People often ask me how much of success in sport is physical and how much is mental. I always answer that it doesn’t matter. What’s most important is the acknowledgement and acceptance that there is a mental component to sporting success. Once you know that, then there should be an automatic desire to become as good and as skilled as you can possibly be at the mental part of your sport. Olympic champion athletes strive to be as good as they can be mentally and don’t concern themselves with whether 80 per cent or 20 per cent of their sport is mental. They want to be 100 per cent proficient at the mental part of their sport, just as they want to be 100 per cent proficient physically.
You have to be careful with the idea of positive thinking, because all the positive thinking in the world won’t help you to be successful and achieve your goals if you’re not prepared and if you haven’t put in the work. One of the very few things I was aware of that could make me feel fearful, not too confident and unable to think positively prior to a race was if I had not prepared properly in the days, weeks and months leading up to it. Preparation is everything. And I dealt with that every day. I didn’t want to feel when I stepped on the line that I wasn’t ready. I wanted to feel, ‘I know I’m ready because I have done everything possible to be ready.’ That motivated me to go out and work as hard as I possibly could and leave nothing on the track. I gave absolutely 100 per cent every single day, so that when the time came and I was in that call room – my favourite time – with the seven other athletes who would be lining up against me, I could feel as confident as I could possibly be and probably more confident than anyone else in that room. I knew I had the talent, I knew I had prepared, I knew I had worked as hard as I could possibly work. Having done everything I possibly could, I could just go out and run and let the chips fall where they may.
I learned during my Olympic career that in sport, as in anything else, it is not enough just to train hard. Training is important without a doubt, and so is execution. What often gets ignored is preparation. Preparation is required in order to take the benefit of the training and apply it to the execution. In those few days when the hard training period was over and I was waiting for race day, I always spent the time focused on preparation for the race. I’d think of all the scenarios before the race, just prior to the race and during the race, and have a plan for each scenario and for perfecting that plan. I also spent that time assessing all of the things I might have to deal with and any potential distractions, and making a plan to control the potential distractions and things I might need to deal with and understanding and preparing to be ready for any that I might not be able to control.
Before the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, I was invited to Australia for an appearance about nine months prior to the Games. It was something that ordinarily I would have probably declined, but I saw it as an opportunity to get to Sydney to scout out the situation, including the distance from the city to the stadium, which actually lay outside the city centre, and also to get an understanding of the best place for me to stay and train. This was all about knowing what my situation would be, what to expect and how to control as much of my environment as possible.
During the Olympic competition, I opted, for the third time in my career, not to stay in the athletes’ village. But that meant I would be quite far from the stadium and would need to work through those logistics. Ultimately, after considering everything including a helicopter shuttle service back and forth each day, my team and I had a plan in place that I’d approved and felt 100 per cent comfortable with. I had a three-bedroom suite in a hotel in the city centre, with restaurants within walking distance and room service, another hotel ten minutes from the stadium, and two dedicated drivers with vans to transport me and my team. The French Olympic team had a training centre about 30 minutes from my hotel to which they had exclusive access with no media or unauthorised persons allowed. I worked out a deal with them for access to their training complex. My plan was to stay in the hotel in the city centre and train at the French complex each day until the day before my first race, and then move into my other hotel close to the stadium. At that point my wife and my son, who was only three months old at the time, would move into the hotel suite in the city centre. Everything was planned from a logistical standpoint months in advance. That allowed me in the days before my race to focus just as diligently on preparing my mind.
Since the end of my career I have continued to devote a significant amount of time and energy to preparation when it comes to accomplishing any goal, because of how well that worked for me as an athlete. Nowadays, as the owner of a sports performance training company that hosts several events each year with professional sporting teams like Arsenal FC and the Dallas Cowboys, along with individual athletes, I am constantly stressing to my staff the importance of understanding every potential problem. In pursuit of my goals of winning and maintaining business, we need to have a plan to address any issue that could come up, and eliminate potential problems or obstacles to a successful event before they occur. My staff have found that this not only minimises the chances of anything negatively affecting our event, it also increases the effectiveness of our operation and execution of the event. Because of the planning, as an organisation we go into the occasion with much more confidence, much less worry, and the ability to focus on running an excellent event. In short, we know we’ve prepared on all fronts. We’re ready, as ready as I used to be in the blocks before every race I ran.
Like me, Sally Gunnell, who calls herself a ‘confidence runner’, had to go into a race knowing that she’d ‘done every training session, eaten well, and just really focused so that when I could stand on the line I’d ticked every box’. Sally, however, found even more ways to give herself confidence. ‘We got into this pre-championship routine of always going to a Chinese restaurant and having a fortune cookie. Luckily they were always brilliant. I remember the one before Barcelona was “You are the chosen one.” My husband John would always give me little lucky charms. I did have a little bag of lucky stones, which I lost about six months before I retired. And I had the routine of getting ready.’
FINDING THAT WINNING EDGE
For a bunch of people who have worked as hard – or harder – than most to excel at what we do, we athletes are an amazingly superstitious bunch. Nadia Comaneci admitted to me that each time she walked into an arena she would lead with the same foot. ‘Every time there was a door, it had to be the right foot. But if something happened in a competition and it didn’t go well, then I was changing and would go with the left foot!’
Superstitions notwithstanding, one of the keys to Olympic success is establishing a formula for success that the athlete can revisit again and again in the good times and the bad times. This establishes consistency and longevity over the span of his or her career. My training sessions were the key for me and quickly led me to a remarkable string of victories.
Even though my confidence started to soar when I began to do so much better in my races than my opponents were doing in theirs, I made sure not to get complacent. At the end of the year I’d take all the trophies I’d won at championships and invitational races around the world that year and box them up. Stripping all my trophies off the living-room shelf reminded me that the season was finished and everything would start over fresh the next year. At the start of the following season I would once more feel the drive to fill that shelf up with trophies again.
I knew there was a danger of feeling I was invincible. You want to feel like that during the race, but you don’t ever want to start to believe that. This can be a very difficult challenge for athletes. You often hear that it’s easier to stay on top than to get to the top. They’re both difficult, but there is an assumption that once you’ve made the climb it’s easier to maintain that lofty height. While that may be true, you should never underestimate the difficulty of sustaining a level of success. And keep in mind that when you’re on top there’s a lot more to lose and a longer way to fall.
After my success in 1996 in Atlanta, I found myself in this situation in a major way. I had not only dominated for six years at that point, I had established myself as the undisputed superstar of the sport. The way I had been successful prior to 1996, however, would no longer be the right formula, and I realised that. To try to use the same type of motivation and tactics to get the best performance from myself and to win races, including the major championships and even the next Olympics, would be a mistake. I was a different athlete now and was perceived differently now as well. What I had accomplished changed everything.
