How do you build an Olympic champion when the road to Olympic success is so difficult and there are so many obstacles and hurdles to overcome? As we’ve seen, the journey requires natural talent, of course, but also continued development of that talent. That takes a number of personality traits, some which many athletes naturally possess and some that they have developed over the years.
My own quest for Olympic success taught me a great deal about myself and how to achieve success. I thought I could write a manual about that. Writing this book, however, has taught me how many more ways there are to reach one’s highest potential.
I already knew most of the athletes I interviewed. I certainly knew most of their stories. And yet I learned something new in talking with each one of them about their Olympic success and how they achieved what they did.
I was particularly impressed by Ian Thorpe continuing to believe in himself and never giving up – refusing to give in even just a little bit to the possibility of not competing when the 2000 Games came to his country. He continued to train while injured and even found ways to use the limitations on what he could do as a way to enhance his training.
I knew that Chris Hoy was a great cyclist but had no idea that he started in his sport with no coaching. I was intrigued and blown away, especially when he told me how the IOC eliminated his event and he was forced to take up a new event if he was going to continue his Olympic dream.
Rebecca Adlington telling me about her experiences as a celebrity and suddenly being thrust into the spotlight made me feel sad and angry. But her account of how she handled it made me smile, and I saw the true Olympic champion in her when she talked about resisting pressure and standing proud in the face of the criticism and very hurtful words. Rebecca is also a great example of an athlete knowing herself and exactly what she needs to succeed – in her case by maintaining the consistent simplicity of her training environment.
For years I have discussed and debated sport and life with Daley Thompson. ‘That is the Daley Thompson I know,’ I first thought when he told me the story of his mother telling him go to college and quit athletics or move out, and it sounded just automatic for him to move out. But after reflecting on this, I’m not sure I would have had the courage to make the same choice at 18.
I was impressed with Usain Bolt’s talent when I first saw him compete in the 2003 World Junior Championships as a young 200-metre sprinter. Just like everyone else, I thought his future would be in the 200 metres and 400 metres. I never would have guessed that an athlete with his height could become the fastest man in the world and the greatest 100-metre sprinter in history. Most coaches would have convinced an athlete with his height to focus on the 200 and 400 metres, and most athletes of his height would have never believed that the 100 metres was possible. But Usain believed, and he is now the fastest man in the world. It is that type of belief that makes champions – not belief just because he wanted to run the 100 metres, but belief that he had what it would take and belief that if he improved his start he could compete at 100 metres.
Most champions learned along the way as they gained experience. Most of them became mentally tougher and improved their skills throughout their careers. The athletes I interviewed all got better and better as their careers continued because they learned how to be winners. We all established a habit of winning based on proven successful training, preparation, personal habits and routines. We also learned what works and what doesn’t work for us as individual people and athletes.
There are a lot of wrong ways to attempt to achieve success. We all know that. But we often think there is only one right way to achieve success. As the interviews in this book show so clearly, there are many right ways as well. Most champions have figured out what works for them and how they need to train and compete to be the best they can be.
As we saw with Mark Spitz, there are some unorthodox ways to approach being your best. I would not agree with any athlete saying they should not train if they can’t get the maximum out of that training. My philosophy was to train every day and wring the most I could out of that training, even if the maximum for that day was less than expected or desired. I still believe, as the stories from so many of the great athletes interviewed for this book show, that every day is an opportunity to get better. Even if it’s only a little bit on a particular day, that’s better than nothing. I still view a day of missed training as a missed opportunity. But Mark proves that different approaches can be successful.
Finally, I learned that most of these athletes knew themselves better than most people do, and that is what helped them to achieve so much. It is one of the things that I believe was most important in my own success.
The fact that so much work goes into the Olympics for so long makes the experience of winning hard to describe and even harder to achieve. You can’t buy it. You can’t package it. There’s no other way to taste that victory – or even the chance to participate. As Nadia Comaneci said, ‘You cannot sign up somebody to be part of an Olympic team. Even if you have a famous dad, you’re not going to be part of an Olympic team. It reflects a huge amount of work and dedication to earn that spot. You have to earn it through work, not through connections or anybody else.’
