Tim Kerrison - Genius coach or doper extreme?

If you want to talk Sky and doping then this man is the one who you need to talk about..

He is either an amazing coach and an absolute genius... or a very dirty cheat..
He was the coach who Wiggins and the rest of the winning Tour team attributed for their incredible perfomances at the Tour.

So I will fill people in with some info on him..:

Kerrison was, as is infamously known, an Australian swimming coach until 2008 when he left and was contacted by the English cricket team, Brailsford managed to whisk him away at the last second.


A fellow coach at Aussie swimming.. said of Kerrison that it was "

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A tremendous loss to Australian swimming and that Kerrison is taking with him substantial knowledge of very innovative practices"

In fact Kerrison, being the genius coach who he is, has developed a software which has also revolutionised British swimming called the HCSI

What was so surprising about the recruitment though was that Kerrison did not have a clue about cycling, it was not all that uncommon considering that many physiologists swap sports, but in retrospect it is particularly surprising.

Yet Brailsford seems to explain it by saying:

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Tim's view is that the body is the body, whether it's swimming, rowing, cycling or any other sport. It is not tarnished by conventional wisdom

Makes pretty good sense to me..

Anyways, Kerrison's job seeing as he was clueless about the sport, was to follow the team around everywhere do nothing but observe, collating ideas and information.

Anyways after the 2010 season, Kerrison sat down with Brailsford to show him what Kerrison had observed and his overall conclusions. Brailsford said afterwards he was "blown away" by what Kerrison presented to him...


Here are his main conclusions...


What is startling from there primarily is how they make so much sense but due to the fact that they come from a mind which has not been whatsoever influenced by the sport and therefore does not concur with the stigmas and stereotypes which many of the tradiotional European teams have been influenced and therefore restricted by. Particularly as he says the reliance on doping, has stunted the coaching aspect of the sport whilst the best coaches and doctors in the past, have not been the ones who are the best trainers, but rather the ones who have the best doping techniques.

1) Kerrison could not understand why it was common practice for riders to use races for training. 

This technique was instituted years ago due to prize money... now the top riders dont need the prize money all that much, then why do they still use the races as training and build up when they can do it in more controlled environments at their own leisure, when they were not subjected to the racing peloton who has a mind and rhythm of its own. 

Yet people still believe that quality efforts would be done at the races, whilst the inter periods would be done at home for resting and lesser intensity training.

Edit: I found this quote which backs up this explanation.

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Wiggins said last month, while on camp in Tenerife, that he doubted if any single day on the Dauphine would be as hard as his training in, on and around Mount Teide and he was manifestly right. To these eyes the one full day's hit out I witnessed in Tenerife was immeasurably tougher than either of the two high mountain stages at the Dauphine.

2) Another concept of his was "reverse periodisation". This is what people have witnessed with Porte, Wiggins and Rogers over the past year, where they have seemed to be at peak form, a step ahead of the other riders throughout the season. 

Effectively it gets rid of the athlete originally focusing on his endurance and building an aerobic base, and then only afterwards to move only on to high intensity exercises only towards the end of the training period or cycle. 

And instead it makes the rider focus on introducing all the power and speed work early on and then they would gradually increase the duration of the training of those attributes as the rider's fitness improved, AKA. in this case closer to the Tour.

In the Wiggins case this was very evident wherease many so called "experts" questioned as to whether Wiggins was not peaking a tad too early. If these "experts" had understood that the "reverse periodisation" allows Wiggins to produce maximal perfomances even prior to his peak they would have realised Wiggins was in perfect shape for the Tour. 

They assumed that if riders are outputting maximal efforts then that would fastrack a rider into and out of the other side of their best form.

Once again this is another one of the misgiving which has stunted cycling and without it, it seems cyclists can perform much better.


Furthermore another example is that of Wiggins's time trialling which as markedly improved over the past two years. This is due to the fact that Kerrison has made Wiggins race his TTs at a lowed cadence.


Indeed Sky have rightfully applauded their genius coach and Wiggins has specifically attributed his Tour win down to Kerrison's coachin. Not only that but Rogers as well claimed that has increased his power threshold by 5-7% since working with Kerrison. 

Even Brailsford has labelled Kerrison 

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"The best man in cycling"

Pretty big considering the quality of the coaches Brailsford has worked with, as Sky, GB and on the track.. DB doesnt give compliments all that easily, so one of this magnitude means something. And tbh I am not sure he is exaggerating all that much.

He even went as far as to note that he doesnt like singing Kerrison's praises too much as ..

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We dont want to lose him. I dont want to say too much about how good he is.

Julich who worked for Riis at CSC said that he was used to Riis's method of training and said:

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"At first when I saw the way Tim was working I was pretty skeptical. Then as soon as I'd figured it out, I was like, WOW! Why doesnt everyone else do it like this"

Doesnt seem to me like the supposed Omerta that Benotti is always going on about.

To me it seems like the quality of coaching in the sport, has been harmed by the prominence of doping and only with coaches like Kerrison can the sport start to focus on improving riders' perfomances in other ways than doping.

Draw your own conclusions, but to me it seems relatively possible that this man could have accomplished what he has done due to just pure tactics and the reasons he has given for them seem to very, very logical and it all seems to explain the improvements and perfomances of the Sky team and specifically the Tour team and the Fantastic 4; of Froome, Porte, Rogers and Wiggins.

It seems to me that cycling has been stunted by certain misgiving and that Sky with Kerrison who has not been subjected to the misgivings therefore have an advantage.

To me he merely seems to be a genius of a coach..