So I had to balance the formula for success that had gotten me to that point with a new way of approaching competition, setting goals and achieving success that would be effective for me over the next four years. Up to that point in my career my primary focus had been on competing. I liked the feeling of finishing first. I seriously went into every race wanting not only to win but to cross the finish line as far ahead of the field as possible. After each race the primary two statistics I immediately focused on were how fast I had run the race and how big the gap was between me and second place. I was keenly aware of who among my competitors was starting to get some hope based on a closer than normal race with me. My goal would be to race him again and crush that hope by beating him to a point of feeling embarrassed that he ever even thought he might get me!
I had also, of course, been motivated by the desire to become an Olympic champion. I had not only accomplished that, I had made Olympic history. I realised those could no longer be my motivation and that I had to find new motivation. In addition, I would have to contend with the fact that now losing a race would be bigger news than winning a race.
It took a little bit of time for me to realise all of these things and make the necessary adjustments, but ultimately I did. I had always enjoyed making history in the sport and doing things that hadn’t been done before, so I started to focus less on just winning the races and more on what mark I would leave on the sport after my retirement. And my main motivation was breaking the 400-metre world record before I left the sport. That shift enabled me to continue to dominate for another four years and win in Sydney.
I have applied that same lesson to my life after sport. I understand now that my goals and motivation and how I achieve success are fluid and require constant adjustments. I only make those necessary adjustments after carefully considering all the factors. They’re based on striking the right balance between, on the one hand, the formula or structure responsible for success in the past, and, on the other, what might be different in the road ahead and what might be needed for the road ahead. When Michael Johnson Performance started up as a company with only four employees, we were trying to establish ourselves and win customers’ trust. Four years later we are in a growth stage, having established a brand that is known for quality training programmes and services, along with innovative ways of getting the best results from athletes. Not only do we have different goals now, but we also have more to protect. So how we operate has had to change to some degree.
Whether as an athlete or a business owner, these are hard choices to make, and the wrong one can be as fatal to a business as it is to an Olympic career. But these choices and decisions are critical components of success. And with the right nurturing, that success can feed upon itself.
As an athlete, it’s easier when you win. The race isn’t as much of a struggle. Part of the reason for that is you feel more in control during the race if you’re winning. If someone’s in front of me and I am not winning, then they’re dictating the race and I am reacting to them. I’m trying to catch them, outrun them and do something in reaction to what they’re doing. By contrast, when I am winning the race I am in charge. The race requires less effort because I’m not making adjustments, I’m not trying as hard. It’s just coming easy.
A SPANNER IN THE WORKS
Even with all the talent and training in place, however, there are no guarantees. I remember talking with my training partners about a month before the 1992 Olympic trials. We had all qualified and would be competing to be on the team. They were all going to be contesting the 400 metres and I had decided to contest the 200 metres. When I made a point about the competitors in the 200 metres, one of them remarked that there was no point in putting odds on that event because I was going to win it. It was sort of a strange moment for me. After training to make the Olympic team all this time, it became clear to me that in order for me not to make the team I would have to really mess up.
When I got to the Olympic trials I ran the best race I had ever run, clocking a personal best of 19.79 and only missing the world record by 0.07 seconds. A few weeks later I followed that up with another personal best, in the 400 metres, running 43.98 seconds. I was in the best shape of my career. And then I came down with food poisoning just two weeks before the Olympics, and it wrecked my body. I didn’t even make it to the final. I sat in Barcelona watching guys who had never beaten me before take medals that could have been mine. It was the biggest disappointment of my life and my career.
Anything can – and does – happen at the Olympics. It’s how you deal with the challenges and setbacks that makes the difference. Sebastian Coe’s story illustrates how elite athletes have to be able to roll with the punches.
‘Winning is predicated on a pretty healthy, robust diet of defeat,’ he told me when I interviewed him. ‘You’ve got to learn to deal with that, and smart people know how to build out of it and what they need to do to address those issues.’ That’s precisely what he was forced to do during the 1980 Olympics when, despite being in the best physical condition of his life, nervousness, inexperience and colder than usual temperatures got the better of him. ‘I just had a bad day in the office,’ he says. ‘I broke five cardinal rules in 800-metre running. One of them would have been terminal, so five of them, there just was no way.’
When you have Seb’s level of talent, a bad day doesn’t mean tanking completely. But it does mean missing out on a gold medal that you had been expected to win and having to settle for silver. The day after the race, Seb was so distraught that he didn’t even want to get out of bed. Then into his room marched British decathlete Daley Thompson, as Seb recalls. ‘I said something really lame like, “What’s the weather like out there?” He ripped the curtains open and went, “It all looks a bit silver to me.”’
Daley remembers the story differently. ‘I actually said, “It looks cloudy with a chance of silver.”’
Seb Coe can now laugh about Daley’s unique brand of psychotherapy, but at the time he had to regroup in a hurry for his next event. ‘I ran for an hour to clear my head and came to terms with two things. One, statistically the chances of running that badly again were on my side. You can’t possibly do that in the next couple of years. Second, I got to the point where I genuinely did not care whether I won, I lost or I was second, third, fourth or fifth. It was clear in my mind that I would never again walk off a track knowing that I had so underperformed. You don’t become a bad athlete overnight. One races sometimes against the odds, and falls back on numbers.’
Seb also talked about the importance of being a student of one’s event, including learning how those who came before you won or lost. ‘I’d pretty much read most of the good athletics biographies and autobiographies by the time I was 20. I’d read the Jim Ryun story. I remember very vividly that in 1972, when Jim got seeded in the wrong race because they looked at his mile time and not his 1500 metre time, he ended up in a field that was inexperienced. Effectively Jim’s career ended that day in the Olympic Games. I was extraordinarily lucky that I had the opportunity to get back on a track within three days and address that.’
MENTAL STRENGTH AND STUDY
Success at the highest level requires this brand of mental fortitude. Ironically, Daley, who was such a loose cannon compared with Seb – who has always been a diplomatic, British darling – shared that strength of spirit along with the determination to better himself by studying his sport. Daley’s learning curve started even before his career had officially been launched. ‘I’ve always been a student of whatever I’m doing. I want to learn so much that I will read and learn everything I possibly can about whatever it is that I’m doing,’ he told me. ‘So when there was an English schools championship coming up in a couple of weeks, I went to the library and picked up a book about how to run faster. It said to do three lots of 300-metre runs in one session twice a week and two lots of 500-metre runs in a session twice a week, so that’s what I did.’
