From cycling star to coach, Laura Brown is breaking stereotypes in leading men’s teams at the Paris Olympics

She’s not just a Canadian track cycling coach, she’s the coach of the men’s endurance team, making her so unusual that some of her international counterparts can’t quite believe it.

“No one ever assumes I’m the men’s coach,” Brown said. “I’ve had coaches when they learn, ‘Oh, you’re the men’s coach,’ they kind of scoff. One said, ‘Women don’t coach men,’ laughing at me.”

Her reply: “Well I do, and we just beat you.”

Brown will be trackside at the Paris Olympics for the men’s team pursuit, the Madison and, for 21-year-old rising star Dylan Bibic, the multi-race omnium event.

At the 2016 Rio Olympics, it was Brown who was riding the banked velodrome track; she won a bronze medal in the women’s team pursuit. She started coaching in 2018 and by 2020 was asked to coach the men’s development team. 

“I was kind of scared at first,” Brown said, recalling she wondered about a woman coaching a team of men. “I don’t really see that internationally but, yeah, I’ll do it.” 

She is often the only female coach trackside at international events and runs into comments from what she calls “the old guard.” But she also says her experience has been great from the get-go. “I was respected, it didn’t feel weird, it was just coaching. Canada is a little more advanced in gender equity than a lot of other countries.”

Canada has more female coaches at the Olympic level than the international average but not by much. At the Tokyo Olympics held in 2021, where more than 60 per cent of Canadian athletes were female and accounted for 75 per cent of the country’s medals, just 16 per cent of Canada’s coaches were women.

Cycling had no female coaches in Tokyo. The two largest sports were athletics, which had two women on its 22-person coaching staff, and swimming, with one of seven.

Cycling Canada has two women on its coaching staff of eight in Paris: Brown and Catharine Pendrel, a 2016 Olympic medallist in cross-country cycling.

Michael Foley, who finished fifth in Tokyo in the men’s team pursuit, is a big fan of Brown’s coaching style.

“She knows from being an athlete that the only way to stick around is to always be improving, so she’s always asking us for feedback (as well as) giving us feedback. I think that’s really important in the modern sports world, I mean, you can’t just have a coach telling you what to do,” the 25-year-old from Milton said.

“She has a lot of experience and knowledge that gives us confidence in her but also I find her openness and willingness to learn makes me even more confident because I know she’s not just doing that with us, she’s doing that everywhere. She’s leaving no stones unturned, which is what you want to see from a coach.”

Brown hadn’t been coaching long before the men’s development team won a medal in an international meet in Milton in 2020. The moment still brings tears to her eyes.

“It felt better than anything I ever did as an athlete. I felt more proud and more excited about seeing athletes perform and succeed and be proud of themselves,” she said.

“Seeing them do well is the best feeling in the world. And then helping them through the hard stuff, because there’s a lot of hard stuff in cycling.”

One of those hard moments occurred in April at the Nations Cup in Milton, the final qualifying event for Paris.

The team pursuit riders posted one of the fastest times in the world this year to place second in the qualifying round. A clean ride in the next round and they would be off to the gold-medal race. Instead, they had a technical error, the tight wheel-on-wheel formation fell apart and their day was over. 

Being on the sideline watching things going sideways is hard.

“As an athlete I screwed up so many times and it’s within your control,” she said. As a coach, “you start thinking is there anything you could have done to set them up for success better, and then your heart just breaks for them.”

She’s confident team pursuit riders Bibic, Foley, Mathias Guillemette and Carson Mattern have the potential to get to the podium in Paris in an event where fractions of a second can separate medals and eighth place.

“We’re always in that mix,” she said. “It’s going to the line believing in each other and trusting in each other that it’s possible, and doing the ride we know we can do and that we do in training, just one more time under one of the biggest spotlights in the sporting world.”

As one of the few female coaches in Paris, Brown knows she’ll also be in the spotlight. That doesn’t change anything for her: “I just do my thing; I’m coaching.”

“But I hope that somebody, a young rider or woman sees me and says, ‘Maybe I can do that, too.’ ”

Men’s team pursuit starts Aug. 5 with the qualifying round. The medals will be contested Aug 7.