The Team Behind the Team – ‘elite people’ supporting elite athletes

There is little that illustrates the point better than road cycling when it comes to the importance of the team behind the team in top-level sport.

A short, steep hill in rural northern France is flanked by hundreds of people awaiting the marauding Tour de France peloton, all standing in among pretty flowers from the nearby meadow.

Dotted within fans holding beers and babies are Ineos Grenadiers’ ‘soigneurs’ – the crucial team support personnel.

They are carrying bags, criss-crossed to either side, full of bottles, with more in their hands as they balance precariously holding either a water or electrolyte drink out for the riders, with energy gels strapped to the side of each with an elastic band like a cheap fairground prize.

To the riders it is salvation as they battle through the oppressive heat, which has returned to the northern Hauts-de-France region after an epic morning downpour, on their way to a blistering uphill coastal finish in Boulogne-sur-Mer.

For the staff, there is more than sustenance to contend with, as they deliver the goods within a peloton which passes in seconds, team cars’ horns blaring from the chasing sporting directors as they miss prams and elbows by inches.

Soigneurs do a lot, including changing every bed sheet and pillow in every hotel to the riders’ preferred type.

But back at the hotel on the outskirts of the beautiful French city of Valenciennes, a range of staff and vehicles are pitched up in the car park, with chefs, mechanics and more ready to service every need.

It is also where you will find the team’s leadership – the only difference being there will be a laptop or multiple smartphones in their hands instead of a spanner or spatula.

So what makes a good leader? Winning. It is as simple as that.

“We have a team of sport directors and they typically run and navigate each of the races,” says Ineos performance director Scott Drawer.

“We have a science, medicine, technology engineering team, and also as part of the performance teams are our riders. So I oversee all of that.

“The conversations you have always start from the end, if that makes sense. Performance always starts at the end. And how does that play itself out in the way we train and prepare? So there’s a framework and structure by which you need to understand the performance.”

Team CEO John Allert is also on the ground in France – overseeing a period in which Ineos have not won a three-week Grand Tour in four years. Yet expectations for the team’s return to the top of the sport are high, after winning seven Tours de France in 10 years between 2010 and 2019, many as Team Sky.

“Like all elite sports, it’s a pyramid and everybody is trying to get to the top. And that creates pressure,” Allert says.

There are people and there is leadership, but numbers are becoming ever more influential in assessing performances and deciding who truly is the best of the best.

Speed, distances, heart rate, VO2 max aerobic capacity tests, biomechanics, injury risk, sleep, mood, stress, positions, heat maps, formations – it is too much for most of us to contemplate.

“Football is the hardest sport. You know, fundamentally, it’s hard to analyse because there are not many goals,” says Ian Graham, founder and CEO of analytics company Ludonautics.

“I was director of research at Liverpool Football Club for 11 years. In the Premier League, certainly every move is analysed.

“For every game, you get this data, which is this list of what happened, where and who did it. Most leagues now have something called tracking data, where you see 25 frames per second, the positions of all of the players. That tells you something about the off-ball impacts of players.”

It does not come cheap, though. Graham says it will cost anything from £1.5m to £3.5m for clubs such as Liverpool, Arsenal, Brighton and Brentford, who are known to be invested in the numbers.

Then again, in football at least, that is a steal if you are paying £100m for a player.

Data will tell anybody with knowledge of how to use it an awful lot, but can athletes understand it themselves?

Certainly – just ask English golfer Lottie Woad, who recently won the Scottish Open aged 21, a week after turning professional in a sport which demands accuracy.

“I love data, so that’s kind of how my brain works,” Woad says.

“I record stats from each round and put them in a system called Upgame – it’ll tell you everything about your round, strokes gained and stuff like that.

“And then in my practice using launch monitors, showing you all the stuff you need for your technique as well as looking at ball flight, spin rates, stuff like that. It’s helped a lot.”

Incremental improvement is the name of the game, but there’s a more sophisticated phenomenon on the horizon which could change elite sport forever and needs a scientist, not a sports star, to explain.

“Artificial intelligence is a form of computer science. So it uses systems that can perform tasks which mirror human intelligence, such as the likes of problem-solving, decision-making and learning,” says the Open University’s Mark Antrobus.

We need humans in elite sport, otherwise it is time to watch the Robot Olympics and forget everything else.

But just how much athlete autonomy is left in the modern era? There is no purer place than the athletics track to get a feel for that.

“The data doesn’t lie,” says Darren Campbell, gold medallist for Great Britain at the 2004 Athens Olympic Games in the 4x100m relay. “But I would say attitude, discipline and relay skills are important ingredients for success.

“Raw speed with no hand skills – we’re not going to get the baton round. You know you can’t just have raw speed.”

Fellow Briton Laviai Nielsen won Olympic bronze at Paris 2024 in the women’s 4x400m relay.

“The training camps are so important – we analyse everything and anything that could happen,” she says.

“We do rehearse a lot of what happens if you get shoved, what happens if you grab the baton and turn around and someone’s right in front of you.”

Back in France, as the morning summer sun warms the hotel swimming pool and its assortment of gently drifting inflatables, Ineos’ 2018 Tour de France winner and team patron Geraint Thomas thinks about his own autonomy on the bike before he retires at the end of this year.

“The racing has moved on, and you just kind of have to adapt. [The riders] definitely have an input,” says the Welshman.

“I like the thought of cycling being an art more than a science. It still needs the human element for sure. Just keep those paintbrushes by your side, mate. That’s what I say.”