Not worrying about the competition doesn’t mean I wasn’t competitive. On the contrary. I’ve always prided myself on being a fierce competitor who was afraid to compete against no one. I ran against anyone at any time and took on all comers.
In my opinion no one should be intimidated or affected by another competitor. In fact, part of the reason I actually chose athletics instead of other sports was because I didn’t want to be affected by the competitors. I wanted to run my own race. In track and field you cannot affect what another athlete is going to do. He has his lane, you have yours. He’s going to run his race, and he’s going to run as fast as he can, neither of which have anything to do with you. So why worry about what you can’t control? That’s why I only thought about what type of race I would run and how fast I would go.
Athletes tend to think far too much about their rivals, and that costs them time and focus. You need to know about them, as we shall see, but you don’t need to think about how they’re competing and compare yourself to them. But that’s exactly what I did when I was competing in college. Most people would probably say this is normal and should be expected, but I felt it was weak of me to be thinking about my competitor and worrying about his condition and his results coming into a competition against me.
I remember losing a conference championship in 1988 to Joe DeLoach, who went on to win the gold medal in the 200 metres in Seoul later that year. We competed against one another quite often in college, so I’d studied him a lot. The day before and on the day of the competition I saw him a few times, and each time I saw him I would then start to think about him and how fast he had run a couple of weeks before. There were some other good athletes in the race as well, but I was focused on DeLoach. After losing to him in the 200-metre final I was riding back to our university on the bus with my team-mates, and on my mind was the fact that I had singled him out and spent so much of my time thinking about him when I should have been thinking about my own race. It also dawned on me that I was, to some degree, giving Joe an advantage by giving him so much respect.
I’m not saying that an athlete shouldn’t respect his competitors, and I always did, but to single one of them out means putting him above the others. From that point on my approach was always that there are seven other athletes in the race and I don’t care what their names are, what their results are, or who they are.
KNOW YOUR RIVALS
Of course, that was during the race itself. Before I ever got to the starting blocks, I had studied my competitors thoroughly. I knew everything about who I was running against – their strengths, their weaknesses, how they competed, their race strategies, even their body language. And I knew their results coming into the competition. I would use that knowledge to help me compete better against them as opposed to letting it worry me or put one athlete above any other.
Careful study of my competitors also reveals weaknesses to me that I could take advantage of. Ironically, although I never beat DeLoach during my college years, I never felt in all of our races as if he should beat me, because he seemed to be weak to me. Joe was a training partner of Carl Lewis’s and competed for the University of Houston. He was extremely talented and very fast but not a tough competitor. Since we were both from Texas I had known of him since high school. I studied him quite a bit. Prior to races I would observe his reaction when he caught sight of me and I would think, ‘I don’t believe that he really believes he can beat me.’ He did beat me each time in college, but after the race he always looked as if he felt like he had gotten lucky. I remember coming home from class to watch on television as DeLoach ran the 200 metres in Seoul and beat Carl Lewis to win the gold medal. I noticed that even after winning the Olympic gold medal, the ultimate accomplishment of a track and field athlete’s career, he had the same look on his face that he had after beating me at the conference championships in college. He looked as if he didn’t believe that he should have won. After that I never lost to Joe DeLoach again, Joe never won another major championship and three years later he was retired from the sport.
Leroy Burrell was my next main competitor. He was also from the University of Houston, the same university as Joe DeLoach and Carl Lewis, and he also trained with the same group they did, the Santa Monica track club. Leroy was a great athlete, a 100-metre champion who held the world record for the event twice in his career. He was also a great long jumper and 200-metre runner. During my final year of college, we ran against one another a few times. The first time was at the conference championship where I had lost to DeLoach two years before. I ran a new personal best, although wind assisted, at 19.91 seconds, but I didn’t win that race. Burrell won the race in 19.61 seconds. There was excessive wind, so it wasn’t as close to a world record as the time would suggest. Even so there was no doubt that Leroy ran extremely fast that day and had the race of his life. Still, I believed I should have won that race.
It was my first 200-metre race of the season and in it I made a major mistake. I knew exactly what it was. Leroy was always a little bit overweight for his height as a sprinter, which helped him with power in the 100 metres but caused him to tire at the end of the 200 metres. His running technique would completely break down in the last 60 to 70 metres. I had also noticed when watching tapes of him in the 200 that he was very uncomfortable around the curve and would usually reserve energy until he came out of the curve and then make a big powerful surge with 100 metres to go. That type of sudden acceleration in the middle of the race, however, takes almost all of your remaining energy and so it’s only good for 40 or 50 metres. I had neglected to plan for and capitalise on that opportunity.
