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Archive for July, 2010

56. Self-Awareness, Part 2

Posted in Self-awareness, tagged , on July 29, 2010 | 3 Comments »

As with many sports, in skeleton we spend as much as two hours a day watching video in addition to all the other things one has to do in terms of preparation and training (not to mention eating and sleeping).  It’s easy to think to yourself, “hey I’ve done two hours of homework here, my preparation is done.”  The concern is that the athletes take a run down the track, watch a video from an external perspective and think of how they’ll then make the video better the next time rather than the skill itself.  In other words you need to translate the video to an internal perspective.  You need to imagine what it looks and feels like as if you were actually doing it.

I realize this may sound a bit specific to skeleton but I believe the same concept applies to all sports (and dance – refer to comments from part 1 of this article).  The concern is, with so much video analysis (an external perspective), the athletes will fall short in terms of putting it back into an internal perspective and obviously this is the only vantage point from which an athlete can perform a skill.

An athlete’s success or failure with regard to a technical skill, is based to some extent on sight but in skeleton when you have five G’s preventing you from looking where you need to go, feel for the ice and body-awareness become even more critical.  It can also be more subtle than that.  For example, does the sled skid underneath you almost unnoticeably as you enter or exit a corner?  In the highest G-force situations is the sled turning and therefore grinding the ice underneath it or is the sled going parallel through the pressure?  Can you feel the pressure drop a very slight amount in the middle of a corner thereby telling you exactly where you are and making it possible to time the exit perfectly?  These are all questions that the best will be able to answer because they’re aware of what they’re feeling and can react to it as it happens.

The athletes I coach are probably tired of me saying it, but my catch phrase is, “there shouldn’t be anything that a video or a time sheet can tell you that you didn’t already know [by feel].”  This is admittedly an exaggeration, and I would never insinuate that video analysis is not a very valuable tool – it truly is.  But it has to be used in the context of gaining a better internal understanding of what’s going on in the performing of a skill as it happens.

With respect to other sports the same physical rules apply.  It may seem like a fine point but athletes need to feel why a change in hip angle leads to an increased efficiency in a skating stride – it’s not for the purpose of making the video look better.  Sprinters spend a lot of time looking at the angle of the torso because it affects the range of motion and therefore the strength of certain muscles integral to generating speed, not the least of which are the hip flexors.  If an athlete simply arches the back to change the angle of the torso it misses the mark, but to an untrained eye the issue may appear to be solved on video.

I’ve actually come across a few examples recently of what I would call poor self-awareness in very elite athletes; a swimmer who couldn’t say whether he was breathing in or out or holding his breath when waiting for the gun to go off; a skeleton athlete that didn’t realize that by doing certain nervous system priming drills within two minutes of a sprint could actually knock up to five hundredths of a second off a 30 meter time.  It becomes really difficult to replicate great performances if you don’t know exactly how they happened.

“There shouldn’t be anything that a video or a time sheet can tell you that you didn’t already know [by feel].”

There are occasionally athletes that have poor self-awareness who are still successful because they have a coach that is so in tune with them that they are able to make all the correct decisions on the athlete’s behalf.  The athlete does exactly what they’re told, when they’re told, and essentially the awareness becomes the coach’s role.  This can work but the chances of success are decreased.  Certainly over years of working together, a coach is going to develop a really good understanding of an athlete’s idiosyncrasies and what they need from them and when, but ideally a coach’s input will only ever be supporting what the athlete already knows for themselves.  Olympic champions like Beckie Scott and Catriona LeMay-Doan have both been referred to as athletes who were extremely self-aware.

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55. Self-Awareness, Part 1.

Posted in Self-awareness, tagged , on July 27, 2010 | 4 Comments »

The underlying message of this blog is this: athletes with perspective, who see the big picture, believe in sportsmanship and fair play, etc., are also more likely to be successful athletes and successful people as well.  One of the ways in which I believe this to be true is through heightened awareness of both themselves and the people around them and this is the topic of this week’s entry.

