The Godfathers
‘Effectiveness is inherently paradoxical. To be effective, a leader must possess attributes that are contradictory, even mutually exclusive.’
Paul Evans, Professor of Organisational Behaviour, INSEAD
The first time I met Stephen Francis was at a hotel in Stockholm in 2009, in connection with the prestigious athletics meet, DN Galan. I had already heard of him – his name was on everybody’s lips when the then-unknown Asafa Powell shifted the world 100 metres record from 9.78 seconds to 9.77 in 2005.
The story of Stephen Francis turning Powell’s fortunes around is far from being an isolated incident. As we saw earlier, Francis ‘collects’ athletes who nobody else wants and transforms them into Olympic champions and world-record holders. This is why I was now standing in the reception of the Nordic Sea Hotel in Stockholm waiting for the man who, in terms of results, is undisputedly the world’s most successful sprint coach.
Eventually I spot him coming down the stairs to reception. He is clad head to foot in black, from his shoes to the shades balanced on his forehead. He looks a little like a hip hop gangster – he is only lacking the baggy jeans and gold chains. He mumbles a lot, and takes long breaks in the middle of sentences, giving the slightly unnerving impression that he is about to drop off to sleep. However, the longer I speak to him, the more insight and perspective surfaces, and by the time I leave the hotel an hour and a half later, I feel deeply enriched.
Two months later I am sitting in front of the television watching the 2009 World Championships in Athletics in Berlin. Before the event, people were sceptical that Stephen Francis’s sprinters could repeat their massive success at the previous year’s Olympics in Beijing. All doubt rapidly evaporates, however. In an out-of-this-world demonstration of power they win eleven medals, six of them gold.
But if we are to understand the secret behind the Jamaican Gold Mine of top sprinters we must first understand Stephen Francis and the way the thinks. I had the same experience in Korea, Kenya, Russia and Ethiopia. All have their own Stephen Francis; a person who, from behind the scenes, creates and sustains an environment in which people achieve extraordinary success.
Don’t start with knowledge, start with interest
After I had met these people, the world’s best coaches, it took me a while to find a way to describe them properly. I toyed with ‘Master Coaches’, ‘backstage winners’ and ‘gold prospectors’, but none of these phrases really captured what I had witnessed in the Gold Mines. They did not convey the enormous respect and admiration these coaches enjoy. As the Jamaican sprinters’ in-house psychologist Dr Aggrey Irons put it when describing Stephen Francis: ‘He is not just an athletics coach. He is a father figure to them. But at the same time, he has a giant ego. He commands respect and loyalty, almost worship, from his people.’
I experienced much the same aura around Colm O’Connell in Iten. Even Olympic champions and world-record holders had a look of gratitude and respect in their eyes when their Irish mentor was mentioned.
It suddenly struck me that in reality, these people are much more than just coaches. They are Godfathers. Although all the Godfathers I met and observed during my travels were completely different personalities, at the same time they had a lot in common. All were totally committed to their role. They read, studied and experimented constantly in order to refresh their knowledge.
Another interesting common trait is that not one of them had practised the sport in which they had become so successful as a coach. Stephen Francis was a statistician, Colm O’Connell a geography teacher, Won Park an environmental activist and Sentayehu Eshetu a PE teacher with a passion for basketball, not running.
‘I have noticed that those coaches who have been successful as practitioners tend to force on their athletes the things that worked for them,’ Colm O’Connell explained to me. ‘They say: “Train like me and you will win like me”. They can’t see the athlete for their own ego. But in reality things don’t work like that. The game is not about you, it’s about your athletes. As a coach you have to understand that what works for one athlete does not necessarily work for another.’
Stephen Francis said more or less the same thing: ‘The coaches who are themselves former athletes tend to over-generalise from their own experience. What did or did not work for them personally has become their only blueprint for success.’
High performance is not either/or
While I was staying in the various Gold Mines, I tried time after time to get these Godfathers to reveal their philosophies. I imagined that they possessed some kind of secret, some ‘golden method’ or ‘three effective principles’. But every time I asked them to be precise about their philosophy, they just brushed me off, saying: ‘I don’t have one.’
‘Each athlete faces an individual challenge. There is no formula. I certainly haven’t found it,’ Colm O’Connell told me. ‘If you become too systematic you risk standardising them. Of course I have guidelines, but I try to avoid the systematic approach.’
