What Does ‘Toxic’ Actually Mean in Elite Sport?

The word that stopped me

When British Cycling's latest culture survey came back with "toxic" as the second most common word riders used to describe their programme, I read it twice. Not because I doubt that people felt it. I don't.

But after more than 25 years in high-performance sport, across four Olympic Games, I want to ask what we actually mean when we use that word.

To be clear about what this post is not: it is not a challenge to the feelings of the people who were surveyed. I don't know their stories, and I won't pretend to. It is a conversation about a word, and about the expectations people now bring into elite environments, some of which may not be realistic if the goal is to win at the highest level.

What the survey actually found

The survey was confidential, funded by UK Sport and run independently by the Happiness Index. It measures employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) on a scale of -100 to +100, where anything below zero is treated as a warning zone.

Riders were also asked for three words to describe the programme:

"Driven" was the most common word. "Toxic" was second, alongside "supportive".

- Other words included cold, unconcerned, distant, unclear, restrictive and misaligned goals.

- Of the 41 athletes who answered the question, 13 said they had witnessed or experienced thoughtless, inappropriate or unacceptable behaviour in the past year.

- One of the lowest-scoring questions was about the senior leadership team.

British Cycling says most of its staff love their jobs, and has put an action plan in place. It focuses on psychological safety, empowerment and leadership behaviours. Since then, a former employee has publicly alleged a toxic culture within the leadership team, which British Cycling says it handles through formal procedures, and 17 jobs are reported to be at risk in a restructure it describes as part of a four-year plan.

These are serious numbers and I'm not waving them away. But they also begin to tell us something about where the problem may sit.

So what does toxic actually mean?

Toxic sits at the very end of the scale. There is nowhere further to go, which is exactly why we should use it carefully.

Look at the other words riders chose: cold, distant, unclear, restrictive, misaligned goals. They describe leaders who aren't connecting, goals that aren't shared and people who don't feel seen. That is a real problem, and largely a leadership one. But it isn't the same as an abusive environment, and it isn't the same as a demanding one. I'd separate three things that often get lumped together:

I'm not saying the word was wrong for everyone who used it. I'm asking whether it fits what most people experienced, or whether it was simply the strongest word on offer. I suspect that for some people "toxic" means "I didn't feel supported enough to meet a very high standard". That is a fair complaint. It is about support and leadership, not about the standard itself.

What the results say

Within days of the survey being reported, Great Britain topped the medal table at the Track World Championships in Shanghai (14 to 18 October): 12 medals, six of them gold. It was Britain's first time top of the table since 2023, and all six golds came from the endurance squad, with the sprint team weakened by a withdrawal. The year before, in Santiago, Britain won 14 medals, the most of any nation, including four golds.

Results like that aren't produced without people remaining highly engaged in the performance process. They take daily trust between athletes, coaches and staff, and a great deal of discretionary effort. That doesn't prove the environment is healthy, and I'll come back to that. But it is hard to square with a place nobody could tolerate.

Australia: standards and wellbeing

It is tempting to set Britain against Australia. Australia has made wellbeing the stated foundation of its high-performance system. Its Win Well strategy says success and rewarding high performance matter, but that wellbeing is the foundation of sustainable success. 61 sports and organisations had signed up by January 2025, and AusCycling is a signatory.

Funding, depth, pathways, coaching, selection, timing and luck all play a part. I'm not arguing that caring for athletes costs medals. I'm arguing that I don't believe a toxic environment is a requirement for winning, and that looking after people and demanding a high standard are not opposites. Australia's own strategy says as much.

Direct is not the same as damaging

I have been personally criticised for setting a high standard for athletes. I don't believe I was being toxic. I was being direct, challenging people to be better, and backing that with a huge amount of support. Challenge and support together are the job. Take either away and you're not coaching.

But I need to test my own argument, because there are three fair objections.

