Without the right DNA, the gift of natural ability and solid technique, you won’t be successful as an Olympic athlete. But that’s just the start. Next comes the work, which is driven by commitment and dedication to the gruelling training sessions in the weight room and on the track, on the court or field or in the pool. Olympic athletes in general, and especially those who rise to the top, don’t just commit to becoming Olympic champions or to competing at the Olympic Games. Nor do they simply commit themselves to the glory and reward of winning or accomplishing their goals. Those commitments are easy. They don’t even just say they will work hard and sweat, and go through pain and sacrifice. They commit to consistently doing what they know it will take to be their absolute best day to day and even hour to hour.
The desire to succeed is extremely important, but it’s easy to want to be the best in the world. Drive is more important. It’s easy to commit to being the Olympic gold medallist, but not as easy to commit to training 50 per cent harder than you did the year before and to making sacrifices to achieve that goal. It is that drive that causes an individual to work for what he desires.
‘I never felt I’d done enough or gone quick enough,’ says Tanni Grey-Thompson. ‘So I was quite driven and quite focused. It was never a problem to make myself go out and train. You could probably count on one hand the number of times in all the years that it was like, “I just can’t do that” [because of fatigue or injury].’
The training required to compete at the championship level Tanni demanded of herself meant that everything else in her life took a back seat. And I mean everything. In 2001, when she and her husband decided to have a family, they actually got out the calendar. The next Games were in 2002. When they worked back, they realised that if Tanni was to regain her fitness in time after her pregnancy, ‘We were going to have a family right then.’ So they started trying straight away.
Somehow, having competition dictate the rest of life seemed perfectly normal to Tanni. ‘It never felt too intrusive. It was just always what I wanted to do more than anything else,’ she told me. ‘I was lucky my parents and my family really understood that, so they put up with lots of me not being there for Christmas or training on Christmas, birthdays or anniversaries. It was fine. I set my wedding date based on my competition schedule. My sister set her wedding on my competition schedule. When she decided to get married, she sat down and said, “Right, okay, you need to be at the wedding. What date is going to work for you?” It was really nice that she wanted me to be at the wedding and she wasn’t saying, “We’re getting married in the summer.” She was like, “You’re not going to be around in the summer. We’ll get married in February.”
Tanni’s life revolved around racing, and those close to her not only understood, they supported that, especially Ian, her husband, who was also her coach. ‘Ian, for one of my birthdays, bought me some aluminium from Russia to build a racing chair. I remember a friend saying, “Oh my God, you were so good at pretending that’s what you really wanted for your birthday.”’ Tanni answered, ‘No, that’s really what I wanted for my birthday.’
Athletes like Tanni who have the incredible drive and single-minded focus required to become Olympic champions don’t let obstacles and setbacks get in their way. It’s not as simple as saying, ‘I’m not going to let that particular setback or obstacle affect me.’ It means figuring out a way around the obstacle.
When I was competing I never lacked for motivation to go out to the track and train every day, even when temperatures were over 100 degrees for more than 30 straight days, as they were in 1994. Most world-class athletes don’t have a problem with training each day. They understand that training makes them better and gets them closer to accomplishing their goal. The pivotal point in most Olympic champions’ lives is that moment when desire for Olympic victory meets the willingness to commit at that level and to that degree.
In my third year of college, after not making the 1988 Olympic team, my indoor track season started with a bang. I won my first NCAA championship and set a new American record in the 200 metres in the process. I also finished second at the US senior indoor championships in the 400 metres. Due to a lack of focus, I hadn’t been running as well during my outdoor season when I pulled my quadriceps in the 100 metres at the conference championships. I found myself rehabbing again, unable to run at the NCAA outdoor championships. So I was shocked to get the opportunity to go to Europe and run races that summer of 1989.
I didn’t turn in a great performance in my races abroad. Even so, the experience would change my life. During my month in Europe I was exposed to what professional track and field is all about. I saw all the top athletes compete, including Carl Lewis, Jackie Joyner-Kersee and Sergey Bubka. I watched Roger Kingdom break the 110 metres hurdles world record. I remember being in the hotel hanging out with some friends not too far away from Kingdom, along with his agent and a group of people who treated him like a superstar. I’d heard already that he’d made a lot of money for breaking that world record.
On the long plane ride home, all I could think about was what I had seen in Europe and the possibility of competing professionally at that level. I knew that I would need to remain healthy to have any chance at all of reaching that goal. I called my coach and asked him to meet me. ‘I know I’m not doing as much as I should on the stretching front and in my strength-training sessions,’ I admitted. ‘I’ll do whatever I need to in order to finish the season healthy.’
I committed to stretching as much as necessary and to lifting weights with the same commitment and intensity that I put into the daily track training that I loved so much. To further minimise the risk of injury, Coach decided that I would run only 400-metre races and relays all season. It worked.
I would venture to say that most if not all Olympic champions have experienced that moment where desire to be the best, the realisation of what it will take and the willingness to put in the effort all merge. Soon after Sally Gunnell focused in on the 400 metres hurdles to the exclusion of other track events she had dabbled with early in her career, she developed the drive required to cross the finish line first. Although she had experienced early success in the Olympics and elsewhere, a four-year dry spell followed. Then she came in fifth in a close race. ‘That was probably the first time I thought I had a chance to win in four years’ time. What it made me realise is that I loved what I was doing.’ It also made her hungry. ‘It made me realise, you know what, this is what I really want in life.’ That gave her back the focus she needed. Just as importantly, it helped her understand that she needed to approach her sport more professionally and get the help she needed with both mechanics and injury prevention.
IN GOOD HEALTH AND BAD
Part of being an athlete is dealing with injuries, which are major setbacks and very difficult mentally to get through. Not only does an injury stop the athlete from being able to compete, the very reason we train in the first place, but it stops all progress towards the goal which is the prize. Worse, it actually destroys some of that progress. After an injury, the athlete, who has been working towards a goal and using that goal as a motivator and a focus in training each day, has to make an adjustment. Instead of training his body to accomplish the goal, which he had been doing to this point, he now has to heal his body before he can go back to training his body. The healing process for a world-class athlete usually consists of a combination of rehabilitation exercises and rest. Both of those activities run exactly counter to what the athlete wants to do and what he was doing before the injury. Rehab exercises are like taking a highly trained physicist and making him do simple arithmetic exercises every day. They are tedious, simple and significantly below the athlete’s normal capabilities. Resting is extremely important to heal an injury, but you can’t really put any effort into resting. It is a passive activity.
