The Olympic cycle starts again. It is mid-autumn in the Western Hemisphere and those August nights at the Stade de France are drifting deeper into the memory.
This is the one time in the quadrennial period when things are truly quiet in track and field. Holidays are taken, the recent Games are reviewed and winter training commences.
Last week, Great Britain’s Olympic and Paralympic coaches were hosted at Buckingham Palace. UK Coaching and UK Sport created the event to ensure coaches were recognised for their pivotal support of British athletes and their success over the summer.
That meant Team GB coaches were available to interview, and The Athletic could finally ask a question that formed watching the action in Paris almost three months before: How do you coach Olympians?
The answers come from three individuals with specifically different roles. Great Britain’s athletes were a nominal team but coaches and staff work within their niche and specific events. Certain roles overlap but others never cross paths.
So from three Olympic coaches, here’s how you coach Olympians.
- Marco Airale: Personal coach of an Italy-based training group featuring multiple GB sprinters
- Paula Dunn: Olympic head coach for British Athletics
- Martyn Rooney: British Athletics’ 4x400m coach
Airale views coaching as a Venn diagram, with ‘scientists’ in one circle and ‘artists’ in the other.
“I always defined myself more as a scientist,” says Airale, who reached a respectable level as a multi-eventer in his native Italy but turned to coaching after realising he would never make the Olympics as an athlete. “When I found these top coaches, almost all of them, even if they were inclined to one side or the other, could do both (be a scientist and an artist).”
Self-awareness is a coaching prerequisite. Many coaches (including this trio) have backgrounds as athletes themselves, so there is a conscious effort to ensure they take the positives and learn from the negatives of those coaches who once trained them.
Airale, who set up his Padova-based training group after the Tokyo Olympics in 2021 (they were delayed a year because of the pandemic), pursued a master’s degree in sports coaching to develop his artistry. “We guide the athletes — the training part is probably 30 or 40 per cent,” he says.
“In these three years, I have tried to change, at the last minute, the last rep — the intensity. Then I understood, nothing changed. Even in the last week (before a Championships) we can do nothing. You just need to keep them comfortable.”
Dunn, whose role as Olympic head coach meant she was in charge of picking coaches, had to find a balance between team coaches and personal ones.
“Our sport is all about people, connections,” she says. “I’m generally quite light-hearted. I walk slow, I smile, and I talk to people. That’s the environment I wanted, rather than people feeling stressed and that they’re being watched or someone will criticise them. It’s a difficult balance to create, but we did great in Paris.”
Her main focuses were not overpromising and ensuring people stayed in their lane. “If you’re a team coach, that is your role — you’re not a personal coach,” she says. “You’re not there to start changing, you’re there to support a personal coach to make sure the sessions are delivered the way you want — in that warm-up area, which is critical, making sure nothing changes for the athlete.”
Airale and Rooney, one personal coach and one team coach, are examples of this.
“I make sure I don’t step on their (personal coach) toes,” says Rooney. “I’m supporting them through that process or whatever the coach wants me to say. I’ll let them lead on things and if the coach can’t access the athlete, then I’ll just relay that information.”
Importantly, most athletes qualify for the Olympics by finishing in the top two at their country’s national championships, which take place around a month before the Games. For most of the Olympic cycle, team coaches don’t know who they will work with on the big stage.
“It’s being in regular communication with the athletes, whether they’re going to the Olympics or not — we don’t know,” says Rooney. “That’s the beauty of WhatsApp and Instagram, you can build rapport. Then, when it comes to those crunch times, you know what to say and how to be around them.”
More on the sporting summer in Paris…
- The ‘post-Olympic blues’: Why do so many competitors suffer an emotional comedown?
- How Noah Lyles became Olympic 100m champion: A 300-page textbook, biomechanics and a stickman
- Mondo Duplantis: Breaking down the biomechanics behind the best-ever pole vaulter
- What makes Leon Marchand a superstar? He’s smaller, lighter and unbelievable underwater
All three coaches reference the c-word: consistency.
Dunn took over as head coach last November, just after the World Championships in Budapest, Hungary. The positive was GB had enjoyed their joint-best championships in medal terms (10, tied with the 1993 World Championships in the German city of Stuttgart). The negative was Dunn didn’t have time to settle — Paris was nine months away.
“It was scary,” she says. “My big focus was to steady the ship; bring clarity and focus, being very clear about what culture we wanted.”
Stress is considered infectious. “We’re there to do a job but we’re not saving lives, so we need to make sure we don’t add additional pressures to the athlete and coach,” says Dunn, who ran the fastest 100m by a British woman during the 1990s (11.15 seconds).
For Airale, learning to be an artist has meant developing his emotional control: “I remember my first championships as a coach. It was a World Indoor Championships, and the emotion for me was high — almost the same emotion athletes have at the blocks.
“That was really important to get to (the Paris) Olympics because I had less anxiety, less pressure.” Not being in the Olympic Village, as a personal coach, actually helped him stay relaxed.
