We speak to the man behind the Netherlands’ growing impact on the sprints and hurdles landscape about building the platform for success
Laurent Meuwly is head coach for sprinting, hurdles and relays in the Netherlands and is best known for coaching multiple world and European champion Femke Bol, the Olympic mixed 4x400m relay champion and two-time Olympic bronze medallist and European record-holder in the 400m hurdles.
Based out of the Olympic Training Centre Papendal, he works with a group of Dutch athletes including Lieke Klaver (Olympic, world and European relay champion); Nadine Visser (European 4x100m bronze medallist and fourth in the 100m hurdles at the 2024 Olympic Games); Liemarvin Bonevacia (Olympic, world and European relay medallist and European 400m bronze medallist); and Isaya Klein Ikkink (Olympic 4x400m mixed relay gold medallist). He also coaches Swiss sprinter Ajla Del Ponte (2021 European indoor 60m champion and Tokyo Olympic Games 100m finalist); world U20 200m silver medallist and Australian 100m national record-holder Torrie Lewis; world U20 400m champion Lurdes Manuel (Czechia); and European indoor 400m champion Attila Molnár (Hungary), the European indoor record-holder.
Meuwly was previously head coach for sprinting, hurdles and relays in Switzerland. During that period he transformed Swiss fortunes in the 4x100m relay and coached Léa Sprunger – Swiss national record-holder in the 400m and 400m hurdles – to European titles in the 400m (indoors) and 400m hurdles.
How did you first get into coaching?
I was an athlete at my home town club [in Switzerland]. The club needed coaches to take care of younger athletes once a week, but it soon became two times, then three, four and five.
I started to work with those club athletes very early – I was only 18 – and my goal was to help them reach their full potential. I went from club coach to regional centre coach, national centre coach, then national coach in Switzerland.
I had a lot of injuries as a young athlete and that was one of my motivations to start as a coach, because I didn’t want to repeat the same mistakes my coaches had made with me.
In October 2018 I got invited to Papendal for a coach congress. [Former British Athletics head coach] Charles van Commenée had just started again as head coach for the Netherlands. He followed my presentations a little bit, and also the training sessions I gave. He called me a month later and asked me to join his team. I discussed with my key athletes if they would follow me to the Netherlands and I took the decision to move. I started in April 2019.
What attracted you to the Netherlands job after your success in Switzerland?
At that time it had nothing to do with the talent of the athletes, because there were very few of them already there. It was partly because of what I’d seen in Papendal – the facilities and the organisation of the centre – but also because of Charles’ vision on high performance, which is really close to mine.
The rest I developed from the moment I started, because we went from three athletes in the 400m and 400m hurdles to now 15 or more, and that’s not including the short sprints and short hurdles.
Charles knew that, while it was great to have athletes on the programme, you also need good coaches. Some months later, he asked me: “We need a new national coach for middle and long distance, who would you bring in?”. We brought in Tomasz Lewandowski and we’ve made some nice steps forward with Niels Laros [Dutch Olympic and world 1500m finalist and multiple national record-holder] and Stefan Nillissen [European U23 1500m champion and Dutch indoor mile record-holder]. Charles was good at that and I think that’s one of the things that changed from 2019 to 2022 and led to the successful development of Dutch athletics.
What was your plan for the programme when you first started?
My approach with this kind of project is always to start with relays because I think that creates a nice dynamic.
I started with 4x400m projects to have more people interested in running 400m. I’m not really a patient guy when it’s about high performance, so Charles was saying: “It’s going to take time to close the gap”, but I told him that we had to be present at the World Championships that first year [Doha 2019], which we were, and we made the women’s final.
That was the start and then, through the relays, individual athletes started to develop. I think that’s the key; it’s really complicated to take one athlete and go to the top and it’s not always sustainable, but I think when you start with a relay project, you get a larger base of athletes and the chance that many of them will develop to the highest level is bigger.
What were the other things that you implemented in those early years that have contributed to the programme’s success?
We trained a bit more. Also, I was impressed by the number of experts who were available from the Olympic Committee at Papendal, for example in nutrition, physiology, biomechanics and the medical team, but they were a bit underused and under-stimulated, so I tried to challenge them to try new things. Charles was also a fan of that, so that helped a lot.