When we squared off a couple of months later in Barcelona, Spain, I looked forward to exacting some revenge, just as I had twice earlier that year on Joe DeLoach. This was a big race, because he and I were the new and exciting young sprinters of 1990. Now that I knew how to compete against him, I was doubly excited to run against him again. I knew that if I ran fast from the start I would make him even more uncomfortable on the curve and he would be chasing me down the straight over the last 100 metres. I just had to have confidence that after a fast start I could hold him off. Sure enough, I beat him during that race and in every race that followed.
I raced against Leroy a few more times before he, like DeLoach, retired from the sport after only a five-year career. Leroy was probably one of the weakest competitors I had ever seen. He was so talented that twice in his career, once in 1991 and once in 1994, he broke the world record for the 100 metres, making him the fastest man in the world. But never during his entire career did he manage to win a gold medal at a major championship. I would watch him from the stands or on television when he ran the 100, and on the starting line just before the start of a race, and I could sense from looking at him then that he didn’t want to be there. I could also sense that he didn’t care at that moment if he won the race or not, he just wanted it to be over because the pressure was too much. And most of his race results proved that to be true.
Frankie Fredericks was the competitor that I had the most respect for. He was consistent, and although he was quiet and reserved he was a fierce competitor. I refer to him often throughout this book because I learned so much about myself from competing against him at 200 metres. He always brought out the best in me. I knew I had to be ready and I could make no mistakes against Frankie. He was quicker than I was, but not by much, and I was definitely stronger. What I learned in terms of strategy from watching and studying Frankie was that he would always press and tighten up if I was ahead of him after coming off the bend. So I used that knowledge to develop my strategy for competing against him and all of my competitors.
In the 400 metres I had to contend with Quincy Watts, the 1992 Olympic gold medallist and a very strong 400-metre runner. One of the first things I noticed from studying Watts was how strong he was. He was notorious for running fast times and then walking off the track looking as if he wasn’t fatigued at all. When I started competing against Watts, everyone talked about how he would beat me and said that he was better than me at 400 metres because I wasn’t a true 400-metre runner. I welcomed the challenge. In the 1993 World Championships, Quincy was the defending Olympic gold medallist at the 400 metres and I had not won a 400 world championship. I had, however, already beaten him at the US championships. Talk about a huge build-up. I beat Quincy and he finished out of the medals.
He put his defeat down to the fact that his shoe had come apart at the end of the race, and the media seemed to be joining in and accepting that excuse, even though my record at that point against Quincy was 2–0. So in that same press conference I threw down the gauntlet and said, ‘Okay, get your shoe fixed and I will see you in Brussels, Berlin and Zurich over the next two weeks.’ He got new shoes and I beat him each time.
Although I never lost to Quincy, I had great respect for him. He was a tough and very confident competitor who never seemed to be intimidated by me or anyone else. I’m sure that when he said that his shoe caused him to lose the race to me at the 1993 World Championships he actually believed that. After being defeated by me during the next three races and over the rest of his career, he never used another excuse. He also never gave up, and continued to compete hard. I knew that because of his strength I had to run a more conservative race when racing Quincy. When balancing the need to run my strategy with the need to race against the competition, with Quincy in the race I needed to shift the balance more towards racing. I needed to be ready to make adjustments in the race to account for his strength.
My main 400-metre rival was Butch Reynolds, the world record holder at 400 metres until I broke his record. He had broken the world record in 1988, running 43.29 seconds. The first year I competed against him was 1990. He had been ranked number one in the world and was the dominant 400-metre runner to that point. We were represented by the same agent and so we travelled together. We would talk about the 400 quite a bit and we were good friends. Reynolds, however, would run the most inconsistent seasons of any 400-metre runner I’d ever seen. I wondered why, so I studied him as an athlete and competitor and listened to him carefully when we talked. That’s when I figured out that Reynolds really didn’t understand how to run fast. He didn’t know why he had run fast when he did, and he didn’t understand race strategy at all. He would employ different race strategies throughout the season and so each race was different.
