If I Were Building a Track Medal Programme for LA 2028

The Politics of Prioritisation

Political mandate may be the most underappreciated factor in Olympic cycling success. A head coach or performance director can design the most technically sound programme imaginable, but without their federation's board having agreed a medal target, endorsed the resource allocation required to pursue it, and committed to protecting the programme from interference across the cycle, that programme will be compromised before a pedal is turned.

Boards change composition. New directors bring different priorities. Regional interests, media pressure, and the competing demands of participation programmes all exert force on resource allocation. Without a mandate that survives these shifts, the performance director operates on borrowed authority -- vulnerable to having resources redirected or strategic decisions second-guessed at the worst possible moment. The programmes that navigate this successfully have performance directors who are politically literate, who understand that their role extends beyond the track and into the boardroom. An Olympic programme exists within a political ecosystem, and ignoring that ecosystem is as strategically negligent as ignoring a rival nation's form.

There is a further layer of political complexity that shapes every national programme: the relationship with the system-level funding agency that sits above the sport. In the United Kingdom, UK Sport controls the strategic investment into Olympic and Paralympic sports and sets the performance targets against which funding is allocated. In Australia, Sport Australia and the Australian Institute of Sport fulfil a comparable role. Across Europe, equivalent bodies include Team Danmark, the Netherlands' NOC*NSF, France's Agence nationale du Sport, and Germany's DOSB working alongside its network of federal research institutes. These agencies are not passive funders. They are active stakeholders with their own strategic priorities, assessment frameworks and political pressures.

The risks of misalignment between a funding agency and a sport's performance programme are real and varied. The most immediately damaging is mid-cycle funding intervention. Most system-level agencies conduct periodic investment reviews -- annual or biannual assessments where sports must demonstrate progress against agreed benchmarks. These reviews serve a legitimate accountability function, but the benchmarks themselves can distort behaviour. If a funding agency assesses progress primarily through World Championship results or world ranking trajectories, it creates an implicit incentive for the performance programme to chase intermediate outcomes at the expense of Olympic preparation. A programme that deliberately underperforms at a mid-cycle World Championships in order to protect a training block or conceal tactical preparation may be making the strategically correct decision for the Games -- while simultaneously triggering a funding review that threatens its resource base. The performance director is caught between two competing imperatives, and the cost of resolving that tension incorrectly is existential.

There is also the structural tension between what funding agencies typically describe as "podium" investment -- resource directed at athletes with realistic medal prospects in the current cycle -- and "pathway" investment in the development pipeline that will produce medal contenders in the next cycle and beyond. Track cycling's development timelines mean that a rider who enters the senior programme at nineteen may not be Olympic-ready until twenty-three or twenty-four. If funding models weight investment too heavily toward the current cycle's podium prospects, the pathway starves, and the sport enters the subsequent cycle without the depth to compete. This is a systemic risk that individual performance directors can flag but rarely control, because the allocation framework sits above the sport.

Government policy shifts compound the problem further. Funding agencies operate within political environments of their own -- responding to ministerial priorities, public accountability pressures, and in some cases the strategic implications of hosting or bidding for major events. A change of government, or a shift in sport policy emphasis from elite performance toward community participation and public health outcomes, can alter the funding landscape for Olympic sports within a single electoral cycle. The sport's competitive trajectory does not pause to accommodate this. A programme building toward Los Angeles cannot absorb a twenty percent funding reduction in 2027 and still deliver. Yet the decision-making that produces such a reduction may have nothing to do with the sport's performance and everything to do with a political calculation made in a different building entirely.

Beneath these system-level pressures sits a more fundamental structural tension that most federations never fully resolve: the competing demands of medal-focused performance investment and broader obligations to participation, development, and domestic competition. These are genuine and legitimate competing demands. Federations that do not create clear institutional separation between the two -- with distinct funding, governance, and accountability structures -- end up compromising both. The participation programme gets stripped to feed the Olympic effort in the final year of the cycle, and the Olympic programme gets diluted by obligations that have nothing to do with winning medals. Neither side gets what it needs, and the people working in both lose faith that the organisation can hold a clear line on anything.