Later, after he had begun to experience success as a decathlete, he got to know Bruce Jenner. Every time he saw him, he tried to pick Jenner’s brain about the decathlon. Eventually, Daley asked so many questions that he drove Jenner crazy. ‘I don’t like talking to you,’ Jenner snapped. ‘I don’t want to talk to you any more.’
As Seb and Daley understood full well, understanding the ins and outs of their sport provided them with an edge that non-students couldn’t compete with. Both also understood the power of their minds to make or break an athletic career.
While positive thinking and self-belief aren’t remotely enough in and of themselves, without them success is impossible. Daley has always assumed he could do anything. Like me and other Olympic athletes including Rebecca Adlington, he focused on the upcoming race rather than his competitors. ‘I felt I was going to win,’ he told me. When I asked him where that confidence came from, he said simply, ‘It’s all I’ve ever known.’
Daley grew up knowing he would be successful. ‘From the time I was a kid, I always believed I was going to do something special,’ he told me. ‘My brothers and sisters were just normal hard-working people and so was my mother, but I believed I could be great at something.’ Like me, he didn’t think early on that his success would involve sport, especially considering the lack of support from his family on that front. Eventually, however, his athletic talent was too great to deny. ‘At one point I thought I could be the best footballer in the world,’ he said. ‘Then I thought I could be the best track athlete in the world.’
The latter proved true. Indeed, considering the ten events it takes to become decathlon champion, it could be argued that Daley became the world’s greatest athlete, period.
Success like Daley’s requires talent, hard work and, yes, belief. The belief that you have the talent, ability, desire, work ethic, and everything else required to achieve your dream sustains you in the face of inevitable setbacks and obstacles. I’m not talking about unjustified belief that you can achieve your goal, but real, justified belief backed up by supporting facts.
Olympic champions don’t just believe in themselves because of what they want. They believe in themselves because they know they’ve got what it takes. People often ask me when I knew I was fast. ‘When I started running fast,’ I answer. As for when I knew that I would become an Olympic champion, my answer is I knew I could become an Olympic champion when I proved to myself that I could run as fast as the athletes winning the medals.
Usain Bolt always believed in himself because he had proved to himself just how fast he really was. At the 2004 Olympics, when sports writers from all over the world were asking whether Usain was going to succeed and why he wasn’t doing better if he was such a talent, he said to the Jamaican team’s press attaché, ‘Listen to them talk. What will they say in two years’ time?’ He knew he would be great.
That doesn’t mean that those athletes who go on to become Olympic legends don’t have doubts. Champions question themselves more than outsiders do. They have a healthy dose of scepticism, but understand that their doubts could help push them to high achievement. In fact, I think that really big dose of scepticism that my father taught me to have has helped me more than anything else.
Of course, questioning oneself only helps if the rest of the mental building blocks are in place on the day of competition. Mental preparation is not just about the mental toughness required to deal with the pressure to perform and deliver in the heat of the battle. It’s also knowing and understanding yourself as an athlete, knowing and understanding your sport and your event, and knowing and understanding the best way for you to compete so as to deliver your best performance consistently. This is not easy to accomplish, especially since there is no textbook or manual to tell you exactly how it’s done. At the Olympic level, where everyone is supremely talented, it’s all about the small improvements that will make the big differences. Those small changes and details go beyond just working hard. The winning formula lies in the effectiveness of what you’re doing.
I started learning about myself as an athlete and a person when I was a university athlete. Throughout my career I continued to learn about myself and what mindset I needed to be in, what my training environment needed to be like to have my best training, and how to control my environment at competitions in order to be best prepared for the race. Until I retired, I would search for an understanding of myself, make adjustments and set up my team to process the information I had about myself in order to be able to perform at my best.
From my days competing for Baylor University, I would watch video of myself as often as I could. The father of my team-mate and good friend Todd Thompson would come and videotape every race we competed in. I would study each tape again and again, repeatedly hitting rewind in order to assess how I was running the race from the gun to the finish line.
Today video analysis is a major tool of Michael Johnson Performance. We use a computerised software programme that allows us to break down athletics movements at 1,000 frames per second and do some amazing analysis. I didn’t have that when I was competing, so I did what I had to and became a master at pressing the pause and play buttons to stop the tape at exactly the point I needed in the race in order to understand how I was running the race. I would also compare a tape of a recently run race with a previous race and contrast the two to understand why I had run faster or slower.
In addition, I was always interested in other sprinters and how they ran their races, so I videotaped professional athletes running races at televised events. I had a tape of the 1987 World Championships from Rome with Calvin Smith winning the 200 metres which I watched repeatedly for tips on how to run a fast 200 metres. On that same tape I had Butch Reynolds, who had broken the world record earlier that year for 400 metres, losing the world championship. I watched that race repeatedly as well, trying to figure out how he lost a race he probably should have won. My study of my sport didn’t stop there. I would watch any track competition on television and try to gain tips about how to sprint better or even what mistakes to avoid.
After graduation from Baylor with a marketing degree and starting my professional career in 1990, I had a lot of time on my hands because I no longer had class each day. I briefly considered continuing to go to school to get a masters degree in business. That would fill my day and continue the routine, but I truly did not care much for school at that point. So I spent most of my afternoons before training watching races and even taking notes on the library of taped race footage that I had accumulated of my own races and the races of others. My training partners Tony Miller and Deon Minor, who worked with me during the first four years of my career, would come to my house to watch races with me, and we would debate late into the night about different athletes and race strategies.
I was always most critical of myself. After every race of my professional career, I immediately assessed how I had run the race and focused on any mistakes. If I didn’t run as fast as I expected, I tried to figure out the reason for the poor performance. If I had a good race, I would assess that too, to understand what I did to run so well, so that I could duplicate that performance.
Early on in my career I had established a base race strategy for the 200 metres and a separate strategy for the 400. Over the years I would study those strategies and make tweaks to each of them in races to try to improve my times. Sometimes those adjustments worked and sometimes they didn’t. I had to be careful because, in athletics, you’re not just running against the clock to run a faster time. You’re also racing against the competition to get to the finish line, since that is what the sport is all about. Too much focus on trying to run a faster time and any radical change from the strategy that had proven successful in winning races could result in a loss, so I had to be careful when deciding how to tweak a race strategy and how much risk to take.
As a result, my effort to improve my personal best over the years proved to be a very slow process. For example, in the 200 metres my first big breakthrough race was when I ran 19.90 seconds in 1990 at the US championships. I consistently ran under 20 seconds for 200 metres for the next two years and improved to 19.79 seconds in 1992 at the US Olympic trials. I felt surely at that point that I was close to being able to break the world record of 19.72 set by Pietro Mennea in 1979. It wasn’t till four years later, in 1996, that I was able to shave just 13 hundredths of a second off my personal best and set a new world record of 19.66. Ultimately, I was able to take another 34 hundredths off that, running 19.32 a month later.