Reynolds was suspended and banned for two years for steroid use after producing a positive urine sample. He maintained his innocence (and still does) and challenged the verdict in court. It was a huge case that kept the lawyers busy for years. It was later found that the testing procedures used for the urine had been flawed but the IAAF nonetheless upheld the ban. I’ve always been uncertain as to whether or not he used drugs. He never ran close to the time that he ran when he broke the world record, and he was very inconsistent, which to me has always been one of the signs of an athlete using drugs. But in Reynolds’s case that inconsistency was the trademark of his career. I felt Butch was confused when running against me and others. He would change his strategy each time he competed, looking for a solution but in the process learning nothing and gaining no consistency. He was obviously talented and dangerous, so I knew that as long as I never let him beat me it would keep him guessing and experimenting, which would also keep him inconsistent.
Yes, I knew my competitors well. I never stopped studying them during my entire career, since every year it seemed that there was someone who was supposed to be the new whizz kid who was going to take over and beat me. As much as sprinting is about executing a good race strategy and executing it well to run a fast time, it is also about racing against your competitors, and the more you know about those competitors the better.
Being able to read the athletes I ran against boosted the confidence I’d gained from giving 100 per cent in every single training session. But I had to make sure that my knowledge about them didn’t upset the delicate balance required for races. You want to know your competition as much as possible, but you must also remain focused on your own strategy as well and not allow what you know about your rivals to deplete your energy. Nor should you risk engendering negative energy by thinking about them come race time. So in those few minutes before the gun went off, no matter who was competing against me, I would see the other racers as all the same: seven people standing between my goal and me. Instead of thinking about them, I focused on what I needed to do.
RAZOR-SHARP FOCUS
The ability to focus was one of my most valuable traits when it came to becoming a successful Olympic athlete. That ability to compartmentalise my thoughts and focus on the task at hand was also aided by the fact that I’m naturally a very organised person who operates best when my work environment is clean, neat and uncluttered. I think someone who is much less organised and who is naturally a person who works better in a cluttered environment may not find it as easy to go into the deep focus that’s required in these moments.
When under pressure during training or competition, great athletes are able to think only about execution. They can defend themselves against potential distraction and have developed the ability to recognise when they are becoming distracted and immediately make the necessary mental adjustment.
Inevitably, if you have the physicality, the talent and the work ethic, you find yourself going nose to nose with some of your heroes. That can be disconcerting, to say the least. Sally Gunnell remembers coming up against Shirley Strong, who she had watched win a silver medal in the 1984 Olympics. ‘She was that role model, a glamorous sort of person, even though she smoked in those days! That probably wasn’t the best thing, but she looked great and was a great hurdler. She was part of it. Then all the sudden we were both competing in the 100 hurdles championship race at the Commonwealth Games. I remember thinking, “My God, I’ve watched and admired this girl for the last four years. And here I am next to her. What do I do?” That was when I realised, “You know what, you’ve got to go do your best.”’
I had the same experience with Calvin Smith, who I always thought was so great. Even though I was a 200-and 400-metre runner and he was the 100-metre world record holder at one point, I emulated him to some degree when I first started in the sport at the professional level. I remember being in a race against him and thinking, ‘Gosh, I’m so lucky to even be able to line up against him.’ Then I beat him.
While some athletes are born with a superior ability to focus, others are born with less capacity to concentrate or compartmentalise their thoughts, so they have to train themselves on that front. Either way, every athlete should strive to be 100 per cent effective in his or her ability to focus.
A lot of people don’t really understand what it means to focus. Being focused means to be totally in the moment and totally about the task at hand and nothing else. So all one’s ability to execute is targeted on that task, which results in the best possible chance of achieving success or performing at one’s absolute best.
