“The Power of the Mind: Elite Performance Under Pressure”

David Barry Vivian Walsh, better known as “Charlie” is a former cycling coach and as well as a former racing cycling coach. Charlie’s cycling career started at 11 years of age, he was track racing twice a week.

During his personal cycling career, in State Championships, Charlie placed 1^st more than 70 times for sprint events to 125 mile road events, and he has toppled or set in excess of 25 State records. Over a 25 year period Charlie crossed the line placing 1^st place more than 1,000 times.

Charlie moved on to coaching ‘Cycling Australia’s National Track Cycling Coach’, a position he held in numerous capacities for some 20 years. During that time he coached cyclists to 10 world records, 12 Olympic Games records and 22 Commonwealth Games records. Under Charlie’s coaching program, his cyclists won a staggering 78 Gold medals (including Olympic Gold), 50 silver and 51 bronze medals.

Charlie was one of the early adopters of high performance psychology, teaching his athletes to push themselves beyond all physical and mental limits. He did this through brutal training regimes, where at times the only metric was survival.

In the 2000’s. after retiring from his various roles within Cycling Australia, Charlie joined the Adelaide Football Club, working alongside senior coach Neil Craig, bringing new insight into high performance and mentoring some of the AFL’s best players.