The most resilient programmes are those where the performance director maintains a genuine working relationship with the funding agency -- not merely a reporting relationship, but one characterised by mutual understanding of the programme's strategic logic, its timeline, and the metrics that genuinely indicate progress toward Olympic performance. Where that relationship is transactional or adversarial, the programme is exposed not just to the competitive risks on the track but to the political risks above it. A performance director who manages the board relationship but neglects the funding agency relationship is exposed on two fronts rather than one, and the second front is the one that can dismantle a programme without a race being ridden.

Talent Identification and Pathways: The Pipeline That Funds the Future

A pathway is the structured route from identification through development to international competitiveness -- coaching, competition, training environment, support. Everything that takes a young athlete from first contact with the sport to the point where they can genuinely contest Olympic selection. It is not a talent camp held once a year. It is a system that operates continuously and feeds the Olympic programme with athletes who arrive prepared rather than merely promising.

Talent is a more contested term. In track cycling it comes down to physical capacity -- power, aerobic engine, body composition, trainability -- combined with the psychological qualities to absorb coaching, tolerate sustained discomfort, and keep developing over years. Defining it is straightforward. Finding it is where programmes diverge.

Participation Versus Identification

There is a long-running debate in high-performance sport between participation-led development and targeted talent identification, and it persists because both positions contain truth.

The participation model says: get as many young people playing sport as possible, provide decent grassroots coaching, and let talent emerge through competition and self-selection. This appeals to governments because it ties elite funding to public health objectives. It also carries genuine developmental weight -- athletes who experience multiple sports before specialising have longer careers, fewer injuries, and higher eventual rates of elite achievement than early specialisers.

Talent identification starts from a different place. Rather than waiting for talent to surface, you go looking -- physiological screening, physical testing, anthropometric profiling -- to find young people whose attributes match what a specific sport demands. Track cycling makes the case perfectly. How many fourteen-year-olds stumble into a velodrome by accident? The sport is facility-dependent, geographically concentrated, and culturally invisible in most countries. Without someone actively looking, the talent pool shrinks to whoever happens to find it -- a tiny fraction of those who could excel.

In practice, the programmes that produce Olympic medallists run a hybrid. Broad participation creates a visible funnel; targeted identification at key age points catches athletes whose profiles suggest serious potential. The real question is not one model versus the other. It is whether a federation has the intent and capability to do both -- and whether talent identification is resourced as a genuine performance investment or treated as a grassroots exercise with performance outcomes bolted on afterwards.

Australia, Britain, and What TID Actually Produces

Australia demonstrated the power of deliberate talent identification more clearly than anyone. The South Australian Sports Institute in particular pioneered a multi-sport TID strategy that became a global benchmark -- screening school-age athletes through physical testing, matching profiles to specific Olympic sports, and channelling them into structured development. What made it work was not the testing itself, but what sat behind it: coaching infrastructure to receive identified athletes, competition pathways to develop them, and institutional will to sustain the pipeline across cycles rather than run it as a one-off recruitment drive.

Rohan Dennis came through the South Australian system and became a double world time trial champion and Olympic medallist. Luke Durbridge emerged from Western Australia's institute pathway. Annette Edmondson, another South Australian product, won Olympic omnium bronze at London 2012. These are not happy accidents. Steph Morton and Matt Glaetzer also came from pure TID or transfer programs -- and yes from the SA institute. They are outputs of a system designed to find and transition talent across different events and disciplines.

Britain produced comparable results through different mechanisms. Joanna Rowsell was spotted at a British Cycling talent team visit to her school with no cycling background -- she won two Olympic golds in the team pursuit. Lizzie Deignan came through the development programme as a teenager and became Olympic silver medallist and world road champion. Laura Kenny emerged from the same pipeline to become the most decorated female Olympic cyclist in history. Rebecca Romero is perhaps the purest talent transfer story in the sport: rowing silver medallist at Athens, identified as having the physiology for the track, individual pursuit Olympic champion at Beijing two years later.

None of these athletes would have reached an Olympic velodrome through participation pathways alone. Each required a system that found them, assessed them, and placed them where their potential could be developed. That is talent identification treated as a strategic function, not an outreach exercise with a clipboard.

Early Maturers, Over-Specialisation, and the Traps Good Systems Avoid

This is where pathway programmes most commonly get it wrong. An early maturer at sixteen can produce power numbers and race results that look like genuine talent -- because at that age, physiological development and actual ability are almost impossible to separate. The athlete gets selected, resourced, reinforced. The late developer, who may have the higher ceiling, gets overlooked because they cannot compete with a body two years ahead of theirs on the maturation curve. By the time biology levels the field, the late developer has often left the sport. They were never less talented. They were just less grown up.