This is where drive becomes really important. During the difficult period of time required for rehab and rest to heal an injury, the athlete with superior drive will put the same energy, effort and focus required into his rehab as he did into training. Yes, it is difficult to dedicate the same energy and effort and commitment to simple exercises that aren’t making you a better athlete but are only making it possible for you to get back to a state where you can start to work again at becoming a better athlete. And yes, it takes significant drive and focus on the overall goal to resist starting back to training too soon instead of being patient and resting.
It is at this time in fact that athletes are most vulnerable to losing focus on their goal and becoming distracted. With more time on their hands than they’re used to, they sometimes fall into a pattern of hanging out with friends more, drinking more, partying more, or indulging in some other pattern of activity that replaces the satisfaction they previously got from training towards their goal. It takes serious drive to sit in your house every day and stay on the same disciplined schedule you were on before the injury, when now you’re not getting closer to your goal and are bored to death.
In rare cases, however, an athlete manages not only to overcome an injury, but to turn it into an asset. How Ian Thorpe dealt with his broken ankle just ten months before the 2000 Sydney Olympics reveals both pragmatism and mental strength. With the exception of the first few days, Ian’s post-injury course of action could serve as a lesson for any injured athlete. I’ll let Ian, who was just 16 at the time of the injury, share his experience in his own words.
‘I was running through a national park and I trod on an uneven rock, triangular shaped. I can remember feeling it and thinking, “Whoah, that hurt.” I started to walk, but that hurt more and I wanted to get back to the pool as quickly as I could, so I jogged back to the pool. My ankle was broken and swollen at this stage, but I couldn’t see because the swelling was in my shoe. I got back to the pool and, totally by chance, the best swimming physiotherapist was at the pool that afternoon. I told him what happened and, after a very brief look at it, he said, “It’s pretty much fine.” (I still bring this up all the time when I see him.) When I took my shoe off, however, it completely ballooned.
‘My reaction to it was not that I’m in pain. It was straight into the process of okay, I’ve got an injury; I have to get rid of it. So I started swimming and doing a little kick swimming. I figured that would probably get some of the fluid from around my ankle away. I didn’t do well in the session but I got through it. I then swum the next day, two swim sessions. It was certainly hurting a bit to walk, but I got through the next day. The following day I trained in the morning. Then I had to take a helicopter to get to an appearance I was doing. By then my ankle was so swollen I couldn’t wear shoes, so I was wearing a pair of slides, you know, like flip-flops.
‘Even though I still didn’t think it was anything serious, I decided then it was probably a good idea to get an X-ray. Then, since training was coming up, I left for the pool before getting the results, which were sent to my doctor. It turns out that I had actually snapped my ankle in half. My doctor called my mother, who then came to the pool. Suddenly my coach was screaming at me: “Get out!”
‘I didn’t know what was wrong. What was I doing wrong in the session?
‘I can remember my mum gave me the kind of look that says that fate had just struck one of those blows that you can’t contend with and started to cry. I looked at her and I wasn’t willing to accept that this was a time for tears. This wasn’t the end of my preparation for the Olympics.
‘I had it cast that afternoon. I chose a fibreglass cast, which weighed a ton but would allow me to still do some swimming. I took two days off, maybe three, but I got back in the pool and started training. I knew my legs were great. I had a reputation for having such a strong kick. Now I had to start using my upper body a little bit more. I realised that my broken ankle could be an opportunity to start working on something new and getting me out of my comfort zone. Building my upper-body strength became the next part of the Olympic preparation. I started to become muscular through my upper body and torso, because of what I was dragging behind me. Basically I began to transition physically from a boy to a man during that time.’
Once Ian’s ankle had healed, he still had to contend with the muscle loss in the leg that had been immobilised in a cast. ‘Even two years after the Games, my legs were still uneven,’ he said. Even so, the only doubt he had about competing was the very first session after the cast had come off and he had been cleared to return to regular training. ‘You’ll be right to do what you want now. Just be cautious,’ he was told. In that first session, however, ‘I wasn’t at my best,’ says Ian. ‘In my mind at that stage, it clicked into, “Oh, maybe this is a bigger problem than you’ve given this credit for.” But I only thought that way for one session. After that, it was time to move on and do everything, so I didn’t think like that again.’
WORK ETHIC
Some athletes, like Rebecca Adlington and Chris Hoy, are about to inspire a future generation as much with their work ethic as with their performance. In 2006 Rebecca had to deal with her sister’s hospitalisation and being ill herself. ‘I still managed to come out of it and go on to the Olympics [two years later] and do well,’ she told me. ‘A girl [in my little swimming club] is going through exactly the same thing at the minute. She’s always asking, “How long did it take you?” “Did you find this?” I really like the fact that people feel like they can come up to me and ask me that sort of stuff. Apart from the home Olympics, I’ve pretty much been through most things in my career. I would always want to pass down my advice. I’m not saying it’s the right thing to do. It’s just my advice and what I would do or what I did. And because I do everything properly and demand 100 per cent from myself every time I’m in the pool, it’s made people realise, “If I do it properly, maybe I would get to her level.” I think that’s the biggest thing I pass on in my club.’
Chris Hoy is another athlete to emulate. Whether or not he wins a single medal in the London 2012 Games, let alone the three golds he’s shooting for, he represents the highest Olympic standard. Despite the lack of coaches, champions to emulate and money of any kind until the late nineties, when the UK’s National Lottery began providing funding for the top few athletes in the country, he devoted 100 per cent of his natural talent and effort to his sport of choice. ‘I’d finished university in 1999, and I went straight from being a full-time student into being a full-time athlete,’ Chris told me. ‘At that point I still didn’t necessarily believe that I would be an Olympic champion. In fact, it would have been a ridiculous idea at the time to think that I could have done that. It was so far off from where I was. But my personal goal was just to see how far I could go and to keep improving. I was not really worried too much about the outcome. Just keep taking steps forward. From there on, it was one more step at a time. When I made the next step, that became my new point for starting from. I just kept looking for ways to get better.
