BRIAN SMITH ON SUFFERING, COACHING & WINNING | ROADMAN CYCLING PODCAST
with Brian Smith — Former professional cyclist (British National Champion 1991, 1994), sports director who took the first African team to the Tour de France, cycling pundit and commentator
Brian Smith won the British National Championships twice in the early 1990s entirely self-coached, then went on to direct MTN-Qhubeka — the first African registered team to ride the Tour de France. He is one of the rare voices in cycling who has been a pro, a sports director, and a commentator, which makes his read on race tactics, motorbike pacing, and rider intent sharper than most. For amateurs interested in coaching philosophy, his perspective on what real coach–athlete trust looks like is unusually grounded.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
01Brian Smith won the British National Championship twice (1991, 1994) — completely self-coached. He picked up the phone and called Robert Millar for training advice, and Millar shared what Panasonic was doing.
02Robert Millar's power-training prescription in the late 80s: an hour on the flat in 53x12, cadence 50-60, then an hour and a quarter on hillier terrain in big gears. Pure low-cadence load work, no power meter.
03Smith's coaching philosophy: it's about the relationship. He could only coach 6-10 of the 20-30 riders on any team because the trust foundation isn't something you can manufacture. Same as parenting your own kid versus coaching a stranger's.
04The "do you want me to invest in a power meter?" moment from a real-world client. Smith visited a two-up two-down house with two young kids. The word "invest" was the alarm — they couldn't afford it. He went old-school instead.
05The triple-perspective frame — pro rider, sports director (took the first African team to the Tour de France), commentator — gives Smith a unique read on motorbikes pacing, team tactics, and rider intent. Most pundits miss two of the three.
Brian Smith won the British National Championship twice and finished 45th at the 1992 World Champs in the same group as Sean Kelly. He didn't float through any of it. On this episode of the Roadman Cycling podcast, he talks about what actually separated him from the riders he beat, and it wasn't power numbers.
Key Takeaways
Smith's whole point about winning is worth sitting with. He says he never once won a race feeling good. Both national titles were hard, the second one came a couple of weeks out from the Giro, and his view is that anyone who says they were floating is talking nonsense. His prep for the 1992 Worlds tells you everything: no races except criteriums for five or six weeks, so he'd do five or six hours himself, salt still on his jersey, then go straight to the chain gang and ride on the front for 30 to 40 miles without missing a turn. He was replicating what a race feels like at the back end when you're already cooked. That's the session most people skip.
The MTN-Qhubeka stuff is just as useful if you coach or mentor anyone. Smith didn't bring in a sports psychologist or overhaul the African riders' training. He brought in Steve Cummings, Boštjan Hagen, and Serge Pauwels and put them on the same bus, in the same rooms, eating the same food, doing the same training. When a young rider is doing everything identically to someone who has won at WorldTour level, something changes. Suddenly the young lad thinks, if he can do it, so can I. That's it. That's the whole intervention.
You Might Also Like
The marginal gains conversation Smith has here connects directly to the Team Sky episode. Go listen to that one first. And if you want more on the mindset side of racing, the Ben Hermans episode covers what it actually feels like inside a Grand Tour.
CLAIMS FROM THIS EPISODE
Each tagged with the strength of evidence behind it.
EXPERT
Brian Smith was British National Road Race Champion in 1991 and 1994 and finished 45th at the 1992 World Championships in the same group as Sean Kelly — performances achieved entirely through self-coaching.
Source: Career record referenced on the Roadman Cycling Podcast
PRO PRACTICE
Robert Millar's late-1980s power training protocol with Panasonic involved one hour on flat terrain in 53x12 at cadences of 50-60 RPM, followed by an hour and 15 minutes on hillier terrain in big gears at similarly low cadences — a pre-power-meter big-gear loading method.
Source: Brian Smith, citing Robert Millar's training methodology
OPINION
Effective coach-rider relationships require structural personal trust that cannot be generated through transactional training programmes — Smith argues he could only effectively coach approximately 6-10 of the 20-30 riders on any given team, regardless of rider talent.
Source: Brian Smith coaching philosophy
EXPERT
Smith took the first African team (MTN-Qhubeka) to the Tour de France as sports director — a structurally significant moment for sport globalisation that reflects his broader contribution beyond his individual rider career.
Source: Career record referenced on the Roadman Cycling Podcast
KEY QUOTES
“My philosophy is if you can suffer more than others you'll win more it's not about yeah you can have good legs and feel good and how many people do and even now in the interviews we get after the wealth or the jira or the tour i had good legs but you didn't win so there's a lot of people felt their good legs have felt good but they didn't win.”
“When i was a pro bike rider it was probably 25 science and 75 percent go out and ride your bike and it seems to be it seems to be going the opposite way more people are getting into the signs than anything else.”
