Gold Rush

What Makes an Olympic Champion?

Michael Johnson

DEDICATION

To my coach, Clyde Hart

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Introduction

1. My Quest for Gold

2. Catching Olympic Fever

3. Technique and DNA

4. Doing What It Takes to Win

5. Mental Games

6. No Shortcuts

7. The Heat of Battle

8. Living and Competing in the Limelight

9. Coaches, Heroes and Mentors

Conclusion

Picture Section

Searchable Terms

Acknowledgements

Copyright

About the Publisher

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank the following people who have helped to make this book possible. First, my wife Armine for all of her support and understanding, and my son Sebastian, who inspires me with his love for reading and his own dream of becoming a writer; my agent Sarah Wooldridge at IMG, whose tireless search for the right publisher and her belief in my ability to write an insightful and informative book has resulted in Gold Rush; Jonathan Taylor for understanding my vision for this book and helping to shape that vision; and Linden Gross, my writing coach, who kept me on task and whose energy and excitement about the project were crucial in getting me to the finish line. Thanks to Steve Burdett and Nick Canham at HarperCollins for picking up the ball after the project had started. Thanks also to Nadia Comaneci, Chris Hoy, Rebecca Adlington, Usain Bolt, Sally Gunnell, Sir Steve Redgrave, Mark Spitz, Lord Sebastian Coe, Ian Thorpe, Cathy Freeman, Dame Tanni Grey-Thompson, Jackie Joyner-Kersee and Daley Thompson for sharing wonderful stories of success, failure, lessons learned and, perhaps most importantly, revealing their personal weaknesses and vulnerabilities.

I would be remiss if I didn’t take this time to also thank the people who were instrumental in my own career success. Writing this book brought back many fond memories of challenges, wins, losses and very valuable life lessons learned. My coach Clyde Hart was the only coach I could ever have had. Clyde’s approach to coaching as a teacher was a perfect match for my approach to training and competing. I was always trying to learn more about myself as an athlete and Coach taught me everything he knew until the point that we started to learn together. He remains a friend, a coach and a role model. Thanks to my manager and agent, Brad Hunt, who helped me during my career to capitalise on the opportunities that my success on the track afforded me. Thanks to my parents Paul and Ruby, my brother Paul Jr, my sisters Regina, Cheryl and Deidre and our friend Brenda Harris for all of their support and for being the ultimate travelling fan club, following me around the globe and being there for me during all times, good and bad.

And finally, thanks to all of my fans around the world who followed and supported my athletics career over 11 years, and those fans who follow me now as a television pundit and encourage me to continue to share a frank and straightforward perspective on sport.

INTRODUCTION

From the moment the UK contingent unveiled its deceptively simple preview of the 2012 Games during the closing ceremony of the 2008 Games in Beijing, it was clear that this would be Britain’s greatest sporting occasion in living memory. London’s Games will provide a total contrast to the 2008 Games. Despite the incredible spectacle that Beijing put on during its opening and closing ceremonies, the Games themselves lacked the festive, fun and exciting atmosphere that everyone associates with the Olympics. This time around, we’re going to have a celebration of the Olympic spirit and of the athletes, who will have the chance of a lifetime to achieve the apex of their sporting careers.

As somewhat of an honorary Brit, I will be rooting for those athletes from the UK who will have to contend with the monstrous pressure of expectation from a home crowd feverishly anticipating a national gold rush.

Will the more than 500 men and women competing under the Union Jack be able to deliver? British athletes in some sports, like cycling, are poised to capitalise on prior success and the support of Queen and country. But Olympic gold could prove a tall order for many others because the British system of developing athletes, at one time one of the best in the world, has fallen behind over the last couple of decades. And while there have been efforts to get back to where they once were, some of the efforts, in athletics for example, could have been implemented a little too late to have a real effect on the medal haul in London.

On the other hand, this is the Olympic Games, where anything can happen. Even better, this Olympic competition is being held in the UK. A home Olympics is a great and rare opportunity for any athlete. Competing in the Olympics on home soil, if managed properly, can prove competitively advantageous. But capitalising on those advantages isn’t easy. This is the toughest sports competition in the world, where the best athletes in the world challenge each other and themselves. As if that weren’t enough pressure, this pinnacle of athletic competition only takes place every four years. If successful, your name will be in the history books for ever, and there is no sporting event with a richer history than the Olympic Games. Miss your opportunity, on the other hand, and you may never get another.