‘I’m quite stubborn and determined. If I set myself a goal or a challenge, I will keep working on it. All the years I’ve been competing at different sports, there have always been guys that you would have put money on becoming really talented, captain of the Scottish rugby team or winning a medal in whatever sport in the Olympics. You’d see these guys who could do stuff so easily at an early age. The difference between them and me is maybe it came too easily too soon, and then when they had to train a bit harder or work harder for success, they didn’t want to because they’d been used to winning without having to put too much in. I had this determined streak and kept working, kept working. If it wasn’t right, I’d go away and think about it and work a bit harder, do something else, try and change my technique or do more training. Once I’ve set that as my goal, I’m not going to give up on it. I’m not going to get halfway through and think it’s too tough and just jack it in.’
That sense of determination, coupled with competitiveness, has given Chris the mental edge even in the toughest of circumstances. ‘It’s easy to be successful at small events, things where the consequences of success aren’t so great,’ he said. ‘You can step up and produce a million times or whatever. But you cannot imagine yourself at certain points in your career, when it really comes down to the crunch.
‘For me, the biggest challenge I ever overcame and I always draw upon now was the Athens Olympics. I was doing the 1,000-metre time trial. That was my event at that time. It’s one rider at a time against the clock in reverse order based on world ranking. I was the world champion at the time, so I had to go last man after the end of I think 24 riders. The three guys before me, the last three guys, had all broken the world record right before I went up there.
‘You’re sitting there about five minutes to go and all of a sudden the goalposts are moved. Then the next guy’s gone and they’ve moved again … and again. So you’re at the starting line literally a few seconds before you’re about to get on the bike and again the chap before you has broken the world record. These were times where … I think he was the first guy to ever go under 61 seconds for the 1,000 metres – just as I am getting up to start. Being able to not start thinking, ‘Oh my God, I’m not even going to get a medal here. Four years of training and everything’s all changed.’ Not panicking.
‘It was about being able to say, right, none of that is in your control; you have to focus on what you can control, and that is your performance. I was rehearsing in my head over and over the perfect race, from the moment when I started to the moment I finished. Having that strength. At that time I did a lot of work rehearsing beforehand, preparing for that potential situation to arise. It worked almost flawlessly. I was aware of the fact that these guys had broken the record, but it just didn’t seem to register or didn’t seem to bother me. I just focused on my race and it went absolutely 100 per cent as well as it could have gone. I broke the Olympic record, broke the world record, got the gold medal. It was like competing in a trance during the race. I crossed the line. It was almost easy.
‘From then on, whenever I go out to a race, I think to myself, you can never be in that situation again. You can never be a not-Olympic champion trying to win your first gold medal, with all the expectation, thinking this could be your only chance. Having all that weight on your shoulders. So now it’s something I draw upon and something that helps me mentally. The more you show your mental strength, the more it builds and the more you can call upon yourself to perform when you have to.’
DEDICATION
With very few exceptions, most Olympic champions sweat and grind their way to the top and do whatever it takes to get there. Sally Gunnell is a good example. ‘Obviously I had a certain amount of natural talent, but I made the most of it through hard work, putting that work in … and then putting the mind in, as well, which I think comes out even bigger than the other two. I’ve seen people who have got massive amounts of talent who just waste it, can’t put it together because they can’t be bothered to train.’
Often they get a little – or a lot – of help along the way. Cathy Freeman’s mother Cecilia, who Cathy ‘loves and adores’, gave her daughter the ultimate attitude adjustment when it seemed that she was taking her natural ability for granted, and wasn’t being as focused as she needed to be. ‘I’d established a bit of a local name for myself in the region as a runner and someone who had a great future ahead of her. From the age of five, I was kind of a little bit used to people creating my destiny for me. That includes my mother and stepfather, who were very integral to my journey. But there is one conversation I recall having with my mother. I had decided I wanted to go out with my friends, under the influence of my wayward teenage friends, and boys were on the scene. My mother said to me, “Catherine, I wish you were Anne-Marie,” referring to my late sister, who had severe cerebral palsy and who eventually died in 1990. Although Anne-Marie wasn’t intellectually disabled, she couldn’t talk and she couldn’t walk; she could maybe just crawl. In that moment, my mother’s tough love made me realise how much I was taking for granted this natural ability and this wonderful opportunity I had at my fingertips.
‘My late sister’s story is one of struggle, one of loss, one of pain, and yet she was always the shining light of my life and always will be. In my mind, in my world, that memory of her is what keeps me going. Because she was the one, thanks to my mother, who helped me understand that living life to the best of my abilities was the only life I wanted to lead. My achievements give her name, her memory meaning. She’s the one who inspires me. She is the one who helped me rise above anybody else or anything else, because in my mind it’s just her and me alone and in my heart. That’s really sacred to me. At the end of the day, I’ve always run for myself and for those I hold dearest to my heart, like my sister, along with others we’ve lost such as my ancestors.’
Cathy’s motivation for achieving Olympic success is unlike any other athlete I know of. But Cathy is not your average athlete or your average person. There’s a purity to the inspiration that drives her. We all like to believe that every athlete does his or her sport purely for the Olympic glory. So even though there’s a lot of money involved, we like to believe that the money doesn’t impact the incentive. But for most athletes that’s just not true.
Initially every athlete had to be an amateur in order to compete in the Olympics. Then throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the International Olympic Committee had to start allowing athletes competing in the Olympics to be paid and be professionals, because athletes were saying, ‘It’s not worth that much to me if I’m not going to be able to make a living. I can’t finish college and spend ten years living on scraps just to be in the Olympics.’ There’s no honour in being a 23-or 24-year-old watching your friends launch great careers and climb the corporate ladder, while you’re sitting over here with nothing. So athletes are definitely motivated to some degree by the prospect of financial gain to become as good as they can be.
