Following another record-breaking year in 2019, the seemingly invincible Adam Peaty added more gold to his already swollen trophy cabinet.

Then came awards season, and long-time coach Mel Marshall nosed ahead of her protégé once again in the silverware stakes.

The absorbing tale of the two halves of swimming’s most dynamic and devastating double act is about so much more than winning medals – as this two-part series will demonstrate – however their individual accolades need to be given prominence, as evidence of what can be achieved when you combine great coaching with great effort and great teamwork.

One of Great Britain’s most decorated athletes of any sport, double Olympian and five-time Olympic finalist Mel has been busy racking up further honours since becoming a coach.

After being named British Swimming Coach of the Year for the fifth time in six years in 2019, Mel scooped the UK Coaching High Performance Coach of the Year award in December and then made it a hat-trick of prestigious wins by picking up the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2019 BT Sport Action Woman Awards.

But in Mel’s eyes, the pursuit of performance excellence and the immense pride she gets in seeing her athletes bask in the golden glow of victory is only half the story. 

It is the extensive knowledge that she has racked up during her incredible journey within the sport that is also worth its weight in gold.

That knowledge includes the information and skills she has acquired through her experiences, but also the knowledge that she has made a massive contribution to people’s lives inside and outside of sport. The desire to make everyone she coaches become a better person as well as a better performer is, as she will explain, the coaching principle she values most.

“At the end of the day we are in the people business. Coaching is all about people.

“It is a really important part of the jigsaw. Everybody that walks through your door has got an individual psychology, an individual physiology, an individual background, an individual character, and it’s about you working out what is the key to you unlocking a higher sense of purpose and a higher sense of potential. That’s your job.”

“There’s another saying I like to use. A wise person once told me that we need to give our athletes roots to grow and wings to fly. Our job is to facilitate that journey, but I don’t think you get to the depths of what people are capable of unless you have a really strong coach-athlete relationship.”

“I’m a community coach at heart. I just love seeing people enjoying sport; people being healthy; people progressing; low confidence going to high confidence through the practise of learning a skill. That’s the community coach in me and I really enjoy that aspect of coaching.

“Many years ago, I worked with a swimmer called Fran Baldwin. She came into my National Squad and the view of the National Squad was that you tried to make it to the National Championships. 

“And then the performance coach in me loves that quest of, ‘this is the biggest challenge we are going to face. How much can our bodies absorb, how much can we go through?’, and that is an amazing journey as well. It can be like scaling Everest… and then having a really long walk through the mountains!”

“Absolutely, and I think it’s the same across all sports. The two messages for me are, we shouldn’t be afraid to try and win and be competitive and be the best version of ourselves. But also, we must reflect on how that experience is making us better through sport. Because, as I say, we must leave the journey of sport better people.

“And to do this we must embrace those challenges that come with sport. Me and my world, the athletes are tired and they do have to hit measures and parameters that you would associate with the top level of performance. But the challenges of being that disciplined and organised and managing yourself, that is a really sellable product for you in the real world – it’s a valuable thing for you as a human being and a person to have experienced.”

“It might be going to the Regional Championships, or getting to the County Championships, but whatever it is they must also leave a better person through their experience under my coaching in my environment, my culture and my leadership.

“Some of those philosophies in performance coaching are the same: trying to make better people as well as better performers, because better people are actually better performers in the long-run. But also, my philosophy is that it is about performance at this level. Everybody is going to get to that level of performance differently but, ultimately, we have to be chasing and striving for that performance and we have to have performance conversations. When it comes down to it, I’m intent on finding ways to maximise performance and get the best out of every situation. That desire is in my blood.”

“You know what, I wouldn’t change anything, because, when I look back now, I was incredibly naïve as a young coach but that naïvety was a powerful thing. I didn’t see any limits, I didn’t see any barriers or have any understanding of what consequences there might be. And I was passionate, I was committed and I was driven to ensuring that what I did was going to work no matter what.

“And even those harder experiences, I’ve become better from them, and so I wouldn’t want to miss out on those experiences. No, I wouldn’t change a thing.”