He’s coached a host of British cycling’s Olympic champions, with double gold medalist Laura Trott citing him as a major factor in her success. Darren Tudor, the Valleys-based head of Welsh Cycling, tells WILL BAIN about life at the heart of British Cycling’s winning machine.

I GUESS I didn’t really think about it at the time, but I look at some of the riders nowthat I’ve been privileged enough to coach, some phenomenal athletes, and I do feel immensely honoured to have worked with them.

I don’t necessarily feel like I had a part in what they did at the Olympics, because some of them had moved on from me for a little while, but I do feel pretty proud that hopefully I did add a little bit along the way.

I’ve always had a bit of a love of two wheels. I had a BMX as a kid growing up in Maesycwmmer and Blackwood, and I was into motorbikes as it was something my dad was very keen on. My mum would never let me have a motorbike though so I was always going to have to pedal my bike rather than it take me anywhere.

My parents bought me my first mountain bike and I joined a couple of cycling clubs, New Tredegar Nomads and Cwmcarn Paragon riding that. It was at Cwmcarn they encouraged me to get a road bike and I found I was better at that and preferred it.

I turned 16 and I was riding the National Road Racing Series for juniors and my parents were taking me all over the country. I represented Wales and GB as a junior and won a medal at the Junior National Road Race in Hampshire in 1993.

I turned senior and was training and working part-time with Martyn Ashfield cycles in Risca, who had been a huge support to me.

Shane Sutton, who is now performance manager at British Cycling and a Team Sky Procycling coach, was doing my job now as Head of Welsh Cycling at the time.

He advertised for some regional coaches and I thought it would be perfect to go alongside my training and racing so I went for it and got one.

I can’t quite put my finger on what that buzz was, but I just enjoyed coaching more than racing. I think working with Shane Sutton was what made it very exciting, you just learnt so much from him. What that guy doesn’t know about cycling isn’t worth knowing, and so I just really enjoyed it.

I also had a good group of Welsh juniors I started coaching at that time, around 2002, including Geraint Thomas and Rob Partridge, who is professional with Endura racing now.

Some of the guys were at the sharp end of the races, some not so much, but it was then, and particularly when I was recruited to be Olympic Development Programme (ODP) coach at British Cycling by Dave Brailsford and Simon Jones in 2005 that I really started to find the process behind performances far more important than just performances themselves.

The Olympic Development Programme is the link between British Cycling’s talent team for promising young riders (generally between 13-17) and the Olympic Academy.

It was with the ODP squad in 2005 where that really came into focus for me. We were at the Junior Track World Championships in Vienna, and we were in the men’s team pursuit final against New Zealand. We had a really strong team and looked like we were going to win and possibly get a junior world record. But in the final the guys touched wheels and crashed.

At that point I realised you can get riders to be as strong as you like, you can work on speed, but if they don’t have the key race skills it’s always going to be a struggle, so we focused very much on the process of winning rather than the winning itself to start with.

It was hard, because for the young athletes it was all about winning medals but for us as coaches it was about the experience of the big event.

The waiting, the nerves, getting your warm-up spot on and putting those key skills, like getting your changes in pursuiting right, into practice at a big event.

I know a lot of people talk about secret formulas in British Cycling, and want to know how we’re successful, but it wasn’t a secret, that’s just how we thought about it.

We wanted to know where someone was skill-wise on the pathway and to get them ready for the next level, so that when they came to the academy and eventually seniors they had the race skills and life skills to be successful.

With the juniors life skills are a key part of it. Shane Sutton always says the most important coach is the junior coach.

As the junior coach you have to manage their racing, their training, their expectations and a lot of them are still in education, so come May- June not only are they thinking about major cycling competitions but also about taking three ALevels.

They’ve got ambitions and pressures in both, so it can be very difficult for both the athlete and their parents.

Hopefully I’ve managed it ok so far. I’ve never had any complaints so hopefully I did all right.

It’s also important to try and keep their feet on the ground. It can be hard as there are a lot of external people praising their performances at such a young age, rightly so in a lot of cases, but I needed them to keep their foot on the gas and keep progressing.

When they are more experienced they know how to cope with that kind of thing but at 16,17,18 they don’t and it was important for me to keep them progressing.

In that time I’ve been hugely privileged to coach some amazing riders.

The Laura Trotts, Peter Kennaughs of this world, Sam Harrison from up the road in Risca, all those top guys are just a pleasure to work with.

They don’t come with many problems, they work hard, they do their training, ask questions.

Every time they get on the bike they give it 100 per cent. Even if it is a recovery ride, they do it to 100 per cent. I wasn’t surprised by what they did at the Olympics because if everything went right, no accidents, they had the talent to do it.

I still see the guys around from time to time and they make jokes about the junior camps and how hard they were, I’m delighted for them and the coaches because I know how hard they work.

I used to really enjoy coaching the juniors. They learn so quickly, you throw a load of training at them and they keep bouncing back for more.

But it got to the stage where I’d attended a few of the Team Sky proroad team training camps and worked with the likes of Bradley Wiggins at the odd event and I felt I was ready to move on and challenge myself again.

When I moved to British Cycling it took me out of my comfort zone and I felt I needed to be taken out of it again. It was a massive decision because I was leaving the best cycling team in the world but I needed to try and put into practice what I learnt at British Cycling.

Dave Brailsford is one of my heroes, what he’s put in place is amazing, and now my responsibility to try and build a pathway in Wales to work with British Cycling going forward, I think it’s pretty exciting.

Ideally we want to get riders on the British Cycling programme, and if they don’t make it, what can we do for them?

After working with Wales at the 2010 Commonwealth Games in Delhi I knew we needed to put more things in place if we wanted to convert that talent into success for Welsh riders.

We have some exciting plans ahead and some really talented youngsters who I am coaching like Elinor Barker andAmy Roberts, who are both European Junior champions and are off in the next couple of weeks to the Junior World Track champs in New Zealand.

It is not realistic by the next Commonwealth Games, but by the 2018 games I want there to be athletes competing who have come through a Welsh Cycling pathway.

I have a seven-month-old little boy, I would like him to be on two wheels but whether that’s cycling or not, we’ll see.

I’m incredibly grateful for the life cycling has given me, the places I’ve been, the friends I’ve made. The people I’ve worked with. I’m a huge cycling fan, so I guess to some extent I’ve lived out my dream.