Summary

The conversation delves into the intricate logistics involved in organising a cycling race, particularly a Grand Tour, highlighting the challenges of managing teams and maintaining motivation in a high-performance environment. Through the lense of a Sports Director / Directeur Sportif. In this case, Matt Wilson, who was the Directeur Sportif for Orica Green Edge from 2013/14 - 2020.

Takeaways

Cycling races involve complex logistics with multiple vehicles and staff. Managing a cycling team requires keeping everyone motivated and happy. Creating a cohesive vision among diverse teams is crucial for success. The environment in cycling is high-pressure and requires effective management. Logistics in cycling are more complicated than in many other sports. Team dynamics play a significant role in achieving performance goals. Each race involves staying in different hotels every night. The number of people involved in a cycling race is substantial. Maintaining a positive atmosphere is essential for team performance. The challenges of cycling logistics are often underestimated.

Transcript:

Cam Nicholls (00:00.056) Welcome back to the RCA podcast where today I am joined by Matt Wilson and Matt's a neighbour of mine and he's also co-founded the Pro Velo Super League which we just talked about in the previous podcast. If you want to hear about that, go back and listen to the last podcast. But Matt, which we didn't talk about in the last podcast, also has quite an illustrious, is that the word, cycling career and spent a lot of time as a pro and also as a DS, a director sportif. And as I'm...

just starting to get a flavor for what's involved. Not that I'm doing the DS role myself, that's Ryan Thomas, the head coach at the RCA, but I'm hearing about all the things he's doing. I'm like, wow, there's a lot of work here. And Matt, you spent eight years as one. thought, why don't we just spend half an hour here or 20 minutes or half an hour. I'm just gonna take chatting about what does a DS actually do? Because you kind of watch unchained documentary, which a lot of people would have watched, and you see this guy in the car yelling at the riders. it's like, is...

Is that all they do? Just tell them to ride faster. Which is clearly not the case, but I think a lot of people obviously don't have an idea and I'm curious myself to learn. But before we go into that, I do need to ask you a pretty hard hitting question here. And that is, you rode pro for a number of years. You won the Sun Tour, Australian road champion, you rode tour to France, know, top 10 at the TDU. Why do you never come to the famous Noosa Tuesday World Champs? Never seen you there. What's going on?

I have done it just before your time. really? Sprint for the blue letterbox?

Okay. Exactly. Yeah. Now it's the red letter box. Someone painted it a different color and you can't, it can't be changed on Strava. It's still the blue letter box.

Matt Wilson (01:40.194) Yeah, right. No, no, I did it back in the day. But yeah, no, not in recent history.

You just don't ride anymore, is you?

I do but I'm just so busy and I sort of you know if I do ride it's 45 minutes down to Parisian and I turn around and I come back and that's it that's that that's my riding couple days a week. Not even. Two hours a week would be a really good week.

So you're doing two, three hours a week? Oh. Not even?

Cam Nicholls (02:08.032) Right. Do you miss it?

Yeah, I do. I don't miss the professional hours and training as a job, but I miss being fit. I miss going out with the guys. I guess that single-minded focus of just all I have to worry about today is just a six hour ride and getting home smashed and just sitting in the couch and recovering and that kind of simple life.

is still attractive now and you're working sort of 10, 12 hours a day and got three kids and juggling, you know, regular life stuff that people have to have to deal with. But, know, as an athlete, you don't.

Yeah, okay. So you don't have any appetite to get fit enough to come do the World Champs on a Tuesday. It'd be great to see you there. Anyway, sorry. This podcast isn't about the World Champs, but it's become quite a well-known ride because I've made a lot of content on it and there's another content creator who's done a bit of content on it and yeah, gets quite a few people there now. They broke the record the other day actually. Really? Well, there was...

How many guys to get?