Whether you’ll succeed or fail, no one knows. But one thing is certain: everyone will be watching. And even as Olympic stars emerge during the London 2012 Games, other future Olympic champions will catch the dream.

My first experience of seeing an Olympics was the 1984 Games in Los Angeles. It was exciting to watch, but I honestly had no idea that four years later I would be trying out for the US Olympic team, eight years later I would compete in my first Olympics, and 12 years later I would be making Olympic history as the Games returned to the US in Atlanta. My journey through those 12 years included a hell of a lot of fun, a lot of pain, some incredibly rewarding achievements, some major setbacks, and memories that will last the rest of my life. In fact, my entire life is pretty much defined by the events of those 12 years from 1984 to 1996.

This book is not just about my journey but about the journey of many Olympic icons, past and present. You will hear about all of our stories. How we got our start in our respective sports, and our unique journeys to Olympic success. Our failures, our successes and, most importantly, in our own words, our own opinions of how and why we were successful in becoming Olympic champions – in many cases more than once.

Gold Rush attempts to explain what it takes to achieve this very rare level of success, investigating the similarities in the approaches taken by each of the champions, and in the make-up of the champions themselves, as well as the differences between them and their approaches. After looking back at my own road to success and then interviewing more than a dozen Olympic champions to hear their stories and find out more about their road to success, I discovered that the similarities far outweighed the differences. I also confirmed something that I have always felt: that most fans aren’t fully aware of the really significant and fine details about their Olympic heroes that make them special. Many Olympic fans have a good 30,000-foot view understanding of Olympic athletes, what makes them tick, and how they achieve such amazing success. This book gets right down to a face-to-face level with Olympic success through the stories told to me – one Olympic champion having a frank, unguarded, casual conversation with another Olympic champion.

I already knew many of these athletes before I interviewed them, and in some cases, as with Seb Coe and Cathy Freeman, they have been long-time friends of mine and we have talked about everything but our Olympic success. So it was truly an enlightening experience for me to talk with these great champions and compare notes not only about our individual Olympic journeys but about what we believe is required for ourselves or anyone else to be successful at the Olympic level. A lot of what I believed already was confirmed from talking with these champions, but I also learned about different approaches from my own that proved successful.

I have always believed that I could put together a pretty good manual for Olympic success. But after talking with so many different Olympic champions who had to overcome multiple different obstacles and challenges en route to their Olympic success, I gained new insight into the mental and physical dedication required to get there.

So as the anticipation of the 2012 Olympic Games rises to fever pitch, let’s look at just what it takes to build an Olympic champion.

1.
MY QUEST FOR GOLD

The Olympic Games are the ultimate in most sports. It’s certainly the pinnacle of a track and field career. And it was the one prize I hadn’t captured. I didn’t want my career to be summarised as: Greatest runner in the 200 and 400 metres ever, but never won an Olympic gold medal.

I couldn’t relax until I had won Olympic gold. But that’s a lot easier said than done. I know from experience how you can be totally ready, go into the Olympics undefeated and clearly the best in the field, and still not win. I had gone from being unranked in the world of track and field, which meant that I was not one of the ten best in the world in my events, to being number one in both the 200-and 400-metre sprints. I’d beaten all the best people in the world in both and had gone undefeated that season. That was an accomplishment that had never been done before, and it garnered me the Men’s Track & Field Athlete of the Year award for 1990. You can’t do better than that.

Two years later, I made the Olympic team. In the four weeks leading up to the Olympics, I prepared for what I knew would be the biggest competition of my life. I focused on the athletes I would be competing against, and worked with my team on how I would need to run the race. Then I prepared to deliver my best.

Not until the opening ceremonies did it really hit me that I was an Olympian. As I looked around at the greatest gathering of athletes representing the best from every nation, I realised even more deeply just how special the Olympics are. This historic competition artfully melds excellence and participation. So even if a country’s top bobsledders, for example, don’t begin to measure up to the rest of the elite bobsledders in the field, they still get to compete.

