In 2009 an Australian sports scientist named Tim Kerrison was going to a job interview with England Cricket when he was called by Dave Brailsford. The boss of British Cycling convinced him to swing by the Manchester velodrome, so the story goes, and poached him then and there for Team Sky, the new road cycling team he was setting up. Kerrison knew almost nothing about professional cycling. Back home, he had been a rower, not a particularly successful one, and he'd stumbled into coaching, first rowing and then the Australian sprint swimming team. He had done a similar job for British Swimming in the build-up to the Beijing Olympics.

During 2010, his first year with Team Sky, Kerrison said very little. He followed races in a camper van known as the Skip: "You would go in there and you could imagine what Swampy's little tent looked like in those trees," recalls Bradley Wiggins in his new autobiography, My Time (Yellow Jersey £20). He watched as Team Sky endured a demoralising and humiliating debut season. Wiggins performed so horribly that there were internal discussions about whether he should be demoted or even sacked.

Then, at the end of 2010, Kerrison piped up and started asking questions. Most of them were basic, almost naive: why did cyclists not warm down after racing? Why did they not train seriously in November and December? The answer to most of his inquiries was: "That's how it's always been done." That wasn't good enough; Kerrison set about devising a new training programme with the rider's coach, Shane Sutton. Wiggins was impressed: "I knew they had put a lot of brainpower into it; they hadn't just written it up sitting on the toilet."

Peter Coe went through a very similar process in Sheffield in the 1970s. His teenage son, Seb, was mad about running and he was "just another parent hostage to their child's sporting activities", writes Coe Jr in Running My Life (Hodder & Stoughton £20), his autobiography. "He had little knowledge of athletics – nor, as far as I'm aware, any interest." Peter Coe was a mechanical engineer, who had become a troubleshooter for companies looking to improve their efficiency.

The prevailing wisdom, coming out of New Zealand, a middle-distance production line at the time, was that serious athletes had to run serious mileage, more than 100 miles a week. Peter Coe thought otherwise: to run fast, you had to train fast; short distances at explosive speeds. Coe sent Seb out up and down Sheffield's hills, running in the headlights of the family Cortina when the three-day week had left the city in darkness. "If that makes me sound like a guinea pig," Seb Coe notes, "I was a more than willing one."

We read sports autobiographies, I think, not to find out about the success – which we probably watched (live, on television) at the time – but the stories behind it. The stuff we didn't see. In a month that sees the release of nearly a dozen such books – Ian Thorpe, Chris Hoy, Ben Ainslie are all competing for your Christmas wish list – it is quickly apparent that not all entries to the canon will be revealing and compelling. But when it works – as it does with My Time and Running My Life – the results are illuminating. Events that we thought we had seen from every angle are given a fresh twist. Tales of individual brilliance become more nuanced ones with multiple threads coming together in a grand tapestry.

My Time, which focuses on the period between 2010 and 2012 – a previous volume, In Pursuit of Glory, does the heavy lifting of Wiggins's childhood and early career – also answers a riddle: just how did he go from Tour de France also-ran to world-beater in two years? Doping, mercifully, is absent from this story. When Team Sky started, Brailsford calculated that performance-enhancing drugs could add 15% to an individual's ability; they needed to find a way to make the same gains without pharmacology. That is where Kerrison – and an army of nutritionists and technology experts – came in. They were Wiggins's EPO.

Likewise, Seb Coe argues that his father's greatest qualities were questioning everything and taking calculated risks: it led him in 1941 to escape a train crossing France, bound for a German prisoner-of-war camp. He doesn't make the link explicit, but the inference is that a similarly maverick approach helped him make London 2012 an unexpected triumph.

Significant others are also a dominant theme in two other new releases: Andy Murray: Champion (Simon & Schuster £18.99) by Mark Hodgkinson and Jessica Ennis's autobiography, Unbelievable (Hodder & Stoughton £20). These lack the distinctive voice and attitude of Wiggins's and Coe's books, but both have their moments. For Murray, the turning point in a career that looked to be stalling was the appointment of Ivan Lendl as his coach late last year. They were quickly labelled "tennis's odd couple", but had one thing in common: both of them lost the first four major finals they competed in. Lendl, indeed, was known as the Choke-oslovakian, before going on to win eight major titles.

Hodgkinson did not have direct access to Murray or Lendl, but in a well researched account, he detects a new calmness in the Scot's play. Murray has finally found a mentor whom he respects – gone are the screaming fits he unloaded at previous coaches – and Lendl devises subtle ways to motivate his new charge. During the final of the US Open in September, the usually taciturn Lendl broke protocol in the fifth set by enthusiastically applauding Murray. It doesn't sound like much, but he won, so maybe it did the trick; Murray's issues have always been ones of self-belief, after all, not talent.

The 26-year-old Ennis has worked with her coach, Toni Minichiello – she calls him Chell, Chris Moyles called him Mini Cheddars – since she was 13 and new to athletics. "It was the start of a love-hate relationship that has caused me more tears, pain and ultimately joy than I could have ever dreaded or wished for," she admits in Unbelievable. Ennis is such a wholesome and excellent all-round human being that it is hard to imagine her ever getting that furious. But, as we know, it all worked out in the end. As she crossed the line to win gold in London this summer, she was bear-hugged by Chell and her ego-less reaction neatly sums up all four books: "We" – note the plural – "had done it."

. Read Richard Williams's round-up of the year's best sports books