The reason that record-breaking performance was so special and is widely regarded as one of the most incredible performances in the history of the sport is due to how much I took off the previous record. Of course some of that improvement wasn’t just due to the changes in the race strategy but also to my coach and me making adjustments in our training programme. That required an understanding by Coach and me that went beyond the established ideas and concepts for 200-metre training. For me to achieve the best performance I was capable of producing in that race, we had to couple our understanding of me as an athlete with our understanding of the event and develop a totally customised training programme and race strategy.
The 400 metres is not only twice the distance of my other event, but the process of developing a customised training programme and race strategy for it is at least twice as difficult. Because the race is twice as long and because your body suffers from fatigue at the end of this race, there is a much bigger margin for error. In fact, even though I came first in all but two of my 400-metre races during my 11-year career, I rarely walked off the track without immediately identifying at least one mistake in the race I’d just won. Because it is such a long sprint, no one, not even the best in the world, can run full speed for the entire 400 metres. That makes it a very difficult race to run. As a result, a big part of the race strategy has to be managing energy, because there isn’t enough to last the full race if you go all out.
My breakthrough race in the 400 metres also came in 1990, when I ran 44.29 seconds. Later that year I improved to 44.27 and then 44.21. Two years later, in 1992, I dipped under 44 seconds, running 43.98. Over the next seven years I would consistently run under 44 seconds, and I finished my career with more sub-44-second times than anyone in the history of the event. In 1995 I won the 400 metres world championship, just missing the world record by one tenth of a second when the clock stopped at 43.39. After breaking the world record in the 200 the next year, I focused my attention on breaking the 400-metre world record before retirement. Even though I concentrated almost exclusively on training and competing at 400 metres, it would be another four years before I finally broke that world record, at the 1999 World Championships in Seville, Spain, running 43.18 in the final.
TO EACH HIS OWN
Clearly it is a long and difficult process of study, self-discovery and trial and error to break a world record or even to set a personal best. Since 2004 I have been working with American 400-metre runner Jeremy Wariner. Jeremy succeeded me as Olympic champion in 2004. He ran 44 seconds flat in that race to take the gold, and since that time he has run several sub-44-second 400-metre races and has come within 27 hundredths of a second of breaking my world record. Jeremy has been coached throughout his career by Clyde Hart, who coached me during mine. I am Jeremy’s agent and mentor. My former training partner Deon, a world-class 400-metre runner himself in the nineties, works for my management company and travels around the world with Jeremy, handling logistics and putting him through his workouts when Clyde isn’t there. Between Clyde, Deon and myself Jeremy is surrounded by probably more 400-metre training expertise and race knowledge than anyone else in the world. Even so, after seven years of trying, Jeremy, undoubtedly the second best and second most consistent 400-metre sprinter in the history of the event, has not yet broken the world record. That is not due to a lack of talent. We cannot simply have Jeremy do everything that I did in my training and assume that will bring him the same level of success.
Each athlete is different. I obviously had the talent to break the 400-metre world record, and so does Jeremy. But he will have to do it differently. Where I was always the fastest 400-metre runner on the track, due to being a world record 200-metre runner with tremendous speed, Jeremy is not nearly as fast as I was. But Jeremy has uniquely superior speed endurance, meaning that he can get to race pace and hold that high level of speed for a very long time without being affected by fatigue. That is a huge advantage for a 400-metre sprinter. So Jeremy has to train differently and run the race differently. Of course there are more similarities between us and our training programmes and race strategies than there are differences. But at this level it is the differences – and understanding those differences – that will determine whether Jeremy breaks my world record or finishes his career with me always being able to say, ‘You couldn’t get me!’
I really hope, however, that he’s eventually the one doing the teasing. People should not have been surprised in 2008 to find that I wasn’t sad or disappointed when Usain Bolt broke my 200 record, since it was well known that since 2004 I’ve been trying to help Jeremy to break my 400 record. The pride that I feel in breaking both records comes not from being able to say today that I am still the world-record holder, but rather from knowing all the work behind those accomplishments. And that is the joy I get now in working with Jeremy and Coach to try and figure out the right customised training programme and race strategy that will help Jeremy break the world record, and watching Jeremy do his part.
STRATEGIC THINKING
We are now in an era of sport when there is so much money and sport is so powerful and such a part of our society, it’s no longer enough to be one of the most physically gifted athletes or even a physically gifted athlete who works hard. The Olympic legends, the athletes who have made history in one of the world’s oldest sports championships and repeatedly dominated at the Olympic level, are those hardworking, physically superior athletes who have taken the time to learn and master their sport and even their mental condition. These athletes have an incredible mental grasp on strategy, technique, their competitors and themselves at a very detailed level. They are obsessed with learning and constantly think about strategy. They train physically for their sport every day, and then study their sport in their spare time.
And that requires staying power. As Sebastian Coe told me, there are thousands of hours tucked away behind the success of an Olympic champion. That ability to stay the course, to accept that it doesn’t happen overnight, is critical. ‘This is the big problem now. A lot of young people live in a world that is very counter-culture to that. Reality television creates heroes over six hours. You and I weren’t created in six years,’ Seb told me. ‘If we’re honest about it, we probably weren’t created within a decade. I started in track and field at 11 or 12. I didn’t get to a Games until I was 23. By any stretch of the imagination, that is a long apprenticeship. Sport allows you to put that into perspective. It helps you pick when you need to be tactical, but at the same time always having that strategic view that this is an important year, but next year is a very important year, and the year after that might be even more important. So it helps you prioritise.’
Hurdler Sally Gunnell told me that she thinks that as much as 70 per cent of athletic success involves the mind. ‘It’s finding the tools, understanding yourself, putting yourself in situations and learning about yourself,’ she says. I completely agree. It takes a lot to prepare, and the work doesn’t just happen on the track, in the pool, on the court or field or in the weight room. You have to spend a lot of time thinking and planning how to be successful.
In addition, you also have to learn to manage those inevitable pre-competition negative thoughts. It’s not enough to say, ‘Don’t think negative thoughts.’ You have to replace those thoughts with something else. I’ll never forget the time when I was in a call room at the 1996 Games and Frankie Fredericks walked past me. I immediately started to think about all the times we’d run against one another. It was always tough against him. As soon as I became aware of that train of thought, I stopped myself and began to visualise myself running the race.