As we stood in the Barcelona stadium after marching in as a team, it got really quiet. Then an archer lit his bow with the Olympic flame, which had been carried all around the world by thousands of people during the torch relay, aimed for a cauldron high at the top of the stadium and let go. The flaming arrow soared through the air, landed in the cauldron and lit the Olympic flame, which would burn for the duration of the Games. It was one of the most amazing things I had ever seen.

That would be the last time I would be caught up in the pageantry of the 1992 Olympics. As an athlete, it’s not enough just being an Olympian and taking part. You want to succeed and deliver your best performance. For some athletes that might mean winning Olympic gold. For others, it could mean making it to the finals. For some, just delivering the best possible performance on that day is enough. But I was an athlete who was a world champion. I had proven that I could be an Olympic champion. Now I had to deliver.

I was the favourite to win the 200 metres. During the US Olympic trials, which I won, I had missed the world record by a mere .07 seconds. I knew that all I had to do was not screw up the race (which I hardly ever did), execute the right strategy (which I did most of the time), train hard and be prepared (which I always did and I had done this time), and beat a field of competitors who had never beaten me before.

In short, the only way I could lose the gold medal was if I made a mistake or something happened to me. Something did happen.

BLINDSIDED

I had scheduled my last tune-up race in Salamanca, Spain, for exactly two weeks before I would start competing in Barcelona. The night before the race, my agent and manager Brad Hunt and I went to dinner with a Spanish journalist Brad knew from university who was living in Madrid and had come to Salamanca to see Brad and interview me. He suggested a small Spanish restaurant just off the main square. I remember sitting there enjoying a very good traditional Spanish paella. We had started the meal with some delicious Spanish ham and olives. As I sat there on that temperate summer night, I remember looking at the ham from which they had carved our appetiser hanging near one of the open front doors which extended from one end of the restaurant to the other, all open. I thought, ‘That might not be the most sanitary situation, with cars kicking up dust as they fly up and down the road. This would probably not be allowed in the US.’ Just as quickly, I decided that we have too many laws and rules in America, and that I shouldn’t worry about it. We even returned there for dinner the following night to celebrate my win. I had wanted to have a really good final tune-up race and I had gotten exactly that. Despite a lack of real competition, I ran 19.91 seconds.

As it turns out, my concern about the restaurant’s lackadaisical attitude to hygiene was justified. By the time we reached Madrid airport the next day I was vomiting. I got on the plane and for the next eight hours I was either vomiting, manning the bathroom or sleeping. I felt exhausted even though I had had a full night’s rest. Over the next few days I would seem to be getting better only to see the vomiting and upset stomach return. Eventually, after about five days of this, my lower stomach and intestinal problems finally cleared up.

FAULTY ASSUMPTIONS

Luckily, my condition hadn’t really affected my training, so I wasn’t concerned. However, as I was getting dressed on the day I was leaving for Barcelona, I noticed that a pair of pants that had previously fitted me perfectly felt a bit large in the waist. ‘That’s strange,’ I thought. But I didn’t really worry about it. I figured I probably had lost a little weight because I hadn’t really been eating that much the last few days. No big deal.

When I arrived in Barcelona I got on the scales in the training room. At that point in my career my weight was pretty steady at about 168 pounds, but the scales read 161 pounds. That definitely concerned me. Still, my training was going well, so I felt there was no need to assume that this would affect my performance. So I didn’t mention the weight loss to my coach, Clyde Hart, or anyone else. The last thing I wanted at that point was for people around me to start worrying unnecessarily.

The first round of the 200 metres was scheduled for the morning, and the quarter-final would be held later that same day in the evening. I was excited when I woke up the morning of the first round. It was finally race time in my first Olympics and I was the favourite. I had only lost one 200-metre race over the last two years and since my professional career started. I had won the US Olympic trials, a race in which six of the best 200-metre runners in the world had competed. Because each country can only enter three athletes in each event, three of the best 200-metre runners in the world were not competing in Barcelona. I just had to do what I had been doing to get to this point and I would be the Olympic champion.