This absence of a single, rigid philosophy is something that I encountered again and again. While many coaches fix on a particular way of doing things and believe they have found the one and only recipe for success, the Godfathers have quite the opposite approach – flexibility. For them, high performance is not a question of ‘either/or’ – it is ‘both/and’. Sometimes they are sympathetic and willing to listen to their athletes, at other times they are unreasonably demanding and dictatorial. They are angels and devils at the same time. They are also enormously ambitious and set the bar sky-high for themselves and others. Their methods won’t always make their athletes happy. But their results will.
Yet at the same time they are enormously unselfish. Unlike many self-obsessed coaches, none of them has the desire or the need to steal the limelight.
‘A good coach knows that it’s not about him, it’s about his athletes,’ Sentayehu Eshetu told me several times during my visit to Bekoji.
The Godfathers thrive on their backstage role, constantly in tune with their athletes’ development. The job, as Colm McConnell puts it, is to ‘inhale more than you exhale’.
They demand ever greater effort and investment on the part of their athletes and can be impatient when they feel they are not delivering. And yet at other times they can be enormously patient when an athlete needs space for their potential to unfold naturally.
You could also call them the ‘maybe’ coaches – when I asked any of them about whether a particular athlete would be a superstar somewhere down the line they just shrugged their shoulders and said ‘Maybe’.
This does seem a little strange, though. If these Godfathers are so good at what they do, why can they not see who is going to be a star in the future?
‘I’ve seen enough to know that you never can be certain,’ Colm O’Connell explained to me. ‘You’ve got to be patient with people because they mature at very different speeds. My job is to remain open-minded and maintain my curiosity with respect to each of my athletes.’
Although the Godfathers were all very open-minded about their methods and prepared to be flexible according to the needs of individual athletes, at times this attitude could be overruled by intransigence if their demands were not met.
As Won Park explained: ‘I will do anything for my players so long as they stick to my rules. Rule number one is that you train from sunrise to sundown. After that you do physical training, mental training and all the other training that doesn’t require light. It’s all golf from the time you get up to the time you go to bed. If that’s okay with you, you’ll have no problems, but if you are not willing to invest the effort, I will kick you out. Simple as that.’
The Godfathers are complex personalities. They are inquisitive but resolute; ambitious but unselfish. They see the big picture but also focus on detail. They are impatient but in a strangely patient way. They are sympathetic but incredibly demanding. The time has now come to meet each of them in turn.
Colm O’Connell
The Godfather of the Kenyan Gold Mine
On 25 June 1976, fresh out of college, geography teacher Colm O’Connell landed in Kenya. He had been given a job at St Patrick’s High School, a remote boys’ school way up in the Kenyan Rift Valley. Had anybody told him back then that 40 years later he would be the coach of the world’s best middle- and long-distance runners he would probably have laughed at them, before wandering off to find the nearest pub. Until he set foot in Kenya he had never even attended an athletics meet. Nevertheless, the truth is that, measured in terms of titles and medals, he is the world’s most successful middle- and long-distance coach. Cast your eyes down the long list of Kenyan world record holders and Olympic champions and you will have difficulty finding an athlete who, at some time or other, has not been trained by ‘Brother’ O’Connell, as he is known. He is the undisputed Godfather of the Kenyan Gold Mine. Here he is what he told me when we chatted:
When I first landed in Kenya I knew nothing about running. In fact, my favourite sport was football. Even today, I’m an ardent Arsenal supporter.
I didn’t bring any set ideas or training methods with me, and I therefore had no option but to listen to the athletes and develop close relationships with them. Although over the years I have built up a considerable technical knowledge of the sport, I still try to accept the athletes for who they are and the point where they are in their development.
There are many theories, training philosophies and general frameworks used in running, but it is my experience that these are not what make the difference. If you really want to help an athlete progress, you have to get close. It’s the relationship between the coach and the athlete that is important. Several of my athletes live in my house. That’s how I get to know them best.
Coaching is not as easy as people tend to believe. You have to be patient; understanding of the athletes. You have to defend them and stand by them, especially when good results are not forthcoming.
As a coach, I also have to look at the background of an athlete – their family, friends and the other people who are important in their life. I have to look at who is influencing the athlete. I have to coordinate that support system.