Of course, proving that you’re the best not only brings monetary reward, it often brings celebrity. That too motivates many athletes.
Finally, actually achieving your potential and winning, or making an Olympic team or whatever your goal might be, is also a motivator.
When you realistically look at all three of these things – financial reward, being celebrated for being great, and delivering on your promise – the first two are easy when you have the potential. They just come automatically. You get the attention and then the endorsements, funding, sponsors and more. But you’ve got to work to reach your full potential.
That’s the tough part, especially considering the here-and-now society we live in. The easier things come to you, the more you’re going to expect them to continue to come to you. It was easy to get that contract and it was easy to get this attention and celebrity status. But now you’ve got to go out there and try and deliver on all that potential you’re being paid for, and that’s hard. That creates a problem. Having already achieved financial success and recognition without having done much to earn them makes it that much more difficult to take on the hard work and singular focus required to achieve your potential, upon which the other two goals are predicated.
YOU NEED TO BE HUNGRY
If I could change one thing about many of today’s athletes, it would be to instil in them the focus and the will to push themselves to the limits of their ability and then find a way to improve from there. That takes a strong focus, especially when you already have the sponsor contracts and acclaim that reward such performance. ‘Okay, you’re paid, people know who you are, you’re getting some attention,’ I would (and do) tell them. ‘But don’t sell yourself short. There is so much more. There’s nothing like being successful as an Olympian – whether that means making an Olympic team, winning a medal, or becoming an Olympic champion, making history at the Olympic level and becoming an Olympic icon. Focus on that. Be hungry for that.’
I wish I could instil more hunger in these athletes for that dream. I think they all had it at one point, but too many don’t keep that hunger. It starts to fade away because it becomes so hard. When you’re 16 or 17 years old you don’t have to work that hard because you’re talented and got a scholarship. Endorsements and even celebrity can follow. And the easier those come, the harder it becomes to deal with the fact that you’ve got to work hard to really achieve your Olympic dream. The easier it is to be good, the more difficult it is to be great.
Compare that with what I experienced. When I was in college I showed potential, but I had no contracts. I got no attention. Nobody was looking at me going, ‘Oh yes, Michael Johnson’s going to be great.’ People said, ‘Michael Johnson has the potential to be great’ but they didn’t reward me with endorsements or sponsorship for that potential. I knew I had potential because I could see it. I’d shown it. But I knew I had to work harder because I kept getting injured at the end of every year. There was no lack of hunger. ‘What have I got to do in order to get the opportunity? I’ve got to stop getting injured. Why am I getting injured? Because I’m not doing what I’m supposed to do. I didn’t like doing weight training, but I knew I had to do it. I didn’t like stretching either. I wasn’t very flexible, so it was difficult. But I knew I had to do it in order to get the opportunity to compete on a world-class level. So I did the work and – boom! – instant, huge reward. Ranked number one in the world in the 200 and 400 metres. At first it was enough to achieve that. But I quickly realised that when I was hungry and went after something, I received a big pay-off.
In contrast, today’s kids are handed their opportunities – and even rewards – before they’ve even worked for them. It’s a backwards cycle that ultimately ends up being detrimental to the athlete. Belief that you deserve or are entitled to win is crap. That will get you nowhere. The belief must be that you can take the talent that you have, and that many other world-class athletes have as well, and support it with the hard work that is required. It must include figuring out how to work and train yourself most effectively to get the absolute best performance possible from your body.
I grew up during that era in sport where hard work was the difference maker. At the top level all of the athletes were naturally talented, but the harder workers were more successful. So I learned how to get the most from myself. I identified my strengths and weaknesses, and understood how I needed to train, as opposed to how everybody else trained.
There are different levels of work effort. Some athletes think they are working hard, even though they may not be working as hard as they can. Depending on the athlete’s level of natural ability, a marginal work ethic is either fatal or not.
Mark Spitz’s approach to training, which he developed around 1970 after the 1968 Mexico City Olympics in which he won two gold medals, actually put him at odds with his coach, George Haines. ‘I had my own opinion on what I wanted to do,’ Mark told me. ‘I figured, “I’m a world record holder. I don’t need to do shit that is for distance swimmers.” If I didn’t want to come to work out, I didn’t. I viewed working out like making a deposit in a bank. If I had nothing to deposit, why would I waste my time getting more irritated? I didn’t want to deposit ten cents. I’d wait until tomorrow and deposit $2.50.
‘There were times I went to my two daily workouts when I thought that but I went anyway. Afterwards I’d go, “Jeeze, I didn’t do jack shit, I loafed.” That made me even more irritated. As a matter of fact I got so pissed off, I made an excuse to be sick the next day even though I wasn’t, so I deliberately didn’t have to go to training.’
Mark Spitz would probably argue with my labelling his work ethic anything but considerable. And yes, he certainly got the job done. But I can’t help wondering what he would have accomplished had he made a training deposit even on those days when he didn’t feel that he had much to give.
PUSHING HARD
Usain Bolt, whose skill level is extraordinarily higher than anyone else he is competing against, can get away with not working extraordinarily hard and still be an Olympic champion. But this is rare, because Usain himself is extremely rare. For starters, he doesn’t exactly seem to be taking his fastest man in the world title too seriously. The majority of sports fans will probably say that his attitude is refreshing, but the competitor in me can’t help but think about how much faster he could go with greater determination and hunger for the sport. Maybe that says more about me than Usain. And to be fair, his approach has worked so far.
But Usain is notorious for his stance against hard work. When I interviewed him and talked to him about whether he may take up the 400 metres some day and become the first athlete to hold world records in all three sprints, he expressed an absolute fear of the hard work required to train for the 400 metres.
‘Everybody’s saying, “Usain, you should do the 400 metres,”’ he told me. ‘Maybe after I defend my championship titles I’ll be ready for it. Right now, I’m not. Work is going to be too hard, and I don’t think I am prepared to dedicate all the days to the 400 metres.’
