Behind every training programme there is always a coach — a figure nobody ever really examines, and one whose characteristics I would like to try to describe. First of all, a distinction has to be drawn between a professional coach (someone who coaches professional athletes, or young competitors who aspire to become them) and an amateur coach: they are two completely different jobs. A professional coach must be able to see the primary characteristics of any athlete within a few moves, and to acquire that sensitivity a coach needs to have gone through specific stages: 1) having had a career as an athlete at least at national level; 2) having built scientific competence through structured education (not the courses offered by the various federations); 3) having run a competitive team in which they have developed and coached a representative number of athletes with results at least at national level. None of this means automatically excluding from a professional career every coach who has not followed that path, but I believe it is worth setting out the precise credentials a coach should have in order to call themselves a professional — otherwise the figure becomes mythological rather than professional. On the World Cup circuit you see all sorts of things: absurd warm-ups and superficial technical analysis, sometimes from the coaches of the very highest-level athletes. Being the coach of a world champion is not enough to make you a professional: if you are lucky enough to sit in a Ferrari, that car will inevitably go fast, whatever the qualities of the person driving it. Another point I want to underline is the way a coach very often comes into a national federation and relates to the athletes. The figure that emerges in international settings is far closer to a chaperone than to a coach, and the reason goes back to the credentials I mentioned earlier: national federations offer work without demanding precise references, and having a non-professional coach can be a political choice, since it sets up dynamics that are simpler to manage. That is why on the circuit you often meet chaperones or, at the other extreme, characters with boundless egos, and more and more rarely actual professional coaches. I will close an argument that would deserve a far wider analysis by highlighting the athlete-coach relationship, which is sometimes misunderstood or taken for granted. It has become a commonplace to stress the centrality of the athlete in that relationship; I believe that is completely wrong — indeed it is the premise for ending up with a chaperone at your side rather than a coach. A relationship is built by two people: an athlete is a person before being an athlete, but behind a coach there is always a person too, with their own identity, their own characteristics, their own personality. If you are a professional this has to be perfectly clear to you — to the coach and to the athlete alike. Otherwise a chaperone will do, and the circle of this argument closes.
