During Team Sky’s first Tour de France campaign, Phil noticed something strange: riders weren’t injured often, but they regularly complained of neck and back pain. The culprit? The beds.

‍Across 21 days of racing, riders changed hotel rooms — and beds — up to 19 times. They had no choice in the matter. And poor sleep meant poor recovery. Poor recovery meant losing the hardest race on Earth.So Phil posed a radical idea: What if we took control of recovery — starting with the bed itself?

‍He led the development of the now-legendary "Bed-in-a-Bag" system: Nine bespoke, four-layer, memory-foam mattresses — one for each rider — designed to maximise rest, support healing from crashes, and follow them from hotel to hotel. Burn-resistant sheets. Road rash–friendly fabrics.
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A marginal gain that delivered massive results. It worked. Riders knew that no matter how brutal the day — 250km, six hours in the saddle — the bed waiting for them wasn’t random. It was theirs. Recovery-ready. Performance-primed.

The system became a staple in the team long after Phil moved on.

Phil’s next frontier? The 2016 Rio Olympics. He led a ground-breaking project after uncovering a serious imbalance: Female cyclists were far more prone to saddle sores than their male counterparts. Phil tackled the issue head-on — not just by adjusting equipment, but by addressing the real health factors behind it.

He successfully lobbied for a change to UCI rules on saddle tilt, improving comfort and riding posture. He brought in dermatologists and gynaecologists to provide gold-standard guidance on saddle-area care. He helped redesign shammies and saddles using materials still in use today. The result? A 100% drop in saddle sores from 2015 to 2016. One Olympic champion later credited the shorts they developed with helping her win her gold medal.

Today, Phil works behind the scenes with some of the world’s most forward-thinking brands — applying his elite sport mindset to product development, customer experience, and innovation strategy. You won’t always hear about these projects. And that’s by design.
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But if you’re using something that feels unusually right, comfortable, or high-performing — it might just have Phil Burt Innovation’s fingerprints on it.Because when it comes to innovation, we don’t wait for the problem to get loud.
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We find it in the shadows — and solve it before anyone else sees it coming.