I learned about the need for focus the hard way – and not just once. In 1996 a lapse in focus led to my losing a pre-Olympic race to Frankie Fredericks. He had been running very, very fast early in the season, and had just missed setting the world record in the 100 metres by one hundredth of a second because he raised his hands in victory as he crossed the finish line. Three days later in Oslo we both lined up for the 200 metres with Frankie in the lane just outside of me. My advantage over Frankie physically had been my ability to run the bend faster than him and put pressure on him by coming out of the bend ahead of him. Then I would use my 400-metre strength to hold him off. I knew that Frankie was in great shape and that I would have to really put a big gap between him and me coming out of the bend. I was still focused on that when the gun went off. So instead of reacting to the gun when it went off, I listened for it. As I would find out, the time it takes to react once you’ve heard the gun, as opposed to reacting to the sound of the gun, can be the difference between winning and losing. By the time I got out of the blocks, Frankie was gone, so I had to use a lot of speed early in the race to catch him. I came off the bend level with him, then used my strength to pull away from him down the home stretch. But I had used so much early in the race that I wasn’t able to hold him off. With about five metres to go, Frankie pulled back even with me. I still could have won if I had thought to lean into the tape. Unfortunately, because I was usually ahead of my competitors, I didn’t think to do that and lost the race to Frankie. But if I had been focused on what I should have been, it would never have been an issue.
Clearly, even the best of the best lose focus sometimes. As part of her quest to win the Barcelona Olympics, Sally Gunnell was determined to medal in the World Championships that preceded the Games. It looked like she would do that as she came off the eighth hurdle in the lead. Instead of remaining focused, however, ‘I’m thinking, how did I do that?’ she said. Then she started worrying about all the people around her. ‘I looked up at Sandra [Farmer-Patrick] and thought, “Oh God, she’s up here too.” I ended up losing focus, stuttering into the ninth hurdle, and having a ding-dong with Sandra over the tenth hurdle. Afterwards, I realised just what an important part the mind plays.’
As Sally recognised, all the training and ability in the world amounts to nothing if you aren’t able to keep your mind exactly where it needs to be.
Rebecca Adlington also focuses on trying to execute from a technique standpoint and race strategy standpoint rather than on her competitors. That doesn’t mean she disregards them. ‘I know they’re there. I know what times they did in the heats and how they’re looking. I know the situation. I know roughly how they swim. I am very aware that this girl might come back strong, that girl is going to go out. I am aware of all that, but the most important part of my race is how I swim. I can’t control anyone else. There’s no point in worrying about them. I can control my own race. The most important thing is how I swim it.’
COMPETITIVE ATTITUDE
As we’ve seen, worrying about rivals creates focus problems. Ironically, so does fraternising with them. In 1992 I was number one in the world in the 200 metres and 400 metres and had been at that point for two years. At an early-season race in Rome before the Olympics in Barcelona, I was again competing against Frankie Fredericks. At that point I was undefeated and had beaten Frankie, along with everyone else in the world, several times. In the call room just before the race I was sitting next to Frankie and we shared a laugh about something that had just happened. We were still laughing as we walked out on to the track. I got focused and got into my blocks. The gun went off and I executed my race as I normally do and crossed the finish line first. At least that’s what I thought. So did the officials, who handed me the victory flowers and trophy. Halfway through my victory lap, my agent Brad Hunt yelled, ‘I don’t think you won.’ I looked up at the stadium screen to see the race results and saw that indeed I had not won. Frankie had just out-leaned me at the very end of the race.
It was my first loss in over two years. I was in great shape and ready to run fast, but I had lost my edge to Frankie during that pre-race laugh. I would never make that mistake again. From that point on, there would be no talking, handshakes or pleasantries before the race. I refused to participate in any activity with my competitors. I just focused on my race strategy and treated each race as a battle, with every competitor seen as the enemy.
I didn’t hate my competitors. I felt no disdain for them. But for me to be at my best I needed to be focused only on me. My new danger zone philosophy and method was tested a month later when I lined up for the final of the 200 metres at the US Olympic trials in New Orleans – it was my first real opportunity to make an Olympic team. I would be running in lane eight against the best in the world, including Carl Lewis, Leroy Burrell, at the time one of the best 100-metre runners in the world, and Mike Marsh, who would go on to become the Olympic gold medallist at 200 metres that year. Since only three sprinters would make the team, I needed to be focused.
My refusal to pay attention to them in order to focus on myself paid off. I made the team. Many people, including my competitors, thought that my attitude or demeanour was meant to intimidate them, but it was not. It was first and foremost all about me and my focus on the task at hand and the race ahead.
I could gain an advantage over my competitors before ever stepping into the blocks simply by looking at them. While sitting in the call room with my head down, thinking only about my race, I would periodically glance up and catch one of my competitors looking at me. When I looked back at them, they always looked away. They would eventually look back at me, only to find me still staring at them. That scared them. Mission accomplished, race won.