To refresh your memory, here’s what Cal Botterill and Tom Patrick said about people with perspective in their book Perspective, The Key To Life,

“People with perspective are usually great at teamwork.  Their ability to see the big picture helps them recognize and appreciate the value of collaboration and working with others.  Their sensitivity and perceptiveness help them realize that everybody has a role that is important and needs to be appreciated.  Most of all, people with perspective have enough vision, gratitude and security to be open to positive rivalries and other people’s needs.”

Notice all the words that relate to awareness here: see, recognize, appreciate, sensitivity, perceptiveness, realize, appreciated, vision, open to.  You could make the generalization that people with good perspective are simply more aware of themselves and the world around them, aware of the bigger picture, aware of the value in sport and competition, and aware of their own values and why they compete in the first place.  I believe that people who have an increased level of awareness not only have better perspective and are better team players as Cal and Tom suggest, but are more successful as well.

One of the ways in which this happens of course is that people who are more aware and are better team players just make their lives easier by valuing their competitors and not looking at them as “the enemy”.  Imagine the stress you would put yourself under by considering everyone around you as the enemy when ultimately you are in a battle with yourself to achieve your best.  Relationships with competitors (and in individual sports we’re also talking about team mates) become a lot less stressed and clearly at an Olympic level a huge part of success lies in one’s ability to deal with stress.

People who have an increased level of awareness not only have better perspective and are better team players as Cal and Tom suggest, but are more successful as well.

Another way in which people who are more aware succeed is through self-awareness.  What is self-awareness and what makes it so important?  I tend to think of it in three sub-categories, 1) technical self-awareness in the performance of a skill, 2) awareness of one’s health or injury status and 3) awareness of one’s reaction to stress or pressure.  Perhaps there are more sub-categories but I believe these three to be key.

For the sake of this discussion I’ll go into a bit more detail with the first sub-category.  Technical self-awareness in the performance of a skill is fundamental – this is the performance of your sport or an aspect of your sport.  Put very simply, to improve, you need to know exactly what you did and what it felt like internally to perform that specific skill – you need this information to perform the skill again and to make corrections.

Recently at a pre-season training camp in Whistler, some of the other skeleton coaches and I had a discussion about a potential concern.  The concern was that with so much external technical (video) analysis going on in multiple locations, every run, run after run, there exists the possibility that the athletes would lose the critical link between what a run looks like on video versus what it feels like to actually do.

Part 2 to be posted Thursday…

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54. The Value of a Medal

Posted in The Big Picture, tagged , on July 19, 2010 | 1 Comment »

“You know, winning a world title is not that important in life.”

Kelly Slater, 9 Time World Champion Surfer

Lauryn Williams, an American sprinter, finished 2nd in the 100 meters at the Athens Olympics in 2004.  She followed that up with a gold in the same event at the World Championships the following year and a silver medal in 2007.  As one could imagine, expectations were high going into the Beijing Olympics in the summer of ‘08 but as fate would have it, Lauryn finished 4th.

First, I should point out that it’s almost universally agreed upon amongst athletes that 4th is the worst place to finish in any major competition – to be the top finishing competitor not to win a medal is a tough spot to be in.  It’s almost better to do worse so as not to have to play back all of the mistakes that could have made what is often a tiny difference between winning a medal and not.

I saw an interview with the sprinter last summer and in it she described the funk she was in after the race.  I don’t remember the interview well enough to quote her word for word but the point was essentially this: she was reliving the race and wallowing in the result over and over again for a long period of time…  and then her father died.

It was really powerful to hear her describe how immediately the race became nothing more than an 11 second segment of her life.  “It’s just 11 seconds.”