Cam Nicholls (03:14.254) There was one guy that rocked up on a TT bike with his sperm helmet and his disc wheel and he was the one that basically did it. But it's funny, like the day that happened, the whole bunch was with him. About 30 minutes prior, a whole bunch of professional triathletes went out and did the same course with six TT bikes and they went and smashed it as well. So it got smashed twice. It had been a record for like seven years and it got beaten twice in one day. yeah.

Alright.

Cam Nicholls (03:43.182) Your role as a DS, you were with Orica and you're a DS there from 2014 was it? To 2020-ish?

Yes. Yeah. If my numbers are right. Yeah. I signed a contract when Green Edge Cycling started, Orica Green Edge, was one year sports director, sorry, one year rider, two years sports director. So I did the first year of the team, which I think was 2013, And stepped into the car. Actually at the end of 2013, I switched. So my last race was Hamburg Classic. And then the next race was the Vuelta and I was a director at the Vuelta.

Yeah, okay. So as a pro rider, how long were you a pro rider for exactly?

10 or 11 years.

10 or 11 years. So you obviously exposed to the direct to sportive role during that time, you know, quite intimately. What was it about being a rider and seeing that role that made it appealing for you when you retired from being a professional cyclist?

Matt Wilson (04:46.54) It was never appealing for the vast majority of my career. The vast majority of my career. Yeah. Look, last, probably the last three or four years of my career, I started to take on a more leadership role on the road and started to become that road captain. And as that started to form, I started to feel like that might be somewhere that I'm going to move into. I didn't have a clear idea of what I wanted to do when I retired around that time.

Ruh!

Something changed though along the way, obviously.

Matt Wilson (05:15.446) So as that started to become more obvious that that was where I was going to go. And I actually, the year I signed with Orica Green Edge, I had offers from other teams as sports director as well. So that was clearly where people saw me going. And that was where I saw myself going and just sort of grew into it. at that time, believed that sitting in the car, like you said, yelling on the radio and doing the team meetings in the bus was all you saw.

You you thought that was the whole job, but essentially that's the tip of the iceberg sticking out the water, you know, and when you go underneath the water, the mountain of ice is really below and that's what all the work is. What you see at the top there, that's the fun part. Right. Getting in the car.

So even like the layman sitting over here watching Unchained and seeing the DS in the bus talking about the race before the race happens and then yelling in the team car, that's almost what you only saw as well as or thought as a rider as well. Sure.

Absolutely. Absolutely. You know, especially as an athlete, you've got tunnel vision. You see what you see in the world that you have and you think that's the world. And then when you get, when you retire, the blink has come off and you see what the real world really is.

It makes a lot of sense. So maybe you could tell me, I don't know, you know, we could probably talk for hours, but is there like five, 10, know, even 15, whatever it is, like critical things you do as a DS? If you had to break down, like what are the top things you have to do in a list of five to 10? Perhaps things that people, you know, outside of yelling on the team radio and talking in the bus before the riders race, like what are you actually doing?

Matt Wilson (06:59.982) Look, a good DS is a logistics guru. Right, okay. So you need to be able to work with multiple teams, 20, 30 staff, eight riders and bring that whole group together in an efficient way.

When you say teams, mean like teams within your team.

Teams within the team. You've got your sporting department. You've got your high performance department. You've got your mechanics. You've got your soigneurs. You've got your management group and trying to bring all that together. And, and, know, on a cycling race, especially a grand tour, you're talking about the three week map of, you know, insanity. You've got, you've got two buses, you've got two trucks. You've got, you know, maybe a dozen cars, a couple of vans, a food truck.

And you're staying in a different hotel every night. Like I said, with a staff of 38 riders, it's complicated, very, very complicated logistics, more than most events. that's one part of the puzzle, which is really difficult. Keeping those teams happy, keeping those teams motivated, keeping those teams on point, those teams within the teams that I just mentioned, and bringing them all together to one vision, one cohesive vision, which is trying to get

whatever result it is you're trying to get and achieve and bring that through in a happy environment, high performance environment is incredibly difficult because you're talking about a lot of different personalities, a lot of different personalities. So, and as a sports director, you're the leader of that group, of that team going to those races. So that's very difficult. Then you've got the tactical, the race tactical side.