Maybe that’s part of what makes winning the Olympics so much more special than any other competition. From 1990 to 1996 I focused on the pure competition, and I did want to beat people by as much as I could. I wanted to cross the finish line so far ahead of everyone else that it was embarrassing for them. That felt good. It felt good to be that much better than everyone else. It wasn’t just that I was better. I felt like I had made myself better. I had worked so hard. I felt like I understood how to run my race better than my opponents. The other guys I was running against were talented, but I was able to do more with my talent. That was a high.
The feeling of winning is a great feeling, but it’s at a whole other level when it’s at the Olympics. At the 1996 Olympics I’d won the 400, but I had to win the 200 to complete the double that I’d gone for so publicly. I’d not only said I was going to do it, the schedule had been changed for me. I was wearing the gold shoes. Anything less than me winning that 200 would have been a failure, at least for me, and I think a lot of other people would have seen it that way as well. The media certainly would have seen it that way.
When I crossed the finish line in the 200 metres, I felt so many different things all at once that I’d never felt before and I’ve never felt since, even in 2000 when I won.
I was relieved that it was over, because there had been so much pressure. I was relieved that I’d been successful at this monumental task, when so many people had said I would fail. In addition, I’d beaten everybody by so much, and I had run so much faster than the world record, that I was a little shocked. I always thought I could run that fast, but never thought I’d run that fast at the end of eight races, because I was far from fresh.
Finally, having successfully completed the double, I was overjoyed. I hadn’t had a chance to celebrate the 400 metres win. My reaction to that gold medal was very subdued because I was already thinking about the 200 race coming up. But once I crossed the finish line in the 200, and could hear the roar of the crowd, which I always blocked out along with everything else during competition, I finally felt like I could celebrate.
Cathy Freeman had a similar experience, and felt a similar sense of relief coupled with joy when she won the gold she was expected to claim for herself and her country at the 2000 Sydney Games. She had watched and been inspired by other Olympic champions. Years of training and races had fostered the belief that she, too, could win Olympic gold. And then she did it. ‘When I crossed the line in Sydney, my immediate thought was, “This is what it feels like to be an Olympic champion.” I am still trying to work out what happened next, because I suddenly found myself in this really insanely mad place. When I run, I’m in this bubble of silence. It’s like I’m in another place. I’m not really with everybody else because I’m so focused. So I didn’t hear anybody before the gun went. But as soon as I crossed the line, for the first time I let my guard down and actually joined everybody else in the real world, in that stadium. And I was overwhelmed. Not only has there not been a lot of Australian Olympic track and field achievement, there certainly hasn’t been a hell of a lot of Olympic indigenous achievement on the track. What I had accomplished had such big meaning for so many, especially Australians. I felt it in the air that night. Trying to register what I had achieved, I was so overcome that I didn’t know what to do but sit down and take my shoes off.’
The Olympics, however, are about more than winning or losing. ‘Other than having my kids, competing in the Olympics is the proudest thing I’ve ever done,’ Daley Thompson told me. The uncharacteristically sentimental words didn’t stop here. ‘There is so much history and the Games have taken place for so long. That’s what makes the Games so special.’ I’m sure that Daley Thompson could have been one of the greatest footballers had he chosen to pursue that instead of athletics. But I know he has no regrets, because as much as he loved football, it would not have brought him on to the Olympic stage. And I know he would not have missed that experience for anything.
I knew I’d done something special when I won my first two gold medals in 1996. The fact that I had done something that no one had ever done before took the experience of winning at the Olympic level to a whole other level. I was not only a winner twice over, I had made history at the Olympics. I wasn’t going to be another name in the Olympic record book, which is special enough. I had set a new Olympic standard for one of history’s oldest sports. That’s amazing and it gives me a tremendous sense of pride.
It’s been 15 years since that accomplishment in 1996, and just a few mornings ago I was on the phone on a conference call and a guy started telling me about how that 200 race was the most special Olympic moment he’s ever seen. Strangers come up to me all the time and start recounting the race to me. I’m sitting there thinking, ‘Yeah, I know, I was there.’ But 15 years after the fact they still remember every aspect of that race and they’re still excited about it.