It was an extremely harsh reminder of the role sport plays in our world.  It’s exciting, it’s challenging, huge amounts of time, money, blood, sweat and tears are invested and yet at the end of the day – it is just sport.  Ultimately, I believe people at both ends of the spectrum come to the same realization.  Those who fail to meet their expectations, as high as they may be like Lauryn Williams in Beijing, suffer a terrible heartbreak but ultimately realize it’s just sport and life goes on.

Perhaps what’s less obvious is that those who are lucky enough to achieve their dream performance also reach the same conclusion.  Whether an Olympic medal actually translates into fame and fortune or does not (and in the vast majority of cases it does not), you quickly realize that you’re no different.  The things that were really important to you in your life prior to the achievement are still the same things after.

“It’s just 11 seconds.”

And for me here’s the crux of the argument – because it is just sport, ultimately the result is less important than how you make it happen.  Whatever it takes to make your dream a reality, do it in a manner in which you can be proud of.  Do you think Lauren Williams’ Dad is proud of her even though she finished 4th in Beijing?  Yes!  Maybe the race didn’t go exactly how she hoped it would but if she gave it her best shot – that in itself is more significant than a result, especially in an event as highly contested as the 100 meters.

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53. Jungle Jim Hunter

Posted in The Challenge, tagged , , , on July 12, 2010 | 4 Comments »

Jungle Jim Hunter was one of the original Crazy Canucks as a member of the Canadian alpine ski team in the early to mid seventies.  These days, besides being both a coach and mentor of young athletes he has a radio talk show that airs in Calgary every Saturday that you can also get on the station’s website at any time (http://www.fan960.com/).  It’s one of the very few programs that focuses on amateur sport and how to become both a better athlete and person and I’ve always found it to be very interesting and very valuable.

A few months ago now, Jim invited me on to the program to talk about skeleton and to discuss the upcoming Olympics that were only a few weeks away at the time.  We talked about a variety of topics, one of which was earning your performances.  Jim made the observation that too many young athletes these days “want to win by default.”  What he meant by that was there is a difference between deserving to win and winning because the competition had a bad day or was unlucky or perhaps had inferior conditions or equipment to work with.

Of course these factors are often beyond our control but the point is that the level of competition contributes to the level of satisfaction.  Very seasoned and very successful athletes often appreciate this relationship and want their competitors to be at their best to make it more meaningful and more satisfying should they prevail (2. Emulating Gregor Staehli).  Jim’s point was that too many young athletes don’t yet appreciate this relationship and would feel happy to win, even in the absence of the top competitors, hence the expression, “winning by default.”

To illustrate the other end of the spectrum, and what he feels athletes should aspire to, he told a story from when he was a teenager and just beginning his international career as a skier.  Because he wanted to be the best, he sought out the best to learn from and at the time that meant such iconic skiers as Franz Klammer, Jean-Claude Killy and Ingemar Stenmark to name a few.  

The next part was what I found particularly extraordinary and at the time I asked him to clarify more than once.  What he did was actually go to their home towns in the off season, and literally show up at their front door unannounced.  I asked him what he would say as some unknown teenager on the front door step of one of these giants of his sport.  He told me he would explain who he was and that he wanted to be a great skier and he asked them if he could interview them and try to learn from them what it takes.

Now apparently he did this on a number of occasions with many of the top skiers of his generation and incredibly he was welcomed in and given valuable information in almost every case.  I made him stick around after the radio program for a good 45 minutes so he could tell me more stories about these incredible unannounced visits.  The one that sums up his point the best, at least in my opinion, was when he came to knock on Ingemar Stenmark’s door.  I gather the man himself answered and after hearing Jim’s explanation as to why he was there, he asked him if he had his workout clothing with him.  After indicating that he did, he was told to come around back for a workout they were just beginning.

Jim was able to participate in the session and learned several training techniques the great Swedish champion was utilizing including intervals riding unicycles of various lengths uphill through pylons to build both strength and coordination at the same time.  At the end of the training, Jim asked Stenmark very simply, “why did you help me?”  His answer, which offers great insight into the way a champion of his stature thinks and is the antithesis of ‘winning by default’, was this:

“I want you to be your best so that if I win I can say I was the best.”

