‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ my mother asked me when I was about 12 years old. I told her that I wished I could be one of the people I read about in the car magazines I used to get from the library, who test-drove and wrote about the fast sports cars. She sensed in my voice that I didn’t really believe I could ever be one of them. ‘If that’s what you want to do, there’s no reason you can’t do that,’ she told me.
The sense of possibility she instilled in me was perfectly balanced by my father’s insistence on the need to have a plan. Instead of telling me I could do anything I wanted, from the time I was a young boy he always challenged me about how I would accomplish things. One day he, too, asked me about my plans for my future. I pulled out a different dream and told him I was going to go to college to be an architect.
‘Do you know what it will take for you to graduate with a degree and pursue a career as an architect?’
I thought I had already answered the question by indicating that I was planning to go to college, so I didn’t know what to say.
‘You don’t know, do you?’ my dad insisted, his voice betraying his frustration. ‘How do you expect to be successful with your goal if you don’t know how you will achieve it?’
Of course, to achieve my dreams, whatever they might be, I knew I would have to work. As a kid, however, that wasn’t exactly my priority. ‘What’s going on with you?’ my mother asked me one morning as we headed to the bus stop that would take me to high school. Although I had been a pretty good student, at that period in high school my grades had dropped off. She didn’t yell or get upset, but I could tell by her voice that she was disappointed in me. I thought about that for the rest of the day. Not wanting her to feel that way about me any more, I started to do better.
I was afraid of disappointing my mother, but I actively feared my father’s wrath. The toughness that defined him had been instilled in him as a young child when his parents both went into the army, leaving him with his grandmother and aunt. They, aware that he was an only child and a boy being raised by two women, and not wanting him to be weak, treated him quite harshly. A stint in the military after high school further toughened him. As a very disciplined man with high moral standards, he has made few mistakes in his life. He expected as much from his children.
That could be a burden. As a kid, I would walk home from school wondering if his car would be in the driveway when I rounded the corner. I knew that Mom would tell me to do my homework and chores, but Dad was sure to grill me about my assignments and how I did my chores.
Don’t get me wrong. I love my father and I looked up to him. He was – and remains – my role model. I thought there wasn’t anything he couldn’t do. I wanted to be just like him. He was certainly not a wealthy man, but as a natural planner he was always in control. As an adult I see a lot of him in myself. And a lot of those characteristics helped me to achieve the success that I did.
PARENTAL SUPPORT
Parents played a major role in the success of many Olympic champions. ‘My dad, who was a farmer, taught me the ethos of working hard,’ said Sally Gunnell. ‘You’d see him go out at five-thirty in the morning, and come back in late. Now looking back at it, that dedication to what you love – he loved what he did – and that focus and hard work was instilled in me from early on.’
Sebastian Coe’s father wasn’t just his inspiration. He became the double gold and double silver Olympian’s coach. ‘When I decided I wanted to get into track and field, I wasn’t being prompted by my parents,’ he told me. ‘Even though my dad had raced competitively in cycling, his initial interest was purely paternal. He and my mum were a bit concerned about the fact that by the time I was 13 or 14, two nights a week and pretty much most of Sundays and half of Saturday afternoons, I was at somewhere called the athletics club. What was I doing? They wanted to make sure it was okay and that my life was balanced by other things like homework. So my dad came down [to check things out].
‘Having been on the fringes of a British cycling team in his youth, he understood the nature of endurance, along with the commitment required. For about a year he just sat around and listened and watched. Slowly, he came to the conclusion that what he was hearing didn’t, in his world, make a lot of sense. Even though people kept saying, “Seb should be running eights in miles and running quick,” every time I ran in a training session I seemed to be running slowly. Being the good engineer that he was, he started to ask some fairly basic questions, pulling apart what he saw and putting it together in a smarter way. Then, of course, he became completely obsessed with it.
‘Over the space of the next five years or so, my old man gently guided me while slowly turning himself into a very proficient coach. He would actually often listen to footfalls with his eyes closed – just listening to the way your feet are coming down.
‘Then he got smart. As a good engineer and good production engineer, he realised that you don’t have to be the greatest physiologist in the world, but you do need to start bringing these people to the table, and effectively created a team. What was good was he was never afraid to be challenged. If he set a training session and I asked, “Why would I be doing that?” he explained his reasoning.
‘Having started out as a strategist and ended up as a deliverer, he then sat back on autopilot and watched it all happen. He always felt that good coaching involved building in self-obsolescence. His greatest pride came when for whatever reason we hadn’t been able to speak for a few days.