Over-specialisation compounds it. A young rider funnelled exclusively into track cycling at fifteen because their sprint numbers look exceptional misses the broader athletic development -- coordination, movement quality, robustness -- that comes from varied sporting experience. They may peak early and visibly, but the foundation is narrow. When senior training loads arrive, narrow foundations crack. The research is consistent and has been for years: early specialisation increases injury risk, accelerates burnout, and actually reduces the probability of reaching the elite senior level. The temptation to lock in a promising junior is understandable. More often than not, it is counterproductive. In writing this, a 17-year-old last week performed a 4:10 S4km IP -- with my external view now, looking outside in, I can't see this as progress.

The best contemporary pathway systems account for this. They assess biological maturity alongside performance data. They resist over-investing in athletes whose results may reflect development rather than ability. And they keep the door open long enough for late developers to come through -- because some of the best senior athletes in track cycling history were nobody's junior world champion. A recent paper by Cesanelli et al. (2024) showed that fewer than 1 in 5 top-ranked juniors manage to become elite performers as adults.

Running a Pathway Without Disrupting Olympic Preparation

A pathway programme and an Olympic preparation programme want different things, run on different timelines, and compete for the same finite pool of coaching attention, track time, and sport science support. Badly managed, a pathway does not just fail to produce future medallists. It actively degrades the preparation of current ones.

The answer is separation. The pathway needs its own coaches, its own competition calendar, its own accountability. Development coaches should not be the same people preparing athletes for Olympic qualification. The head coach needs visibility of who is coming through -- but should not be running it. Their job is the athletes racing in Los Angeles, not the athletes who might race in Brisbane.

There is a point in every pathway rider's development where they need exposure to the senior environment -- to feel the intensity, see the standards, understand what is expected. That exposure should be deliberate, time-limited, and carefully managed. Bringing a pathway rider into a team pursuit camp for a week is development. Having pathway riders permanently in the Olympic group because there is not enough coaching resource to run both environments is a structural failure dressed up as integration.

The Italian Junior Model

Italy's junior track programme deserves a closer look. The Italian Cycling Federation has built what amounts to a mini-Olympic programme -- centralised camps, dedicated coaching, structured international racing, sport science support that a decade ago would have been reserved for senior squads. The Junior World Championship results have been striking.

Filippo Ganna is the headline graduate. Junior world champion, converted to multiple elite world titles and Olympic team pursuit gold at Tokyo. Jonathan Milan followed a similar route into the senior squad and the WorldTour. These are genuine proof points that the system produces athletes who win at the highest level.

But the conversion question needs honest treatment. The physical development between seventeen and twenty-four is enormous. Athletes who dominate juniors through early maturation can watch that advantage disappear. The road-track divide pulls talented juniors away from the velodrome -- Italy's best young track riders are targets for WorldTour development teams where the incentives lead in the opposite direction. And the deepest risk is that a heavily resourced junior programme starts optimising for junior results rather than senior readiness. A junior world championship gold is a data point. An Olympic medal is the outcome. The distance between the two is years of continued development, not the colour of a jersey won at seventeen.

The federations that get the most from their pathway investment treat junior success as an indicator of potential, not a validation of the system -- and maintain the coaching, environment, and exposure to develop that potential through the unglamorous years between junior podium and Olympic selection.

Workforce: The Coaching and Support Pipeline

Medal programmes are built by people, and the quality of the coaching and support workforce is a direct predictor of sustainable success. A world-class track programme requires depth across sprint and endurance coaching, sport science, strength and conditioning, sports medicine, psychology, and increasingly, aerodynamic and equipment engineering.

Federations consistently undervalue coaching relative to sport science -- not deliberately, but because sport science outputs are easier to measure and therefore easier to justify institutionally. Both matter. But if forced to choose, coaching quality is the most consequential single variable in an athlete's training outcomes. A programme with an excellent coach and modest sport science will outperform a programme with world-class sport science and an average coach -- consistently.

The challenge is building and retaining this workforce within four-year funding cycles. The best biomechanists, performance analysts and sport scientists command international market rates and can choose their employers. If a federation offers short-term contracts tied to Olympic cycle funding with no certainty beyond the Games, it will struggle to attract the calibre of people that makes the marginal difference at medal level.