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Follow-ups…

Posted in Follow-ups..., tagged on July 8, 2010 | 3 Comments »

This is a blog written by Sébastien Théberge, a former media relations manager with the Vancouver Olympic Organizing Committee.  I’m posting it here today with his permission as it is a response to the article I posted on June 22 (http://sportatitsbest.com/2010/06/22/50-money-for-amateur-athletes/).  It is an interesting perspective piece that highlights the relationship between public interest and support of our athletes.  Thanks to Mr. Théberge for allowing us to post his article.

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Our athletes and the race for sponsors

Last February, our Canadian Olympic medalists lived the moment of a lifetime: glory on Canadian soil. It is a myth to believe that they have become rich overnight. Our new heroes face a huge obstacle:  Canadian Olympic fatigue. But there is hope as the sport media world is about to change in our country.

One reason is clear: several corporations have simply emptied their sports promotion budget. Why? They came out strongly to support athletes but companies also spent more than ever because the Games were in Canada. Then came the financial crisis but those companies stuck to their financial commitments made even though marketing budgets are often the first to get the axe in the first weeks of any recession.

A huge patriotic wave unfurled across the country during the Games; a tremendous and positive force of support, marking an entire generation of Canadians. We will still talk about it twenty years from now. Has that patriotism translated into Corporate Canada warming up to invest more in our athletes?

Last year’s Tiger Woods drama has clearly cooled down the interest for large reputational sponsorship campaigns, seen as too risky and expensive. During the 2010 World Cup, the superbank Credit Agricole abandoned their sponsorship of the French national soccer team. The story of Les Bleus’ poor performance was becoming secondary to their behaviour off the field and about personality clashes.

According to Jean Gosselin, sports marketing and sponsorship expert, with whom I discussed the issue, athletes should focus on exploring the conference and speech circuit. The niche is clearly more lucrative and “has less constraints than most corporate sponsorship, which is bound by measures of return on investment and will insist on various levels of corporate or logo exposure.” Athletes or former athletes that choose to prioritize a public speaking program also bring a human dimension, a story-telling significance which should not be underestimated.

In a February 2010 article,  Mr Gosselin stated that a Canadian Olympic gold medalist a stands to earn up to 200,000$ but such an achievement is rare occurrence.

More cash in the US?

Are Canadian corporations less generous than American ones?  Mr Gosselin believes that, ”proportionally speaking, we are no less generous than our corporate friends south of the border.” Although it is indeed immediately after an Olympic victory that an athlete’s “value” is at its highest, the year leading up to an Olympic appearance offers the best “return on investment”. Some will wait until the return of winter sports and the World Cup Tours to invest in an athlete or a team’ exposure. Others will wait for 2013, the year before Sochi 2014, since most of these medalists will be back to compete in Russia.

Some smart athletes, like Kaillie Humphreys (bobsled) launched their own online donation program. In my opinion, if such program is well integrated into a well planned public relations and social media strategy, it can be surprisingly successful.

Another well-known cause of athlete underfunding in Canada: aside from the FIS World Cup (ski) in Europe, some figure skating competitions and the NHL, the vast majority of winter sports do not enjoy systematic and substantial support from the business world and even less airtime or space in the media. Incidentally, it is often discussed in the Olympic family circles that hockey takes too much space in Canada both in the news and in the advertizing budgets.

The Canadian sports media world is about to change

Recognizing that the traditional media play a critical role for such exposure, one must congratulate CTV for elevating our athletes well before the last Olympics began. I recall a meeting during which CTV presented its pre-Games and Games-time coverage and hinting at how much space was reserved for athletes and their sport and how high the priority it was for the Consortium to promote them.  They were household names by the time the Games began.

