Developing MTB Champions
With AusCycling delivering updated development pathways for young mountain bikers - are there now less road blocks?
Photos: Rogers, Rousu, Waygood
Need it even be said that mountain biking is booming. Kids skills clinics are sold out in capital and regional cities alike. In the wake of COVID we have seen a seismic shift towards active recreation, and mountain biking is a beneficiary. Kids have access to better cycling equipment and technology in 2022 (quality kids bikes and attire), coaching clinics and kid-specific clubs, as well as increasing numbers of trail networks around the country. These kids aren’t growing up wondering if it’s possible—they’re on YouTube in the afternoon watching RedBull hardline, Tom Pidcock's domination across multiple disciplines, and Danny McAskill videos—it’s a case of when.
So surely with the boom in mountain biking’s uptake more broadly, Australia should feel pretty confident in its ability to represent at the highest level, especially with the Brisbane 2032 Olympics looming large?
Despite junior participation rising, Australia has historically had a hard time when it comes to the pointy level in mountain bike endurance, and Cross Country Olympic (XCO) is the only mountain bike discipline set to feature at the Brisbane games. On the other hand, considering our governing bodies (MTBA now AusCycling) scant funding of gravity-based disciplines (downhill, enduro), Australia actually thrives when it comes to this arm of the sport. So what makes a rider successful at the highest level? Here I discuss the key elements in ‘bridging the gap’ from domestic junior racing to making it at the ‘big time’, and talk to coaches, athletes and high performance representatives at AusCycling themselves to see how they are looking to tackle this problem head-on.
We start with the kids
From the available research I have found in endurance cycling, U15 and U17 are largely unreliable predictors of performance at the elite level. There is some correlation at U19, but making it through the ‘espoir’ or U23 category is key in bridging the gap. Furthermore, athletes that struggle with each age group transition are less likely to become successful in the elite ranks.1
So while U15 and U17 is an important stage in an athlete's journey into the elite ranks (and a key level to target grassroots participation to swell the selection pool in the future for high performance), it’s not the time to be cranking out 15-hour weeks. For this age group cycling training should be focussed on learning to train, gaining skills and experiencing competition. Cycling is a sport that preferences late specialisation, compared to sport such as Gymnastics, where early entry and high performance programs beget performance at much younger age (the definition of early specialisation is <12, meaning that the athlete narrows their sporting focus to their chosen discipline at this time, compared to entering the sport with multiple other activities/no specialisation)2.
Adam Kelsall, coach at Hero Dirt Cycle Coaching, who has worked as the Junior performance coach alongside MTBA for high performance campaigns at Cairns, Lenzerheide and Mont Ste Anne World cups, states that athlete development through this time should be rider-led in accordance with Long Term Athlete Development principles (LTAD) and allow a broad range of exploration of disciplines, including time off from the sport throughout the year. Adam states; “Parents and coaches should work with athletes to develop balance during those four weeks – go bushwalking, surfing, reconnect with mates, read books etc.”
1 Mireille Mostaert, Pieter Vansteenkiste, Johan Pion, Frederik J.A. Deconinck & Matthieu Lenoir (2021) The importance of performance in youth competitions as an indicator of future success in cycling, European Journal of Sport Science, DOI: 10.1080/17461391.2021.1877359
2 https://www.ais.gov.au/position_statements/content/sport-specialisation-in-young-athletes
Adam also states that athlete retention through the U19 onto U23 and beyond is likely a product of ‘doing it all’ at a young age, "After usually pretty intense u19 careers trying to get to Worlds while completing high-school, its important to take the pressure off first year u23. It's a big transition year for them, often out of home and school and into share accommodation and uni. They have 5 years to move from U19” and Adam recommends sticking to “fun races for first year U23, like local clubbies, stage races that finish at breweries etc.”
But this is exactly where many Australian athletes become unstuck. While AusCycling has recently announced the development of the Academy program for mountain bike, run on a state by state basis, performance pathways from U19 onwards are still a work in progress.
He does warn of the tough slog ahead and commitment to the process, “If they (prospective high performance athletes) want to succeed in Europe they need to see it as a three year process. Expecting to go over there and succeed in one season is unrealistic and arrogant. Look at the journey Dan and Bec (McConnell, Australia’s most successful XCO athletes) went on, it took them years”.
