Supporting Champions

Dave Smith, Paralympic champion shares his emotional story intertwining sporting pursuit and cancer survival. This interview is a deep one, it’s a full existential exploration of what is important, how and what we pursue and the focus on what really matters in our lives. I had the truly humbling, moving and inspirational experience of speaking to Dave Smith to tell his utterly remarkable story of...

Performance psychologist Dr Josie Perry is this episode's guest. Josie has a successful consultancy service supporting endurance athletes, golfers tennis players, but she also has a rich background in communications. Originally a journalist, director of communications and public relations. Josie converted to psychology but what was fascinating about this interview was about the fusion of the two s...

Dawn Scott, High Performance Coach to the USA women’s national football team, who happen to have won two successive World cup titles and Olympic gold in 2012, is this episode's guest. In this interview you’ll hear about Dawn’s journey from her early days grafting away with women’s football, taking a lead role at the English FA and then taking the leap to working with the US team. Critically you’ll...

Nick Grantham, performance enhancement specialist and consultant, is this week's guest. Nick and I go way back to the mid 1990s and have worked alongside each other in the sphere of sports performance. Nick has worked with a range of elite teams, netball, gymnastics, basketball, premiership football, downhill mountain biking to name a few. Nick is also a leading light in taking an active role in d...

Neil Chugani was a coxswain and a good one too. He coxed the Oxford crew to success in the boat race in 1991, he was World Champion in the coxed pairs in 2001, where I met Neil for the first time as Matthew Pinsent and James Cracknell went for the double, double, both the coxed pairs followed by coxless pairs world championship finals in the space of two hours – a story I feature in my book How to...

Emma Hatton star of the West End talks about her career, Emma has starred in some of the biggest musicals and lead roles, Scaramouche in We will Rock You, Elphaba in Wicked, Eva Peron in Evita and recently Grizabella in Cats. We discuss Emma’s origins as an athlete, the pull of performing on stage, the art form that Emma performs and how she does that, the persistence and knock backs, sustaining p...

Dame Jessica Ennis-Hill is triple World champion, Olympic champion, European Champion and British record holder in the heptathlon and World indoor champion in pentathlon. Perhaps more significantly Jess is an icon of British sport and global track and field athletics – as much for carrying the weight of expectations of a nation at the London Olympics in 2012. To give you an example a 4000m2 portra...

This week’s guest is Dr Hannah Critchlow, cellular and molecular neuroscientist at the University of Cambridge. Hannah has recently released her new book the ‘science of fate’, exploring whether our genetic code determines our path or instead whether our genetic code acts as a start point from which we get to choose who we become. I grabbed 15 mins with Hannah between sessions at the Cheltenham Sc...

Matt Dixon is a professional triathlon coach and founder of Purplepatch fitness. Matt is former professional triathlete and elite swimmer, now coach and has set up a highly successful performance training and coaching support business. Purple patch has a roster of numerous world class triathletes that Matt and his team of coaches have supported to hundreds of ironman and half ironman victories. Bu...

Joining us this week on the Supporting Champions podcast is Head of Physiology at the English Institute of Sport (EIS), Dr. Emma Ross. I first met Emma at a scientific conference in 2009 and she blew me away with her ability to communicate and translate complex ideas and concepts. A few years later I appointed Emma as Head of Physiology at the EIS and after moving on from the system in 2016, I hav...

In this week’s episode I am joined by Dr. Tom Waller (Senior Vice President Whitespace, Innovation and R&D at lululemon athletica). After completing his PhD at Loughborough University in sports technologies, where I first met Tom, he went on to work at Progressive Sports Technologies and onto Speedo as Head of Aqualab at a time where skinsuits were at their peak at having an impact on world record...

Nick Matthew is three-time British and three-time World squash champion, as well as being two-time Commonwealth champion and former world number one. In this discussion we explore Nick’s early rise into the sport, particularly the breakthroughs he made through grit and perseverance. We also delve into his insights from finding his ‘super strength’ with the help of Mark Bawden and how he could appl...