Although Usain doesn’t realise it, he’s already a legend in athletics. But can he focus enough to push the boundaries even further by lowering the 100-and 200-metre records and eventually taking my 400-metre record, too? He’d be the first man to hold all three, and probably the last. A superhuman. I think he can do it. I want him to, even though it would effectively write me out of the history books in many people’s view. He told me he never thought he would be this big, yet I don’t think he has a clue how big he really is. But that’s what we like about Usain. He’s running for the fun of it. The boundaries just happen to be in front of him and he has a habit of crashing through them.
The athletes who work really hard measure their work effort against the effort they are physically capable of producing. That’s what I did. What my father always said was either give something your best effort or don’t do it at all. Once I started training, my position was simply that every day was an opportunity for me to get better. So with that in mind, any day I missed training or any day I didn’t give 100 per cent of the effort I was capable of giving would have been a missed opportunity.
Many people want to believe that it is only because of their hard work or primarily because of their hard work that they are successful, and this goes for sport as well. Nothing bothers me more than to be at a dinner party with wealthy people or successful business owners who tell you that they are self-made and that they only succeeded because of their hard work, but don’t disclose the important fact that their parents were wealthy business owners or that they come from a family which provided them not only with the best education but also the seed capital to start their business and, most importantly, the ‘safety net’ of support if they happened to fail at their business venture. There is no underestimating the value of that safety net – and the knowledge that it is there. It increases people’s confidence, and their ability to take chances and risks that they might not otherwise take and that individuals without that safety net probably wouldn’t take. The same applies to athletes who boast of their hard work and talk about how they aren’t as physically talented as some of their competitors but only succeeded because of their hard work and determination. They will say they worked harder than everyone else, even though they have no way of measuring their work effort against that of their competitors, who train in another country entirely and far away.
I never focused on how hard my competitors were working, since I couldn’t do anything about that and it really had nothing to do with me or my goals. Just working harder than my competitors might not be enough. Great athletes and Olympic champions don’t worry about other athletes and their work habits. They work as hard as they can most days. They focus their time and energy on making sure that they are giving everything they can. Weather, emergencies and changes are not excuses for missing training. If the weather is not conducive to training outside, then you move inside. If you show up at the track and there is an event going on that you didn’t expect, you go to another track. If there is no other track to train on, you train on the grass, or the treadmill, or the street, or the hallway of a building. The training session may not have the quality of the planned session, but the work still gets done. My coach used to say, you could tell a champion athlete because when something happened and the coach for some reason couldn’t make it to training and couldn’t get a message to his athletes that he wouldn’t be there, that athlete would train anyway, even if he didn’t know what the training programme was for the day.
Most champions push themselves in their pursuit of excellence. The possibility of competing in the Olympics some day prompts them to push even harder.
By the time Nadia Comaneci was 11 years old her coaches were telling her that with hard work and dedication she could make it to the Olympics. ‘But that’s what everybody says, no?’ Nadia said to me with a laugh.
‘Did you believe it?’ I asked.
‘I did because I was improving a lot all the time. With every competition I was getting better and better. I was competitive with myself. When I was five and a half years old, my first competition involved a bicycle with three wheels. I wanted to win and I did. I wanted to be the best. It didn’t matter at what. I was the kind of kid that if I put my mind to something, I was going to go all the way, giving the best that I can.’
That’s what Nadia did just nine years later and for the rest of her career. ‘The only thing I could do was to be the best I can be,’ she said. ‘Then I tried to give as much as I could from everything that I’d learned.’
Being the best she could be meant devoting herself to every part of her training. That included her conditioning regimen, which she hated as much as I hated weight workouts and stretching. In hindsight, she too recognises just how much that hard work paid off. ‘I didn’t have anything broken or torn during my career, because I was physically so well prepared by conditioning,’ she told me. Not only did the rigorous conditioning keep Nadia safe from injury, it helped her performance. ‘It was one of the best things I did, because it’s much easier to perform the gymnastic tricks when you are physically prepared.’
Like me, Nadia didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about who she would be competing against. ‘There was nothing I could do against the other competitors. They were training themselves, trying to be the best.’ So she focused on herself, her determination to succeed compensating for her shortcomings. ‘Other gymnasts had more talent than I had, because I was not the springiest one,’ she told me frankly. ‘I wasn’t the fastest. I didn’t have a huge amount of flexibility. But I was willing to do more than I was asked to do. I was the kind of kid who, when my coach was asking me to do ten repetitions, I always did 12 or 15. I always did more. So even today, when I see my coach, he said he never knew what my limit was, because I always delivered more than what he asked for.’
COMMITTING 100%
Chris Hoy didn’t even have coaches when he started his biking career. ‘The Olympics were always the dream, but never in a million years would I have believed it was possible for a number of reasons,’ he told me. ‘First of all, there wasn’t the pathway. There wasn’t any kind of coaching infrastructure. There was no one there to guide you that way.’
So Chris filled in the gaps himself. He pursued a degree in sports science. ‘I wanted to understand more about physiology, more about the human body and how we train it, how we find ways to become a better athlete, and there was no one around to give me that information.’ Everything he learned in the early days of his racing career, he researched and found out for himself. ‘I went and read about sprinting. I learned about muscle power, about strength development.’ Then he’d head to the gym or climb on his bike and figure out by trial and error which training methods worked. ‘At that time, it was so hit and miss that you’d take two steps forward, then you’d take one step back. I tended to train too much and just do too much volume of training to ever get any real adaptation to it. I look back on my training diaries from the early days and it’s hilarious. I mean, I was doing three or four times the volume of work that I’m doing now.’
Armed with a basic understanding about training fundamentals thanks to his college degree, Chris added strategy to his racing. ‘At that time in the UK, people were just riding their bikes and turning up at races,’ he said. ‘They weren’t really thinking about how to get better. It was just a matter of riding their bikes and hoping for the best.’ Perhaps not surprisingly, Chris’s approach quickly put him at the top of the heap. At that point, even though Chris had no thoughts about cycling full-time, since there was no funding available to support that effort, he decided to try and make a go of it.