“Dan and Bec showed if you have the tenacity and talent you can make it on the world stage without support from the national body. But that's only a small part of it, overall I think the biggest contributor is the lack of pathways from AusCycling”
A first-hand experience
Teagan Atherstone is no stranger to high performance mountain biking in Australia. She travelled to World Championships and was an XCO junior in 2017 and 2018, as well as self-funded trips to UCI races to collect points and experience ahead of Worlds in her own attempt to bridge the gap to the professional elite level.
“I found it really hard because I didn’t have endless money. So for me to travel everywhere with my family that was really expensive. (The trips) didn’t reach their full potential”.
In terms of the quality of competition and lack of pathways for her, “There is a huge step up (racing overseas). As a junior, to get to those places I really had to work extra hard to find out where to go or what to do, what to race. As a junior you’d race the national series and Worlds is the ultimate goal, but there was nothing to say ‘we can help you do this and do that’. You can't just start at number 30 at Worlds. Juniors need more information about how to prepare yourself better.”
Atherstone cites lack of pathways and direction as key factors in the difficulty in riding to the level required to ‘make it’ “At the time MTBA would congratulate you on getting to Worlds, they would be like ‘here’s a training camp’ but then there wouldn’t be much in-between”.
In juniors you don’t normally have a team, you’re not on a big pro team. It really is the governing body, unless you have a coach that’s done it all before.
Atherstone is still involved in the sport, but after a concussion leading into 2018 World Championships, doesn’t see herself venturing back into high performance again. Reflecting on her experience though, Atherstone offered some recommendations, “There was a distinct lack of development of ‘the whole athlete’. Everything is about winning and racing as fast as you can. It’s a good opportunity to look at the whole person”.
Former XCO high-performance junior, Momo Frank, thinks that the difficulties that arise are multifarious and complex, “when considering XCO, especially in Australia, I genuinely believe it is one of the most challenging and complex fields to delve into. I found one of the main obstacles to Australian riders in particular to be the enormous difference in calibre between racing at home, and overseas”. Frank cites abundant junior fields, and funding both in terms of private branded sponsorship, in addition to clubs and federations. He states the race village was “like I’d never seen before”.
“Where I was training alone for the most part, these riders had squads of riders to train with, a wealth of knowledge around them, and an extremely competitive environment that in my opinion breeds the fierce competition you see in European riders”. Frank continues “in my experience as a high performance XCO athlete in Australia you are very much on your own; financially, mentally, and especially on training rides. I by no means believe fancy factory teams and sponosrships are needed for our athletes to succeed, but the few (then) MTBA group trips/camps I was lucky enough to be a part of were definite highlights of my time in the sport, and I think that speaks volumes for the merit they hold as a first step to extending the lifespan of our athlete’s careers beyond Junior racing and into Europe and beyond.”
From MTBA to AusCycling: a beacon of hope for better funding?
Evan James is no stranger to the difficulties surrounding high performance mountain bike development, as Pathways Manager for MTB and CX (AusCycling Sport Pillar), James was previously sport manager at MTBA from late 2014 until the formation of AusCycling. The role included all junior development pathway formation and delivery, as well as facilitating and leading national teams at XCO/DHI/4X Worlds, XCM Worlds, CX Worlds, as well as administering CX and MTB World Cup entries and federation entry allocation.
James states that his roles “have given me a huge insight into mountain bike high performance, a solid relationship with many of the countries top riders, and a wide network of stakeholders I can draw on for specific knowledge and services” and acknowledges the plight of high performance in mountain bike is hobbled from many angles, including financial support, clear and transparent pathways, access to overseas race opportunities and sponsorships, and the lack of visibility and funding for non-olympic sports (think downhill and gravity).
On funding, it’s undeniable that mountain biking has been on the back foot from the beginning. “MTBA did it’s best with limited resources and in my opinion spent a considerable amount of money effectively in key areas (coach education, development programs and camps, and supporting large national teams)” James says, “It’s important to recognise that Cycling Australia was the custodian of all federal government funding for cycling and over the past ten or so years their investment in MTBA went from $300k to $50k to $0 per annum from an annual high performance funding pool from the Australian Sports Commission of roughly $11 million”.
It’s important to note that we are starting to see some investment in mountain bike high performance from AusCycling and the Australian Cycling Team in 2022 but James cautions “it’s early days and it will take some more time for this to fully evolve”.