Good coaching is not about charisma. It’s not anything magical or elusive. You have to set clear goals with your athletes, motivate them to work hard towards those goals and work relentlessly to accomplish them. It’s a long, hard road.
I treat everybody differently. I worked complete differently with David Rudisha, who recently broke the 800 metres world record, than I did with Wilson Kipketer [the former holder of the 800 metres world record]. They are completely different personalities, which means that the greatest mistake I could make is to believe that they are both just 800 metre runners, and therefore need identical training.
One of the most important lessons I have learned is to keep an open mind about the possibilities and potentials of all athletes. Athletes start at many different levels of commitment, enthusiasm and performance, and the rates at which they develop vary just as much. That means you have to be very patient as a coach; very, very patient.
People talk a lot about training, but I speak to my athletes just as much about relaxation. Very few people fully realise how important relaxation is. If your brain is working while you ‘relax’ it means that you are not relaxing. You must forget yourself, the things that are stressing you out – and forget the next session.
The ability to relax is underestimated as a factor in the Kenyans’ success. The Western world has become so hyped up, so demanding and stressful, that it can be difficult to find peace and quiet. The Kenyan lifestyle facilitates quality relaxation to a much higher degree.
I also talk more about losing than winning. This is not negative talk, far from it. I try to educate my runners about the realities of becoming an athlete, part of which is accepting defeat. This is something that they do with grace and humility in more cases than not. They know it is only one race; that another will follow. A winner to me is a loser who has evaluated himself.
Won Park
The Godfather of the Korean Gold Mine
Won Park was originally just a Korean English teacher. He then became interested in sustainability and decided to do a PhD in environmental policy and management. His studies led to him to Las Vegas, to participate in an international conference on the harmful effects of golf courses on the environment. However, he became so enamoured with the sport that he stopped fighting it and instead became a golf coach! Today he is one of the most successful in the world. He has coached players such as J.A. Shin (highest earner on the LPGA Tour in 2009), Eun Hee Ji (US Open Winner), Jae Eun Chung (gold medallist at the Asian games), as well as numerous other Korean elite players. This is what he had to say to me:
My players must abide by my rules, otherwise I will kick them out. That means training from when you get up to when you go to bed. Some players may be lucky enough to get a day off a week, but most of them don’t take their breaks. They train all year round, non-stop.
I use various methods to motivate people. For example, my players must pay two dollars if they go over par. All the money goes into a pool which goes to the winning player.
The first time I stood on a golf course with an iron in my hand I thought it would be a piece of cake. I had read everything and I knew precisely what mistakes people usually make. But when I tried myself I found that my body refused to follow my head.
Concentrating on something for more than 30 minutes is impossible. It’s part of human nature. Even 30 seconds is difficult. Try to focus on the tip of your finger for 30 seconds without thinking about anything else. That’s how difficult it is to play golf. You need to put yourself in a state in which you shut out everything and are totally focused on the present.
Most Korean coaches are former players, and so they teach on the basis of their own experiences. It works, but only if your players have the same mindset as you. It’s important to understand that what works for you doesn’t necessarily work for someone else.
Coaches should spend much more time than they do on their own development. There is always room for improvement, and if you are going to remain useful and relevant to your players you have to progress as they do.
I love to collect cases and stories; evidence of what it takes to be among the best. I tell my players what Se Ri Pak had to go through to get to the top. She was the first Korean to make it, and it wasn’t easy. Everything was new to her: the hotels, language, the other contestants, all of it. But she stood her ground. Her example shows my players that what they want to do is possible if they don’t lose faith. I have an archive of stories, sorted by subject. Some are about engendering faith, some about making sacrifices and others about self-motivation.
I often tell my players that they must surround themselves with the right people. Being with people with negative mindsets will make them develop a negative mindset themselves. Positive mindsets are contagious as well – if you want to be a good putter, then choose a putter as your best friend.
It is mindset that sorts the best from the next best. It is the ability to constantly set higher goals, to push yourself and to learn from your mistakes.
Let’s say I have two players. One of them finds everything very easy. Regardless of what I ask him to do, he does it perfectly. His problem is that he is not dedicated enough to his training. The other player, in contrast, is not so quick to master new techniques but is dedicated. He lives like a monk and does everything he needs to do every single day. In the long term, I have most faith in the second guy.
