Dr Jo Brown details her rise to Noah Lyles’ inner sanctum as she moves to the Gold Coast to prime Australia’s next Olympians

The high performance coach behind Noah Lyles Olympic gold is embarking on a quest to prime Australia’s next generation to dominate the Brisbane Olympics.

What do Noah Lyles, Yohan Blake, NBA players, the Jamaican bobsled team, the Australian beach volleyball team, and a plethora of other successful athletes and teams have in common?

When one peeks under the bonnet to examine just how their success came to be, they uncover the fingerprints of Dr Jo Brown.

Brown is a physio turned ‘high performance coach’, who, among an abundance of other achievements, spent the best part of three years in Noah Lyles’ inner sanctum, with her work culminating in his breathtaking 100m gold medal at the Paris Olympics earlier this year.

Now, the New Zealand-born Queenslander is set to relocate to the Gold Coast as she hones in on priming Australia’s next generation for the 2032 Brisbane Olympics.

“It’s a bit of a crazy ride,” Brown said of her journey.

“Sometimes you take it for granted and can lose perspective because you’ve been in it for so long.”

Dr Jo Brown at the 2022 Commonwealth Games. Picture: Supplied.

‘Taught me resilience and self belief’

Before moving to the Sunshine Coast in her early 20s, Brown spent her formative years living on a dairy farm in the small seaside town Opotiki in New Zealand.

It was there that the traits which have propelled her to some of the most elite inner sanctums in world sport would be formed.

“If I wanted to do sport or anything like that I had to figure out my own way to get there, so I rode to swim training, to surf lifesaving training, to school, it would be nothing for me to ride 40km in a day separate to the actual sport (I was doing),” Brown said.

“It kind of taught me this resilience and self-belief that I took with me in everything I did and this belief that you can do anything if you try hard enough … if you don’t know you’ll figure it out and go to the next level.

“That attitude created this base for me to question what it takes to be the best and what makes one person better than the other at certain things.”

Brown’s first taste of the professional sporting arena came when she was still a student, offered a chance to work with the Tongan Rugby Sevens team as they couldn’t afford a physio.

Dr Jo Brown with Noah Lyles celebrating success at the 2022 Zurich Diamond League meet. Picture: Supplied.

“Next minute I’m running out on the field in front of a full stadium,” she reflected.

“I’d done volunteer stuff at the rugby clubs at university but all of a sudden you’re an international stage and have to perform at that highest level.

“I wasn’t scared I loved it, I was like the bigger the stage, the bigger the pressure, this is me. I was just hungry for it after that and took every opportunity.”

By her early 20s, Brown had relocated from New Zealand to Queensland’s Sunshine Coast in search of a bigger market and more opportunity. Roles with the United States ski team, Swimming Australia, and Tennis Australia – where Brown could observe what set the likes of Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal apart – would follow.

‘Treated like royalty’

The 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics presented the real-life sequel of the famous ‘Cool Runnings’ movie, where the Jamaican bob sled team replicated the unfathomable efforts of their predecessors in 1988 to reach the Winter Olympics for the first time in over 20 years.

Brown was at the fore of the achievement, and it all began at the 2018 Commonwealth Games on the Gold Coast, where she was one of 20 physios selected from over 2000 applicants to work with a national team.

Dr Jo Brown with the Jamaican bobseld team. Picture: Supplied.

Dr Jo Brown with the Jamaican flag. Picture: Supplied.

Her prayers for a “fun” country were answered when she was allocated Jamaica. It would be the start of something special.

“I fell in love with them, they fell in love with me,” Brown said.

“The rugby guys wanted me to strap their shoulders and the track and field guys wanted me to fix their pelvises and I ended up having a driver and I’d go to all the different sports. I had this bizarre relationship almost instantaneously with this whole nation of people.

“I ended up going back and forth spending a lot of time in Jamaica and working with Yohan Blake closely for the next couple of years.

“I was literally treated like royalty in Jamaica; diplomatic entry, TV interviews, speaking at their Olympic Association. It was quite an amazing, bizarre, special time in my life and I feel very blessed to have had it as a white girl from New Zealand, that doesn’t just happen to anyone.”

It was at a Jamaican Olympic Association dinner where she ran into Nelson Christian Stokes, a four-time Olympian with the bobsled whose passion for the sport had never wavered, so much so he had kept the Jamaican program running “off his own bat” for over two decades despite its time in the Olympic wilderness.

“I was like so it’s still a thing and it’s real, it’s not just a movie?” Brown said of when she was approached by Stokes to work with the bobsled team.

She would work with them from 2019, and throughout the challenges the Covid years tossed up.

“That was a pretty amazing journey with them and to be part of that legacy and that culture,” she said.

“It was just such a special time in my life, we were the same as the original team, we had no money and we’re relying on sponsorship and people knowing we were trying to qualify to pay for us to live, we had minimal budget to eat and sleep, at one point we had no money to get fuel to get our sled up the mountain so we had to put our sled on someone’s truck and hitchhike to get up the mountains.