“He used to not look at his power on anything when he was a trainer he used to look at his heart rate and that's something that i grew up with before power meters it's all about heart rate so he'd look at his heart rate more than anything and then afterwards he would look at his power once he was back home but not look at his power and training.”
I'm delighted to chat with you brian i feel like is it weird when i've spent so much time watching you on the tv and you've never seen me before it's this weird dynamic we have gone now um i don't do a lot of envision stuff i've started to do more envision stuff in the last three years it's it's more my my voice so people don't really see me um you know when my kids were growing up they were my partner was putting the tv on and they were watching tv they could hear the voice but they couldn't see me and sometimes um even a male yorker i met a group about three years ago and i just asked them just politely is it okay if i tag along with you and he turned around and went i recognize your voice recognize my voice and he said offshore and got to know them and yeah it's strange that people people now because i've done a lot more envision people see me and say hello to me but three four years ago it was just all about my voice so i i don't think i've got a distinctive voice but people think you have when i was thinking about uh people for the summit and we're trying to tackle this idea of performance and how to maximize your performance from as many different angles as possible i thought there can't be as many there can't be i don't know if there's another person in the world as well placed as you to look at this from different perspectives because you've been a writer of some note with national titles you've been a director of some note and now you're one of the the leading pundits in the sport that sort of trifecta is very unique i think yeah it it brings a lot to commentary as well because too many times that a lot of teams you work with one team you concentrate on one team and with commentary because i've been there um you know i took the first african team to the tour de france with some some good success so you concentrate on what you're doing but you don't see what others are doing and with commentary you have to look at all the teams what all the teams are are doing and and like you say i've been a sports director at the highest level i've been a a writer i wouldn't say the highest level but you know a good good very good level um and also working in the media with across most of the major events but i've also worked in a lot of events as well and been at a lot of events you know i've been on site at the gyro the welter the tour the world championships i've worked in the tour of britain so that gives me another element because i'm as a is a punder i'm looking at the motorbikes the setup and things like that and i understand from the rider's point of view the the motorbikes are getting too close and helping the riders there's a lot of performances have been helped by the motorbikes at the front of the race but working in the media side and working on the the event side i can see you know both sides so that gives me a unique element as you say to you know what i think about cycling i think you're quite modest when you're describing yourself as a writer of not much notes because you've two national titles was it 91 and 94. so if we join us back to that talk to me then like how it's changed from then to now like were you coached back for those british national titles i'm self-coached it's it's something that um i've learned when i retired from the sport i i coached someone from scottish club level up to winning in britain you know the uh there's a series that a national series called the um premiere i think the premier events so i coached them from hardly finishing uh a scottish race to one winning a british level so i did about coaching but um i'm not too sure if coaching was for me i like helping individuals but it's like having kids i know that now i've got two young kids and being a coach yeah it's not about i can coach you let me get to know you first once i get to know you and i think that's what um a lot of coaches maybe don't understand that it's about the relationship because i can go into a team like savello testimo or netapp enduro or mtn quebecer but of the the riders that are in that team i don't think i could coach every one of them um there's maybe six or eight maybe more ten i could coach but it's that that personal relationship if you don't have the relationship it's like father and son my father was a cyclist and i used to listen to them but i wouldn't take everything in but yet um a stranger or someone i didn't know really well give me the same information and i'll take it in yeah so it's all about that relationship the trust the relationship because i don't think someone that's got um even rider agents i've got a stable of maybe 20 or 30 riders but they just put them in teams to make money they don't put them in the right teams it's the same with coaching you can coach 20 or 30 riders but do you really know that rider because it's not just about giving giving the the training you've got to know how it fits into to their their life and what their life is about is something i learned from i did a coach the coach show for um a program here in the uk where myself and rob hales we selected know two individuals and coached them towards an event as a sportive and you know i got no individual i got to know the circumstances and there's one thing he said to me you want me to invest into a power meter and that rang a bell invest and i went to meet him it was a two up two down house just a just a nice simple how two young kids looking around i'm thinking i don't want him to spend a thousand pounds in a parameter yeah it's going to help me look at it help him train but i couldn't do that to him and you have to look at specific things that are going to to help not just the individual but help the family and when he said invest if someone