He opted for the kilometre ride, at the time one of cycling’s oldest – and easiest to understand – events. Simply put, the rider who crosses the finish line first wins. ‘The kilo riders, as we were known, we used to get the mickey taken out of us because we were kind of one-dimensional,’ Chris said. ‘We were seen as being these workhorses. We knew 100 per cent of nothing. You didn’t have any judgement of speed. You didn’t have any tactics. You had no awareness. It was literally just the gun would go, and you’d just go flat out and hold it for a really nasty minute.’
Chris relied on his two team-mates and rivals Jason Queally and Craig McLean during training sessions. ‘They’d watch me training on the track and then give me feedback when I’d come in. ‘You looked a bit rough there,’ or ‘You went a bit late there,’ or ‘Watch your technique for this bit.’ Then I’d give them feedback when they were training. So we basically shared ideas and coached ourselves.’
The close-knit training group did well, with Queally earning gold in the 2000 Sydney Olympics and the trio winning silver in the team sprint. Chris would earn his first gold medal four years later at the Athens Games. ‘It was a supportive network. You pushed each other on in training and encouraged each other and gave each other feedback. Queally and McLean were my training partners, rivals, team-mates and coaches all in one.’
An unexpected setback, however, almost put a halt to Chris’s cycling career. In an effort to appeal to a younger audience, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) decided to introduce BMX into the 2008 Beijing Olympics, which meant that one medal event in cycling would have to be knocked out. ‘The kilometre race I was doing was kind of like the blue riband event. It wasn’t an event you’d imagine would ever be taken out of the programme,’ Chris told me. ‘I think the cycling international governing body called the IOC’s bluff and said, ‘Well, okay, if you’re going to make us drop an event, we’re going to drop the kilo time trial – the 1,000-metre time trial.’ The IOC replied, ‘If that’s what you’re going to drop, that’s what you’re going to drop.’ At first everyone was up in arms. There were petitions and all kinds of outcry. Then it stuck and the event went.
‘It took a long time to get over that, because mentally I kept thinking, “Something is going to happen and they’re going to resolve this and it will be back in.” It had been in the Games since cycling had been in the Games.’
Chris was wrong. Eventually he decided to try the team sprint, since the British team he’d been part of had been world champions in 2002 and 2005, and had a chance at medalling. Competition for a spot in the team, however, would be fierce. ‘I had to try to strengthen my position in the team, so I thought, “I’ll start riding in the two individual sprint events and that will help give me more strength and more chance of being selected for the team sprint. And in the process it will help me improve my speed.” So I just started taking up these two new events and didn’t think anything more about it.’
The events couldn’t have been more different from what he was used to. In the sprint, suddenly strategy was as important as power and speed. ‘Tactically, you can win a race or place top three in a race without necessarily being the best rider,’ he explained to me. ‘You could race well, you could shelter, you could position yourself well and you could improve through that. I never thought I’d be able to pick it up.’
Luckily, coaches had been brought into the sport by that point, and they were able to help shatter the mystique of the event. ‘They made what had seemed like a difficult, insurmountable mountain really simple,’ said Chris. ‘Still, I didn’t believe I could make it individually. I thought I’d just use it as a way to improve my speed and improve my chance of getting into the team sprint. “If I can do well in a sprint, then there’s more chance to do more than one event,” I figured. “If I’ve only got the team sprint and I’m very close to another athlete in terms of performance in the team sprint, if one of us had two events to do, they might take that athlete rather than the other one.”’
Initially Chris didn’t think he would ever become Olympic champion in either event. ‘The breakthrough for one of the events came through a World Cup event,’ he recalled. ‘Instead of hugging the round, stalling and using tactics, I just went to the front of the race – it was a six-man race – and just powered down and strung the race out. Whereas there would have been a lot of waiting and watching each other and lots of tactics, I just went in the front and put the hammer down and won the race in the front, which was quite an unusual thing at the time. That became my strategy, my technique, my tactic for that event. At that race a little light bulb went off in my head. I thought, “Wow, I think I can do this event.”’
Chris would go on to become the most successful Olympic male cyclist of all time. He did it by putting his sport first in his life, a choice he doesn’t consider a sacrifice. ‘When you commit yourself 100 per cent, then everything else becomes secondary, really,’ he told me. ‘From an early age, my parents instilled this philosophy that it doesn’t matter what you do. You could be a brain surgeon or a street cleaner. If the job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing properly and to the best of your ability. The commitment and determination to be the best that I can be – that’s what’s driven me on.’
GETTING IT DONE
Athleticism coupled with this kind of hard work is an absolute requirement. As an Olympian you are competing against the absolute best in the world and other athletes who have superior ability just like you. So ability alone is rarely if ever enough. But even hard work isn’t enough. You need the drive that will compel you to make the sacrifices, even if you don’t call them that, necessary to be successful.
When I asked Daley Thompson about sacrifice, he said, ‘I never felt like I sacrificed. It was just automatic. I wanted to train and work on being the best I could be. I never felt like anything that I didn’t do when I was training and preparing for competitions was a sacrifice.’
Like Chris and Daley, most Olympic champions are so driven that they don’t believe they have really sacrificed much. They were both so focused on winning and being the best they could be, that was all that mattered. I have always felt this way. Now that I am retired and I compare my current lifestyle with my lifestyle when I was competing, I do see that I made some sacrifices. My eating habits are about the same, but that’s because I am now making the sacrifice for my health and longevity. Besides, I’ve been doing that for so long it has become a way of life, so I eat pretty healthy but balanced. I have a weakness for cakes and cookies, and I like fried foods and fatty foods. I ate these foods when I was competing and I do now, but in moderation and in balance with healthy foods that I might not enjoy as much. I enjoy wine, vodka and really good Scotch. I have a glass of wine just about every day with dinner, but when I was competing I limited my alcohol beverages to weekends. At the time it didn’t seem like a sacrifice, because my goal was so important to me, and I was so driven to succeed and accomplish my goal that the idea of violating my policy and drinking alcohol during the week was not an option. The same policy applied for going out and hanging out with friends. That was only a weekend activity when I was competing. I missed many friends’ weddings, birthday parties and events that I would like to have attended but didn’t because of my training or competition schedule. But when you’re an Olympic champion your sense of commitment will actually blind you to any option other than what it takes you to refine your talent and accomplish your goal. Your path, which you are driven to follow, becomes the norm.