Although I enjoyed making those athletes I didn’t like squirm before a race, I regretted having to sacrifice my friendships with competitors like Frankie who I liked and respected. But that’s just what I had to do to keep my race focus sharp. Winning was the priority.
Sebastian Coe and I talked about the inevitable fallout that accompanies the drive to win at all costs. ‘If you get to the top level of your sport, there is a deep streak of selfishness,’ he said. ‘There has to be. There are friendships you can’t accommodate during that period. My mother used to say that a week before a race I would barely recognise her even in the house! It’s in your DNA. I was probably selfish enough to think I’m just not going to allow anything to intrude on something I’ve been doing for ten years and take very seriously.’
The recipe for success, however, isn’t the same for all athletes, even those in the elite ranks. Since 2008, when the Jamaican Olympic track and field team took home a record number of medals in the sprints, many people have wondered, ‘What is it about the Jamaicans that makes them so good?’ Their great talent, of course, is a given. But the Jamaicans are also a very easy-going society. They don’t worry about things as much, and tend to stress a lot less than those from many other cultures. Ironically, that slower pace and more easy-going approach to life have contributed to their championship performances of late, with Usain Bolt leading the way.
Prior to Usain, his Jamaican team-mate Asafa Powell was the fastest man in the world. But just like American Leroy Burrell, Asafa broke the 100-metre world record twice but never won a championship during that time. Interestingly, he was notorious for his very un-Jamaican demeanour at the championships, with the pressure he felt on the starting line clearly visible to competitors and spectators alike.
Usain, by contrast, exhibits a very relaxed and even playful demeanour on the starting line prior to his races. ‘Yeah, definitely. I love to enjoy myself. I like to have fun. I’m kind of laid-back sometimes,’ he told me when he arrived two and a half hours late for training at the University of West Indies training facility. I was never late for training. ‘A lot of people stand there focused, thinking about what they have to do. But for me, I know what I’m here to do, so all I’ve got to do is make sure I’m relaxed and I don’t stress over the race too much.’
During the 2010 season, I happened to be talking to him in the warm-up area. As he joked and laughed, as he does often, I looked up to see that all of his competitors were walking out on to the track. His race was starting in less than ten minutes, yet his demeanour was the same as mine used to be after the race.
‘I don’t try to think about the race,’ he explained. ‘I think when you start thinking about everything in your mind at the start, “Gotta make sure this, gotta make sure that,” all these little things start coming back and if you’re not really focused, then you’re going to throw off your race. That’s what happens to a lot of guys out there. They’re stressing so much they lose it.’
Of course, when you’re as good as Usain you certainly don’t have to worry as much as the other competitors. Neither did I. In order to be the absolute best I could be, however, I needed to be focused. That was my way. But other members of the Jamaican sprint team have followed Usain’s way. Instead of going into a deep focus before the race and allowing themselves to feel the stress of the moment, they have found that they compete better when they take a more relaxed and easy-going approach to the race. And that is as natural to them as my deep focus is to me.
I was all business on the track, so I usually just focused on my own race. As always, I would visualise myself running my race, thinking only about my own performance and ignoring the rest of the field. My behaving as if they weren’t even there – as if I was only running against the clock for myself – proved equally intimidating.
By the time I got into the call room, I knew I had done the work required and could beat them all. Would I? We would soon find out. My BBC colleague Colin Jackson often tells me he hated being in such close proximity with competitors with whom he would soon be walking out on to the track side by side, but I craved that pre-race moment. It’s what I miss now that I’m retired.
PREPARING FOR BATTLE
Immediately before a race, great Olympic athletes are unaffected by potential outcomes, positive or negative. This is all about the heat of the battle, that time when you are in the most competitive environment. The competition is about to start in minutes and you know what you are capable of doing, you know what your competition is capable of doing, but you don’t know if you will execute perfectly, horribly, or any of the many possibilities in between. You also don’t know how each of your competitors will perform. They may have the performance of a lifetime today, they may perform just as you predicted and expected they would, or they may have a major setback today. The only thing that is certain is that the race will happen and there will be a result.
Great Olympic athletes are able at this time to detach their minds from everything else that is going on, so that they are only thinking about the competition – and only the things that will help them to succeed. This is where I think I was at my best. Of course I was nervous and anxious, and the automatic default mode for my brain at that moment was to think of the consequences of the result, since I was obviously conscious of the fact that, as much as I wanted to win and I believed wholeheartedly that I could win and would win, anything can happen. That’s why we race – to see who will put it all together and take all of the different levels of talent, and different levels of work, and the different approaches to preparation, and execute best on that day in order to come out on top and take the gold medal.