says do you want me to invest that's a bit of money for them and so you know they cannot alarm bells go off they can't afford them so we went back to kind of old-school ways where you asked me the question i was self-taught i used to pick up the phone when i was younger and phone robert mueller and ask robert miller would give me he's a nice guy to have in your corner yeah he gave me the the training that he was doing with panasonic you know some of the power training they were doing in the winter and it was a lot of the kind of weight training the power training was was done over either an hour or an hour and 15 minutes but it was done on the bike so i was doing a lot of this stuff and so was that just big gear stuff on the bike yeah well you did an hour on the flat in the biggest gear on your bike so just like some power stuff it was like in a load training so what was the biggest gear then were you still 50 11 no i don't think it was 11 i think it was 53 12 at that time and then an hour and 15 minutes on maybe some hillier trip terrain but you used the gears a little bit more but your cadence was always about you know 50 60 maximum and it was just about power stuff so that's what they were training i think most of the uh the flat stuff was more down towards kind of time trialling efforts because robert told me that that helped his time trial effort that bit at the end and also towards the end of once you've done your four hours your five hours just for ten minutes you put it in the maximum gear and just right that power stuff so there's a lot of stuff that i i learned there was no scientific way they were they were kind of passed down um but the biggest thing in training that i got is if you don't want to do it don't do it yeah and i think it's something i'm getting like when we look at this multi-factorial approach to performance across the summit i spoke with the scott murphy he's the head physio for mitchell scott and he was talking about you've all these studies now that talks about biomarkers or recovery should you use ice baths space boots all this different stuff he's like but he thinks he can basically throw all them studies out the window because you need to figure out does it make the writer feel better and that's not captured in any of these studies because he said if it makes you feel better like if i ask you why you how did you feel the day you won the british national championships you'll probably come back with something like i had good legs and that's common we hear that a lot from riders good legs and bad legs that's it's all subjective no i i think a lot of that is a forgive my french is sometimes a bit of bollocks uh when someone says they were floating in my book whether i won a lost cycle is not easy my first british title i got um i was a bit lucky in getting it because other people were marked out of it but i gave everything and i was i was on the limit at the end my second british title between them i finished second twice but the next title i was like this is hard it was like a couple of weeks after the giro d'italia that was in 1994 yeah so you wouldn't motorola that year was it yeah so all my wins that i had in my career um and even before i was a professional there was there was not one i thought i was on a float there that was easy they were all hard and and that's what i said to a lot of riders you will not win because you've got your great legs or you're floating or ends like that you just have to suffer more than anybody else yeah that's what you have to do and my philosophy is if you can suffer more than others you'll win more it's not about yeah you can have good legs and feel good and how many people do and even now in the interviews we get after the the wealth or the jira or the tour i had good legs but you didn't win so there's a lot of people felt their good legs have felt good but they didn't win and i think a lot of that is a like i said before a bit of bollocks because no one nobody that races and finishes that race finishes that stage gets it easy well i think that's the part that a lot of guys coming into the sport you know the entry level categories in ireland we call it category four i'm not sure if they have four cats in the uk but they're coming into the sport they're so conditioned to indoroid and through zwift training rights where they're making excuses saying oh i better ease off in a group ride and let themselves get dropped because they're looking at a power meter at some point you just need to draw a line and say this is a hard sport you need to roll up your sleeves because you're not going to get anywhere in this board unless you're happy with that misery like i i've spent a lot of time with sean kelly and and even sean says that he was just able to suffer a lot longer okay he did the physical attributes but he could just suffer for longer and i do quite a lot of running with him and i can see that he's 63 years old he's got 10 years in me and i was quite fit last year and running and i would lift the tempo and lift it and he'd still be there he's still over there and that's that's him just blocking off that you'll be responsible for the death of sean kelly no i'll be i'll be responsible for him living to 100 possibly but no no seriousness when i was um a pro bike rider it was probably 25 science and 75 percent go out and ride your bike and it seems to be it seems to be going the opposite way more people are getting into the signs than anything else and one thing that working with teams and working with individuals like you say in races everybody looks at a power meter so you go out and you look at your power meter you're on a good day if you're producing some good power on the same roads you did last week but how how do you feel when you're producing less power on that road the conditions change it can a place where you mind a little bit so a lot of the time when you go to do your training and i know that this is something i talked about with steve cummings who had some great success as a writer great i had him on the