More recently, the CRTC has recently approved several new license requests for sports channels: TVA, Radio-Canada and Rogers were granted permission to operate a channel and the CBC’s Sports Plus birth delay shouldn’t last much longer.Let’s hope this increase of media space will benefit those who continue to inspire us and represent us brilliantly:  Bilodeau, Humphries, Montgomery, Saint-Gelais, Hamelin, Ricker, McIvor, Anderson, Nesbitt, Hughes, Virtue and Moir and so many more. Legends.

Sébastien Théberge

About the author

On Twitter  @SebTheberge

Reading and references:Duff Gibson’s piece on this topic here

The Globe’s Matthew Sekeres’ piece surprised some observers.

Randy Starkman, from the Toronto Star, wrote about this in his article in April 2010

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52. John Wooden

Posted in The Big Picture, tagged , , on July 5, 2010 | 3 Comments »

When John Wooden passed away last month he was referred to as the greatest coach of any sport, of all time. Pretty high praise, but the man had a record that’s pretty hard to argue with and a philosophy that’s a little off the beaten path in that it focusses on making better people as well as better athletes.  Here’s a short and sweet summary of John Wooden’s philosophies written by Brenna  Fisher.  And thanks to Adam Kreek for passing this along.

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During his coaching career at UCLA, John Wooden led the basketball team to an 88-game winning streak and 10 NCAA championship titles. But Wooden is equally famous for being a mentor and lifelong teacher, with several books published on his insights and methods for leadership. The following include some of his key strategies.

Be enthusiastic about your work. Enthusiasm is one of the cornerstones of Wooden’s “Pyramid of Success.” “Without enthusiasm, you cannot work up to your fullest ability and potential; you’re just going through the motions. And just going through the motions won’t bring you to the level of competitive greatness we seek, whether in basketball, business or life.”

Don’t get angry when people test you. “People are going to test you. But don’t back down from them on the things in which you believe, because once they take advantage of you and get away with it, they’ll keep it up.”

A famous incident involving the coach being tested involved All-American center Bill Walton, who defiantly showed up to Picture Day on the eve of the season’s first practice with a full beard, which Wooden forbade his players to have. Walton told Wooden that he didn’t have the right to tell him how to wear his hair. Wooden agreed that he didn’t have the right to tell him how to wear his hair, but he did, however, have the right to decide who would play on the team. “We’ll miss you,” he told Walton, who shaved his beard before practice the next day.

To get cooperation, you must give cooperation. “The sharing of ideas, information, creativity, responsibilities and tasks is a priority of good leadership. The only thing that is not shared is blame. A strong leader accepts blame and gives the credit (when deserved) to others.”

Don’t be afraid to fail. “If you are afraid to fail, you will never do the things you are capable of doing. If you have thoroughly prepared and are ready to give it all you’ve got, there is no shame if you fail-nothing to fear in failure. But fear of failure is what often prevents one from taking action.”

Be confident but not arrogant. “Arrogance, or elitism, is the feeling of superiority that fosters the assumption that past success will be repeated without the same hard effort that brought it about in the first place. Thus, I have never gone into a game assuming victory. All opponents have been respected, none feared. I taught those under my supervision to do the same. This reflects confidence, not arrogance. Arrogance will bring you down by your own hands.”

Pay attention to the little things. As a coach, Wooden was known for teaching his players how to put on their socks and shoes on the first day of practice. The lesson: Every detail matters.

Be loyal to yourself and to your organization. “A leader who has loyalty is the leader whose team I wish to be a part of. And so do others. Most people, the overwhelming majority of us, wish to be in an organization whose leadership cares about them, provides fairness and respect, dignity and consideration…. [Be loyal] and you will subsequently lead an organization that will not waffle in the wind when things get tough.”

Remember that success is not defined by victories. Wooden’s definition of success: “peace of mind, which is a direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you made the effort to become the best of which you are capable.”

Sources: Wooden: A Lifetime of Observations and Reflections; Wooden on Leadership; The Essential Wooden; and http://www.coachwooden.com

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