Jack Carlin talks about the big picture a lot.
And such is the level he’s reached, for him, the big picture means only world and Olympic medals.
It’s why he goes into this week’s European Track Cycling Championships, which begin today in Grenchen, Switzerland, somewhat unsure about what kind of outcome he’d be satisfied with.
With the 25-year-old from Paisley having already collected five European medals in his career – three silver and two bronze – as well as four World Championship and two Olympic medals, he’s well aware how capable he is of, once again, grabbing a step on the podium over the coming days.
But he’s also conscious that with a home World Championships coming up in Glasgow this summer, he’s got bigger fish to fry this season and so is currently in the midst of a heavy training block that just may hinder his efforts to find his very best form in Grenchen.
It can then, he admits, be a tricky balance to strike when it comes to setting expectations for the next four days, where he will race the individual sprint, team sprint and keirin.
“It’s about different priorities these days – I still give it my all to win but now, I maybe don’t go away devastated if I don’t because it’s about the bigger picture and about what events I want to do really well,” he says.
“So actually, in some way, the pressure is off a bit because it’s more about the nitty-gritty of what I do well or badly in each race rather than the result.
“I’ll still approach the Europeans with the mindset that I want to do as well as I can – just because I might not be firing on all cylinders doesn’t mean my drive to do well is diminished in any way. There’s no point in any of us going there to just make up the numbers.
“If I’m not quite where I’d want to be physically, I think that’s ok because if I can do everything right here and then add in the physical form that we’ll all have in Glasgow then hopefully that’ll mean some good results at the Worlds.
“I am guilty of sometimes needing people to remind me of the fact that it’s about the bigger picture, though, because I do get frustrated and disappointed - but I wouldn’t be a normal athlete if I wasn’t disappointed about losing. So you sometimes need coaches to remind you what the end goal is and that most of the time, you can’t just rock up and win things.
“There’s no excuses though, I’ll still be disappointed if I go there and don’t do well.
“Knowing where I’m at, it’d be a long shot to win, but weirder things have happened.”
Since Carlin broke onto the international scene as a teenager, winning his first major championship medal at the European Championships in 2016, he has consistently been within touching distance of the very best in the world.
Eleven major championship medals is quite a haul but he has, as yet anyway, to win gold.
However, that is as much to do with the rapid increase in standard of men’s sprinting as much as anything else, with Carlin well aware that standing still in terms of performance would result in him sliding down the global pecking order sharpish.
Which is why, for fear of stagnation, he’s spent the past few months trying out some different things in training.
“This winter, I had one of the best blocks of training I’ve ever had. It was really consistent - not once did I have any real niggles and I did some different kinds of training too to try and bring the level up again,” he says.
“I felt like I plateaued a bit after the Tokyo Olympics and so there’s been a big focus on training this winter.
“You look at how things have progressed since I broke through – the improvement in qualifying times at the Rio Olympics compared to Tokyo is really significant, which just shows how much the sport has advanced in the past few years.
“That’s not a bad thing – sport should always evolve and so we needed to think about what I could do better to keep up.
“We’ll hopefully start to see signs of those improvements towards this summer and then the Olympics next year.”
The Glasgow World Championships this August are what Carlin is gearing up for.
He admits himself the dream scenario would be to win gold in the velodrome he began cycling in and so the heavy training he must undertake over the next few months to be at his best come this summer is why he will not be as fresh as he could be at these European Championships.
It is a sacrifice he is willing to make given the potential rewards In August, although he is reluctant to allow himself to think about the fairy-tale ending too much.
“Of course I want to do well in Glasgow but I’m very much more about the day-to-day,” he says.
“I could go to the Euros and have a horrific crash and be out for six months; there’s so much that can happen between now and Glasgow and I feel like if you
start getting ahead of yourself, things go wrong.”
Carlin will be joined at the European Championships by four of his fellow Scots; Katie Archibald and Neah Evans are in the women’s endurance squad and will have high hopes of collecting several medals while in the sprint squad, both Lauren Bell and Ali Fielding will be aiming to add to their maiden World Championship medals won at the end of 2022.