‘“What have you done in training?” he asked when I finally rang up. “That’s fantastic,” he said when I told him. “That’s exactly what I would have asked you to do had I been there. I now begin to recognise that maybe 80 per cent of my job is done.”
‘Just before the 1984 Olympics, I got in to Los Angeles after training in Chicago. He had not seen me in three or four weeks, so when he came he said, “We’ll go down to the track.”
‘It was about a week before, and I was doing four or five 400s at a fairly even pace – 50 seconds with tight recoveries of about a minute. After the third 400 he said, “I’ve seen enough. You’re fine. Let’s go have a burger.”’
Seb’s father had recognised that the necessary work had been done and no more was needed. He even used the same exact expression that my coach Clyde did. ‘The hay is in the barn,’ both men would say.
UNBEATABLE COACHES
Clyde, who would be my coach from 1986, when I finished high school, right through to 2000, when I retired, also shared Coach Coe’s training philosophy. ‘What do you think we’re going to do today?’ he would say at every daily practice. It was a test. If I got the answer wrong, he taught me why we weren’t going to do what I had assumed and why we were going to do what he had planned. That helped me as an athlete, since I could execute the training a lot better when I knew exactly what we were doing.
To me Clyde, who is now in his late seventies, felt much more like a teacher than a coach. Even so, he accepted my input and even my challenges. If I asked, ‘Why are we doing this? I’m thinking we should be doing something else,’ he’d ask why. Sometimes my answers actually would make sense to him. In short, we had a partnership where we worked together.
Here, again, Sebastian Coe’s relationship with his coach, who happened to be his dad, mimics my relationship with Clyde. ‘He would structure stuff in a way that allowed you to fill in some of the bits,’ Seb recalled. ‘Looking back, however, the most important role he played in the first four or five years was stopping me doing things that I would have instinctively done that would have led to over-training and over-usage.’
Nadia Comaneci credits her coach with 50 per cent of her history-making gymnastic career. ‘I always have said my success was possible because I was lucky to partner with my coach Béla,’ she said. ‘I think if he wasn’t around, I wouldn’t be able to deliver. When you’re a kid of seven, eight years old, you have no direction where you should go, so you have somebody who is supposed to tell you what’s good for you to do. He was a very good motivator. The best thing that he had which few others have was that he was able to prepare the gymnast to deliver the best at the most important time. If you’re great in training, and two months later in the Olympic Games you aren’t good, then who cares? You have to shine at the right moment. Orchestrating your climb involves an artistry that the coach needs to know how to do. You can’t stay up for 12 months. If you have two or three competitions in a year, you have to go up and down, up and down. The coach definitely needs to calculate when you go down, so you can come up.’
To get the best from Nadia, Béla would drive her to improve her performance. ‘This was great, but you can do better,’ he would say. Even when Nadia earned a 10, he said, ‘That was a great competition, but you can do better than this.’ To fully tap her potential, he always pushed her to better and better performances by setting new goals and trying new moves. She likened that drive for improvement to my own. ‘When you are the fastest at one Olympic Games, you’re going to keep the time the same for the next Games? You have to be faster, no?’
The coach–athlete relationship is crucial to Olympic success. I often joke that Coach and I were a team, and when we won, we won together, but when we lost, it was his fault. The truth is that most of the time the wins can be attributed to the team but the losses are on the athlete.
There is a skill set required for coaching that many people aren’t aware of. Often they assume that the biggest advantage a coach can have is the benefit of having played the sport they are coaching at the highest level. As a result, people tend to assume that I automatically went into coaching sprinters after my career, and they are surprised when I tell them that I am not coaching. Some will even tell me what a shame it is that I am not sharing my knowledge from my career with young sprinters. They don’t realise that as a consultant to many sports organisations, as well as athletes and coaches not only in athletics but in all sports, I am sharing my knowledge from a career in which I learned plenty. But I know that I do not possess the skill set to be a coach. Coaching in a lot of ways is teaching, and that is why many of the best coaches have at one point taught school.
As the owner of Michael Johnson Performance my objective is to help athletes at all levels achieve their full athletic potential. In order to provide that level of support to those athletes, we not only need a wealth of sport training knowledge – to which I am a significant contributor – we also have to effectively communicate that knowledge to the athletes we train. We also have to be able to motivate them and get them to buy into what we are teaching them. It takes a certain personality and skill set to do that. After hiring over 20 different coaches for Michael Johnson Performance Centres, I have a good idea of the personality and skills that make a good coach.