Matt Wilson (08:46.7) So understanding what's going on in the race, where are the opportunities? What are the other teams going to do today? How can we capitalize on those? What's going to help our position? What's going to help our result? Working with those riders and understanding that you've got eight individuals who've probably got individual capacity to win or desires to win motivations, what motivates those riders and trying to bring them together in a team to for one.

in most cases for one or two riders to get a result. So balancing all of their ambitions and balancing it in a way that it creates a high performance environment is incredibly difficult. So they're kind of the main things that you're juggling at all times.

So, and just if we can double down on that one because I find that one really interesting. Do you like going into a grand tour, you obviously have a strategy, but then I'm assuming things change very dramatically and can change very quickly. How do you, what are your tactics to deal with?

you know those situations do you have before you go into a grant or do you have a plan B and a plan C and a plan D if someone has a crash or somebody does something wrong like how does how does that look

Yeah, look, mean, every director's different. You know, I've come through and seen directors that I've worked with as a writer and directors that I've worked with as a director. And everyone's got different style. And you can have very authoritarian directors, which is I've got one plan. Everyone does what I want. If they don't do what I want, you're out. It's a very hard lined, immobile...

Matt Wilson (10:36.974) and direct. So, you know, what me, myself, I was probably the complete opposite. So I was very open to, to feedback from riders, very open to ideas from riders. At the end of the day, the ride is the one that's on the road that sees everything. you know, when I was a captain at a bike race, I know the level of what was going on in the bunch because I was there and I remember what it was like and I knew what to do.

at all times because you had all the information. You knew which way the wind was coming from. You know who'd been on the front. You know who was going well, who wasn't going well. You knew if you were going to get that break back or not. You knew everything because you had all the information in the race. As a sports director, you're 20, 30 cars back, maybe with some sketchy vision if you're lucky. And you've got riders that you can barely hear on the radio. And you've got a radio tour coming back to you with time gaps.

like a little detective back there trying to figure it all out. And it's gotten better since I've retired because I speak to a lot of sports directors now with the technology they use to gather that information. essentially, you're trying to make decisions as best you can. if the plan changes, or from my side anyway, if the plan changes, I speak to the riders in the race, what are they doing? What are they going on? What do you think?

And then you sit down and you work through, you know, is that right? Are trying to tell you something for their own benefit? Cause you get a lot of personalities like that. So you got to wade through the information a little bit. but I try and make the best information I could and, and, and make a plan, but you need to be able to pivot. need to be able to change. nowadays the racing seems a lot less structured than it used to be. It seems like they can attack at any point.

pit they happy just to throw a carton of eggs against the wall and just see what happens. Where back in my day it was much more, know, if you had tact you had a plan why you were attacking. I don't know.

Cam Nicholls (12:44.078) Oh, so now it's way more unpredictable. Way more unpredictable. Really interesting. And you can't put your finger on as to why?

I don't know why, but it's a, this no plan is now plan kind of plan seems to be, it seems to be the norm, which is, which should be terribly hard as a sports director nowadays to navigate.

Yeah, interesting. I interviewed a Swiss rider, his name's eluding me at the moment. He raced for 17 year pro, Mickey Shaw. Mickey Shaw, there we go. In 2022, I think I interviewed him, the year before he retired. he was, because he'd been racing for 17 years. And he was saying to me that in his time, what he'd noticed with racing is, you you'd have races where it was kind of like, you know,

like Tour Down Under was just more of a warm-up race for the year. And these were more warm-up races and these were more serious races. And over the years, particularly in the last few years, he said at the time that he felt like every race had become full gas and full on, like there was no more easier races. So I don't know if that plays into what you're saying, but that was an interesting anecdote from him, I thought.