They also had very nice facilities but there was nothing in terms of recovery, so very quickly we put in place a well-organised recovery set-up – ice bath, sauna, sleeping pods – with a good medical team and physios at every session.
I think we really raised the bar everywhere, not only with the athletes. We started to do more/longer training camps and the athletes became more professional. Overall, I think the organisation became more professional.
How has your philosophy evolved over the period you’ve been coaching?
It’s developed with the level of the athletes I’ve coached. When you start out in a club, everyone is at school or doing an apprenticeship or whatever, and you have to adapt to their conditions because they are not professional athletes.
The volume part developed with the more professional athletes, so being able to train more but having the time to recover properly from the sessions. From a training perspective, I think when I started my approach was very sprint-oriented but, if I focus on sprint hurdles, I reached a point after some years where I understood that to be able to train more, to recover quicker from training, we needed a bigger aerobic base. I think over the years this became one of the signs of my training philosophy.
Our training is very polarised – we focus on speed and strength all year, but at the same time we’re running a lot of kilometres at a slow pace with short rests. A lot of coaches around the world think that makes you slow, but I think it helps a lot with the recovery and also to support the hard, more lactic sessions.
Who has been your greatest coaching influence?
There are not really specific people. I did my coaching qualifications for the theoretical base, but I’ve also learned a lot abroad at camps and being in contact with other training groups, watching what they were doing, trying to figure out what would add value to my philosophy, to my training content and, of course, staying up to date with the latest developments in science.
I also search for the right expertise in every domain – in nutrition, in recovery, in physiology, in biomechanics – and to ensure I’m surrounded by experts who can bring a different view on my work.
So it’s not one person or one viewpoint, it’s more about being open to what others are doing, or to exchange knowledge with people who are more expert in certain domains than I am and then filtering that information and identifying what fits best with my philosophy.
Has coaching changed since you first started?
When I first started coaching it was very directive, athletes would come with the programme and the plan, but now I let my athletes give their opinions more and more. They know the programme and they know the philosophy. I can integrate the athletes much more because they’re at a different level and have different experience.
There are also challenges. Coaches need to be careful with younger athletes and teach them to become professional athletes progressively. They need to stay aware and be able to adapt.
We speak a lot now about creating a safe environment for athletes, but it’s a very thin line where you can push athletes too much or what kind of remarks you can make. It can make our jobs really hard at times because there are people around in high performance who don’t really understand that athletics is a very competitive sport.
I think for some coaches who were active 30, 40 years ago, they’ve had a hard time adapting to new generations, to a new environment. Or the environment is still the same, but the way people look at it is a bit different. That’s the difficult part. I try personally to keep the high performance standard, but of course to adapt my talking, my coaching, to the new generation and the new rules.
Femke’s transition to the 800m has attracted significant interest. How do you manage the risk and expectations around change for such a high-profile athlete?
I think it starts with good communication but also being realistic on what is possible. We’ve been discussing the 800m project for quite a long time.
Actually, after the disappointment in Paris [finishing third in the Olympic 400m hurdles final], she almost wanted to change directly to 800m for 2025. It wasn’t too early for her, but I thought that it would have been a pity to end a great career in the 400m hurdles on a negative note. Luckily, I convinced her to do another year and it turned out to be a very successful one.
I have information that shows me that it’s realistic for Femke to be one of the best 800m runners in the world in the coming three years and to battle for the gold medal in Los Angeles, because I would not propose this kind of change to an athlete of this calibre without having a certain amount of guarantee that it’s going to be successful.
Some things are a bit subjective of course – her stride, her relaxation, the way she can keep her form even when she’s in the last part of the race – but a lot is also objective; for example she holds the 500m indoor world record (1:05.63). If she’d just have jogged another 100m she would probably also have the 600m indoor record.
READ MORE: Femke Bol’s 800m potential analysed
The plan is to be competitive in 2026, to be in the final or top five in 2027, and to be medal competitive in 2028. I don’t think it’s an unrealistic plan.
The race-specific work – the speed, the strength – is no problem, she’s very good in the anaerobic part, but she needs to become better in the aerobic part, to progressively build a solid base. It’s like starting a new sport, because when you’re a world and Olympic champion, it’s more difficult to be patient and to adapt to this kind of stuff.