That was my automatic default response. I would hear the gun go off in my head and start going through my paces. Then I’d visualise the whole thing again. I think being somewhat quiet and reserved helped me. In situations where the pressure was on, I had a distinct advantage because I could revert to my natural tendency to go inside my own mind. Instead of being distracted by exterior people or events, I focused on running a perfect race in my head.
That mindset doesn’t just take place during competition. A number of the Olympian champions I interviewed told me that whether they were training, relaxing or working on hobbies, they thought about, planned and visualised themselves executing a winning performance. In short, they lived, ate, drank and breathed their sport, which is what’s required in order to be a great Olympic athlete. Throughout my career, any time I wasn’t doing something that required my full attention my mind defaulted back to thinking about and visualising races. Several times a day, I would automatically imagine the gun going off and myself contending with a different scenario each time I ran.
That’s the kind of strategic positive thinking that works. The 200 sprint, for example, is so technical that you have to develop a race strategy before the gun goes off and then stick to that. It’s all in the preparation. The 400, on the other hand, demands a completely different approach. I’d make all kinds of adjustments in that race, based on what other people were doing or how I’d gone through a particular phase of the race. Running through the options in my mind before I ever hit the track was critical.
Throughout her career Sally Gunnell also visualised herself reacting differently depending on how the race unfolded. She ran her races so often in her mind that when she had to race with a cold during the World Championships in 1993 she was able to go on to autopilot. ‘With the hurdles, I always knew American Sandra Farmer-Patrick would be way ahead at 200. I also knew that if I was coming off the eighth hurdle in the lead, it was mine. So I had to work with that in my mind.’ Sally did that so often that for a brief moment she wasn’t sure whether the gold medal she had just won despite not feeling up to par physically was real or imagined. ‘I remember crossing the finish line and thinking, “Am I in a dream or has that really happened?” Because I’d done it so many times in my mind!’
THE PRESSURE OF SUCCESS
Winning, however, comes with its own burden in the shape of unrelenting pressure that intensifies the better you get. To succeed, you have to learn to live with that. After I had won Olympic gold in the 1996 Atlanta Games and broken the world record in the 200 metres, Frankie, who finished second and ran very fast as well, was asked during the post-race press conference whether the pressure had gotten to him. He had been favoured because I was doubling in the 200 metres and 400 metres, which meant that by the time I reached the 200-metre finals I had already run four rounds of the 400 and three rounds of the 200. Frankie was doubling only in the traditional 100-metre/200-metre double. Running 100-metre races instead of 400-metre races certainly gave him an advantage. Additionally, the 100 metres is the first event held at the Olympics in track and field and the 200 metres falls at the end, so Frankie had four days of rest between the final of the 100 metres and the preliminaries of the 200 metres. I had one day between the 400 metres final and the 200 metres preliminaries. Expectations that he would win gold in the 200 were further fuelled by the fact that he had beaten me during a tune-up race in Oslo the month before. But of course he did not win Olympic gold and I did. After the race he told the media that he felt that he would have had a better chance of being victorious had he not become the favourite. That shocked me. Until that point I always thought that every competitor wanted to be the favourite, because I always did.
Unlike many of the other athletes I interviewed for this book, Chris Hoy has not retired, so his battle with pressure isn’t over. Not only does he want to win in front of the British home crowd in 2012, he wants to bring home gold in all three of his events. Luckily, as the top man to beat in cycling, Chris is used to dealing with that level of expectation. ‘It’s almost like you’re in a no-win situation,’ he told me. ‘If you win, people expect it and go, “That’s what you should be doing.” If you think about it that way, it’s a huge amount of pressure. But what I think about now is that nothing can take away my past performances. Nothing can take away from the gold medals at Beijing, the gold medal at Athens, the world championships. So I don’t think about the outcomes; I only think about performance.’
Chris and I discussed how competing in front of a home crowd automatically brings with it a tremendous amount of pressure. I certainly felt that in Atlanta, and Ian Thorpe, despite coming back from a broken ankle, felt that as the favourite in Sydney during the 2000 Olympics. But with that pressure of being the favourite also comes incredible opportunity. As I experienced, you can choose to focus on the pressure or on the support you get from the home crowd.
Either way, you still have to contend with self-imposed pressure. By aiming to duplicate his Beijing achievement of winning gold in all three of his events, Chris Hoy could effectively paralyse himself. But I get the sense that he knows just how to contend with and channel that internal pressure, especially since one of those events will be a team effort only partially within his control.
‘Ultimately, you can’t predict medals because you don’t know what your rivals are going to be like. You can produce the best ride of your life and get second. Or you could produce a sub-standard ride and still win. It just depends on your competition,’ Hoy concluded. ‘All I know is my goal is to be the best prepared that I’ve ever been in my career. I want to go up to the start line in London in the best shape of my life. That simple goal takes away all the other distractions and brings it back to yourself. You say, “You know what, if someone beats me, then it’s because they deserve it. But it won’t be because I didn’t train hard enough or prepare properly. I want to leave no stones unturned.”’
All champions develop their own very personal way of dealing with such enormous expectation from themselves or others. Rebecca Adlington doesn’t feel fear when she races, even when she’s behind. While competing in Beijing, she somehow found the physical and mental strength to pull out the gold after trailing in seventh place. Competition may not be a problem for Rebecca, but the expectations put on her after she won in Beijing proved to be another matter. ‘People don’t know swimming very well. It’s just not a big sport,’ she told me. ‘All they know about swimming is Phelps, and Phelps wins everything. They just think I’m kind of like that, but Phelps is one of those rare human beings who are unbelievable.’ Still, sidestepping those expectations, however unrealistic, proved difficult. ‘When I went to the Worlds in ’09, I couldn’t handle the pressure of feeling that I had to repeat my performance in Beijing.’
The reaction to her coming in third instead of winning at the World Championships, even though she had swum a personal best, proved even more difficult to handle. ‘I’ve never been one to want attention. So I found it really weird that everyone was looking at me and everyone was talking about it. I didn’t appreciate that even when I lost people would still talk about it. I’d often see stuff across the newspapers about it. I didn’t expect that and I didn’t know how to handle it.’
Recognising that she had begun to put ‘loads of pressure’ on herself to win simply because of others’ expectations, she began seeing a sports psychologist. ‘He’s helped me so much to realise what works for me,’ she told me. ‘I expect so much of myself all of the time. I know I can do better. Then it’s me that makes the pressure worse rather than other people. My friends and family, they’re not mad at me if I swim bad. It’s because I am disappointed, not for any other reason. Same with all the sponsors and the media and all that sort. People have been really nice. Even after the Europeans when I didn’t swim very well in the 800, so many people on Twitter and Facebook left so many nice messages. I got to the point where I was like, hold on, I’m putting all this pressure on myself for absolutely no reason.
