Prior to Brailsford’s appointment British cycling had endured a rather mediocre level of success, with just a single gold medal at the Olympics since 1908, and no British cyclist ever winning the Tour de France since its inception.
When Brailsford joined be brought with him a new vision and strategy for improving the performance and success of the team in what came to be known as “the aggregation of marginal gains”. With this strategy Brailsford pushed his athletes and his team to look for tiny improvements everyday in everything that they were doing.
“The whole principle came from the idea that if you broke down everything you could think of that goes into riding a bike, and then improve it by 1 percent, you will get a significant increase when you put them all together.”
Brailsford and his team set to work measuring and monitoring every aspect of their riders, from the clothes they wore while riding, to the mattresses and pillows they slept on and recorded the effect of every change to see how this would impact performance. By looking for just small increases in performance across a wide area, the team were able to keep the goals realistic, achievable, and measurable. As these small improvements accumulated, they added up rapidly to huge success on the road/track for the athletes.