No, mean, like the money's gone up incredibly. The coverage with it, the sports science has gone up. think the experience of the bunch as a whole has gone down. So if you think about it, back in my day, you'd be amateur for three or four years minimum. And in that time, you'd do 80 to 100 days of racing a year as an amateur.

Matt Wilson (14:28.108) And then you would turn professional and you turn professional and you'd have two years on minimum wage and you wouldn't get a chance to win anything. You did, you did a job every day and then you slowly started to develop and you got leadership opportunities and your career sort of went on from there. So by the time you were professional, especially by the time you're professional in racing at the front of the bunch, you had done four or 500 days of racing at a high level. So you were experienced.

And what age would you typically be? Like after 25?

Yeah. You're probably turning pro at 22, 23 was early. Yeah. Okay. So a lot of guys, I was 24 when I turned professional. So you could, you could sign a lot later. So the average experience in the bunch was a lot higher where now there's kids turning professional at 18 years of age, 17 years of age. They've done 20 races as an amateur, as a junior. training has gone to another level.

So they are physically strong. can put out as much power, know, more power than we ever could. At that age. The high performance side has gone up hugely. So you've got these huge engines with no experience thrown into a situation where they're racing, racing for sheep stations at every race. so there are no, so bunches become a lot sketchier.

That's interesting. I'd never thought of that.

Matt Wilson (15:57.698) Yeah, and the racing style has just become a lot more out of control.

Yeah, there you go. So going back to the DS, so obviously there's a lot to manage. There's a lot of moving parts, a lot of logistics, as you said. If we break down a year, like what would a typical year look like? Because I look at professional riders and they seem to target specific races and then they may not race at certain races, they might go into training and they may come home or whatever. But I look at the...

the team infrastructure that sits behind the riders, including the DS, are you just away all year? Do you ever come home? Are you just on from the time the TDU hits till whenever the last race of the year is late October or whatever? Is it just constant mayhem? What does the year look like for a DS?

Yeah, look, I mean, it depends what your specific DS role is. you know, traditionally there'd be a head DS, which would be in charge of signing riders and, you know, building the team for the next season, planning out the races, planning out which riders will do which races, individual performance plans for each rider. And so that sort of role.

Which was your role?

Matt Wilson (17:15.018) No, I've never had DS. Okay. No. So if I talk about what my role would have been, and it's hard to sort of say when the season starts, but let's just say it starts in December of the year before. Normally you'd run a training camp sometime in that early season with the whole new team, get them in. And at that stage it's probably less about the training and more about team building and getting together. Obviously it's the training as well.

But sitting down with each rider and mapping out the year. Saying, you know, what went wrong last year? What are we going to focus on for next year? What's your personal goals? What's the team goals? This is what your program is going to look like, roughly. You normally map out at least until the Giro. So you knew for sure what that early season looks like and then sort of have an idea with the middle season what it's probably going to look like and then the back end just wait.

injuries, illnesses, everything changes sort of in that back end of the year. having a sit down with each one of those riders and just mapping out that whole thing, giving them the time to unload on what they really want. And you'd sit down and be all the directors, you'd have the head coach, you'd have different people from the high performance team all there sort of chiming in. So they'll get a really good idea of where that rider's at.

Do those conversations always go well? I can imagine there might be bit of pushback. Yeah, but obviously you're dealing with a of personality. So do you often get pushback? Like people leave those meetings and they're frustrated because they want more out of their year versus what's been articulated from say you and the wider team? Yeah. So how do you deal with

It really depends on the writer.

Matt Wilson (18:56.13) Yeah, sometimes. Yeah. It really, it depends. Some writers can be, can walk in there, you know, full of, full of themselves. They're going to do this. They want to do that. they, they've surrounded themselves with people that have been telling them that. And they, and they believe they're at a different level to what, you know, we believe they're at. And that's difficult. Of course. Yeah. That's a really difficult conversation.

Been telling him that.