I miss that nervous energy and anxiousness, when it feels like it’s taking forever for them to let us race. At that point I can’t wait for the gun to go off so I can race. But I also want to know. I want to know the result. Not just the result but my result. Did I do it? I know I thought I could, but did I? Even though going through those pre-race moments was very tough and I felt a tremendous (and uncomfortable) pressure at that moment, after it was over I wanted to do it again.
The athletes who can control their thoughts and focus, and think only about the competition, their own performance and what they need to do, win races. These days, however, I see athletes in the hour to two hours before their competition actually go over and check their phone to see if they have any phone calls or messages. I deliberately turned my phone off when I went to the track so that it wouldn’t ring, and I certainly wouldn’t check it, because there might be a message that could distract me and make me think of something else.
It’s hard enough to focus and think only about the task at hand without inviting potential distractions. I always thought, there are few things that could happen that would cause me to decide not to run a race. And even if it was an emergency, there would be nothing I could do about that situation right then. So I always chose to turn my phone off and cut off all communication with everyone other than my support team in the couple of hours leading up to race time. This allowed me to focus only on the race and not risk any distractions from phone calls or messages. As for those distractions that I couldn’t as readily control, I had developed a way to deal with that by reserving the time leading up to and during the competition to only think about the race. To do this I had to be very strict with myself and not allow any exceptions. This included even thinking about the outcome of the race, or what might or would happen immediately after the race, or even upon crossing the finish line.
Athletes will often start to think about the consequences of a loss or of victory before the race even starts, which is a major distraction.
They will also start to think about other competitors who are in such close proximity. It’s hard not to start thinking about the athlete who has just crossed your path. And while you might start contemplating how you’re going to race against them, that’s not what you should be thinking about at that point, because you can’t control what they will do.
Just before the race you want to be thinking only about those elements you can control and what is about to happen in a mere few minutes. Your mind, however, presents all of these distracting roadblocks, and you must have incredible discipline to prevent yourself, or your mind, from contemplating them.
RETAINING PERSPECTIVE
Of course, it helps if you don’t let the sheer enormity of the Games and what’s at stake overwhelm you. That’s what initially happened to Jackie Joyner-Kersee. ‘For me, the Olympics has been the foundation to me going on and having the other successes or successful years after that, because in 1984 I realised I had talked about going to the Olympics and I had dreamed about it, but I hadn’t realised the magnitude of the whole Olympic movement,’ she told me. ‘I didn’t really feel it until I was actually in the stands for the opening ceremonies – the anticipation from the fans and just the excitement when you sat there and watched each country come through.
‘As I was sitting there, I became really anxious and nervous. I had set the Olympic record at the Olympic trials. Going into the Games, people had picked me to win the gold in the heptathlon, but I had strained my hamstring. I had never really been injured before and thought it was a pulled muscle.
‘At the Games, I was focused on my leg so completely that I lost all the train of thought of how prepared I was to really execute to the best of my abilities – even with the leg being heavily bandaged. Each event, I went out there anticipating the pain, but I didn’t really feel it. I didn’t feel anything. After the high jump, the shot put and the 200 metres, my numbers were not so far off from what I had done at the trials. By the time we went down to the long jump on the second day, I was finally ready to go because the long jump is my favourite event. I committed two fouls and ended up far behind the board to just stay in the competition.’
Performing poorly on the long jump lost Jackie a lot of points. ‘I was so bummed out I didn’t even eat when [her coach] Bobby [who would later be her husband] told me to replenish my fuel. I sat off in the corner crying. Bobby pulled me over to the side with a very few, choice words. “The heptathlon is made up of seven events, and you’ve still got two events to go,” he told me. By then I didn’t care about my leg because I really wanted to win. I threw the javelin, and I remember lining up for the 800 metres. I ran the first lap, and then on the second lap on the back stretch Bob was telling me to pump my arms, but by then I had no more energy left. When I crossed the line I knew Glynis Nunn from Australia had won. I remember embracing her and congratulating her. She was like, “No, you won.” I said, “No, you won.” I knew.
