One-eyed British football fans might label him a traitor to his country, but 47-year-old Briton Kelvin Giles is readying himself for the moment when he will be on the rugby sidelines urging exhausted Australians to crush the British in the World Cup Challenge.
"Make them crack," advises Giles, head trainer for the Brisbane Broncos, World Cup holders, "before you do..."
The man who for the past five years has been the Broncos' performance coordinator, playing a major role in their success, began his career in Birmingham in physical education, moved to the United States for a Master's degree and then back to Birmingham to teach and run little athletics clubs.
At 28 he was handed the coveted job of national athletics coach for Great Britain and responsible for coaching for the Midlands. Then he was appointed team coach for the Moscow Olympics.
And he found himself balanced on the see-saw of uncertainty.
He had arrived back in Birmingham frustrated by lack of support. "In the 70s and early 80s I had been looking after a whole region of the nation, educating the coaches, keeping abreast of all developments, getting together a vibrant committee - but without an office, without a secretary and without adequate financial support."
At the Moscow Olympic Village he'd socialised with Australian athletics officials who enthused about the new Australian Institute of Sport in Canberra. They pointedly asked if he would be interested in flying out?
"I was given a rosy picture of what Australian athletics would be like. They phoned several times when they got back. But I didn't take it too seriously."
Then one more call came from Australian swimming coach, Don Talbot. It reached Kelvin on a 'wet, cold, miserable day'. "The sunshine out there, the newness of it all, the wonderful promises he was making, all seemed too good to be true!" The offer was exciting enough: to be head coach of the AIS. Kelvin glanced out at the sleet and decided he'd take it.
"But when I got there in January, 1981, I found it was a battleground of egos; involving people who just didn't really understand what performance was about.
"In the UK athletes are born of the severity of competition and preparation. They have to be able to survive in the world theatre of athletics, which is the European Grand Prix circuit. They learn to understand sacrifice and appreciate expertise.
"Australian athletes, when I arrived, had a 'She'll be right' attitude. The nation had no coaching strategy, and politics and backbiting were threatening to destroy the Institute.
"I walked straight into the middle of that war.
"I battled with it for three years. Finally, soon after I returned from the Los Angeles Olympic Games, I was sacked. They said I had a different philosophy of sport to that of the AIS and that I didn't get on with the Federation of Athletics. That was true; I was trying to make athletes and coaches central to all activity. They were placing officials as central to all activity."
Giles could have returned to the UK where a job was waiting. Frank Dick, director of track and field athletics for Great Britain got on the phone. "You've had your little flutter. You've escaped reality for a while. Come back to the real world."
Upset for Giles, three of his Olympic athletes told him they'd quit the AIS in sympathy. Would he stay and coach them? "By now I was down. My marriage had collapsed under the strain. I had put athletic performance ahead of everything. I had been burned emotionally and financially." Without a job, Kelvin Giles nevertheless agreed to remain in Canberra, to train his charges. "The athletes couldn't pay me to coach them and they had to go out to work. I got a job as a night-club bouncer. We were all banned from the Institute."
The 1986 Commonwealth Games were coming up in Edinburgh. Giles had to sell his car to get there. He returned $11,000 out of pocket, but his athletes came back with two silver medals and a gold. "We did it the hard way."
Back at the night-club doors watching for drunks and troublemakers, a couple of rugby-playing fellow bouncers who played for the Canberra Raiders, asked him what training they should be doing off-season? He made suggestions, was hired and his hard work helped the Raiders to a Grand Final win from behind, in extra time.
The phone then rang again in Canberra for bouncer Giles. The Raiders' former coach, Wayne Bennett, had been enticed to the Brisbane Broncos. Would he like to fly over and discuss things?
It took just two hours, with the intense, frowning Giles pushing his lecture on A Better Way of Doing Things in front of Bennett and the Broncos' top minders. Bennett had been handling coaching, training, injury management, research and development. Giles said he would take most of this load, leaving the shrewd Bennett to get on with the coaching.
"I had thought they might be threatened by my ideas; might close up; you, know, put a wall up. ('We've got to be careful of this guy!') I didn't want to find reality different again, either. I didn't want to be picked up, chewed and spat out like I had been before.
"But they didn't hedge. They simply asked me to come as soon as I could, and put my ideas into practice."
That meant the kings and princes of football-mad Queensland facing a one-level, take-no-prisoners Giles who warned them face-to-face: "There is no need to explain my background, it's not important. I will tell you one thing: I have just one loyalty and that is to performance, nothing else."
First on the agenda - crossing the bridges of pain.
"This involves hard exercises with stress loadings that take the athlete or footballer into new territory; beyond a level he has ever been before. It's an edge to their fitness envelope. Anybody can make a player hurt, or break; I am with them as they get frightened physically and emotionally.
"They either listen to the voice that says 'Stop!' Or listen to my voice taking them down that perilous route. It's a matter of are they willing to go there?"
Do they hate him on the way?
"You'd better ask them that. I verbally blast some, manipulate and encourage others. It's a system of overload - pushing the player forward."
He doesn't like it when players grumble that he's being unfair when they get within 100th. of a second of achieving what he wants them to; when he forces them to go back and take a penalty for not completely succeeding. "I give them an instruction and they must carry it out. I am trying to get these players to become better men..."
Now he's talking about Big names. Footballers with $1 million contracts. Heroes fans would almost die for. And they're out there sweating, panting, forcing themselves to go on for what?
"-- the last 10 minutes in the first half, and the last 15 minutes of the second half; sometimes minutes into extra time when the game is decided."
"At this point somebody has to break and somebody will break." (And it's not going to be a Bronco if Giles has anything to do with it).
Here, on a television 'grab' is legend Wally Lewis, 'The King', until it was taken away from him. Worth millions as a star to the team and to football itself, not to mention his huge contract fee; arguing with trainer Giles about his fitness.
"We were in damage-control where Wally was concerned, right from the start. A great player whose effect on football has been incredible, Lewis was coming gradually to the end of his career. He had one successive injury after another.
"I never had a real confrontation with him, but we fell out when I believed he was injured and he argued that he wasn't. He broke down in the first eight minutes of play..."
Giles says he's proud that - apart from two big purchases of stars - the 'inside-the-team' nurturing has produced 20 top footballers from within the club itself. "We do not have a cheque-book mentality. We have made every player."
Last grand final day was, according to hard-man Giles, 'a torrid and dour affair. It came down to those people who continued to carry out their assignments when they were chronically fatigued.'
In June in Brisbane, the Broncos will be defending their world Cup Challenge title against English footballers.
The Sultan of Sweat will be there, clipped moustache quivering, brow wrinkled, tough, wiry, dour. Waiting for the pain to start...willing his better men over the edge.
