BOULDER — Motivational speaking and pep talks aren’t necessarily his coaching style. Instead, Neal Henderson focuses on giving his athletes numbers, facts and top-notch equipment to ride to success.

That’s how he helped triathlete Flora Duffy get back on her bike and back to the Olympics.

“Neal didn’t push me into it, to get back to competing at the top level,” said Duffy, a student at the University of Colorado. “He just kind of guided me. Slowly but surely, I started competing at a higher and higher level. … It was the gradual progression of training and me enjoying it.”

Duffy, who will compete for Bermuda at the London Games, is one of several Olympic athletes whom Henderson coaches.

In 2009, when Duffy asked him to coach her in triathlon, he knew he was going to have an Olympian to tutor. Duffy qualified for the 2008 Beijing Games but left injured, having lost her passion for the sport. She decided she just wanted to be a college student and joined the CU cycling team for fun.

“I knew cycling would probably be the ideal avenue for Flora to rediscover that (passion) and whether or not she wanted to get back into triathlon,” said Henderson, the director of sport science at the Boulder Center for Sports Medicine.

Henderson didn’t drop hints to Duffy that she could aim for London. Instead, it was Duffy who approached Henderson, asking about mixing cycling with her running. From there, with her enthusiasm for triathlon renewed, he mapped out a plan on how often she should run, the intensity and on what types of surface. Slowly, she worked her way to a top-20 finish at the 2010 Des Moines World Cup. She recently placed third at the ITU World Cup in Edmonton, Alberta.

Read more about Henderson, who is coaching the women’s cycling team at the London Games.