This week we are joined by Gareth Sandford, exercise physiologist at the Canadian Sports Institute. Gareth is just starting his post-doctoral studies and so in many ways you could say he is at the beginning of his career, having just wrapped up his PhD in New Zealand, but he certainly has some incredible insights to share! Yes, this story is one of studying hard, but the reason why I wanted to tal...

Trent Stellingwerff, sports nutritionist is this week's guest. Trent and Steve first met as coaches in Valencia at the 2008 World Indoor Championships and he has since had a glittering career in the sport and exercise sciences. Trent now currently works at the Canadian Sports Institute, leading the track and field nutrition support team and is also the institute’s lead for innovation and research....

Podcast 034 Show Notes – Performance People In this week’s episode, Steve takes the reins on his own as he shares some perspectives about developing the next generation of performance people. Over the last few years Supporting Champions have been applying the lessons learnt in elite sport into other sports, business and education and one of the areas we keep observing/hearing about is the lack of...

This week’s guest is polar explorer Antony Jinman, a former naval officer and mountain leader. Antony was the 12th Briton to ski to both the geographic north and south pole. In this interview Antony shares the ups and downs of his career, in particular coping and managing with depression. He shares with us some of the demands of designing, funding and managing an expedition off set against actuall...

Joe Eisenmann joins me on the Supporting Champions podcast this week as we explore the area of long-term athletic development. We discuss his background in physiology, academia and applied practice and start off by discussing some of the fundamental principles of pedagogy and how important that is in academic and practical pursuits.  We then delve into some of the research Joe has conducted on lif...

BBC Breakfast's Louise Minchin on performing in broadcasting and as an age group triathlete for team GB. Louise is a journalist and former radio presenter and is best known as the anchor on BBC1's Breakfast programme - a unique job that welcomes the day in for many people. However, you may not know that Louise has had a sharp rise into competing for Great Britain in the age group Olympic distance...

030: Katelyn Ohashi on finding joy in gymnastics   In this episode I talk to Katelyn Ohashi about that viral routine https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ic7RNS4Dfo Katelyn shares here journey through gymnastics Body shaming Writing and poetry Advice for my daughter Finding joy once again with Miss Val The details of her routine and what it meant to her.   Supporting Champions on Twitter  www.twitter....

In Part 1 of this Podcast Special we have Head Coach of UCLA Gymnastics and orchestrator of THAT viral gymnastics' routine by Katelyn Ohashi, Miss Val Kondos Field. Miss Val and I discussed; how she was a ballerina originally but transitioned into coaching in gymnastics, the culture of gymnastics in the United States and how it has gone rotten, we unpacked her philosophies that have been galvanise...

Helen Jenkins is a two time World Triathlon Champion. In this interview Helen begins by discussing motherhood, her early career and the importance of early career influences such as the legendary coach Chris Jones and world champion Leanda Cave. We delve into her peak performance in San Diego, where Helen produced one of the most dominant triathlon performances in the last few decades, crushing a...

Brad is a trained Exercise Physiologist, Molecular Biologist, and Biostatistician, but wasn’t in these specialist topics that the insights started to flow in the interview, it was much more about how we live, work, day-to-day performance habits, parallels and allegories from the world of human function and human performance that we ended up exploring. One key area though really emerged and that wa...

Katherine is Great Britain’s most decorated female Olympic athlete. She won medals at 5 consecutive Olympic games in Sydney (2000), Athens (2004), Beijing (2008), London (2012) and Rio de Janeiro (2016), culminating in gold at our very own home games and a recording breaking fifth medal in Rio. To top off an incredible year, Dame Katherine Grainger was honoured in the 2017 New Year’s Honours List...

I take a look back at some of the highlights from the last year of interviews and discussions about high performance. The show is grouped into 5 common themes across all of the episodes: early career experiences and getting started, working with others, embracing change, thriving and looking at the bigger picture in life and leadership. Show Notes  Get Started Emilie Thienot from Ep #5 on getting...

This week Tim Harper from Harper Performance joins us to discuss moving out of elite performance support in the UK to create unique, locally driven solutions to performance problems in disadvantaged communities across the world. Tim and his social enterprise are on a mission to give sport back some of its purer spirit, to diversify thinking about preparation and performance and to fiercely champio...