But is funding the missing link? Downhill results at a World level may paint a different picture, as it’s historically relied on athletes getting results and being offered professional contracts, and the numbers don’t lie: it works for the discipline, with Downhill winning 20x elite medals (gold, silver or bronze) and 24 junior medals at World Championships since 1990, with XCO a paltry 10 in total (3x U23, 2x Elite and 5x U19). This is in the setting of scant funding, so if it isn’t just the finances, what else could it be?
Pathways, Categorisation and Selections
A key part of MTBA’s merger into AusCycling was better funding and management of high performance for mountain bike athletes, and last year AusCycling announced a new categorisation criteria for managing ‘emerging’ to ‘podium ready’ mountain bike endurance athletes, using the AIS’s national framework. The key physiological criteria is based on 20 minute power, a test that’s long been accepted to characterise aerobic fitness which is critical for success in races that feature a lot of climbing and reliance on power to weight (expressed in w/kg) such as XCO, in addition to race results at World Cup or World Champs, expressed as a percentage time of the winners.
Jesse Korf, recently appointed Executive General Manager of Performance at AusCycling explains that categorisation’s “function is to classify those with an evidence of what we can call as a 'bridgeable gap' to Olympic and Paralympic podium performances. What we have done for each individual in XCO that got onto a World Championship and Olympic podium was backtrack their entire career's race results. What we plotted was the percentage time behind the winner at for all those individuals at World Cups and World Championships from 17 to 38 years old in the entire UCI race database backdating to 2010. We took the highest percentage behind the winner as minimum standard and the average percentage behind the winner as preferred standard. In other words, the minimum standard is the furthest off pace any individual that has ever medalled has been”.
But that’s just the race result standard, when we look at physiological testing (20min power) it gets more interesting. Here, the the lowest categorisation, emerging (targeting U19 riders) has a minimum performance standard of 4.7wkg for women, and 5.4w/kg for men.
Korf explains, “how we went about setting the 20 minute scores is that we took 20 minute power scores from Canadian, Swiss, French and Dutch mountain bikers that we had data on, that finished within the minimum race results at varying age points. We cross validated them with our best climbers on the road we had data on and they are broadly reflected in the Coggan (1) scale when looking at progressions to world class. Are these numbers very high and rare? Yes, they are. In that same breath, so is getting on the podium at an elite World Championships or Olympic games and that is what we are working backwards from”.
But others may raise their eyebrows at such restrictive physiological measures, with one coach stating anonymously that it could be deliberately restrictive in order to reduce funding outlays for mountain bike.
Deb Latouf, coach at Spin Doctor Coaching on the Sunshine Coast is an avid follower of professional cycling performances, and as such assessed performances at the “Giro d'Italia Donne” climbing time-trial last year. The stage was 11.2km at an average gradient of 4.6%, so fits the bill for w/kg to reign supreme and to give insight into what world level performances look like.
Her findings? Anna Van Der Breggen (multiple road world champion, Olympic gold medallist) took the win in 24mins 58sec, over one minute ahead of the rest of the field. Her w/kg? 5.1w/kg. This puts van Der Breggen in AusCycling’s ‘developing’ category.
Even if we scaled the 25min as 95% capacity to estimate 20min power, this performance still remains in the ‘developing’ category of w/kg; above emerging but below ‘podium potential’ and ‘podium ready’ categories. (Caveats here: they were 4 days into a grand tour and thus not rested, but this number represents the pointiest of the elite road field in the world, certainly not a developing athlete).
So while we have some movement and development of pathways in AusCycling, its use is limited if it’s not catching the talent that we have emerging within Australia; acknowledging that U19 is a great period of physical maturation and growth.
More recently, AusCycling announced further high performance initiatives and proposed pathways; a U19/U23 high performance camp leading to a UCI World Team Selection. Up to 12 athletes travelled to Canberra to be part of the selection race in March, ahead of the National Cup race at Stromlo. From this camp, two scholarships would be awarded to a male and female rider to train and live at the UCI World Cycling Centre for up to six months, racing UCI French and Swiss cups.
