WHILE there is no doubting the importance of sports science, a coach's instinct should never be overlooked.
Track cycling coach John Beasley admitted that he should have "trusted himself more" when selecting gear sizes for Azizulhasni Awang in the sprint qualifying round at the recent Tokyo Olympics.
Beasley admitted that the Pocket Rocketman was "over-geared" for the sprint qualifiers which slightly hampered his performance.
The Australian had, prior to the event, expected Azizulhasni to better his own Asian record of 9.548s, set at last year's Berlin World Championships.
Azizulhasni, however, could only manage 9.626s for 17th in the qualifying round. Japan's Yuta Wakimoto erased Azizulhasni's Asian mark with a 9.518s.
"I'm extremely happy with both boys (overall) performances but if I was to be brutally honest, we did not execute the sprint qualifying as well as we should have," said Beasley.
"With Datuk Azizul, I had over-geared him, I left the gear selection too much up to science. I should have trusted my gut feeling as a coach.
"We did a lot of (computer simulation) modelling during this Olympic campaign.
"The model showed us that if we went larger in our gear selection — with our current CDA (aerodynamic drag), frontal surface area and with the current power we had — we should have gone two-tenths of a second faster.
"I was always skeptical of the model and as it turned out, I should have trusted myself more.
"When we got into the sprint (elimination) rounds and keirin, I selected gears that I thought were best suited for each athlete as they both have very different optimal cadence ranges.
"I believe we got that as close to perfect as possible (in sprint elimination and keirin)".
Azizulhasni went on to win silver in the keirin, bettering his bronze medal performance at the 2016 Rio Games.
Shah Firdaus Sahrom, who was making his Olympic debut, managed to reach the keirin quarterfinals despite being injured from an earlier crash.