podcast actually lovely man yeah it's he used to not look at his power on anything when he was a trainer he used to look at his heart rate and that's something that i grew up with before power meters it's all about heart rate so he'd look at his heart rate more than anything and then afterwards he would look at his power once he was back home but not look at his power and training and that's something that is probably more me than anything because it's very difficult when you're out training to replicate the same conditions so when you're riding you're doing your train and you've gone up this climb and it's like that the conditions all change you feel different but one thing about it is if you're making the effort your heart rate is very similar so when you're making these efforts you're looking at your heart rates and then you can look at the power files later on not the the opposite way around and there are times where in training i've asked the mechanics to tape up the parameters and just go out there and ride the bike and they can look at it afterwards i had i asked the question as well why are raiders still doing six seven eight our rights why are writers doing it because the sign says you don't need to do it and it's getting even longer like i was looking at some of bernal's rides in particular during lockdown and they were crazy lit so why did they do it one i think it makes them feel better and you know obviously there's a lot of kind of fat burning going on and a lot of you know long race to you know to stay lean and things like that and you know if you're on a bike that you're not tempted to you know do maybe three or four hours rather than six seven eight hours and when she came off the bike you're tempted to eat more and things like that so there's a there's a lot of psychological things come into training and it's not just about about the numbers people ask me about empty income becca i came in and rebuilt that team and i took a bunch of i think underachievers and i i'll say that they're under they had underachieved over the the previous years so they hadn't changed anything physically i hadn't got these coaching girls to to get them to to train harder they were just training the difference is here that's the difference and i i keep on banging on about it is you can be the fittest rider the most trained rider um no tactics more than anybody else but with me my weakness was tiredness if i was tired i wouldn't perform at the same level but how do you get riders to switch on to that as you say the mindset part is that sports psychologists or is it less subtle is it more subtle than that i think working with um i don't think you need a sports psychologist they can help a little bit um um steve peters helped the british olympic team and not waking through scenarios i've worked with a sports psychologist before but that kind of pushed it pushed me like another way a little bit thinking too much about it i think if you've got an individual um like possibly like a father figure or or a big brother that you can talk to someone that that you can believe in and trust and you've got that these kind of individuals that that are not you can work in constructive criticism with them maybe you did that in the race maybe you did that maybe you could do this and look i go i got recently asked a couple of questions about mtn quebec how did the african level riders rise up to you know daniel tickle hammer not um having a polka dot jess in the tour de france and that was unbelievable my philosophy was when you've got a bunch of um african riders scottish this is what i've got scottish top on you know supporting my my national team later on but um as a scottish rider you had robert miller you'd uh billy boslin before that there's always a kind of 10 years of a a difference different in a decade when i said i wanted to become a professional cyclist people laughed at me and people put me down when i went to france you only last two weeks this is all i got is maybe something scottish or i don't know if you've got this an island but as soon as you showed ambition people want to put you down yeah it's a very harsh thing as well yeah so they want to put you down they don't want you to see see you succeed um but i was determined and when i first went down to england to race you get the cycling magazine you look at it you see these individuals the write-ups the pictures and you go down there and you see them in the flesh for the first time you think oh they're better than me then you go out there and win the race and you think i'm just as good as them so my philosophy was if you bring in the steve cummings the boston haggins the search piles and these riders and they're all eating living um on the bus doing everything together training together racing together there's a spark in the mind of these underdogs that think i've got two legs two arms i'm i'm okay some of them might be you know black but i'm the same as the ride that i'm sleeping in the same room with and that gives them confidence because they're doing exactly everything they're putting the same fuel in the tank they're training the same they're doing everything the same why can i not be successful like they are well we have that can't see me can't be me i'm not sure if that's uh prevalent in the uk but it's the idea that we've katie taylor as a female role model in sport and katie taylor's the best in the world maybe the greatest female boxer ever so yeah any female boxer can be that sean kelly done that like it wasn't branded i can't see him he can't beat me but sean kelly blew the lid off expectations for reuters and we've seen roach chris yo jensen dan martin and obviously sam bennett coming through and benefiting from the ground to kelly paved for us well look at sam bennett sam bennett way back in uh 2014 um i phoned sean and i said what about sam for mtn robert sam he needs another year he said and he was right sean was right he needs another year to develop and you you find out this year that john kelly won his first tour stage at 22.
