GREGARIOUS GREGARIOUS AND STRONG SILENT TYPES

INT CLIMBERS EXT SPRINTERS

PERFECTIONISM MENTAL TOUGHNESS EMOTIONAL STABILITY SELF-BELIEF

Team Sky, it was once said, changed the face of cycling by shearing £100,000 from a rider’s £1-million salary and spending it on a coach. By increasing coaching time, the rider would hit and sustain their peak rather than hope they didn’t fall off the tightrope between optimum performance and overtraining. Every WorldTour team is replete with soigneurs, mechanics and managers, individuals charged with honing performance. The spotlight, however, shines much less brightly on the impact of the character and personality of a rider.

That seems an oversight when you have the unique sporting model in cycling of athletes who grew up largely competing as individuals morphing into team players as pros but watching on as their group efforts send a sole rider to the podium.

So how does personality affect results and performance? That’s important because exploring the psychological characteristics of elite cyclists can help to identify attitudes and personality traits that are helpful – or unhelpful – to performance. This has implications for team managers, whose job is to extract the very best from each of their minions.

EXTROVERT OR INTROVERT?

The former sprinter Mario Cipollini was once quoted as saying, “If I wasn’t a pro bike rider, I’d be a porn star.” Cipollini was not short on confidence, but had results to back up the rhetoric. He won 191 times, including 12 stages of the Tour de France, in