‘When I went into the press room and people said, “If you didn’t have the injury …” I let them know: “It had nothing to do with the injury. It was that I didn’t perform.” I had to accept that. I’ll tell you, when I left Los Angeles I left there telling myself that if I was blessed to make another Olympic team I would be the toughest athlete out there mentally.’
I asked Jackie if she thought she had gotten caught up in the spectacle instead of being focused on the competition. She agreed that she had. The injury just accentuated her sense of being overwhelmed. ‘Even though my physical therapist told me, “Jackie, you’re ready,” I didn’t believe it because I wasn’t accustomed to seeing my leg swollen,’ she said. ‘For whatever reason, the people who were the closest to me, I just disregarded what they were saying. I had a lot of doubt, because I just didn’t think the leg was going to hold up.’ Only when she looked at her times after the Games were over did she realise that her self-doubt had cost her the gold.
‘At the 1984 Olympic Games I looked at myself in the mirror and I told myself – not to take anything away from Glynis Nunn – “The reason you didn’t walk away from here as a gold medallist is because you didn’t want it bad enough.” When I left there, I trained and I told myself I wasn’t going to let negativity get in the way of the success of my dreams. “I’ve got to think like a champion, and I’ve got to put myself in difficult positions and situations,” I decided. “When my physical therapist or Bobby is telling me something, they are my eyes, they see the things I don’t see, and I have to be on the same page with them.”
‘When I left Los Angeles, I said, “God willing, you give me another shot at this, no one, no one is going to beat me mentally. If they beat me, it won’t be because of a mental breakdown. It will be because they were just better than I was on that day.”
‘That’s why I fought through the asthma I was diagnosed with as a freshman in college. Even though I know it’s a condition, I saw it as a sign of being weak and I couldn’t let it get me. I started using asthma as an opponent. The asthma’s like the Germans and the Russians, like they were trying to beat me. That was my mindset. There were times when I prayed and prayed that I would never have an attack in a competition. My biggest fear was going somewhere and not being able to do the 800. Or if the weather got bad or I had an allergic reaction. That weighed on me so much. I could train and do all this, but there were some days when I could run a mile on Monday, but Tuesday if there was fresh cut grass and all that, I would have a reaction to it. That’s why I tried to stay on top of everything, to make sure that my immune system wouldn’t break down. I couldn’t afford to go on any medication or prednisone, because it would sap my muscle strength and make me unable to compete.’
Jackie’s prayers for a second shot at the Olympics, asthma notwithstanding, were answered when she made the 1988 US team for the long jump and the heptathlon. She didn’t go into the Games 100 per cent healthy. Her left knee had tendonitis on the patella. But that didn’t matter. ‘After what I had gone through in 1984, I remember telling myself, “I don’t care; I am willing to pull every muscle in my body to get it done. I’m going to be positive. I’m going to get through this.” I remember one of the reporters said, “You’re behind. You’re not going to break the record. Where are you going to make the points up?” I wasn’t even thinking about the points. I went up to this guy and said, “You know, I’ll find a way. God will help me.”’
Jackie had learned about running her own race the hard way the year before when she just barely missed her chance to break the world record because her opponents teamed up against her and went out slowly. ‘I realised from that point on that I would not depend on anybody else to bring me to a pace, so I started learning my own pace.’
That lesson, coupled with what she had learned in the 1984 Games, would cement her career. She would go on to win three gold medals in the Olympics, four gold medals in the World Championships and one gold medal in the Pan American Games. She also became one of my heroes after I arrived on the Olympic scene. I watched her not only compete with confidence but handle her training sessions and preparation with the utmost professionalism.
UNLIKELY MOTIVATOR
Great athletes are able to understand themselves and how they naturally deal with pressure, but that doesn’t mean that they naturally do it well or like it. I was a pressure performer, but that didn’t mean that I enjoyed it. Pressure is uncomfortable to everyone and it was uncomfortable to me. But I found a way to deal with the pressure and not allow it to control me. Then I took it a step further and figured out how to take the pressure and turn it into a motivator. So although I never loved the feeling of being under pressure, I loved how I made it work for me.
As a result, I was immune to the pressure that kills some athletes’ careers. As an elite athlete, however, pressure doesn’t just exist during competitions. The better you get, the more you have to not only compete in the limelight, but live in it too. And that came with its own set of challenges which I, for one, found especially hard to deal with.