“I spent three months with them (when the world was locked down in Covid) and didn’t see my family, I was stuck on the other side of the world and had to spend Christmas in Canada.”

Dr Jo Brown with Jamaica's Yohan Blake.. Picture: Supplied.

‘One chance’

Brown’s relationship with Jamaica, and more specifically Yohan Blake, would continue to bear fruit as she stumbled into her next challenge: the quest for a 100m gold medal.

It’s arguably the pinnacle of the Olympics, and all sports for that matter.

Blake’s agent had picked up the phone, telling Brown that Lance Brennan – one of the world’s greatest track and field coaches – desperately needed her help. Covid was still rife around the globe, leaving a scarcity of world-class physios.

“He needs you bad, he’s got all these broken athletes … the next Olympics cycle’s starting and he doesn’t have anyone good helping the athletes in his camp,” Blake’s agent had told Brown, who happened to have an upcoming trip to work with the Jamaican bobsled team on the horizon.

She managed to sneak a day off to fly to Florida and meet with Brennan.

“I had no idea what the meeting was about, I just knew I had to meet the guy and was going by gut and intuition,” she recalled.

The pair agreed to trial working together in a crucial two-week training block over Easter.

“(Noah Lyles) saw me working with everyone else, he stood back and watched me work then after a week he came up to me and said ‘do you think you’d have a look at me?’,” Brown said.

“At this point no one really knew who he was, but I did because I was a track fan and he’d been racing Yohan Blake.

“I was like yeah sure no worries, he thought he had a groin problem and I quickly told him it wasn’t his groin it was his back, he was like ‘you’ve got good hands and blah blah blah’. It was one of those moments where you’ve got one chance to own it and be great at what you do.

Dr Jo Brown with Noah Lyles. Picture: Supplied.

“He said I was great and I was like ‘yeah, I’m one of the best in the world at what I do, full stop’, and then just carried on. If I had just said ‘oh I’m okay’, he doesn’t want okay, he wants to be the best. The language you use with these guys that want to be the best is so important and that’s all part of their understanding with performance.”

The day before she was due to fly out, Lyles’ brother Josephus invited Brown onto the team.

“When he hired me he thought he was going to get a physio that was stopping him from getting injured … and I was like ‘no, I’m a lot of things’.

“The relationship went from there and we were locked into a mission. When I first started working with him, winning the 100m at the Olympics was just a pipe dream, not a reality at all.

“As he grew and evolved and I got to understand him better we all worked as a team so well together to realise his best potential and got to be a part of that gold winning team, fastest man on the planet, it’s a pretty cool journey to be on.

“When every contraction matters and the whole world is watching what you do and how you do it nothing really compares, I didn’t realise the pressure I was under … it’s so intense. I didn’t realise how invested I was and what I’d given up in terms of relationships and people, my husband, my family, my friends.

“When he won, everyone was like, ‘did he win, did he not?’ I just started crying because I was so overwhelmed.

“Now looking back it wouldn’t have been pretty for me personally if he hadn’t won it because I’d given up so much and put so much on the line.

“There’s so many parts of it that so many people will never understand and what every person has to give up to achieve something like that, it’s been a wild ride and now it’s about finding my palace where I can make my biggest difference back in Australia.

“That was his dream, now it’s what’s my dream, where do I want to give back and what’s that about?”

Dr Jo Brown with famed Jamaican sprinter Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce. Picture: Supplied.

Priming Aussie crop for Brisbane 2032

Brown jokingly describes herself as a “lucky charm” when it comes to Olympic qualification, but it isn’t said without substance.

Among the Jamaican bobsled team and others, she was also pivotal in Australia’s men’s volleyball team reaching the Olympics for the first time in 13 years at Tokyo.

Now, her focus has turned to making her “biggest difference” on Australian shores ahead of the Brisbane Olympics, and she believes the Gold Coast is the place to do just that.

“Keeping my hand in Australian sports has been really important to me,” Brown said

Brown has joined forces with renowned Coast trainer Joey Hayes, who runs Ultimate Sports Performance, with the pair fresh off a US study tour together. The likes of Aussie rules studs Kurt Tippett, Dayne Beams, Touk Miller and Katie Brennan, four-time Coolangatta Gold winner and three-time Iron Series champion Courtney Hancock, and Australian Boomer Matt Hodgson have all trained under Hayes.

“The move down (to the Gold Coast) is because there’s a lot more sport at a higher level going on,” Brown said.

“I definitely can make that difference for those higher level people and understand or see things others don’t.

“Having been to many different sports and within different cultures as well I think I have this unique capacity to impact performance.”

Brown will be working with a number of young Olympic hopefuls, while a Gold Coast Suns board member was also left impressed by her work.

“If I can have an impact on the performance of youth athletes leading into 2032 and help a couple of athletes realise their direction and goal towards 2032 that’s really awesome and I’d love to be a part of that,” Brown said.

“I see that there’s a huge supply of athletes on the Gold Coast that are just needing that tip to get over the next level.”

Originally published as Dr Jo Brown details her rise to Noah Lyles’ inner sanctum as she moves to the Gold Coast to prime Australia’s next Olympians