I went to the Olympic stadium and went through my normal routine to warm up for the first round. After having been in Barcelona for almost a week, I just wanted to get started. When I began to set my starting blocks for the race, I didn’t think any more about the fact that I was at the Olympics or that my parents and brother and sisters were all in the stands or what was at stake. As the number one ranked 200-metre runner in the world for the previous two years, and the reigning world champion, I was certainly favoured not just to advance to the quarter-finals but basically to be able to jog through this first-round race and win with ease. Even so, I was all business.

I always approached my first-round races that way, even though I didn’t have to since the races are seeded, with the top athletes with the best times coming into the race placed into separate heats. This is done to make sure the top competitors meet in a showdown in the final instead of running against one another in the early rounds. While the competition wasn’t stiff, I always chose to use the early rounds to work on different parts of my race. Since my start was the weakest part of my race, I always tried to get out of the blocks with the most explosive start that I could. Then I’d go through the drive phase and the first 50 to 80 metres as if it were a final before relaxing during the remainder of the race in order to conserve energy for the next rounds.

So when the gun went off, I exploded out of my blocks, which were in the middle of the track in lane four. With the exception of Patrick Stephens, a pretty good sprinter from Belgium, I wasn’t familiar with anyone else in the race. Although most were the best their country had to offer, they were not truly world-class athletes competing on the international circuit. After I exploded from the blocks with my head still down in the drive phase where I couldn’t see any of my competitors, I felt okay but not great.

After driving through the first 20 metres, I came out of the drive phase and started to raise my head – and I was not where I expected to be. In my previous championship first-round races, by the time I raised my head I would have already made up the stagger on the athlete outside of me or even passed him. But I had not made up any of the stagger. I also noticed that I didn’t really feel that quick or strong, so I immediately started to put in more effort and press. I got a little response from this effort, but at the mid-point of the race I was not leading, but rather was even with Stevens. Not being able to shake them felt very strange, scary and uncomfortable. I pressed more and was able to get ahead of him and finish first.

I’d won my heat but I felt horrible. I actually felt like I was running in someone else’s body. I usually felt extremely fast and very strong, and certainly in control of the race. But on this day I felt that regardless of my effort I hadn’t been able to get far enough ahead of the competition.

As I walked off the track to the changing area to take off my spikes and put my warm-up clothes back on, I looked at a television screen that was showing the replay. I wanted to see what I looked like, because I knew I didn’t feel good. As I watched the replay I saw that I had struggled the entire way. I didn’t look fast or strong, and I certainly wasn’t controlling the race.

Now I was really concerned. All at once it hit me and my mind began rewinding through the last two weeks: the scales, my pants not fitting, the vomiting, and all the way back to the initial feeling of sickness in the car driving from Salamanca to Madrid. ‘But why have I felt so good in training this past week?’ I wondered.

I answered my own question almost as soon as I asked it. In the final week before a major competition you’re in what’s called a ‘taper’, where you no longer have the heavy workload and you’re now allowing your body to recover and prepare to be at its best for the competition. So the training focus is not on getting stronger or more powerful, the focus is on technique. My training over the last week had been focused on my start and speed. So I never realised that my strength and speed endurance had diminished dramatically during that time.

I met up with Coach after the race. Although we both knew what was happening, Coach always puts a positive spin on things. ‘Maybe it’s not as bad as it seems,’ he said. ‘Maybe you just needed to get that one race in to get some rust off. Besides, you’re not accustomed to running so early in the morning.’ As much as we both wanted to believe his words, we both knew that was in all likelihood not the case.

OUT OF MY CONTROL

I returned to my hotel to rest before the quarter-final, scheduled for later that evening. While I sat in my room that afternoon thinking about what had happened in the first-round race, part of me was really ready to go out and run the next round in order to compete like I normally do. But part of me was afraid to go back out there and run a sub-standard race, feeling so helpless and out of control.

When we got back out to the track that evening, I tried to approach my warm-up as if everything was fine and normal. But it wasn’t and I was worried. When the race started, I executed the only way I knew how, the same as I always had. I sprang aggressively out of the blocks and drove for the first 20 metres. This was the quarter-final, 32 of the best athletes in the world, so the level of competition was higher than in the preliminary round. When I lifted my head coming out of the drive phase I was behind. I was able to get myself back into the race but only managed to finish second.