Added to this, internal pressure is best avoided because the demand for performances and medals is huge.
“We’re always pushed, externally, to hit a certain number of targets and medals,” says Rooney. “From my experience as an athlete, it was an unnecessary pressure.” He earned four global medals for GB, all in the 4x400m relay.
Rooney’s way of circumnavigating pressure was through athlete-led goals. “It was always easy to remind them, ‘This is what we’re aiming for because this is what you wanted, not what I want’,” he says.
“It’s pretty easy with the Olympics: ‘Here’s the Olympic rings. What do you see? What do you feel?’. Some people want medals, glory, but some just want to instil pride and feel like they’ve delivered something for other people, which is a different way — you can’t put a medal or a number next to that. It’s nice to know who you’re working with.”
What did GB’s 4x400m athletes want from Paris? “Three medals,” Rooney says. They got them — and more.
GB finished in the medals in all five relay events (the men’s and women’s 4x100m and 4x400m, and the mixed 4x400m). They were the only nation on the podium in all those events — an outstanding feat considering the strength of the United States and Jamaica — and took home 10 athletics medals (one gold, four silvers, five bronzes), which is their best track and field performance at an Olympics since Los Angeles in 1984 (16 medals).
For Rooney, there was pride in responding to the “target on the back” of taking three 4x400m relay World Championships medals last September. In Paris, GB set national records in Rooney’s three events.
All in, there were eight new British athletics records. That is more than in the previous five Olympics combined (seven), which owes plenty to improvements in synthetic running tracks and advanced shoe technology, but as Dunn says, “You still need a body that’s physically able and fit to run those times.”
“There’s only three medals per event — that’s it,” she adds. “So you can’t base everything on the medal, you’ve got to look at other things.”
Georgia Bell (1,500m) and Amber Anning (400m) set British records in events where the Olympic record was broken. Dunn calls these “near-misses” that are “easy to skip across because they weren’t medal winners”, but she is passionate about being nuanced and breaking the binary that athletes return from an Olympics as medallists or failures.
“When I came home from the (1988, Seoul) Olympic Games, there was nobody really besides my family (to celebrate), nothing else,” says Dunn, who reached the quarter-finals of the 100m and the semi-finals in the 200m and 4×100. “That is not what I wanted in this team, because it’s not fair — they’re great athletes doing great things in a highly competitive global sport.”
BRONZE AND NEW NATIONAL RECORD 🥉
Georgia Bell completes an incredible comeback to athletics with a new British Record of 3:52.61 👏#WhereItStarts | #Paris2024 pic.twitter.com/HDUqzyXiaV
— British Athletics (@BritAthletics) August 10, 2024
Coaches accept they simply have to ride the emotional rollercoaster during major championships. “Once you get them to the finals, you say it’s on them: they just need to have fun, and try to be in the top three,” says Airale.
Dunn’s favourite memory from Paris was August 5, four days into the track and field programme.
“That was the morning Molly Caudery and Holly Bradshaw, Lawrence Okoye and Nick Percy didn’t qualify for their events,” Dunn says.
GB’s hopes of field medals quickly diminished. The qualification process is the same across all field events — Caudrey and Bradshaw in pole vault, Okoye and Percy in discus — with the top 12 advancing to the final in two days. None of the four jumped high enough or threw far enough.
“All of a sudden, the pressure becomes quite real and then the mood in the camp changes,” Dunn adds. “You have to work hard with your staff, make sure that they stay consistent in their behaviours. I don’t want that feeling of doom to start sinking into the team. That was a long morning, we’re picking up and looking after athletes.
“Then, in the evening, Keely comes.”
Keely Hodgkinson, the 800m favourite, delivered. She took gold, becoming GB’s first women’s middle-distance Olympic champion since Kelly Holmes in 2004.
“It was only a day but it felt like three days,” Dunn says. “You’re dealing with emotions, so you’ve got the highs and lows, but what you’ve got to do, as the team leader and the staff, is remain consistent.”
Rooney’s highlight was “Charlie Dobson’s leg (the last/anchor leg of the men’s 4x400m final), knowing that they were going to medal. There was no way anyone was going to chase him, no matter how good they were”.
He adds: “I was watching it, in the stands, with his coach, Leon Baptiste. We were screaming because we knew that was it — a victory lap, a medal lap, in itself.”
Airale, Dunn and Rooney already have eyes on 2028 and the next Olympics in Los Angeles, which Rooney calls the “big show”. Next year, as 2027 will, culminates in a September World Championships — the first real marker en route to LA.
In 2026, Britain will host two championships, the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow and the European Championships in Birmingham, which give Team GB athletes — and, therefore, coaches — an extra incentive.
Airale frames it simply: “Three years of work were put down” into events which last as little as 11 seconds and as long as a few minutes. Coaches keep coming back for those moments when performances are executed at the right time, limits are pushed and bests bettered; the adrenaline surges and cortisol releases. They’re humans, too.
(Top photo: Christian Petersen/Getty Images)