Matt Wilson (19:21.922) And there's some writers that come in and I can remember Simon Gerens as an example of this. And, you know, we had done 20 writers over the past three or four days and a lot of them come in and they're very timid because they're a bit afraid of where they're going to be sitting and what we're going to say. you know, because they're not confident in what they've done over the last couple of years. So we're kind of used to that going through. And then we got Simon Gerens and he came in and

We sort of started the meeting and we're talking about how we can improve and what's happened in this season, blah, blah, blah, all that sort of stuff. And then he's basically said, you know, are you finished? And we're like, yep. And he goes, all right, well, this is where you guys can improve. And he went down and he spent half an hour going through all these things from a team side that's bad, that needs to improve. And because at the time he had such a standing, like he was still, he was 30 years old, I think at that point, but still getting better.

Take

and winning more races and he'd been the linchpin of the team, you know, for those first three years, especially. Right. And he had, and he, and he, I remember a few jaws hit the floor and you've walked out and we all looked at each other and went, wow, that was pretty cool.

So he had a rot to be out here.

Cam Nicholls (20:37.536) So it was a good constructive conversation then? Yeah!

Yeah, just to see a rider coming in prepared with the intelligence and the right to go, this is how you can help me. This is how we can get results together. This how you guys need to improve. It really called out a lot of things in the team. So that was a pretty cool moment.

The level head.

Cam Nicholls (21:01.89) Yeah, okay. And the things that were brought to the table, were they implemented and did it cease? Absolutely. Yeah, and was it success from that? Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, yeah. No, made everyone sort of check yourself and go, well, let's just be patting ourselves on the back about how well everything's going and yeah, let's try and improve. So it was good.

So you have this meeting at the start of the year and then what flows on from there?

Yeah, so then there'll be, during that training camp, do biomechanical stuff and measuring up on clothes. be lots of media stuff that you're doing around that. And then we'll move into a planning phase. So basically planning out logistically how everything's going to work through that early part of the season. Speaking to staff, speaking to the mechanics, and then you hit the ground with the first events. For me, was always the summer of cycling in Australia.

You had national championships, Tour de Nanda, all of those races. Generally, part of the team would split then off to the Middle East, part would go back to Europe. So for me, I'd be in Australia from basically November, December through January, and then head back to Europe early February. And the season would basically run like you would as a rider. So you'd be going home, going back to races.

Matt Wilson (22:26.67) But the difference was rather than going home and training and resting and preparing for the next race, you go back and you'd be planning. So creating race reports, individual rider reports, sending feedback to all the riders on their past race, then planning out the next race, what are the stages like, what's our opportunities going to be, build out a race plan, build out individual race plans as well.

talk to the staff about logistics, how that was going to work and then yeah just move into that next race.

Are you on all the time? do have like when you come back and you have a weekend to just to, you know, chill out and you don't look like the kind of guy that's going to chill out on a weekend. You look like you're always on like me, but you know, can you do that as a DS or you just always, because obviously riders are going to communicate with you probably on the weekend. And you know, this is probably always, I could just envisage there would always be stuff happening.

Yeah, no, the whole weekend thing, didn't really get until I sort of shifted to Australia based businesses. Okay. Where there's this focus on weekends, but you know, when you're cycling, is no weekend. And look, it was busy as a director. I would never say there was complete days off. You're always on call. You're always picking up a phone. You're always on email doing something.

Yeah

Matt Wilson (23:50.35) But there was still plenty of downtime in between races. So, and the difference between as a writer and as a director, as a writer, you couldn't really relax at all because you had to be focused on your diet. You obviously so focused on your performance. So that was always sort of hanging over your head where as a sports director, you've got a few hours a day of solid work that you can put into planning.

But you know you're going to have the afternoon free and you can go and have a few drinks and you might have to pick up the phone or something. there's a life balance in between as a sports director.

Yeah, okay. Calendar year, how long, how many days would you typically be away from Australia when you were a TS?

