Moving Parts - Head Chef Nick Holt

INEOS TEAM UK Head Chef Nick Holt is living out his dream. As a lifelong cook with a love of sailing, he could not have found himself a better suited job. Nick joined the team in August 2019 and has not looked back since.

“I grew up in Worcestershire where my parents ran a hotel and my grandmother was a cookery school teacher. My grandmother bought me my first cook book. That’s probably where this all started! Growing up I also did a lot of sailing from an early age and it became my favourite past time. My role with the team now combines my hobby and my job. It’s my ideal job really.”

Nick, inspired by his parents and his grandmother, started early in his cooking career. Whilst at school he would often help his dad cooking in the kitchen and then after finishing school he joined a catering college in Worcester. That was followed by stints cooking in various establishments across the country, from Queens hotel in Cheltenham to Number One Aldwych in London, at the time voted the second best boutique hotel in the world.

After several years, however, Nick opted to leave London and return home. He decided to run a pub in the Cotswolds, which he ended up doing for seven years. His career then took a further turn when he finished with his pub and moved into an entirely new world, the world of event catering. It was there that he first encountered the sports industry.

“After finishing with the pub, I went to work for an event catering company. That’s where I started getting into the sporting side of things, but from an event catering point of view. I was, for example, the Head Chef for the two Portsmouth America’s Cup World Series events (in 2015 and 2016), where we were catering for up to 700 hospitality guests. We also did various high-end hospitality sports events including the last two Ryder cups held in Europe and Formula 1 Grand Prix’s such as Silverstone and Monaco.

“At the same time, I started sailing again at Avon Sailing Club, the same club near Tewkesbury in Gloucestershire where I grew up sailing. One day I was down at the sailing club when a friend of mine pointed out a job advertisement for Head Chef of INEOS TEAM UK and knowing that I loved both cooking and sailing suggested I go for it. I immediately applied, it sounded perfect for me.”.

Nick Holt joined the team in August 2019 as Head Chef. Whilst he had a significant amount of experience as a chef, he had never worked for a professional sports team. It was a completely new world for Nick.

“My role now is a very different one to what I did before. Previously, for my whole career, I was always cooking for people who were there for a good time, whether that be in restaurants, pubs or at events. Now it is all about feeding people to help them be at their peak physical performance.

“We feed everyone from the sailors through to all the behind-the-scenes staff. We feed everybody the same meal, however, and all those meal plans are based entirely around what the Performance team want the sailors to eat.

“Everything we make for the team is freshly made, that means there are often a lot of early starts. If it’s a sailing day, for example, we’ll be up from 5:30 in the morning preparing breakfast for the team, that could be anything from an overnight porridge to  home-made ricotta pancakes. Prep will then start for lunch service for the whole team from 1PM.”

As Head Chef Nick works closely together with INEOS TEAM UK’s Head of Human Performance Ben Williams and KXLife’s Aidan Goggins, the man behind the sirtdiet and Nutrition Medicine Consultant for INEOS TEAM UK, to put together the weekly meal plans that will be best suited to the sailors’ current period of training.

"I work very closely alongside Ben and Aidan. Aidan, as the nutritional guy, will give me an outline with a list of food that we need to use. For example, we use a lot of lean meats as opposed to red meats and we try and keep away from big game fish like Tuna. Using that outline, and Ben Williams’ input on training programmes and where the sailors are currently at, I will then write a menu every week. That menu then goes back to Aidan and Ben for them to run their eyes over and give any feedback on. They may say, for example, that because of how the sailors’ blood sugars are or how their performance is going during a particular training period, that they want something changed.

“It’s a great process to be in. Everyone involved really knows their stuff, the feedback is often invaluable. I am learning a lot and the constructive criticism is always a good thing. Being so hands on and getting to work alongside the sailors and the Performance team has been very interesting. It’s completely different to what I was used to, but I love it.”

The changing and ever-developing nature of an America’s Cup programme requires Nick and the Performance team to review the team’s intake programmes on a weekly basis. A notable shift, for example, will come once the team begins racing for the Cup.

“At the moment the sailors are either training every day or when they do go out sailing, as they did in Cagliari, it was always for a long period of time. Once we get to New Zealand the food and the intake will change quite a bit. In racing mode, the races are only for a short period of time compared to the six or eight hours the guys might be out on the water now”.

On hand to help Nick and the Performance team with that shift are Science in Sport. Earlier this year INEOS TEAM UK, alongside Team INEOS and the England Lionesses, joined Science in Sport’s newly launched Performance Solutions, a ground-breaking sports research and nutrition service designed to elevate elite teams and athletes to the next level of performance. The move saw experts from SiS’ Performance Solutions team embedded in INEOS TEAM UK to help deliver bespoke solutions to improve performance. The partnership has made an immediate impact.

“When we are looking at how intake will change in racing mode, for example, we are working a lot with Science in Sport on that and they are having a lot of input on what we will need to feed the guys. Their professionalism in what they do has been brilliant to see. We had a couple of their team come out to Cagliari to our winter training camp where they got to see how we operate. It’s great to have them on board and their knowledge, including through their connection with Team INEOS, is brilliant to be able to bring to the team. It’s a partnership that’s only going to grow and blossom over the course of this Cup campaign.”

For a lifelong sailing fan, regular sailor and a career chef becoming the Head Chef of an America’s Cup challenging team does not get much better. There is only one thing Nick could imagine topping that.

“I love my job. I see it as almost like mixing pleasure with work. People say you can never be happy unless you find your ideal job and I have definitely done that. To become the Head Chef of the first British America’s Cup winning team, however, would top it all off. That would be awesome. I can’t think of a better thing to have done and be involved in in my career. It would literally be a dream come true.”