Nick Green has been in the role of Cycling Australia CEO for just over two years in which the national federation has set about reforming its business and governances structure that has strengthened its financial position. A former gold medal winning rower with several years of sports administration under his belt prior to joining Cycling Australia, Green has brought his experience and knowledge to the sport with his aim of improving cycling from the grassroots through to high-performance.
In a wide-ranging interview with Cyclingnews, Green outlined his achievements in his two years with Cycling Australia, how to improve the governing body's finances, his Rio Olympic experience, and the upcoming Australian 'summer of cycling'.
Cyclingnews: Two years in, what do see as your major achievements as CEO?
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NG: If I look at the annual report for 2016, most of our achievements have been the 'boring side of cycling' and that is re-establishing our business structure, our governance reform, our leadership of the sport, our key personnel. So we have spent a significant amount of work on putting the structure and vision of a business to be successful. The model previously was very much a high-risk business strategy, there was no clarity around evolution, there was no clarity around a real strategic pointed pathway. We have launched a strategy 2020 and our vision for the sport by the 2020 Olympic Games and everything that goes around that and being very clear and concise in what we are trying to do as a business.
For the first time, the national federation will start to involve in a new partnership conversation with new events that also allows us to talk to a new audience. That also allows us to have a new conversation in the advocacy space. We haven't previously had a role in the advocacy space and I think it's fundamental that we do because of the large participation in cycling broadly across the country. We feel that we want to have an influence and also contribute to the conversation around safe riding, better gender parity, better integrity of the sport being managed and those key messages around advocacy. We are very clear on that. as a business there are so new areas we want to focus in, we have made that very clear but at the same time, half of business in terms of our funding is dedicated to high performance. While we have a very successful year-on-year out high-performance strategy and athletes, the reality is that in the able body we were unsuccessful in the Olympic Games and very successful in the para games. We have an obligation to refocus and re-energise our high-performance strategy between now and the Commonwealth and Olympic Games to ensure Australia has an aspirational view and reinsert itself as the leading cycling nation in high performance around the world. We know that success also leads to great visibility in the sport, great role models in the sport, a great aspiration for the general cyclist.
We have a spent a lot of time restructuring the business to be successful in the future years and very proud of what we have done. It has been particularly difficult to be moving at the speed we wanted to but we are undoing a number of existing long-term obligations that we didn't think were suitable to the business. We had to face some real financial challenges when we started two years ago and we are really pleased, even though it is very modest, that we have been able to deliver two years in a row surplus's and it hasn't come with any fanfare, it has come with some suffering in getting the business right. As a scorecard, we have done well in some aspects but there are a lot of other aspects we haven't done well in because of our focus on trying to fix the business and being very much fiscally conservative which has led to our inability to have the resources and people that we would like to do everything the cycling industry wants us to do immediately. Along the way, there have been some gaps that have opened up that we are now in a better position to address for 2017, 2018 and beyond.
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