I don’t think that anyone is perfect. I certainly know I wasn’t perfect. But I was always looking to be perfect or at least as close to perfect as I could be in all ways. I can’t say that this is absolutely necessary to be a great athlete, but it definitely helps. That compulsion to always improve myself is part of my personality. These days I want to be the best person I can be. Then I wanted to be the best athlete I could be. I wanted to be the best starter I could be. I wanted to be the best finisher I could be.
That perfectionism extended beyond competition day. I wanted my practices to be perfect and without mistakes or distractions. And it wasn’t just my efforts at practice that I wanted to be perfect. I wanted my practice environment to be perfect and I wanted my coach to coach me perfectly. I wanted my training partners to want a perfect practice and to approach practice with all of the seriousness that was required for the practice to be perfect. Because I believe that perfection in practice will lead to perfection in the race.
Sebastian Coe, who would become a Member of Parliament for the Conservative Party and then chairman of the London Organising Committee for the Olympic Games after heading up London’s successful bid to host the 2012 Summer Olympics, felt the same way. ‘When you and I were training, you and I craved criticism,’ he said during our interview. ‘You’re always wanting to absorb information and support and help that might make you that much quicker or that much higher.’
That quest for perfection is something that any athlete who is going to be great must possess, especially at the Olympic level. Growing up, however, that wasn’t my strong suit. My dad, who was a perfectionist and expected the same from me, changed that. When I was a teenager, to make extra money I mowed the lawns of some of the neighbours in the community. One day I was home doing my homework when my dad came home and walked into my room. ‘Did you mow Mrs Williams’s yard today?’ he asked.
‘Yes, I did,’ I answered. As usual, she had told me what good work I had done before paying me.
‘I drove by there on my way home and you did a pitiful job,’ he said bluntly. ‘As soon as you finish your homework, you go back down there and do it right.’
My dad was always on to me to be the best I could be and didn’t accept less, no matter what it was. And in so doing he taught me to do the same. Many athletes, however, don’t have that perfectionism personality trait.
I sought perfection in every race. To achieve that, I also had to demand perfection from myself in every practice, which is why those were always closed to onlookers. My track workouts were dictated not only by my coach, but by the beeper which I encountered on my first day of training at the Baylor Track in 1986, and which I described in detail in Chapter 1. I always wanted to be on or ahead of the beeper. That was the only way to make sure that a 26-second 200-metre interval was really a 26-second 200-metre interval.
I recognised early on that it was easier to run really fast at the beginning of an interval run, and be far ahead of the beeper, which meant I could coast at the end of the run when I was fatigued and be back on the beeper by the end of the run. But that didn’t provide effective training. So my objective was to be on the beeper at all times. If I got ahead of the beeper at any point during the interval run, then I demanded that I finish the run that far ahead or more.
THE DIFFERENCE IS IN THE DETAILS
For me attention to detail was – and continues to be – everything. This is where focusing on the small things comes into play. You can’t be perfect by just making sure that the big things are all okay. You have to make sure the small details have been taken care of as well. That included making sure practice tracks would be available when we were on the road, making sure we started practice on time, making sure the beeper was set on the right time by timing it against my watch in order to ensure that I was running the time that the workout called for. I’d also check the weather at the beginning of each week to know what training gear to take with me when travelling to train with Coach, since I needed to focus on training without the distraction of being too cold or wet.
That kind of planning down to the smallest detail came easily to me. My father was a planner. When you’re in control and have a plan, you’re less likely to be surprised. As someone who is easily embarrassed, having a plan for every eventuality meant that I would be less likely to be surprised. Fewer surprises meant less embarrassment. Naturally, I wanted to be just like him. So I learned to plan and manage the details that derail others.
Some people, however, have personality traits that make them less effective when it comes to sweating the details.
FOR BETTER OR WORSE
Recognising one’s weaknesses – whether mental or physical – and doing what it takes to improve is an essential component of Olympic success. Take Mark Spitz.
‘What do you think your greatest accomplishments were, Mark?’ a reporter asked him at a press conference in Sydney, Australia.
‘Obviously winning seven gold medals,’ Mark answered.
‘No, I don’t think that’s it,’ said the Australian reporter, who knew swimming as well as a British sports reporter would know football.
‘Okay, I’m game,’ Mark said. ‘Tell me what my greatest accomplishment was.’
‘When I analyse all of the years you’ve been swimming, and not counting prelims or semi-finals, on the day you basically swam in national championships, international meets, Pan-Am games [there were no World Championships when Mark competed] and the Olympic Games, you swam 76 times, and you had 35 world records. Basically, 50 per cent of the time you swam, you broke a world record. But more importantly, the last 20 times you were in the water you broke 19 world records, and you won all 20 of those races. That is your greatest accomplishment.’
Mark must have had an occasional bad day during those competitions. But he still managed to win. ‘I just figured that winning was a matter of making one or two less mistakes,’ Mark told me. ‘I think that’s pretty common with a lot of great athletes, that they knew what their weaknesses were. I always concentrated on trying to improve those.
‘There’s a film of me when I finished my very last individual event in the Olympic games. I only had one event left to win the seventh gold medal the next day in the relay. You see my coach putting his hand around me, pointing his finger at me and giving me instruction. You can read my lips as I reply, “I know what you’re saying.” Even at that point he was still instructing me on all the mistakes I made even through my last event, because it was always a work in progress.’
Athletes not only have to constantly learn about themselves, they have to want to perfect themselves as people and as athletes. Even though perfection is almost impossible to achieve, you always have to strive to get as close as possible to that goal. Only through that quest will you continue to address those areas that still need improving. Over the years there have been debates in sport about whether you should train to your strengths or train to your weaknesses. Most people, myself included, believe you must train to both. But when it comes down to where the balance lies, even though there is no one uniform strategy for success, I think that the best athletes focus more on their flaws.
Of course, some weaknesses can’t be fixed. So you must also accept those inherent shortcomings that you can’t change and make adjustments accordingly. Happily, just the awareness of your deficiencies can be a huge help, because that awareness allows you to compensate by building in special features to your routine or programme.