‘Last year, 2010, was different to a normal year because I had two major competition trials – Commonwealths and Europeans. It was a chance to go in and relax and not put so much pressure on. I’m learning ways now that help me to relax and not think about the outcome so much. I’m more focused on the process and the journey and going through the race rather than the outcome before I’ve even swum it. Before my races I think, “I can do this,” rather than “I should win this.” I think about my prior successes and focus on what I’ve done in training. “I do this race in the pool every single day,” I tell myself. “It’s all water, it’s just a pool. If I can do it there, I can do it here.”’ Perhaps most importantly, she has learned to stop thinking of Beijing as a perfect experience that she has to duplicate.
Rebecca is far from being the only athlete who has had to deal with the pressure of sudden success. ‘We are never catapulted into the limelight in the way most people think we are,’ Sebastian Coe told me. ‘There’s 10,000 hours behind that.’ But sometimes, even 10,000 hours doesn’t seem like enough when people start pinning their Olympic hopes on you, a feeling Seb knows all too well. ‘In 1978, I’d nicked a bronze medal in a European championship. I’d broken a British record. Halfway through 1979 and I’d broken the 800, the 1500 and the mile within 41 days. Somewhere in the middle, journalists were basically hanging medals around my neck and saying, “He’s broken the world record. Of course he’s going to win the Olympics.” And God help you if you don’t perform up to expectation.’
Clearly, even those of us who enjoy – and court – pressure have to learn how to handle it. And nowhere is the pressure more intense than at a home Olympic Games. Pull it off, and you make history. Just as Atlanta was the defining moment of my career, Sydney was the defining moment of Cathy Freeman’s when she competed in the 2000 Sydney Games in front of her home crowd. I remember her race, in part because no one was paying any attention to the race I was running. It was almost as if we weren’t even there.
‘We’re a small country,’ she countered when I mentioned that during our interview. ‘We don’t have many successes in track and field.’
Cathy, of course, was the notable exception. She wasn’t just good, she was great. She wasn’t just expected to medal, she was expected to win. And this scorching spotlight of expectation fell on to a young woman who has never been one to care for being the centre of attention or in the limelight. ‘I’m very happy with my own company,’ she told me. ‘I’m not one of these people who needs to be with people all the time.’
So how did she cope? ‘I don’t take myself all that seriously,’ she said. ‘You’ve got to have the ability to laugh at yourself. It’s a really important way of coping with little setbacks or frustrations or pressure or drama and conflict. I’ve always been determined to live my life the way I want to live it. I’ve always been clear on the sort of person I am and the person I want to be, and the person I don’t want to be. I can feel shifts within myself sometimes where there is an opportunity to change, but I think I’ve got pretty good instincts. I back my judgement. I trust in who I am. That’s why I’m always grounded and I always feel safe wherever I go and whoever I’m with, because I know that within myself is everything I will ever need. I don’t feel like I’ve got to buy into what other people see in me. At the end of the day, so many performers talk about how the only pressure that really matters is the pressure we place on ourselves, anyway. That’s exactly what I was like, as well. It was that tunnel vision. All that I see is all I see.’
During the lead-up to those same Sydney Olympics, Australia’s Ian Thorpe had been so successful that, in his words, ‘It was almost assumed that I’d win.’ This at a home Olympics in a country as fanatical about swimming as other countries are about football. And let’s not forget that Ian at the time was just 17 years old and was recovering from a broken ankle. Instead of providing him with an excuse, ‘A new pressure was created, because I had to get back into shape.’ Indeed, since he didn’t want his competitors to think that if they just pushed a little harder they might have a chance due to Ian’s injury, he tried to keep the whole thing quiet. ‘It was a stupid thing to think that I’d be able to do it. But also, in my own mind, I didn’t want this to be something that was staring down at me. So as soon as I broke my ankle, everyone else was more concerned than me. I just looked at it as being another obstacle that when I stood behind the blocks I knew what I’d been through and that that was going to add to my performance.’
Ian dealt with the multi-faceted stress and monster expectation by not allowing himself to really grasp just how much pressure he was under. That worked for him, even though the Olympic experience itself threatened to derail him. ‘I had received advice from other athletes who said, “No matter what you’ve experienced, until you get to the Olympic Games you haven’t experienced anything.” Do you know what? It’s really quite true. But it’s also false.
‘I tried very hard to separate the competition from the Olympics and what goes on with an Olympics. It’s really different to any other competition. I tried to separate it and tried to just be a Zen master about this whole thing and just go into competition. But I had a terrible swim. I didn’t struggle and qualified fastest for the final, but it came at a higher cost than I was used to. So I had all these doubts right before the race. Australia hadn’t won at this stage, which adds more expectation. But people almost innocently assumed that I’d win without thinking about what I might be struggling with.
‘Then they announced my name. I was used to getting big cheers when I stood on the blocks right before the start of a race, but I hadn’t anticipated the big roar from the crowd. I couldn’t do anything but smile. That moment interrupted my negative thoughts and helped allow a little bit of humanity into what I was trying to do. When they moved past my lane to announce the next person, I was in game mode. I started to relax even more into myself, to go to what I knew and to become dangerously relaxed. That was the turning point for me. I was ready to compete and I was ready to win.’
Despite his youth and the relentless pressure he was under, Ian went on to deliver three golds and two silvers. Many athletes, however, when confronting immense pressure will damage their chances by playing mental games with themselves. These athletes will try to convince themselves that this isn’t so important and that it’s just another competition. That doesn’t work because it’s not reality, and at some point – and possibly the worst point, just before the start of the competition – that reality comes back and slaps them right in the face. Then panic ensues.
Other athletes will start making excuses before the competition even starts in an effort to manage expectations. At this point the athlete has stopped believing in himself. He still hopes that he can do well and deliver, but without belief it is almost impossible. You can’t have it both ways. Athletes attempt to hedge their bets, but that doesn’t work in a high-stakes game, and the Olympics is a high-stakes game. You’re either all in or you’re out. I actually set the expectations bar so high that at times it wasn’t enough for me to just win. I had to win by a margin so great that the race wouldn’t be close.
Usain Bolt will have this same problem. He has set the bar so high by breaking world records in his last two championships and at such a young age that fans expect more and more. He is by far the most famous person in his small country. When he arrives in London for the 2012 Olympics, back in Jamaica the entire country will be watching his every move.