None of that makes "toxic" the right word for every hard environment. It means the word should be earned. Before using it, I'd ask:

The pitfall of being too close

There is another factor I think gets overlooked. Unlike most working environments, athletes, coaches and staff spend an extraordinary amount of time together: camps, travel, hotels, early mornings, hard days and big moments, often for years. That builds a familiarity most colleagues never reach.

I try to avoid the word "family", because it isn't a perfect analogy. But it is similar. In a family, people say things to each other that they would never say to a colleague in an office, and tone, humour and bluntness drift as the familiarity grows. In a high-performance environment the same thing can happen, and the line moves without anyone noticing.

I want to underscore that I'm not justifying anything that may or may not have happened. Familiarity explains how lines can blur. It is not an excuse for crossing them. And the family comparison breaks down in one important way: nobody in a family decides who makes the team. A coach or manager holds the power over selection, opportunity and funding, so the responsibility for holding the line sits with the person with the power. What passes as banter between equals can land very differently on an athlete.

The research supports both sides of this. Closeness, meaning trust, respect and appreciation, sits at the heart of effective coach-athlete relationships. But work on safeguarding in sport describes closeness as both an ingredient of success and a risk factor, alongside power, blurred boundaries and ambiguous roles. Its recommendation is clear boundaries set from the start.

This is where I wonder about the survey. Riders described their programme as cold, distant and unclear. It is possible, and I can't prove it, that some of that distance grows out of over-closeness: when familiarity has led to behaviour that damages trust, people pull back to protect themselves. It is also possible that the distance describes the senior leadership, who sit away from the riders, while the closeness describes the coaches and staff who are with them every day. Both can be true at once. That is a reason to ask, not to assume.

The answer isn't to care less. It is to be explicit: clear roles, standards of behaviour that apply on the road as much as in the office, and a way for either side to say "that crossed a line" without fear of what comes next.

What leaders can do differently: ask, then show what you heard

There is one simple thing I've seen leaders skip. I once asked the leadership of Australian Cycling, the head coaches and technical directors, to ask their athletes directly for feedback by email. One of the older athletes wrote back to say that in about 15 years as part of the Cycling Australia team, nobody had ever once asked them what they thought.

Fifteen years. That tells me something about how psychological safety and trust get built, and it isn't through a survey. A survey arrives once a year or less, long after the moment has passed. Waiting for one is a significant problem in itself. Asking is free, it is fast, and it is something any coach or leader can start tomorrow.

The second step matters just as much. Don't keep the feedback as a mental note. Put it up on your office door, or share it in a training session: this is what I asked, and this is what you said. Keep it anonymous if people need that, or attribute it where they're comfortable. Either way, be transparent, and be willing to be vulnerable in front of the people you lead. Then say what you will change, and what you won't and why.

The research points the same way. Harvard's Amy Edmondson defines psychological safety as a shared belief that a team is safe for taking interpersonal risks, and she is clear that it is not about being nice or lowering standards. Her ideal is high safety and high standards together. Google's Project Aristotle found it was the strongest factor explaining performance differences between its teams. In elite sport, a 2025 review of the high-performance environment suggests the features that support both performance and wellbeing include balancing results with athlete development and wellbeing, and a personalised, caring coaching philosophy. It also notes that such environments remain the exception rather than the norm.

British Cycling's own action plan names psychological safety as a priority, and UK Sport says athlete voice should be part of decision-making. Asking, then showing what you heard, is how you make that real. It costs nothing, and it does more for trust than a poster of values on the wall.

Where I land

I don't think the answer is to lower the standard. I think it is to be more precise with our language, and more proactive with our leadership. If every demanding environment is called toxic, the word stops meaning anything for the people who are genuinely being harmed. And if every complaint is dismissed as softness, we will miss the problems that are real.

The British Cycling survey points to leadership, clarity and connection. Those are fixable, and worth fixing, starting with something as simple as asking people what they think and showing them what you heard. They are also different problems from the one the headline word suggests.

So what does "toxic" mean to you? And is it the word you really mean?

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