I probably do three, four to six week blocks a year in Europe. But then obviously doing time away in Australia and Asia as well. It wouldn't just be Europe. mean, generally you'd probably do away from home 120, 140 days a year.

Okay. Does that, do you miss that? Or?

Matt Wilson (24:56.274) Sometimes. Interesting. Yeah. I miss the travel. I don't mind traveling. I don't mind living out of a suitcase. I've got three kids and life's pretty hectic at home. So now it pretty exciting to go away for a week now. But I'd never go back. I'd never go back and do it. When COVID hit, became too impossible for me to just go head overseas anymore.

Bye.

Matt Wilson (25:24.11) I was living in Australia for the last sort of three, four years I was a director and just doing trips back and forth. And that was manageable. But you know, when COVID hit, I couldn't do three months in Europe without seeing the family. It's just too long.

Makes sense. eight years doing this role, like what's your fondest memory? The time Simon Gerrans came in and told you how it is.

Look, I've got a lot of great ones. guess the year Matt Heyman won Paris Roubaix. Yep. That sticks out in my mind. Why is that? He's a guy, you know, we're similar age. I think we're a year apart. So we had a whole cycling career together as riders. And then he came onto Green Edge when I was a sports director and we both loved the classics and I knew how much he loved Paris Roubaix. And I knew him well enough to know

what the problems were with him not winning it. He always put a lot of pressure on himself. He always overthought everything. He knew every cobblestone, every corner of that race. It was unbelievable, the recall that he had of everything that had ever gone wrong and every paribas he'd ever seen, everyone that he'd ever done. I guess he saw all the problems all the time rather than just letting it go and racing. That year that he won, he

broke his arm or his collarbone. Yeah. So I was sports director at the classics there and he broke his arm at, think it was Het Falk. Was it Het Falk? Yeah. can't remember. But he basically had six weeks off the bike through the whole classics period. he didn't have six weeks off the road, I should say. Yeah. He was on the bike. He's in the home training and doing Zwift and had a pretty

Cam Nicholls (26:50.67) So what were you doing in the urea blimey in the car? yeah, okay

Cam Nicholls (27:08.066) He was on the trino, wasn't he?

Matt Wilson (27:17.132) comprehensive program. And we knew it was happening. He was telling us the whole time that he hadn't really had any time off and he was on the home trainer. But everything we knew about cycling was you had to do the classics and you had to do all the classics. These are 250 to 300 kilometer long races. You have to condition yourself. You have to do this length. And you build up through Milan-San Remo and then you do Tour of Flanders and get Wavilgem and then eventually you do Paris-Roubaix. And that's the program.

condition you

Matt Wilson (27:46.392) So he didn't get back on the road until a week before Paris-Roubaix. Went and did a little Spanish race and went okay. Anyway, he wanted to do Paris-Roubaix, he put his hand up for selection and we almost didn't select him. It was down to the last spot and we're like, it was him or Chris Jorgensen. And Chris Jorgensen had done every classic and finished all of them. So we knew he was going to be good for Paris-Roubaix. But Hayman had the experience. So...

We kind of thought, well, Durbo's going really well. At least Heyman can help him for the first half of the race. So that was the plan. So he only just got in and we thought he'd do half a race. And he turned up and he had, normally he rides different bike, different wheels, different everything, overthinks everything. And he just said, I'm riding my standard bike with standard pressure. I don't want to talk about it. That was it. The mechanics couldn't convince him. said, no, don't talk to me.

Why do you think he had that mindset?

He just went into the whole thing differently for the first time. This is probably his last pair of Rebets. So you've to imagine this guy's done 18 of them.

You thought the pressure was finally off his, he finally took the pressure off his shoulders.