Sam won his first stage this year at 29 right but it took him a little bit longer um but still the same one in the green jersey one in two stage one in champs-elysees i don't think sam could believe it but people believed in him and i think ireland believed in that and we always need these role models and i bet you there's a lot of cyclists back in ireland that have raced or ridden or trained with sam bennett thinking to themselves well if he can do it i can do it because it's it's set in the bar it's it's not you know okay sam's got a gift right not everybody has these gifts i didn't have the same gifts as a stephen roach or sean kelly and these are riders but i used what i had i was in an era in the 90s which was you know high use of epo as a clean cyclist this is very difficult to compete at that level but i had a reasonably good enough career but it's all about confidence in my mind a lot of okay you have to you train and i think when you look at technology dave brailsford came in with marginal gains all these small things you put them together but everybody's caught up now everybody the bikes that all the teams are using there's not much and they keep on swapping around they're all very much the same the wheels the tires everything the clothing now and to jump in there on the marginal gains i actually think what we're seeing with amateurs is they're just focusing on the marginal gains now and they're missing the entire rest of the cake if you want to think of marginal gains as the cherry on top they're like hard work is the bit you they don't talk about it they talk about the wheels the tires the skin suits and they're missing that whole aspect of it and you know you can't you can't skip it no you can't you can't skip the hard work it's you have to put the hard hours in and i can remember um i wrote the worlds in 92 and i was riding in britain and for a whole kind of five six weeks i had um three or four criteriums that's all i had no other races it was in benidorm over kilometers um i went there having done the training on my own i used to do you know eight nine hours training and ride races and ride home afterwards but i didn't have those races all i had was criteriums which is in the uk lasted one hour so i was having what i did was i was doing five or six hours and then going straight to the chain gang and everybody knows the chain gang it's about 30 or 40 miles right through and off so i would do a hilly ride meet them salt all over me they'd be shaking their head at me and then i would ride on the front thrown off not miss a turn the whole night and that's how i was training i was just training harder than anybody else and trying to replicate what happens in races and i finished the worlds in 1992 uh finished 45th finished in the same group as a certain sean kelly and beyond that's one of my claims to fame that yeah you have to put the hard yards in but i will say that sport science can show a lot and now we're seeing even um food signs before you used to have all the writers this is what you would eat right but everybody's um using different calories so now like a team sun web and naked rocks told me this that over the last in a couple of years it's all wayed out and it's all individual so it's not a case of this it suits you it will suit him and everybody's equal and everybody has the same amount it's all individually chopped up and it's the same with training you can go and do 12 minute intervals on the flats but that might not suit every rider some might nine some might do 15. it's it's it's it's an individual thing and you cannot just go out there and this this training will suit all but i tell you what the one thing that i've learned in cycling is everybody likes to ride the bike and if you can mix up the the hard stuff the interval training you know the the hard stuff with riding your bike then it kind of breaks up the rides and helps you train and because some people they'll go on swift um or the the just a trainer and do these intervals that's probably one of the hardest things to do purely just go on and do this training what i learned was you maybe do 45 minutes riding and then you do your intervals then you do another 45 minutes just riding or having a ride and then you do some more intervals afterwards if you're coming back after doing three sometimes three and a half hours or four hours and you've done some some high intensity and you're riding your bike because that helps you mentally looking at a turbo trainer and knowing that you're going to go in there like chris hoy used to do intervals on his um on his walk bike and have a mattress next to him in a bucket he used to go that deep fall off after his interval session be sick in the bucket so do that that's actually a good segue to this one because you were in 94 in motorola and when i think about the evolution of cycling around up here you park in the ethics of the epo and stuff that started going on around that area but it was definitely a torn point around sport science as well and it marked the kind of in my mind anyway maybe i'm open to be corrected by it marked in my mind the new era of cyclone where we start really dialing in with the teachings of ferrari and what's it like looking back now on that sort of evolution of how writers train well it not only changed the way we were training because we were sponsored by polar and you know it was all about um training heart rates and things like that we never had power meters then but we also had the technology in your ear we had motorola um sets that you know the headsets know that yeah you know every approach so we were getting information in our ears we were looking at the training but motorola that team was amazing for me because yeah can a new writer's coming forward and i'm i'm talking about lance armstrong george hancock and these these guys they were the kind of younger kind of new writers coming through so they had their own training but you also had phil anderson even jan scheuer a niche german from leipzig with his training methods so i would train with the likes of sean yates uh phil anderson jan scheuer steve bauer these type of guys and learn from them from canada i was i think is a a younger rider i was a sponge taking information but what i was good at is adapting what helped me one thing that i i disliked is doing intervals in the flats but i can do intervals in a claim yeah because and it's the same with time trials time traveling in the flat is a whole different thing and time traveling and the climbs because it's it's easier to do on on a climb because it's easier to get your heart rate it's easier to go up to that that kind of level when you ride a time trawler rider along a flat i was always having to think to myself you can write faster you can ride faster and because in a flat i found um in intervals difficult and what i learned pre-season doing intervals doing it and with another individual and i did it with um sean yates and we'd do a minute minute on swing