I had advanced to the semi-finals, but at this point I was well off the mark and there was no way I could win gold against the best in the world in this type of condition. When I lined up for the semi-final the following day, I knew there was a chance I might not even qualify for the final. Still, the quarter-final had been a better race than the preliminary race, so maybe I could improve in the semi-final and the final.

I set out to do my best, but my best in the semi-final was sixth place. Only the top four advance to the final, so my Olympic dream was over.

After the semi-final I had to go and face the media in a press conference and explain why I wasn’t competing at the level I had shown over the last two years, when I had been the most dominant athlete in the entire sport. As tough as it was, I put on a stoic face and explained everything. Inside, however, I seethed with anger. I couldn’t believe that this had happened to me. I wondered what it meant for my future. For the last three years I had been one of the top athletes in my sport, demanding the highest appearance fee, rewarded with the most lucrative endorsement portfolio, and commanding respect in the sport as one of its biggest stars. What would it be like not being number one?

When I returned to my hotel after the press conference, Coach, my parents, my brother and my sisters were there waiting for me. They all hugged me and told me they loved me. ‘Thanks for coming,’ I told them. ‘It means a lot to me, but I just want to be alone.’ I had no sooner reached my room when there was a knock on my door. I opened it to find my father. If it had been anyone else I probably would have asked them to please let me be alone. But my father has always been my hero and I have always admired him. While he’s never been an emotional man or one who shows a lot of his feelings, he always could bring some calm to a situation and say the right thing at the right time to me. So I felt comfortable with him being there with me at that moment.

‘Everyone is very proud of you,’ he said. ‘I know this is tough for you, but I want you to be okay.’ I could tell he was really concerned about me. I said, ‘I’ll be okay.’ And as difficult as the days following that semi-final wound up being, I was.

SECOND CHANCE FOR MY FIRST MEDAL

Now, four years later, I had my chance not only to medal in the Olympics but to make Olympic history. Brad and I had convinced the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) to juggle the Olympic schedule so that I could compete in both the 200-and 400-metre sprints. No male athlete had ever attempted to run both.

After six years of intensive training and competitive dominance, I was ready. More than ready. Before the Olympics as usual I’d done my training in Waco, Texas, where my coach Clyde Hart was still the head track coach for Baylor University. I trained there just about every day. During the final week, instead of pushing hard, we focused on the technical elements of the race. We wanted to let my body rest so that it would be fresh for competition. Just days before a competition all of the work has been done, and if it hasn’t it’s too late to make up the deficiency.

That week I worked on my start out of the blocks, which was never as good as it should have been or as I wanted it to be. The workout, which I had done many times before, was also designed to keep my speed up and to keep me technically sharp. After my warm-up for this particular workout, Coach asked me if I wanted to put on my spikes for the 200-metre portion of the workout. Normally I would definitely wear lightweight spikes for a session requiring me to hit those kinds of times, but this time I decided to wait until we did the starts, even though wearing flats (regular running shoes) would be a disadvantage.

We had a timing system called ‘the beeper’, which would sound every few seconds during our training sessions to help me ascertain whether I was on the pace the session required, and also whether each interval run was accurate. Just like a metronome that helps musicians develop a rhythm with the music, the beeper helped me accurately measure my speed, so I could pace myself correctly and not go too fast or too slowly. This was critical, since a workout session that calls for three 200-metre sprints to be run in 23 seconds is more effective if each run is actually 23 seconds as opposed to one being 21 seconds, one being 25 and one being 23.

For 15 years I’d heard the beeper, which was wired into the Baylor University track’s loudspeakers. I had come to rely on it so much as an essential part of my training that I had my own portable beeper made so that I could take it on the road when I trained away from Waco.

On this particular day I started my first 200-metre run with the beeper set for a 23-second run. I took off. At the 50-metre cone I noticed that I was a little ahead of the beeper. Even so, I maintained my pace. I expected that I would be about the same amount ahead at the second cone, but I was a bit more ahead. I relaxed a little to meet the 23-second goal, but came through the third cone even further ahead. At this point, even though I usually did exactly what Coach’s workout called for when it came to times, I decided not to slow down.

