Anna Meares: ‘I Wouldn’t Have Been as Good as I Was Without Competitive Rivalry’

Australian cycling champion, Anna Meares, credits part of her success to an ongoing rivalry with British cyclist Victoria Pendleton. She says business leaders can draw correlation from her learnings and experience on the track to level up their game.

Victoria Pendleton inspired me to be better. She was the benchmark. 

Our rivalry intensified from early competitions and I quickly learned that if I wanted to beat her, I needed to shift my focus to what I could control. 

My high-performance director, Kevin Tabotta, told me Victoria wasn’t going to get worse. She would only get better. If I wanted to survive, I had to be the one to make changes. Rather than dwelling on the competition, I had to learn from it.

At first, I was unable to see through the emotion of the rivalry to understand what I needed to change. But by taking an analytical approach and breaking Victoria’s performances down into statistical data, I was able to remove emotion from the equation. My team watched more than 300 hours of her performances. 

The analysis found Victoria was predictable and in a competitive environment, being predictable leads to defeat. I could see her strengths and weaknesses, her behaviours of preference and avoidance. This gave us a window into how to negate her strengths and capitalise on her lack of preference in other areas. I understood what I needed to do and could work to upskill myself to be competitive.

Map Out Your Strategy

From there, my team mapped out the strategies we could use, the skills required and the shortfalls we needed to work on.

What followed was a period of upskilling. I had to learn a whole new skill set and break old habits, so I didn’t revert to autopilot. It was a slow and frustrating process because change is not easy.

I spent 3.5 years living in an uncomfortable space but, ultimately, it created a blueprint of how my team looked at every other competitor I came up against. And it changed the way I raced. 

I wouldn’t have been as good as I was if it wasn’t for Victoria being the best in the world. That’s not to say I beat her every time. We were each multiple world champion and at the 2012 London Games, we won each other’s discipline that we were reigning world champions for, and both came away with an Olympic Gold.

After the London Games, Victoria retired, and I feel she became one of my biggest cheerleaders. 

In 2016, while Victoria was working for BBC 5 radio as part of the media team for the Rio Olympics, we sat down for an interview and debriefed our rivalry. Before that, we didn’t know the full extent of each other’s side of the story. Not many people could understand that experience and we both gained incredible insight and respect.

Lessons Beyond the Track

The lessons I learned from my time as an athlete and while in a competitive rivalry with Victoria are transferable beyond the track. When physical competition is well-matched, it’s psychological capacity and preparation that becomes differentiator.   

Mindset can make an enormous difference and an open mindset in particular.

Another factor that impacted me in a positive way both on and off the track was community – not just the one you work and operate in on a daily basis. The community you live in is vitally important. 

The Importance of Community

Giving back to my community through working with charities has helped me to have perspective in an environment where it can be hard to keep your feet on the ground. When I felt like my world was crumbling because I lost a bike race, being involved with an organisation such as the Little Heroes Foundation that supports children with cancer and serious illness reminded me it really wasn’t.

The applicable correlations for business leaders from my story are lengthy. In a nutshell, as we have gone over here, removing emotion from the equation when you access your competitors allows you to see information more clearly and create a strategy. Analyse their performance, identify their strengths, weaknesses and preferences. Once you have the information, look internally. What do you need to change to be better? 

In business, as on the track, rivalry can be your competitive advantage and help you to win.

The 2024 Annual Asia-Pacific CFO & CPO Forum

I look forward to sharing my thoughts on the role of leadership in elite sport at the 2024 Annual Asia-Pacific CFO & CPO Forum, which will bring Finance and Procurement leaders together for the first time to share insights and strategies to tackle the most complex business challenges. 

As well as leadership, the Forum will deep dive into the energy transition, governance risk, combatting inflation and more. Hear from renowned speakers, such as Investa Property Group Chair Rebecca McGrath, Rio Tinto Chief Executive Kellie Parker and Akora Resources Chairman Graeme Hunt.

Register here: https://www.procurious.com/events/annual-asia-pacific-cfo-cpo-forum

This article was written by Anna Meares, Chef de Mission, Australian Olympic Team for Paris 2024 Olympic Games & Australian Cycling Olympian.