over and sit on the wheel of the other individual who was going flat out for a minute that that drags you out so you've got big kick to get back into the wheel then as well into the wheel and hold that wheel where he's gone because he's on your wheel for a minute you swing over so you've given absolutely everything for a minute you swing over go on that wheel and suffer like a dog it's the same with the difference between time traveling in your own and that kind of focus and pushing yourself without power meters to see where you are so and writing a team time trial because a team time trial is easier to ride because you've got other individuals pulling you out and i think doing something difficult interval training um is mentally a little bit easier to do with someone else because they always push you on and i think it's more specific as well because guys wonder they do their flat out steady stay 15 20 minute intervals all off season and then they come into the season and they wonder why they can't really chew on the break because they haven't got that like you were talking about that pup to get back into the wheel because there's just been steady stage of whatever 300 watts they've been doing all winter it's the same you look at your power meter on in a race you know 200 meters before the top of the hill and you're at your max what do you do do you ease back lose the wheel and you have to chase hard down the other side or you just go into the red a little bit hang on and then everybody can easily come down it's it's the choices and that's where sport science you you're trying not to go into the red too much you're trying to do everything but sometimes you have to go on the reddit parts and this is where the the tactical side of things come in if you pop into the red a little bits and then you get and you find yourself in front and you look back and they're riding negatively behind you it's the fact that you've gone into that red where the others have chosen not to go into the reds so tactically when you've got these numbers i don't think is the writer you should be thinking when i get to that number of power that's me i'm not going any harder but that person that goes into the reds goes over the top of that climb onto the descent tries to recover on that descent the other right are starting to write negatively behind then you've won that race because you have taken that that um that choice and i think everybody in cycling has got the choice whether they go into the red or not and it's not all about you know riding that threshold changing gear for a second i know we're in an era now which i suppose is saturated media coverage i'd almost say of cycling from vloggers on youtube to cycling websites to people who have huge followings on twitter or instagram and then it's you know your tv channels as well and for somebody getting into the sport that doesn't have they're not immersed in this cycle in history and cycling tradition there's a lot of voices there who's the trusted voices that you go to and still admire like you work with bradley wiggins and sean kelly i would assume they're two of the the better voices to listen to in the sport it's a it's a hard question um you know you can get to the top of the sport but and i think a lot of writers that have what at the top of the sport don't really remember or know what it feels like to be in the masses kind of hanging on the back a little bit and it's something i i ripped sean about the whole time i said you only know but it's what um probably five or six riders in this race no you know what it feels like because you were there you were one of these kind of five or six writers you don't know what it's like to kind of hang on the back and you know be suffering like a a dog all day um so i think for me i think it's a collective like i said i'm a sponge um i'll take advice from everybody i'll never stop learning uh i'll learn a little bit from brian holm when i talk to him about you know tactics and the race i absorb that and i can understand that um there's certain things that i hear and when someone else is commentating there'll be things that bradley wiggins will pick up um so for for me it's not about that's the the guru of cycling that's the person that i think is is the the person i would go to to learn everything i think for me i'm educated by a lot different people and there's a lot of influencers i take nuggets from because i don't think in cycling everybody knows everything and you know people often say to me how do you know that tactic is going to happen the race how do you know well i've got 15 years experience and i can know and and i brought that experience to the teams in the church of france in 2015 we missed a group of 20 and then boston haggin um in the radio do we chase do we chase and i went no it's not for us to chase because i knew that i looked at the composition of the the group i looked at who'd already missed it out who benefited more to chase and all of a sudden garmin came up and chased it down it saved us from doing anything because it's always a poker game because these things because i know that rick oberto iran on the murder britann has been nearly almost won this one a stage before and they're a a bigger team than mtn quebec they'd missed the break away so it's down to them to do it but as a viewer getting into these tactics like i've been you know around the sport are involved in this board for guts of 15 years or so when i'm watching any race on the tv you know i would say i'm understanding 95 maybe i'm missing some of the subtle tactics but i'm by and large i pretty much know what's going on and but then i chat to you know buddies that are just getting into the sport or clients who are just getting started you know maybe i'm talking to real entry level guys maybe somebody's played rugby for years now they're looking for a new challenge and they come across the cyclone they're used to watching football rugby these games are very easily understood tactics wise you get into cycling and we just have this if you take a tour of france you know football who scores the most goals win tour de france try and explain that to a person who's not into cycling okay so we have this three-week race and then we've just one classification called the general but then we've raced to the top of the hill each day and that's mountains points and then we've these intermediate sprint points that gather up for a green jersey but all some guys don't even care about any of that some of them only care about winning the stage and then this one spanish team just cares about the team classification they don't care about anything else how do we communicate or how do we onboard those new users into their sport i think it's very difficult to do that because even with my experience in big racing i my motivation is i go into any race and i don't know what's going to happen i i kind of suspect the breakaway is going to go away here there's going to be about maybe 10 