As Sebastian Coe says, the Olympics is the toughest of the competitions. ‘It’s not a World Championships. It’s not Oslo or Zurich. It is such an extraordinary synthesis of the mental and the physical. It probably demands greater willpower and focus than almost anything else. In all our sports it’s clearly the pinnacle. We have World Championships, but I think we know the difference. In my sport, we know the difference between the World Championships and an Olympic Games. You’ve done the most difficult thing you’re ever going to be asked to do. Now go off and build on that and learn a little bit more about yourself.
‘I’ve seen it through so many prisms: as an athlete, as a working journalist, as a broadcaster in Australia, and now as a member of the IAAF Council,’ Seb told me. ‘It is the most complicated piece of project management. You know it. I know it. I went to a Games and I just assumed the village would be there. The bed seemed to have sheets on it. The medals occasionally turned up in the order they were supposed to. The event took place. The transport seemed to be there. When you got back, there was food. If you wanted a massage … I had no idea what lay behind that.’
I laughed when he said that and countered, ‘It’s the same thing as people assuming when the gun goes off, you just run the race, and the first person to the finish line wins. It’s simple, right?’
His turn to laugh. ‘Run fast, turn left,’ he said.
There is nothing like the Olympic Games, and any athlete fortunate enough to take part understands this. It is such a rare opportunity and one that will become a major part of the rest of your life. I just hope that, whatever the results, the athletes allow that Olympic spirit to infuse them. Jackie Joyner-Kersee’s Olympic achievement still gives her pleasure. ‘It’s really a great feeling when I think back on where I started from and what I was trying to do,’ she told me. She knows she gave everything she had inside to her sport, and it changed her life. ‘Yesterday I was out to dinner with this young girl who sees me as a role model,’ she told me. ‘She thinks I’m amazing, but it’s amazing what the Olympics do for all of us. It puts us in the history books. It puts us in the lives of people that sometimes we might come in contact with, and sometimes we won’t. It’s not for me to take that for granted. I embrace it and appreciate it. To know that, wow, I dreamed about this, and it really happened.’
Now she’s using her Olympic experience to change the lives of others. ‘I am grateful to be able to work with young people, because I can help them to set a solid foundation and put them on the right path.’ Although the kids she works with see her as an Olympic hero, she is quick to let them know that she wasn’t that promising an athlete when she first started out. ‘Being an Olympic athlete, people see you at your highest heights. Especially in the eyes of young people, Olympic success makes you a finished product. For me, it’s so important to tell them how to get to that finished product. It’s the struggle. It’s the commitment to hard work. It’s the things that you must do before you can be on television. If that’s where you want to go, you’ve got to do these things when the cameras are not on. The days when people tell you to work hard when no one is watching are so crucial to you going on. If it’s an Olympian you want to become, it can happen, but you’ve got to put the work in now.’
Once the Olympic torch, after its journey around the UK, lights the Olympic cauldron to open the 2012 London Games, some 3.5 billion viewers will tune in to watch 17,000 athletes from more than 200 countries test themselves physically, mentally and emotionally. And as the Games play out over a 15-day span, a whole new set of embryonic Olympic athletes will be born. As Steve Redgrave says, ‘The Olympics are magical. It gives kids dreams.’
I couldn’t agree more. Kids dream of becoming Olympians, of participating in the Olympics some day like their heroes. But they’re not alone. Fans dream of going to the Olympics. Athletes dream of reaching the pinnacle of their sport by making it to the Olympics as competitors. And Olympians dream of becoming Olympic champions. I went through each one of those stages and still wanted to take it further. I was fortunate to do so; after becoming Olympic champion I was able to make Olympic history. And now, since the end of my Olympic career, I work to help other Olympic athletes achieve their dreams. In the process, I get to share their Olympic dream, since I want them to be as fortunate as I was.
Dreams are exactly what make the Olympics so extraordinary. And I know that my Olympic experience allows me to keep dreaming – to keep the flame alive and undimmed. May the upcoming Olympic Games inspire that same torch inside of you.