During the Beijing Games in 2008, when Usain competed and broke world records en route to winning gold in the 100 metres, the 200 metres and the 4 x 100m relay, the country of Jamaica came to a standstill. There were huge television monitors in the middle of Kingston, with mobs of people standing in the streets to watch and celebrating wildly after his victory. He is a great source of pride for Jamaicans, not only living in Jamaica but all around the world. The large population of Jamaicans living in London will be supporting Usain in 2012 and hoping for not only victories from him but more world-record-setting performances. Preparing mentally for this will prove even more difficult than getting ready physically. It’s all in how he balances his own approach to the challenge. While there are huge expectations of him and he is well aware of this, he will have to focus on his own goals and not the expectations of his many supporters. The key is not to try to ignore those expectations or pretend they are not there, but to acknowledge they exist and develop a plan to deal with them while you focus on your own goals.
LOSING HURTS BUT IT DOESN’T KILL YOU
Some athletes try to convince themselves that neither the competition nor whether they win or lose really matters. This is huge mistake. During my career I simply refused to dwell on the possibility, choosing instead to focus on what I need to do to win the race.
Like every top athlete, I hate to lose. But I wasn’t scared of losing. My coach used to say, ‘We’re not afraid to run against anyone, they can’t eat us.’ This was his way of reminding me that the competitors I lined up against weren’t monsters, they were just athletes. There was no reason to be afraid. If they beat us, we would learn from it, line up against them next time and do better.
That doesn’t mean that you accept those losses. You can’t be okay with losing or performing below what you think you’re capable of. Hating to lose, however, often transforms itself into being afraid to lose. As a result, the focus shifts from offence to defence. ‘Yeah, I could win, but I am so afraid of losing that I’d rather focus on trying not to lose rather than trying to win.’ Or athletes, especially those who already have huge contracts negotiated on the basis of their potential, simply shield themselves from being in a position to lose.
These days, however, there is such desperation from countries to find the next Olympic medallist and from sports teams and clubs and sportswear companies to find the next star that athletes are identified very early on the strength of their potential alone. Instead of learning to question themselves, they’re rewarded with significant contracts, attention and even endorsement opportunities before they have proved themselves. As a result of being told for so long that they have the talent and that they are that good, they wind up thinking that they’re entitled to Olympic success.
This has become a particularly acute problem in the UK, where athletes are insulated against loss and rewarded for mediocrity and ‘potential’. I’ve experienced how the Brits take care of their athletes, both as a journalist and as an athlete. When I was competing as a 200-and 400-metre runner, when I would come to the UK to compete, the promoter of the UK events, Andy Norman, would say to me, ‘Hey, Michael, we want you to come and run here.’ I’d say, ‘Okay, I want to run a 400.’ Then they’d say, ‘Nope, you can’t run a 400. I’ve got Roger Black in the 400 and you can’t be beating him on home soil. I will pay you more to run the 200.’ And sometimes I’d say, ‘Okay, I’m going to come to London. I want to run the 200.’ This time they’d say, ‘No, John Regis is going to run the 200. We can’t have you beating him on home soil. We’ll pay you more to run the 400.’
These were great athletes, world champions and Olympic medallists. They probably didn’t even know they were receiving this type of protection and would probably have been disappointed if they had known it was being provided to them. Those athletes wanted to be the best in the world and take on the best, whether the best came to their country or if they had to go outside the UK to compete. But today’s British athletes take that kind of protection and no longer venture abroad. Ironically, instead of creating more champions, taking care of them has stripped the country’s current athletes of a lot of their hunger. As a result, they end up not competing as much, or they don’t compete against their main competition. And when they do lose, they look for people to blame instead of focusing on what else they need to do in order to win.
Of course, even world-class champions will question their readiness, but only to a certain point, as Cathy Freeman confirmed. ‘I was always at a point where you kind of look over your shoulder and can’t help but ask yourself, even on a subconscious level, “Have I done enough work? Am I ready? Have I done everything I possibly can to get myself in the best shape possible physically?” Two weeks, a week, or a few days away from an Olympic Games or World Championships, you’ve really got to put your doubts aside and you’ve got to put your negative thoughts aside, and you’ve just got to focus on your strengths.’
ALL ABOUT ATTITUDE
Attitude, as much as anything, defines the successful competitor. ‘I thrived on competition,’ Cathy Freeman told me. ‘I loved it. Any chance I got to race, I would be in there. As soon as I went to a competition, my focus was always to turn it on and get on with it and do the best I could.’
When you meet Cathy off the field, she’s so grounded and so contemplative that it’s hard to imagine her clicking into competition mode, especially since competitiveness is usually associated with someone with a much more aggressive personality. But for Cathy, competition on the track didn’t mean beating her opponents as much as it meant tapping into the deepest part of her being in the best way she knew how. ‘You and I both understand that our running was our voice,’ she told me during our interview. ‘It was the voice that was going to make people stand up and listen, even though that wasn’t always the central intention. At the end of the day, it was always going to be my voice. I am pretty quiet and reserved. Even as a 12-year-old girl it was hard for people to ignore the fact that I had a natural running style, and it was really difficult for people to not create aspirations for me before I’d even realised them. But I was always going to be a runner from a young age, and running was always going to be my voice. It was this expression of who I was. It suited my personality perfectly, because I’m definitely more of doer than a talker. You could see who I was through the running. I didn’t need to say much.
‘This means of expression meant that I could take my feelings, my deepest emotions, that energy and transform it into this physical performance. I was still grieving publicly for the loss of my father and my sister, and I’ve always felt the struggle for rights of my people out here in Australia. My parents, as recent as the sixties and seventies, had to get permission to go and spend time with their families for Christmas. I mean, behind that story is a pain that you carry. That always came out in my athletic performance. You add to that a hatred of losing and wanting to stand for something – to take that anger or intense emotion and transform it into something constructive – and you can become pretty unstoppable. I can’t actually, really, articulate the intensity of those emotions, because words aren’t there. They simply aren’t enough, which is why I was such a competitive beast, Michael.’
I urge the athletes I work with to learn to embrace the kind of competitiveness that Cathy Freeman felt so deeply rather than the fear of losing or not performing as well as they want to. It’s not about not wanting to lose. It’s about wanting to win. Of course not every athlete can win every competition. But every athlete can win when it comes to personal performance. For example, there was a special point in my career in 1988 when I was a sophomore in college who hadn’t been on any US teams. Suddenly I found myself racing against a guy named Emmit King, who was a world-class 100-metre runner, Calvin Smith, who was a 200-metre world champion and former world record holder, and a guy named Mel Lattany, who was a world-class runner at 100 and 200 metres. I wasn’t world class yet. Far from it. So losing that race wouldn’t have been a failure. The fact that I won that race was huge for me. Once I became the world champion, Olympic gold medallist, world record holder – the best in the world – any race I lost was going to be a failure.