or 12 or more or less and this is what's going to happen and it could end up in a sprint but how many times in the restart to this year's season have we seen the unpredictable and we keep on saying this we don't know what's going to happen and all of a sudden you get um you know the breakaway going away i think the breakaway might go to the end and border come up to the front and drag it all back okay they might not win in the end so you never know what's happening in every particular team what the tactics are going to be unless you're go sitting in every team meeting and understanding at all and that's for you as the experienced pundit trying to call it can you imagine for the rugby player coming in trying to make sense of what's going on because my concern with it is we lose a lot of those guys because they come in and they turn on a tour of the front stage and they can't make any sense of it and they go well how can you watch someone just cycling along for five hours i can understand that um sam bennett won his first stage why isn't he in you hello you know he's angry he's used to winning but i don't think we help each other um and i know that the uci i know uci races now the world tour there's only four jerseys i can remember when there was six jerseys and some races you know more than six jerseys we were saying this and in the giro d'italia there's about seven or eight competitions in the gyro d'italia um but we're down to four jerseys i know that a lot of people i like the pink jersey i i like the the red jars and i like the yellow jersey i think they seem that there needs to be some sort of consistency to make it easier yeah i agree if we've got consistency people will go and i think it'll be a crying shame to have a yellow jersey as a a leader of each tour but for a for a layman coming in and gone the welter or that riders in yellow he must be leading but that rather than jairo he must be leaving i like the fact that there's different leaders jerseys but i think every other jersey i think if we can get some sort of consistency that will help identify these riders i also think that maybe some sort of sign towards um you know i know they give a red number for more aggressive but i think they should be identified to the writer that won the stage the previous day but i think it's so complex when you put and i go down to 22 teams together there's four competition jerseys there's a race for the stage there's a race for the for you know different points there's no the gc contenders it's a big education it's a big education and i think what we have to do and maybe you know i know some some people do um videos and things like that talking about echelons and it's something that i've learned i've i started last year to write a book on the start of this year to write a book and i'm i'm getting through it now i've started um i didn't do too much in lockdown but i'm starting to get through it but i've got a proofreader that knows nothing about cycling that's brilliant so when i give them that because i want to i want to appeal to to everybody and say it and in easy enough terms that everybody will understand because it nearly needs a tour de france for dummies as an introductory text to explain what's going on we need an education for sure it's not all about echelons and things like that we need to they have to be educational videos that says the gc contenders these are gc days and these are the riders that humility over 21 stages has the fastest time while there's other riders just going for stages can lose half an hour one day and win the race that the next day because it just struck me i recorded a podcast on the welton and i was reflecting back on the last mountain stage of welter i'm not sure if you remember and kara paz attacked roglic was dropped he was on the back foot and we've seen in the last couple of kilometers two movie star riders royden i think it was solaire to come back from the early break and mask yeah i was explaining there's a number of things going on here one dan martin's dropped so mass has the chance of potentially jumping them on gc because i was getting questions like why are they working for a rug glitch i was like well they're working to bring mass separate that gap from dan martin and it was just the amount of dms i got after and i touched on another couple of points or so i wasn't sure valid or not kara paz's left movie star last year and i'm led to believe it wasn't a brilliant split i'm like i'm sure there's no love lost there solaire might have a bit of extra fire in his belly to ride a little bit harder and you're potentially banking a favor with ruglitch one of the stars in the sport it's like when you add all those three together it's a powerful motivator for movie star to ride and help ruglitch but the amount of dms on instagram i got that people just they couldn't even understand the forestries and never mind the second two i was speculating on i was like whoa but how are they watching the race like where are they getting their enjoyment from if they don't know that that's going on do you know i think i think um we need to look at the uci points as well um we have the array for the position because there's a certain amount of points and all the teams need points to stay um in the in the world tour we have to look at that in days gone by it was all about finishing on the podium that's what it mattered finishing on the podium whether you dropped down to ninth from six didn't really matter but now with the the point system in cycling the higher up the ladder you get the more points you get and and it's all about points and okay there's prize monies as well but we could we could definitely look at that where you know there's not a big difference between sixth and tenth but you hear it all the time even into the last stage when we saw um the uh the rider from astana trying to go on the podium trying to go for the bonus sprint because he's sitting in an 11th and blastoff wanted to get um some second bonus to to pop over valverde and molly star were having none of it so it's been happening for the last decades or even more that riders get paid a little bit more there's a bit more kudos about finishing in the top ten and i think we have to get back and strip it all back to it's all about the podium and get everybody racing because like you whether it was for and you're right kara paz i think the movie star were wanting cara pass to stay um movie star are renowned for for doing these type of things as well um but then again if it's just like a race for the podium then karo pass would have got a lot closer but yeah i think there was no love lost between uh movie star and karapas that they it was in their best interest to do it but i think it gave them that added push to make sure that kara passed after saying that they asked to to movie star under not great circumstances you know that's kind of payback for uh letting us down yeah i'm sure they had a good giggle at dinner that night about