Matt Wilson (28:57.558) Took the pressure off his shoulders and he must've had a realisation that he'd just been overthinking everything. This could be his last rubay and he's just going to do it and have fun. So he just let go of everything. Didn't want to ride any different bikes. Before the race, I saw him sitting there with his feet up on the back of a stool and he was on the phone to his wife and he was just a different person. He was just laughing and having a good time. And we chatted about the race and I sort of said, well, you know,

If the brake hasn't gone after 70 or 80 K, just sit on the wheel. It might be worth just going once with the brake and just seeing if you can slip into it. Because if you get up the road, you can get a good buffer and you might be there for turbo, you know, a little bit later than halfway. Who knows? So lo and behold, 80 K in, the brake hadn't gone. He came back to the car. He just chucked his jumper in. He said, I'm going to go with the brake, threw his jumper in and then just went straight up to the front.

and just dove in the break and that was the break that went away. And he just, I get goosebumps every time I talk about it, but he just rode the whole race ridiculously. Like everything you shouldn't do, he did. He rode on the front sections. He attacked with 90 K to go. He was riding like a man who was, I don't know, he was so overconfident. It was, it was crazy. And I was

constantly yelling it in the radio, you know, just take it easy, take it easy. You might run top 10 here, you might run top five. And then in the finish, even when he's attacking Boonin with 2k to go, I'm like, what are you attacking? You could run top three here. Like I never gave him the credit of ever winning it. And it wasn't until he hit out with 200 to go. I knew the second he hit out, went, he was always winning this. Like he was the best rider in the race from the start. So.

it.

Matt Wilson (30:50.926) It's just an amazing sporting story at that age to be assessed with one race and to have that moment. And it's all about athletes in the zone. And that's when you have all the experience, you have the fitness and condition and your mind doesn't think anymore. It just acts. When that mind is just taken out of it and you're just acting on instinct and that instinct is at a high level. That's when you're in the zone, when athletes are in the zone. And that one day he was in the zone.

it's pretty cool

Is that like, obviously you would have learned something as a DS from seeing that and witnessing that? that part of the learning for you? when you see a rider in the zone like that in the future, maybe let him off the leash a little bit more or was it something else?

Absolutely. You can't control athletes too much. You you clip their wings. And I learnt that too with young riders. I remember the Yates brothers when they first came on to Green Edge. Yeah, I saw Adam riding through the junction yesterday.

One of them's here at the moment, isn't he?

Cam Nicholls (31:51.95) I saw in the corner of my eye, I'm like, yes, you know, some, some lame I was wearing a pro kit. And then I looked across and I'm like, no, that's actually a pro. And then I found out he was in town.

Yeah. Yeah. But they turned up to that team meeting in December and basically sat down and said, so you're going to put us in a tour de France in the first year? we're going to win stages. Neo-pros from England. But they came out and they were so confident and they achieved, you know, and we didn't clip their wings. We gave them leadership roles. They deserved it and they delivered. know, yeah.

learning that controlling riders and forcing them into what you think they should be and what you think they should be doing can be counterproductive a lot of times and sprinters are the best example of that. Working with sprinters is probably the most challenging area of being a sports director. It's incredibly dynamic, incredibly complicated. There's always a lot of people that can be at fault in a sprint, why the sprinter didn't win and you've got a very delicate

mentality around a sprinter in terms of their confidence and ego, the aggression. They need to be able to respect the team and commit to the team and have trust in the team, but they also need to be able to decide when the team's not going to deliver for them and act on their own. So it's a very, very difficult thing and you need to make sure that you don't try and control that situation too much, I found.

That's interesting. Well, that's a great note to finish on. Thanks for sharing that story. That's yeah, I mean, I knew the Matt Hayman story. I've seen it, but I didn't know some of those intricacies. So that's pretty cool.

Matt Wilson (33:39.288) Yep. Also a local. Buddrum Log...

Yeah, Budram. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Budram Nye, I think he's an ambassador for, I'll be doing in a week's time. So thanks for your time, Matt. Much appreciated. Hope you enjoyed that conversation with Matt Wilson. We'll catch you in the next podcast.

No worries, thanks.