Coaches must have the ability to motivate a variety of athletes, all of whom have different personalities and who respond differently to motivational techniques. When an athlete isn’t giving his all, for example, or is not feeling particularly motivated about training, a coach has to understand that athlete as a person, as well as how to get the most out of that athlete and get him or her through the training session. Some athletes, for example, need an aggressive talking-to, so a coach will sometimes even go so far as to call those athletes out and question their toughness. This technique will cause some athletes to see themselves the way the coach is seeing them. When they don’t like what they see and recognise that it is not the best attitude or approach to training, they will adjust. Another athlete may already not be feeling well or may be having a bad day. Being called out and talked down to by the coach just causes him to go further into his lack of motivation, to the point where he doesn’t even want to be there at all. A good coach will get to know his athletes and understand how to read them.
Clyde knew me and knew exactly how to motivate me. He knew, for example, that for the most part I motivated myself. But he also knew me well enough to know when things weren’t right. One day in 1999 during my pre-training stretch, a time when he and I would usually joke around or talk about things going on in the sport or just about anything else that didn’t involve my training, he noticed that I was pretty quiet.
‘What’s on your mind?’ he asked. I said nothing.
Even though the first part of the training session went okay, before we started the next part of the session he again asked me what the problem was. I told him I was not enjoying the sport any more because of all of the negative publicity I was getting, including being accused of ducking Maurice Greene and being criticised for not winning races by a large enough margin. Instead of lighting into me as I’m sure he wanted to, he knew how he needed to motivate me. I had always been focused on my own goals and cared little what was said or printed about me as long as I was winning and I was the best. So he reminded me first of the ridiculousness of anyone making the claim that I wasn’t winning races by enough. He went on to remind me of our goal for the year which was to break the 400 world record and win a fourth consecutive world championship. Then he reminded me how my training over the last few months indicated that I was in the best shape I had been in since 1996 and that I was completely healthy for the first time since 1996. He ended by asking me the rhetorical question, ‘Are you ready to start the second part of the training session?’
Of course I was. I felt a little stupid for feeling sorry for myself, and a little weak for allowing silly criticism, the kind of thing that I knew went along with being the best, to get to me and affect my training.
Good coaches like Béla and Clyde know how to get the best from their athletes no matter what the circumstances. They also know how to guide the athletes they work with, especially when they’re young. When I met Clyde, my parents and I immediately knew that he was completely different from any other coach who had come to recruit me. At the time, although I had been offered scholarships at a lot of different schools, I was pretty much set on going to the University of Texas. Then Clyde, who would wind up coaching at Baylor for 42 years, came to my house. Instead of focusing exclusively on athletics, he talked a lot about the experience at the school and the quality of education I would get at Baylor. He talked about track and the experience of being part of the track team, but he talked equally about helping me develop as a young man. His objective was to teach young people, and he felt that track was a good way to learn lessons that would be helpful later on in life.
At the time, no one knew that I would go on to compete in the Olympics. I had shown the talent to be a good college athlete, but no more. My work with Clyde, once I committed to doing what I needed to do to get healthy, changed all that.
ATHLETE RESPONSIBILITY
Still, as much as I respected and listened to my coach, I retained command of the situation. Like the athletes I grew up watching and continued to look up to – people like Jackie Joyner-Kersee, Carl Lewis, Greg Foster and Sergei Bubka – I worked with my agent, manager and coach but accepted responsibility for my decisions and my actions, whether those involved competitions or contracts. But today many of the athletes, including some of those I work with, do not show this level of maturity. I don’t see them as adult because they don’t act like adults. And why would they?
Over the last ten years or so since athletes started to leave college early or to forgo it completely in favour of turning pro, the maturity level of the average athlete has gone down dramatically. Even though many of these athletes now compete in the professional arena, they still seek the team atmosphere that they had in college. They also still seek the guidance and control that some high school and most college coaches exert over their athletes. These young athletes simply aren’t ready for and don’t want the responsibility that comes with all the money and fame.
Coaches are also part of the problem. When I was competing not many athletes paid their coaches. Most athletes were coached even in their professional careers by their college coaches. When I first approached my coach about paying him, he refused and said that would only complicate things. I finally managed to convince Clyde that since he was helping me make a lot of money it was only fair that I should share and compensate him for his time and talent. Eventually coaches started to see how much money athletes were making and it became commonplace for athletes to pay for coaching services. As my coach predicted, that ultimately did complicate things. Coaches started to feel that they needed to justify their pay, so they started taking on larger roles with their athletes.