that uh last question and i'll let you go uh brian if you're looking back on your cycling career i'm talking pawn this director sportif into a rider and you get to whisper back in young brian's ear as he started this whole journey again what advice would you give to yourself back then um i think that the old saying is if only i had a no nuts um i'd had a better career i i grew up in cycling i enjoyed cycling too much i there's a lot of times i used to think about cycling too much and not just throw caution to the wind you know there's two in my mind there's two different riders a rider that thinks too much and a rider that just broke strength and ignorance and i i i look back at my career and have a few worksheets i wish i had just attacked and and and forgot about trying to work things out and just attacked and i've lost a loss of a one-on-one and it's as simple as that and that's how i won my first british title but i was told to do it i think throughout my career if i had just used a bit of bridge strength and ignorance and put myself in the game i'd probably won more and that's probably a wee bit advice and it's probably come out on this in this uh meeting with you that you can look a bit you can look at the numbers you can look at the signs you look at everything unless you're prepared to just go out there and do it and suffer like a dog then you're not going to have that success and i think that's something that i learned from from from cycling that any team and individuals i work with now i just say i don't care if you lose just go out there and one and one of the circumstances came and and milan san remo where um edward bozenhagen was was there in the front group and it was important for the team for him to finish in the first ten because that's where you get the uci points yeah but unbeliever of do not play safe go out there and try and win and he did and he attacked and he was off the front and they get brought back and had no points okay we had to bear the consequences of you know the the team on are going we get no points from that race why did they go and attack but the riders like racing you don't you know when you grow up as a kid you don't you go oh daddy i want to go and ride round the park no you go i want to race around the park come on and race i want to erase you and all these young riders they just want to race and it's brilliant so the further up the ladder you get you take that racing away from them you do this and you do that it's the same now at the high level all these riders want to do is race and i think we've seen a little bit of that with with the likes of kara pass rogue glitch dan martin right yeah the racers the thing about pagatcha was in the last week of the the tour he had to change and he had to change because you look back at the pyrenees when he was racing he was in a in the stage the pirates earth he was racing and he loves race and he loves attacking we love seeing that as a as a pundit as a commentator we love seeing all that but in the last few days before the time trial he just had to follow he was just following fallen for saving that for the big efforts sometimes you have to do that but we'd like to see racers and i think i made that comment about the welter right from the start we're in for a race because we've got kara paz roglic dan martin we've got racers and that's why i think the welter was so great this year because people were out trying to race each other and that's what we want now people are willing to race with each other that's entertainment and that brings people to our sport not people that want to go put the team on the front because there's a rider moving into fifth place and we want to keep that fifth place so we have to look at our sport as what's more entertaining the points staying in the world tour i think the world tour is it's a slippery slope because you hear that you know the the african team ntt may be riding at eight eight million euros eight million euros that's like a second division team now it's they're not going to have the the budget to be able to to do a whole race program and and have the same amount of riders but they want that world tour license because it guarantees them into every race we have to look at all this and think that's not right what we want is the best teams at the best races with the best riders we've got too many it's two day looted and i think we've we've seen a glimpse of that over the last three months in our sport we've seen a lot of the best riders at the big the best races yeah and a lot of other riders and i think that's been more entertaining and i think we have to learn from the last three months and try and replicate that because the only time that the best riders are at the top race seems to be the tour de france because it's a phenomenally good season so it's looking back and replicating that like you said brian smith i could end up yapping to you all night here about cycling thanks very much for your time and thanks for joining us on summer no worries thanks again
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
What training methods did Brian Smith use as a professional cyclist?+
Brian Smith adopted a power-based training approach influenced by Robert Millar during his time at Panasonic. This involved hour-long efforts in a 53x12 at 50-60 rpm to build muscular strength, plus maximum-gear intervals tacked onto the end of long rides. It was old-school by modern standards but highly effective for developing the raw power required at the top level.
How important are personal relationships in professional cycling coaching?+
Brian Smith argues that personal relationships are central to effective coaching at the professional level. Understanding a rider's full life circumstances, including stress, sleep, and personal pressures, matters as much as any prescribed training plan. A sports director who treats riders as individuals rather than data points will consistently get more out of them.
What does a cycling sports director actually do?+
A sports director manages race strategy from the team car, communicating with riders via radio throughout the race and making real-time decisions about positioning, breakaways, and resource allocation. Brian Smith brings a rare perspective to the role, having experienced professional racing first-hand as a two-time British national champion before moving into team management and broadcast punditry.
What separates professional cyclists from amateur riders mentally?+
Brian Smith highlights that the ability to perform under pressure and adapt to constantly changing race circumstances distinguishes professionals from amateurs far more than raw fitness alone. Elite riders develop an instinctive reading of the race that cannot be replicated purely through structured training. That intelligence is built over years of high-level competition, not simply coached into someone.
NEVER MISS AN EPISODE
Weekly insights from the podcast. The stuff that actually makes you faster.