During the 1996 Games, Nike had a controversial billboard campaign that, as per Nike’s usual, pushed the envelope. Billboards all over Atlanta read, ‘You don’t win silver. You lose gold.’ That was true for me, but it isn’t for the majority of competitors. For some athletes, just making it to the Olympics is a victory.
Frankie Fredericks was a silver medallist in 1992 in the 100 and 200 metres. In 1996 he was the silver medallist in the 100 and 200 metres again. He got four silver medals. He doesn’t have a gold medal. Could he have won? Who knows. In 1992 he lost the 100 metres to Linford Christie. Linford was a better athlete than Frankie was. In 1996 he lost the 100 metres to Donovan Bailey, but Donovan broke the world record in that race. Then, in the 200 metres, he lost to me. I also broke the world record in that race. So is that failure? No, that’s success for him.
That same record would have been failure for me. I was expected to win gold. However, if I had trained with the notion of not losing the gold medals I was expected to win, I would have been lucky to end up with Fredericks’s results. Because instead of focusing on what was possible and going all out to achieve what was possible, I would have been limited by the fear of not performing to the level of expectations of myself and others.
While the fear of losing is often paralysing, some athletes actually use it as motivation. Tanni Grey-Thompson told me, ‘The fear of losing made me train really hard. I was terrified of being on the starting line and not having done everything I possibly could. I’m a bit of a control freak, and I wanted to feel as much in control as I possibly could. I felt a lot more in control if I knew I’d done everything I could possibly do and left nothing to chance.’
Sally Gunnell also admitted that she was so afraid of losing that she ‘trained scared … I trained bloody hard because I was scared of losing. I put so much pressure on myself.’ In 1992 nobody expected Sally to even medal. ‘I knew that I’d done everything and that I was going to win,’ she recalls. But no one else did. That changed the following year when she entered the World Championships as an Olympic gold medallist. She dealt with the pressure of expectations by, in her words, force-feeding herself the notion that you don’t become a bad athlete overnight. ‘You know you’re capable of winning. You’re in the shape of your life. The only thing between you winning or not is this up here and you not believing in yourself. I didn’t want that to be the reason why I had lost,’ she said. ‘I knew now what I was really capable of doing. I knew I could break world records. I knew I could win Worlds. I’d set it all out.’
Of course, some athletes seem to thrive on amplifying public expectations. Take Mark Spitz announcing to the world that he would win six Olympic gold medals at the 1972 Olympics. He had made the same prediction four years earlier, and only wound up with two team gold medals. This was to be his last Olympics. It was now or never.
Fortunately, the notion that he was winding up his competitive athletic career helped inspire his training and diminish his sense of pressure before that record-setting 1972 Olympics. ‘For something that I loved, which is my sport, I really don’t like working out. But starting from 4 September 1971, every single day was the last time that I was ever going to have to work out on that day. So, I was lightening the load,’ he told me. He would tell himself, ‘I’m going to make this workout special. I am going to make a deposit of some value and it’s always going to be positive. For all the times in the past that I held back, I don’t need to hold back any more because it’s one brick off of that cart of responsibility that I’ve placed on my shoulders. Dammit, I’m going to make sure this is the best race. How do I be sure of that? Relive in my mind that image of what it was like to swim all those years before in every single race that felt easy.
‘Every single day that I swam, I relied on that feeling of confidence. I said, I am embracing this; I want to swim this event. Every second, every stroke is going to be lighter, faster, quicker because I am that much closer to winning the gold medal. All I have to do is stay focused on exactly the same way I have always won against my competitors. Once I win that gold medal, because I am swimming in another event the next day, my God, I am better, I am faster, and the load is getting lighter, and the sense of responsibility is getting less. You know that your 100 metres and 200 metres, those races were different. You had different competitors and different situations. You had different angles. One you’re going straight. One you’re making a turn.
‘You know that once you’ve got through with one of those events, all of that shit’s out of your brain. It makes you a lot clearer for the next day. Even going from preliminaries to semi-finals, you become so much clearer. To me, I was going, it’s no different. It’s just another day in the office, but God, the load is getting lighter and my confidence is great. I didn’t even concentrate on times. I just told myself, “If I swim my honest race, it’s going to be fast.” I didn’t give a shit about times, because at the end of the day it’s all about the gold medal. That just went along with the ride.’
Despite how daunting expectations of victory can be, even when they’ve been cultivated by the athletes themselves, many have clearly courted that kind of self-imposed pressure. For four years Steve Redgrave and his team-mate had told people that they were going to win a gold medal at the Atlanta Games. After all, they had won in Barcelona in the same boat. Besides, telling people that they would win gold helped motivate them to keep training as hard as they could. ‘Then suddenly you get to that week and you’re thinking this is it. It’s what we do this week that makes the difference,’ recalls Steve. ‘I really struggled with the pressure in some ways …The World Championships are nice, but they’re just stepping stones towards the next Olympics. Suddenly you’ve got to deal with that expectation, with your own expectation at that particular time. The bits for me that were sheer hell were the last little bit of waiting around: that last two or three hours with butterflies in your stomach, thinking, “Why am I doing this? This is just awful. Why do I keep coming back to this? This is just dreadful.” I was rowing then with Matt Benson, who would be curled up fast asleep in a ball an hour before we go. “How can he sleep at this time?” I’d wonder. Then you start thinking you’re getting too nervous; you’re going over the top and you’re not going to get the best performance out of yourself because of the state you’re getting yourself into.
‘In some ways, I had to get myself into that state to be able to get a good performance, but it is very much a knife edge of being able to go off the other way. In the last hour or so I’d be laying around in the rest area sort of thinking through the tactics of the race and thinking – just go out and race; you’ve done so much for four years of hard graft. All the hours and sacrifice that you’ve put into this – just go out and race and get the best performance you possibly can and don’t come back. And that’s it. Then you go out there and do it.
‘A few months later, you find yourself rowing up and down at Henley doing your training and you’re thinking, “God, I said I was never going to do this again, but here I am! That was fun; it was really exciting at the Olympics.” But in that moment it is the worst place in the world.’
Steve and I are different. As difficult as that moment is just before you have to go out and prove yourself in the Olympic arena, I love it. I dealt with that kind of pressure and elevated expectation by being in control at all times and by putting so much pressure on myself to deliver that the rest paled by comparison. That was especially true going into the 1996 Olympics. I was the face of those Games. The schedule had been changed to allow me to attempt a historic double. But I had put so much pressure on myself that I never focused on the external pressure. It just didn’t matter.