In the first half of my career my coach rarely travelled with me to meets in the summer and I was still able to achieve great success. Eventually, in the second half of my career he started to travel with me to most but certainly not all of my races. But I would have been successful whether he had travelled with me or not. Having him there with me was simply an added benefit.
Now, however, athletes feel that they can’t compete without their coach at their side at every competition. Coaches, in turn, want to protect their meal ticket and make sure someone else doesn’t steal their athlete. They also feel that they need to justify the fee they’re being paid by being at every competition and making every decision for their charge, to the point where the athlete takes no personal responsibility at all for his or her own performance.
Even with this newly heightened role, coaching is sometimes a thankless job. While the coach–athlete relationship is a partnership and the coach is certainly partially responsible for the success of the athlete, it’s the athlete who gets all of the glory. When coaches start to want more of the credit for their athletes’ success and start to seek the glory by becoming what I call ‘celebrity coaches’, trouble is usually around the corner. Good coaches recognise that they are helping to guide the athletes. They know that, while their role is extremely important, they are not solely responsible for the athletes’ success.
I have sometimes heard a coach say that an athlete would be nowhere without him. That may be true at some levels but not at the Olympic level. Olympic success is due to a number of things. Talent is certainly at the top of that list. Hard work, commitment and focus are absolute necessities. And the pressures of dealing with the expectations of your country, fans, family, friends, and your coach, as well as yourself, are carried by the athletes. As important as the best coaches are, they are limited in what they can do to help the athletes through all of the mental and physical developments required just to get them to the Games in a state that gives them the best possible chance of success.
Once the competition starts, the coach is even more limited in what he can do. At the moment of truth, in the heat of the battle, it’s the athletes alone who have to deliver. The coaches are sitting in the stands and powerless to help. While that is a reason why coaches should recognise the limits to their influence on the success of an athlete, we should recognise how this incredible lack of control impacts on them. After working so hard, day in, day out, for months or years to help get an athlete to the Games, suddenly there they are in the stands watching their athlete, who’s about to compete, unable to have any influence over that final moment that will determine whether all that work will produce success or failure.
All too often, athletes who aren’t successful blame their coaches. As a result, most athletes will change coaches several times during their careers. That’s not to say that if a coach is not the right coach an athlete should stay with that coach, but it is to say that an athlete should look inward for, and take full responsibility for, his own success. If he is not achieving the success that he feels he is capable of, he should assess all the components of his performance and then make the necessary corrections. Instead, the tendency to look outwards first and point the finger has caused many talented athletes to fall short of reaching their full potential.
Contrast that with Chris Hoy, who basically started his career with no coaching at all. Or Daley Thompson, who forged ahead despite a total lack of parental support.
‘Why are you playing that game?’ Daley’s hard-working mother would ask him. ‘That’s not what we do.’ Finally, she laid down the law. ‘Either you go to college or you move out,’ she told her son.
‘I moved out the next day,’ Daley recalled. ‘I knew I could be the best in the world. I believed in myself, so I left.’
Of course, Daley was proved right. Even so, his mother only ever came to a single one of the Olympic icon’s competitions, and that was towards the end of his career. ‘Even after I became successful, she never felt that I had a real job,’ he said.
TEAM EFFORT
Perhaps working with four different coaches simultaneously, each with his own speciality, filled the parental gap. ‘We learned together,’ recalled Daley, who to this day remains good friends with all four. ‘They learned from me and I learned from them.’
Clearly, however, he did not depend on them to bolster him emotionally or physically. He used his coaches to help him train to his fullest capacity, but as a self-made athlete he didn’t need them. Like Chris Hoy, he was already intently barrelling down the path of learning how to perfect his performance. And that, coupled with everything else, made his success almost inevitable.
Although I was as self-motivated as Chris, I also relied on my team, which for several years included training partners in addition to my coach. Training partners are often overlooked but they can be a very important part of an athlete’s success. The road to Olympic success is a tough one, and having training partners to lighten the load can help tremendously. Having other athletes sharing all the difficulty, pain and agony of the daily training regimen makes doing what you have to do a lot easier.
