it was a turning point—a moment that shaped how I see performance, coaching, and progress. It reminded me that success isn't always about massive changes or talent alone. Sometimes, it’s about consistently shaving off tenths—identifying the overlooked, refining the small things, and when the big things are sorted, stacking the marginal gains. And whether I’m coaching elite athletes or school teams, that mindset stays with me. The smallest details, when added up, can make all the difference.

Coach Hare