I crossed the finish line figuring that I would be about one second ahead and started to count. ‘One thousand one.’ No beep. ‘One thousand –’ The beep finally sounded. I was 1.5 seconds fast. 21.5. Not an amazing time, given that I had set the world record a month earlier at 19.66 seconds, but to have done it in a training run, during which I’d tried to relax to get back to 23 pace for the last two thirds of the interval, confirmed that I was in the best competitive shape of my life.

After I finished the run, I saw Coach in the middle of the infield with his stopwatch. He didn’t say anything. Normally he would tell me to get back on pace, but this time he remained silent. I walked and kept moving as I always did during the 90 seconds between intervals.

‘Thirty seconds,’ Coach announced, indicating that one minute had passed and I had just 30 more seconds of rest so I should start moving back towards the starting line. Ninety seconds rest means 90 seconds of rest. Not 100 seconds, not two minutes, but 90 seconds of rest. So you don’t start walking to the starting line at 90 seconds. You start running at 90 seconds.

I walked to the starting line and got into start position. The beeper went off and I took off running. I know from experience that the first 50 metres starting from a standing start takes more effort than the other three splits between the other cones, since those segments are from a running start. So normally you start with a little more effort, then settle into a pace and try to relax and maintain it. Since I had run ahead of pace on the first segment of the first interval, I adjusted down and didn’t start as aggressively. I passed the first cone at 50 metres. The beeper didn’t sound until half a second later. Exactly the same as last time.

‘Adjust down,’ I thought. However, it’s mentally tiring to keep making adjustments during the training session intervals, so I decided to maintain my pace. Besides, I was excited about the challenge of maintaining that pace and that distance ahead of the pace not only for the remainder of that interval but for the third one as well. I finished with about the same time as my previous training intervals – 1.5 seconds ahead by my count.

I looked over at Coach and he said nothing again. I felt really good. I realised I was fitter than I had ever been, because although the final interval was coming up in less than 90 seconds, I knew I could run it in 20 seconds if I wanted to. I wouldn’t, since that would be full speed and we never run full speed in training. But the capacity was there.

I started the final 200 and ran just under full effort after having already completed two intervals in the last five minutes. I was well ahead of the first cone when the beeper went off, and it felt effortless. The gap grew at 100 and 150. When I reached the cone at 200 metres, I was 2.5 seconds ahead by my count. That would be 21.5 on the first interval, just under 21.5 on the second and 20.5 on the third.

I started to walk around the track. Coach would normally walk over to join me for the 200 metres back to the starting line side of the track, during which we would talk about how I felt and he would tell me my exact times. This time he didn’t. Instead, he walked into the office at the track under the stands. By the time I reached the other side of the track, Coach was walking out of the office, his training log in hand. ‘Start your cool down,’ he said. Then he showed me the stopwatch. The actual times were 21.4, 21.2 and 20.1. ‘And you weren’t wearing spikes,’ he said.

Coach and I are a lot alike. We expect the best effort, and if that effort is your best, then even if it is as impressive as what I’d just done there’s no reason to get all giddy and celebrate. Our attitude was that I had done what I was capable of, so that’s what we should have expected. I work with one athlete now who always tells me, when I ask him how training is going, that he and his coach feel they are ahead of schedule. To me that means your schedule is wrong and you need to adjust it! Still, my coach and I both agreed that my accomplishment that day confirmed that I was ready to do something really special in Atlanta the following week. ‘The hay is in the barn,’ he said. ‘We’re ready.’

Even so, I sure wasn’t going to assume that I would medal. As I’d learned in 1992, I could do everything right and still not win Olympic gold or any other colour. Something out of my control could happen again. Or I could screw it up myself this time.

TIME TO MAKE IT HAPPEN

On the morning of the 400 metres final, having successfully gotten through and winning the first three rounds over the prior three days, I woke up ready to win my first individual Olympic gold medal. I was the overwhelming favourite. Even though I’d be racing against top competitors, including my US team-mate Alvin Harrison, two Jamaicans – Roxbert Martin and Davian Clarke – and Great Britain’s Roger Black, who had also been running well, everyone expected me to win.

I hadn’t lost a 400-metre race since I was in college over six years ago. Still, I never took my competition for granted. I didn’t believe that any of the athletes in the final could beat me, but I was always aware that there’s more to winning a race than being better than the competition. To win races you have to execute, and one little mistake can cost you a race. If something went wrong in this one, would I even be able to race in another four years when the Olympics rolled around again?