Early in my career, I depended on my training partners Tony and Deon, both 400-metre sprinters, to help me get through the daily training. We all worked together each day to make the training easier. In athletics, most training days consist of interval training with the objective of completing intervals in the required time. It takes a lot of energy to run the interval while trying to maintain a particular pace, so Tony, Deon and I would take it in turns to be the lead for the day. That allowed the other two to just run without having to focus on pace.
Having training partners also helps with motivation. There are always days when, as an athlete, you’re just not as excited mentally about training, and there are days when you’re not feeling as great as you’d like physically. Having training partners to take the lead helps to get you through the training and prevents you from having a sub-standard session.
Simply being around other individuals training at the same time helps too, because it provides an infectious energy and raises everyone’s energy level. That’s why it’s always a good idea for young athletes starting out in their professional career to be in a training environment with a group of more experienced athletes, who can serve as role models, exemplifying the professionalism and commitment required to achieve success at the Olympic level.
During my four years at Baylor and the first four years of my professional career, I always had training partners. Later in my career, after Tony retired from the sport and Deon moved away, I started to train alone. By that time I was at a point where my training was so specialised, and Coach and I were working at such a high level of customised training, that we actually benefited from being the only two at the track. The trade-off was that I no longer had that high-energy environment and had to rely solely on myself to bring the energy to my training sessions. The training was tougher, but by that time I had what it took and could rely on myself alone for the motivation, commitment and dedication required to get through the training effectively.
After the 1998 season Coach and I were approached by Greg Haughton, Jamaica’s top 400-metre sprinter, about training with us. Greg had lived in the US since his university days competing for George Mason University. I had known Greg well since he finished third and got the bronze medal in the 1995 World Championships where I took the gold. Coach and I both felt at this point in my career that having another individual training with me would help push me during training sessions, so we welcomed Greg. He turned out to be a great training partner and we both benefited in Sydney, when I won my second Olympic 400-metre gold and Greg took the bronze.
As much as training partners helped me stay the course, like so many other Olympic champions I shared the credit for my wins with Coach. Rebecca Adlington knows just how much of her success she owes to her coach – exactly half. She may be the one racing in the pool, but they’re a team. ‘I never argue with the work he sets me. He expects me to come in, give him respect and do my work in the pool. I expect him to come in, write up on the board what I’m going to do, and be there for me,’ she said. ‘Some coaches like to know every single part of their athlete’s life. Bill’s not really like that. He wants me to be happy and knows I’ve got to have a life outside swimming. As long as it doesn’t affect my swimming in any way, he is happy. If it does start to affect my work in the pool, he will sit down and say, “What’s going on?” Apart from that, he’s totally focused on the swimming, which is really good. He knows me so well now. He’s very good at reading body language. I don’t even have to come in and tell him if I’m tired or if there’s something wrong; he knows straight away and will pick up on it. He knows exactly when to ease back. He knows how to motivate me, as well. He doesn’t get stressed, which is good since I kind of switch off if you start shouting at me. We have such a good relationship because he knows me so well. I’ve always said I kind of see him like my second dad, if you like. In fact, most people think he is my dad.’
I know that feeling. I had the same. Clyde, who is 76 years old now and was my coach from the time I was 18 to the very end of my career, is kind of like another dad. We had such a close relationship that when I came out to the track he knew exactly what I was thinking that day, how I was feeling. Like Rebecca’s coach, he knew how to motivate me – and it wasn’t by shouting. That didn’t work with me either.
Part of the reason I was so successful was that I always expected more out of myself. When I didn’t perform at that ever-higher level, I looked first and foremost at myself to determine what I wasn’t doing and what I could do better in order to perform better. That process of self-discovery and learning more about myself allowed me to make the adjustments necessary for me to achieve my best.
I do know that today’s athletes need to have a sense of responsibility for their talent instilled into them. Nobody else is responsible for that. If you’re an athlete, nobody else is going to treat that talent the way that you do. It’s not as important to anybody else – not coaches, not parents – as it is to you. Athletes I represent talk to me about their coaches all the time. Often they seem to think the coach isn’t doing enough.
‘It’s not about the coach,’ I tell them. ‘Look, you’ve got a small window to achieve your potential here. If you don’t, it’s over for you. But that coach is still going to be coaching athletes. There’s going to be some other athletes he’s going to be coaching. I’m going to be representing some other athletes. You’re the only one who is going to be left out. So don’t rely totally on your coach, don’t rely totally on me. We’re just your support team. You have take responsibility for yourself and your performance. That means giving the attention and focus needed to achieve your potential.’