Talent tends to get in the way of itself. My task with someone who seems to be a ‘natural’ is to try to change his mindset, because he is not hungry enough. For instance, I will take him out to the driving range where some of the world’s best players are training. I ask him to stand and observe them and write down a list of the players who arrive first in the morning and those stay longest in the evening. Then later, when I show him the top of the world ranking list he realises that there is an unmistakable correlation.
Sentayehu Eshetu
The Godfather of the Ethiopian Gold Mine
Sentayehu Eshetu has a whole list of Olympic gold medallists on his CV even though he has never been outside Ethiopia. Since he arrived in Bekoji 30 years ago he has been training the little village’s children at six every morning on a track he built with his bare hands. He is famous for his insanely tough training sessions which push the children to their limits. Four gold medals at the Beijing Olympics can be traced straight back to Eshetu. These days, he is a celebrity among Bekoji’s 30,000 inhabitants. Here is what he told me:
My dream was to become a professional footballer, but when I finished my teacher training the government sent me to Bekoji to be a sports teacher. There was nothing here. No facilities whatsoever. I decided to build a track for my students myself.
Derartu Tulu was one of my first students. She left all the boys way behind as a thirteen year old, and a couple of years later she was discovered by the Ethiopian Athletic Federation. When I saw how successful she was out there in the world, I thought: ‘If I can do this with her then can I do the same with others?’
I have 300 children and youngsters who come here every morning at six o’clock to train with me. It can be difficult to organise training for so many people, but fortunately I have recently been given an assistant coach by the Federation.
My training methods do not come from things I read in books. I’m self-made. I have learned everything by trying things out to see what works.
These kids are willing to do anything to succeed, and I train them ruthlessly. That said, I have reduced the intensity of the sessions very slightly after one of the boys started to pass blood in his urine after training.
In Bekoji, people focus on only one thing. Running is business here. They focus on nothing else from the age of thirteen. They do nothing but sleep, eat and train all year round. I don’t think they’re as disciplined in Kenya, but then I’ve never been there myself.
My athletes’ greatest fear is not getting discovered. They know that they have to go on to Addis Ababa if they are to have a chance of getting onto the world scene.
People in Bekoji are poor, but happy. They try to be thankful for every day. Even if they get nothing to eat they thank God for giving them another day to live.
The new Derartu Tulu [double gold medallist from Bekoji] is called Meseret Tadesse. I found her living with her family about 15 km from Bekoji. They were extremely poor. It took some convincing to get them to release her from work on the farm. They felt that they were losing valuable hands, but I told them she would be a better investment for them as a runner. Today she lives in a rented mud hut in Bekoji.
The only way you can get away from Bekoji is to be a good runner. It is impossible for young people to get an education that can advance them, which is why they commit everything to running. It’s their only option. I’ve never seen anybody come to training late. They really want to do this, and they have no plan B.
Role models are the most important thing. The Bekele brothers and Dibaba sisters show all the children in Bekoji what they can become if they work hard. We need champions if we are to build the world’s best athletes.
A lot of people in Bekoji get good at running because, when all is said and done, there is nothing else for them to do. Life here offers very few choices or opportunities. Running gives people’s lives meaning and purpose.
I would like to start training marathon runners here, but I would need a bicycle to follow them across the terrain. A bicycle costs 100 dollars and I can’t afford that.
Parents come here every week knocking on my door to ask if I will train their sons and daughters. They have seen what a running career can lead to.
Competition among the athletes is very important. It is very difficult to be the best in Bekoji; there is invariably somebody better than you. This means that everybody maintains their humility.
I remember watching the World Championships in Osaka. Dibaba stumbled at the start of the 10,000 metres and fell way behind, but she won all the same. That is the kind of survival mentality you find here in Bekoji.
Believing in yourself costs nothing. My athletes may not have the best shoes and the best training track, but they believe they can win. Sometimes adults over 40 ask if they can train with us. They still believe that they have a chance.
Stephen Francis
The Godfather of the Jamaican Gold Mine
A former financial analyst, for the last five years Stephen Francis has without doubt been the world’s most successful sprint coach in terms of medals. Others in the athletics world have described him as pompous, arrogant and self-assertive, but he is known by his own athletes as perceptive and tremendously intelligent. As reigning 100 metre hurdles world champion Brigitte Foster-Hylton said: ‘Every day I’m surprised how much depth there is in his outlook.’ Here is what he had to say when we met:
Athletics is an individual sport, and many people believe that they can do things on their own initiative. I wanted to create a team environment, more like those you find in football. A footballer doesn’t decide on his own initiative that he’s going to train at ten o’clock. No, the coach decides that the whole team is going to train at nine o’clock, so that’s when everybody turns out. I felt there was a need for a disciplined team environment in which everybody was in the same situation, regardless of their ability. I often asked them to start training at five or six in the morning.