Federations serious about retention need to think beyond the cycle: longer-term contracting, cross-sport secondment pathways, and roles that offer genuine professional development rather than simply a four-year assignment.

There is also the coaching pipeline beneath the head coach. Too many federations treat the head coach appointment as the beginning and end of their coaching strategy. The coaches developing the next generation of Olympic-capable riders at regional and national level receive far less strategic attention than they deserve.

If a system produces one exceptional head coach but no capable successors, the programme is one resignation or one contract dispute away from crisis. Building coaching depth is a multi-cycle investment. Federations that neglect it find themselves recruiting expertise from overseas cycle after cycle, which works until the coach leaves and the knowledge leaves with them.

Culture: The Invisible Architecture

Of all the factors that determine whether a programme sustains success or collapses under its own weight, culture is the most consequential and the least visible. Culture in this context means something specific. It is the behavioural contract governing how people within the programme treat each other, how decisions are communicated, how dissent is handled, and how athletes who fall outside selection are managed.

Whether an athlete who questions a training decision is heard or shut down. Whether selection criteria are communicated transparently before the process or rationalised after the fact. Whether a coach who behaves poorly toward a developing rider faces the same accountability as one who delivers poor results. Athletes read these signals with precision, and they remember.

The most instructive cautionary example in recent track cycling is British Cycling's experience surrounding the 2016 Rio Olympics. This was a programme that had achieved extraordinary medal success -- dominant at London 2012, a major force at successive World Championships. Yet beneath that success, an independent review commissioned in the aftermath of serious allegations found what it described as a culture of fear. Athletes reported feeling unable to raise concerns. Coaching behaviour that prioritised results at the expense of welfare went unchallenged. The review, which followed the resignation of a senior technical director amid allegations of discriminatory and bullying conduct, produced recommendations for sweeping organisational change.

The medals had masked the dysfunction, but the dysfunction was corroding the programme from within. The pattern is consistent across high-performance sport: when a programme defines success exclusively through results and fails to hold its people to behavioural standards, it creates an environment where talent eventually walks away.

During my time in senior coaching roles, I spoke with WorldTour-level riders -- athletes with the talent and the results to contribute meaningfully to an Olympic campaign -- who had made a conscious decision not to engage with their national programme. The reason, in every case, was the behaviour and culture of the coaching environment -- something they would not subject themselves to.

These were professional athletes making rational decisions about where they could perform their best, and they chose elsewhere. When a programme loses riders of that calibre for reasons that have nothing to do with performance, the cost is not just tactical. It is an indictment of the system.

I have also experienced the other side. One of the letters I value most from my entire career came from the father of an athlete who was not selected for a squad. He wrote to thank me for the way his son had been treated throughout the process -- the honesty of communication, the respect shown, the care taken even in delivering a disappointing outcome.

That letter is framed on my wall. How you treat the people who do not make the team is as defining of your programme's culture as how you prepare the people who do. A programme that cannot hold both standards -- relentless performance expectation and genuine human decency -- is operating on borrowed time.

Peaking at the Right Moment

The final consideration is timing. A programme must be designed to peak at the Olympic Games -- not at the World Championships eighteen months before, not at a World Cup round that generates short-term confidence but pulls preparation off course.

This requires disciplined restraint through the middle years of a cycle, when the pressure to demonstrate progress through intermediate results can distort priorities. A programme that peaks at the wrong moment has a timing problem, and timing problems at this level are rarely recoverable within the remaining months.

The goal is to arrive at the Olympic velodrome with every element -- physical preparation, tactical execution, equipment optimisation, team cohesion and psychological readiness -- converging simultaneously.

This demands a periodisation philosophy that extends beyond individual training load to the programme's entire strategic rhythm: when to blood new riders, when to test tactical variations, when to race internationally and when to protect training blocks.

The programmes that get this right share a quality that is difficult to quantify but immediately recognisable: patience. They resist validating themselves through intermediate results and maintain focus on the only outcome that defines the cycle.

The System, Not the Secret

Building a medal programme for Los Angeles is a systems problem -- one that requires honest diagnosis and decisive resource allocation, structural clarity and political literacy, and above all, investment in people and the cultural integrity to sustain them. The nations that understand this will be on the podium in 2028. The rest will wonder what they missed.

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