Early in my career my training group always did strength training after our track training sessions. At that point I was already fatigued from the track session, so not only was I not mentally motivated for the strength session, which I never cared for, I was not physically motivated either. So while I would never skip a session, I could tell sometimes when I completed that session that I had not given 100 per cent.
I knew that this was something about me that wasn’t going to change, no matter how much I wanted it to change, and so I made an adjustment in my programme and started doing my strength training sessions in the mornings. I would wake up, eat breakfast, give myself an hour and a half to get going and meet my strength coach for my weight training session. I also hired a strength coach who I knew would never allow me to slack in those sessions, because as much as I wanted to have 100 per cent effective strength training sessions, knowing how important they were to my career, I also knew I could not depend on myself and my willpower alone.
I use that same strategy now as I try to maintain my fitness in a post-competitive life. Because I’ve trained for the better part of my life to be athletically fit, people tend to think that even now that I am no longer competing I must be this workout fanatic who has to train every day just to be happy and make it through life – but for me that couldn’t be further from the truth. It is very difficult for me to go out and put my body through physical stress for an obvious reward in terms of health, but one that will never compare with the reward of winning races. For years after I first retired I tried to go out in the afternoon for training and found that, just like when I tried to do strength training in the afternoon, I was unsuccessful. Since this was not a job or a career, instead of going out in the afternoon for training and giving a less than 100 per cent effort, many times I would just delay until it was evening and too late to train. So I started getting up in the morning and getting my training done first thing. It still takes a bit of tough self-talk and some serious willpower to do it, but now I get them done.
Successful athletes know themselves very well. Most of the time this comes from the ability to step outside oneself and do a serious objective analysis of themselves. This approach, which is an incredibly valuable tool when it comes to identifying and self-correcting flaws and weaknesses, is at every athlete’s disposal. It came naturally to me, but in working with other athletes I have come to realise that it doesn’t always come naturally. Some athletes find it easier to make excuses for their flaws or just to ignore them altogether. Or sometimes they feel they can afford to let those flaws or weaknesses exist because superior talent and hard work will help them succeed. But if you want to be the absolute best you can be, you must always seek out and correct any flaw or weakness.
When Steve Redgrave acknowledged his weaknesses, it made all the difference in his performance. ‘I’ve always been more of an explosive athlete, and rowing is more endurance,’ he told me. ‘It’s good to have the speed and the power, but my downfall in international rowing at the beginning of my career was that I could blast off the start and get a lead on almost anybody, and then sort of struggle, and then in the closing stages of the race I could come flying back at people. But I could never maintain it all the way through.
‘Because rowing is a muscular endurance sport – so it’s good to be big and strong – it’s about how much training you do. So you can technically be very bad, but if you train really hard you can get really good results. There’s a saying in rowing that if you can’t catch, throw or kick a ball, your sport is rowing. For a very co-ordinated sport, we have a whole host of people that are not that well co-ordinated that end up winning Olympic gold medals, because of the repetitiveness of the sport – just going in and grinding away. You can improve from that point of view.’
Steve, however, recognised that he needed to do more than put in the miles. So he and his coach at the time, Mike Spracklen, an extremely good technical coach, began to look at training regimens in other sports to figure out how best to work on Steve’s endurance limitations. One of those sports was swimming.
‘Swimmers tend to plough up and down, apart from the 50-metre guys, and work on endurance all the time,’ says Steve. ‘So that’s what we started to do. I had this natural power and speed but couldn’t maintain it. So I started doing more miles, making the speed last longer.
‘Mike had this theory that time in the boat is well spent, even if you’re sitting in it and not doing anything. You’re sort of becoming in harmony with the boat and more sympathetic towards it. In some ways he was right, but miles make champions. The more training you do, the fitter you become, the stronger you become. Yes, your technique improves with it, because if you’re out there doing a rowing session, you’re not just working physically, you’re going to work on your technique as well.’
Suddenly, within 12 months of being eliminated at the World Championships – not even in the top 12 – Steve was holding his own with the top guys worldwide in single sculls. Just two months before the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics he jumped into a coxless four with Matthew Pinsent, Tim Foster and James Cracknell, and the team became the favourite to win the Olympics. Steve had been good enough to win most of his races in the UK. Instead of settling for national acclaim, however, he ferreted out his weaknesses and then strove to correct them.
TRAINING SMART
That kind of smart training has proved to be the difference between Olympic athletes and Olympic champions over the last several years. The fact that an athlete works hard doesn’t necessarily mean that he’s getting better or getting closer to accomplishing his goal. When I first made the decision to focus equally on being the best in the world at 200 metres and at 400 metres, my coach and I had to develop one training programme that would be effective for my improvement and development in both events. We knew training twice a day would be impossible, at least if the training sessions were to have the quality of effort required. So each session had to be as effective as possible. As my coach and I developed my training programme, I made sure that each training session was effective at helping me to improve. I wanted to understand exactly what Coach had me doing each training session and exactly how doing that training session was going to help me to run a faster 200 metres or a faster 400 metres or to beat my competitors.
Since I retired and started Michael Johnson Performance, my training staff and I have been obsessed with the effectiveness of our training programmes. So we have taken the concept of ‘smart training’ to a whole other level from when I was competing. We liken our philosophy to a rifle approach, as opposed to a shotgun approach. With a shotgun you get a lot of small attempts at hitting the target. With the rifle you have to put more time into aiming, but you have a much bigger and more effective bullet to hit the target. We have found that when we take this approach in designing all of our training programmes, and most importantly when we educate our athletes while training them, they improve more rapidly.
The more the athlete knows about the training programme and how it will help him to improve, the better he will execute the training sessions and thus the more effective the training will be in helping him reach his goal. Nowadays the Olympic champion athlete understands this and takes an active role in developing his training programme. The work doesn’t stop with just physically showing up every day to train and give maximum physical effort. The athlete must also engage intellectually and work in partnership with coaches and trainers to develop the most effective training programme to help him to be the best he can be both physically and mentally.