I also raised the level of ambition. Among other things, I began to plan training sessions on Christmas Eve and on days when the athletes would normally have had time off. I told them that sprinters who win the World Championships and the Olympics don’t take time off at Christmas. I wanted them to understand that they were not competing against runners from Jamaica. They were competing against the whole world. Our ambition was not local, it was global.
I don’t recruit superstars with huge egos. Instead, I look for those with the greatest potential to develop. To begin with, nobody believed that the runners I took under my wing were any good. But I proved them wrong.
I sometimes tell my athletes that they know they are getting it right when for 80 per cent of the time they wish they were somewhere else. If you enjoy your job too much, you’re not working hard enough.
It was easy to get my athletes to work hard actually, because most of them hadn’t achieved that much. They were hungry. I would venture that it would be more difficult to motivate a person who had already run the 100 metres in 9.90. When a runner succeeds in doing something, he associates his success with his approach to the sport to date, and so it will be difficult to convince him that he needs to do something radically different. But a man who runs the distance in 10.6 or 10.7 is a different animal. So long as he believes you can help him, he will be willing to do anything you say. I wanted to change the way people trained and thought, and this was easier to achieve with athletes who had not yet seriously performed.
Conventional wisdom would have it that the greatest potential can be delivered if the coach has the opportunity to concentrate on the performance of a single athlete. The larger the training group, the less attention is available to each individual. I don’t believe that is true. I have seen countless examples of coaches who only have one athlete to concentrate on, where that athlete does not perform at all well when it counts. My approach is to have individual focus but to train in a large group.
It is very difficult to see who will make it. That is why I take in so many athletes. I have more than 80 athletes in my group today, all training at the same time, and all of them are at extremely different levels. I’ve got guys who run the 100 metres in 11.5 seconds, and I have some who run it in 9.7. I have girls who run the 400 metres in 64 seconds and others who do it in 49 seconds. But there’s no guarantee that an athlete will have what it takes to raise themselves up to the next level, and that’s what makes the numbers so important. Right now one guy does the 100 metres in 10.11. When he came to me he ran it in 11.2.
If I hadn’t taken so many in, athletes like Asafa Powell and Shelly-Ann Fraser might never have been discovered. Experience has shown me that many athletes do not mature for some time and that it is important not to shut the door on them. This means you have to be willing to invest your time and resources in something that looks rather ordinary but which in time can flourish to become something extraordinary.
Not many people in Europe believe that they can sprint, and this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. It’s not because they can’t, they had just been led to believe that they can’t do it.
It’s just like in war. Two sides might have the same equipment, but only one will win. It will be the side with the best trained soldiers. That’s the way it is with sprinting, too.
What you should never forget about
GODFATHER LEADERSHIP
1. Leadership is paradoxical – a great leader must be able to build close relationships but be able to keep at a suitable distance. They must lead from the front and yet hold themselves in the background. They must be in control at all times but trust their people and be willing to relinquish some of that control to them. They must be visionary but keep their feet on the ground. They must create consensus but be willing to make decisions against the majority if necessary. To truly become a great leader, you must recognise and reconcile these opposing behaviours. Godfathers master these paradoxes and understand that it’s never a question of either/or. It’s both/and.
2. Leadership is situational. No leadership style is universal. No leadership style works in all situations. Contexts shift and relationships change over time, and therefore great leaders are flexible. Bad leaders are static. The only tool they have is a hammer and therefore they tend to see every problem as a nail. The Godfathers use different leadership styles depending on the situation and the people they are leading. They don’t please through their methods and philosophies. They please through their results.
3. Leadership is relational. It’s the business of human nature. A hydroelectric engineer must have an understanding of the nature of water in order to build a dam. A physiotherapist must understand anatomy to treat their patients. In the same way, a leader must understand human nature in order to lead effectively. Godfathers have a deep insight into the psychology of people and understand what it takes to maximise their unique potential.