But the announcement was met with mixed reviews, some coaches saw it as a boon for their prospective athlete that may fit the bill, while others identified that taking the potential scholarship recipients out of their support networks across the other side of the world, away from their own coaches and sponsorship arrangements for six months of the year may not be suitable or viable for many athletes. Korf does state that “it is about the entire ecosystem that cultivates performance” which could be construed many ways, but it will be interesting so see how the scholarships unfold and if the athletes are able to thrive away from their home ‘ecosystem’, and whether the benefits of the immersive European experience offset potential negatives that could arise from relocation and isolation.
1 Dr Andrew Coggan is widely recognised as one of the leading experts on the use of power meters, and is the originator of the normalised power, TSS, power profiling and quadrant analysis.
There is the additional concern of AusCycling selecting only one athlete of each gender and the implication that they’re ‘putting all their eggs in one basket’ with this program. It makes sense: it’s exorbitantly expensive to offer this kind of scholarship and not feasible to set up ten emerging athletes overseas, but it begs the question of why this particular route has been deemed the best option.
Perhaps Kelsall puts it best “I think if this (high performance program) is complemented by categorisation where athletes have the supports at home I mentioned: psychologist, nutrition, strength and conditioning etc then it's a pretty good model. And don’t make them change their coach every time they make a progression. This idea that athletes should be resilient enough to change coaches just because the national body tells them to is bullshit. It's demeaning to the athlete and the coach who have worked really hard to get to that point.”
The Elephant in the room: What’s happening with Gravity and Downhill?
Jared Graves, Nathan Rennie, Tracey Hannah, Caroline Buchanan, Sam Hill, Jared Rando… the list goes on and on; and that’s not exhaustive. Perhaps Australia’s success in downhill is a bit of a case of ‘if you can see it, you can be it’, or the fact that Downhill, essentially a gnarly descending time-trial against the clock, doesn’t feature some of the issues that plague XCO (mass start position based on UCI points, fitness not the defining characteristic, fighting European altitude in a long, demanding race, better attended gravity-style events in Australia).
At the time of publication, AusCycling have not announced any high performance programs focussed on the Downhill and Gravity disciplines. The announcement of state-based academies, however, will allow riders to select their main discipline (including gravity and downhill), and will be based around needs-based programs. The announcement of the Academy programs allows a launching pad into future high performance programs, targeting the U15–U17 age groups predominantly. Ideally, this incentive will develop more robust fields through to the U19 level and a stronger contingent of athlete which theoretically gives Australia more chances of finding success.
But the road to the top for a gravity athlete is still difficult, and in many ways features the same barriers (financial, pathways, distance) that face the endurance mountain biking community, but despite this, Australia punches above its weight in performance outcomes in these events.
But the road to the top for a gravity athlete is still difficult, and in many ways features the same barriers (financial, pathways, distance) that face the endurance mountain biking community, but despite this, Australia punches above its weight in performance outcomes in these events.
Initially on announcement, performance criteria for World Championships selection was tightened considerably, with the minimum performance standard of ‘Top three in Oceania Championships’ reading as though the maximum junior athletes AusCycling will support is three. As Korf states “the world championships are a performance event rather than a participation or development event and that those selected for World Championships can compete at the front of the race and potentially hit podiums”. But with some considerable confusion and outrage from the gravity community, a second, updated criteria was released during the writing of this article and mirrored previous years’ selection criteria more broadly, allowing the scope for a larger junior cohort at Les Gets in 2022. Time will tell as to how the 2022 World Championships selection transpires for the talented downhill juniors.
Keys to success moving forward
High performance has been elusive for endurance mountain bikers in Australia for a long time, aside from a few outliers who have devoted their life to chasing the dream with all the joys and sorrows that are associated with high performance. It’s clear that we have the talent here, our long pedigree in road and track highlight that it’s not necessarily a lack of physiology that’s holding us back.
What was evident from speaking to all the stakeholders involved in this article and many others that aren’t named or quoted, is that there are multiple reasons that Australia has struggled including lack of funding, tyranny of distance, lack of pathway, lack of visibility of those at the highest level, lack of experience in races with more high-calibre riders and more dense fields than we experience in Australia, and the perceived lack of concern for athlete welfare in high performance arenas.
It’s exciting to see movement in the high performance space, especially for mountain bikers that have historically felt left behind and underfunded, for good reason. It will take the test of time whether the fruits of this recent funding from AusCycling will deliver the fruits of performance it promises.
