Australian track cycling leading the sprint to change coaching of elite female athletes

Stephanie Morton was in the Australian squad to go to her second Olympic Games next year at Tokyo.

Last year she won gold with her teammate Kaarle McCulloch in the women’s team sprint at the Track Cycling World Championships in Poland.

But just eight months before the Games — and after thinking long and hard — Morton decided it was time to stop.

“When we got the announcement in March that they were postponing the Olympics, it went from four months to go to the Games to 16 months to go to the Games and that was a pretty big blow,” she said.

“You know you can postpone the Olympics, but you can’t postpone the rest of the world. You know life still goes on.”

Morton has been studying criminology and now wants to pursue a career in the field, satisfied she has achieved everything she wanted to on the bike.

But her retirement has created a crisis in Australian women’s sprint cycling.

Just a few years ago, Australia was arguably the best women’s sprint cycling nation in the world.

There was Anna Meares, the winner of two Olympic golds, five Commonwealth Games golds and a staggering 11 world championships.

Morton and McCulloch have both won numerous Commonwealth Games gold medals along with their world championship, while pushing Meares all the way during the latter stages of her decorated career.

Suddenly the cupboard is almost bare.

McCulloch is the only woman left in AusCycling’s elite podium program for female sprinters and only one other athlete is in the next-level academy program.

It is a sport like no other, with athletes racing at up to 60 kilometres per hour around a tight, wooden, steeply sloped velodrome.

“It’s just so exciting, it’s fast paced, it’s action packed,” Morton said.

And yet, despite the years of success, other women haven’t taken up the sport. Why?

“I think this is the big question,” Morton said.

“As a sprint cyclist, I know how great it is, but why isn’t everyone else realising that?”

They say in crisis lies great opportunity.

The woman with the job of getting Australia back on top is Lynne Munro, the head of AusCycling’s women’s Olympic fast track program.

“We in Australia are looking for Olympic gold, so that’s the opportunity,” said Dr Munro, who is looking to build a team for the 2024 Olympics in Paris.

But Dr Munro is also seeking to answer the question posed by Morton, whose retirement has created a big hole in the program — where are the new women?

And that is another opportunity.

It is not just the chance for Olympic success Dr Munro is offering: she wants to completely rethink the way women have been trained and coached in elite sport.

“We’re looking at building an environment that is specifically about female athletes,” Dr Munro said.

It is in many ways a unique philosophy that says it is too simplistic to transpose women into coaching and training environments that have been developed for men over a hundred years or more.

“So, the opportunity we have is to say, ‘OK, so maybe women were managing OK and obviously they were finding success within those environments, but was that ideal? Could we do better?'” Dr Munro said.

“Could we actually create an environment which is based around what women actually need to flourish?

“Let’s understand deeply how we attract, retain and support women, so they actually have no limits in achieving their aspirations.”

‘There are differences’

It is something Peta Searle has been thinking about for more than a decade in her long and varied career coaching Australian rules football.

Searle is now the head coach of the St Kilda AFLW team and the only woman among 14 senior coaches in the competition.

But she has seen the other side of the coin as a coach of male amateur and junior teams before getting a job as an assistant with the St Kilda AFL team.

“I certainly think that there are differences,” Searle said.

“But having said that, to some degree the way that we coach women should lend itself more to the way that we coach guys.”

Searle knew that when she was offered the job of head coach of St Kilda’s AFLW team she wanted to do something new.

“There was a sense of ‘OK, there’s a women’s team and we’re going to put them in a male environment’,” she said.

“And for us at St Kilda, it was important that we’ll bring in a women’s team, but we were able to have the space to create what we want and how that looks for our girls.

“We tend to really coach girls around building confidence, building self-esteem. [Coaching girls is] about building connectedness, their sense of belonging.

“[It’s about] Understanding at a deeper level the barriers they face, understanding the challenges that they have as a woman and as an athlete.”

Which in many ways mirrors what Dr Munro is trying to achieve to put women’s track sprint cycling back on top of the podium.

But whereas Australian rules caters for all sorts of athletes, Dr Munro said she was looking for “people who are exceptional, who are outliers” — powerful athletes who want to get even more powerful.

If you want to know what strong is, look up Meares.

There is a video on YouTube of Australia’s greatest ever track sprint cyclist doing a standing box jump as she trained for the London 2012 Olympic Games.

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She is only 165 centimetres tall and she is looking at a box 110 centimetres high right in front of her — it comes up to her chest.

She takes a deep breath, crouches, and explodes up to what seems like an impossible height. She does it six times for good measure.

It was that power and dedication to training that inspired Morton to drop badminton as a 15-year-old and take up the explosive, dynamic and dangerous sport that it is track sprint cycling.

“They were serious athletes, like they were girls,” Morton said.

“They wanted to go fast, they were happy to put on muscle and I was just like: ‘Yeah, this is really cool.'”

Casting the recruitment net far and wide

Dr Munro is on the search for power athletes to build up her squad, no matter what sport or endeavour they may have come from.

“So, we could be looking at sports like CrossFit or [TV’s] Ninja Warriors,” she said.

Morton said prospective track cyclists would need to know what lay ahead if they wanted to pursue the sport.

“It requires you to put on a muscle, you know you need to get girls that are willing to get in the gym, lift big,” Morton said.

“Understand that going shopping for jeans is going to be quite stressful from now on.”

But that’s not a bad thing, according to Dr Munro.

“It’s a positive thing for women to be strong and I think we’ve shied away from that image for a while,” she said.

Dr Munro’s starting almost from scratch but is embracing the challenge of creating a high-performance program that is specifically focused on the needs of elite female athletes.

It is a science and data-led approach.

“The research that’s out there in terms of peer-reviewed journals, are largely based around male athletes,” she said.

“We actually have to do some specific research for women and understand what women’s practices need to be.

“In our sport, we’ve got the opportunity to lead the way here and that’s exactly what we aim to do.”

Dr Munro said she was confident of looking ahead to 10 or 20 years time when the sporting environment for women would cater specifically for their needs.

“I would absolutely believe that things will look different, but we have to actively make that happen,” she said.