On race day I ordered breakfast through room service and began to lay out my uniform, competition number, socks, spikes, music player, headphones, and everything else I would need at the track. Then I sat in my room for the rest of the day visualising almost every scenario that could possibly happen in that final and devising a plan for what I would do in each scenario.

Although we had travelled to the track from the hotel three times prior to the 400 metres final and had gotten the routine down, I wanted to get to the track early, as much to ensure that I was there in plenty of time as to get out of the room. Even though I had always hated waiting all day for a race because I was so ready to run, I usually didn’t allow myself to leave my room until it was time to go to the track. But this time heading out early gave me the illusion that I could make race time come quicker.

Finally it was time. I finished my warm-up and prepared to report to the ‘call room’, a holding room where all athletes in the race are required to report and wait together just before being taken out to the track for the start of the race. Just before walking over, Coach pulled me aside and we prayed together as we had done since I was in college. I had heard other athletes ask God to let them win, which I thought was ridiculous. Coach, however, simply asked God to keep me healthy and, if it was His will, to allow me to run at my best. ‘God blessed me with this talent,’ I thought as the prayer ended. ‘His job is done, and it’s up to me and me alone to win this race.’

Coach and I had debated about whether to go for a fast race and possibly a world record in the 400 metres final if I was winning at the halfway point, or to run conservatively since after just a day of rest I had to be ready to run the 200-metre races. The 200 metres would be the more difficult challenge, not only because the competition was tougher but also because it would come after four days of gruelling 400-metre races. ‘The decision is yours,’ Coach said before I got on the bus that would take us from the practice field to the Olympic stadium five minutes away. I ran through both options in my head and thought, ‘Stick to the plan. Don’t get distracted with the opportunity to break a world record. There will be plenty of time for that. Win an individual gold medal.’

GOLD MEDAL, GOLD SHOES

I had gotten used to the overwhelming flickers of cameras and the applause each time I walked into the stadium. The attention arose not because I had become the face of the 1996 Olympic Games or because I had announced that I would make history. The attention derived from my decision to wear bright, shiny, gold track spikes, designed for me by Nike. The shoes were unlike anything ever made for a track athlete. The technology and design that went into making these shoes and the time spent, over two years, working on them to make them perfect was incredible. The fans and the media, however, focused on the fact that they were gold and looked like nothing anyone had ever seen before. One magazine actually did an entire story just on those shoes, which could be seen from the top of the Olympic stadium. Opting for gold shoes could have been considered downright cocky, but I was confident and never doubted my ability to deliver gold medals to match my shimmering footwear.

The gold shoes project with Nike had actually started as a result of Nike sprint spikes falling behind those of companies like Mizuno in terms of quality, technology and performance. The last straw had come during the 1993 World Championships when the Nike sprint shoe of 400 metres Olympic gold medallist Quincy Watts came apart in the final 100 metres of the race. He placed fourth in the race and blamed his damaged Nike shoe, which he showed to the world on camera in his post-race interview.

At that point Nike had been making my shoes for three years. Basically they had shoes available to anyone to purchase; Nike athletes would choose from that line of shoes and Nike would make them in whatever colours an athlete wanted, adding their name or any other desired graphic on the shoe. So the customisation of the shoe was purely aesthetic. I had used the same Nike model – a very lightweight shoe with a lot of flexibility that Nike had been making since the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics – from the time I was in university. By 1990, however, Nike had stopped making this shoe and had moved on to much more rigid shoes that were designed to help the athlete’s foot strike and recover in a much more efficient way that required less effort. But these shoes were heavy and stiff. I preferred something that would work with my foot and the track.

Although they were no longer selling the shoe I liked, Nike had taken all of the plates (which are the bottom part of the shoe that actually holds the spikes) that they had left in my size and held them in order to make the shoe just for me. Then, at the beginning of 1995, they approached me about a project to highlight the fact that they had overhauled Nike sprint shoes. In our first meeting about the project, they asked me what I liked about my current shoe and why I liked those attributes. ‘What would you want in a shoe if you could have anything you wanted with no limitations?’ they asked. After I answered, they set out to deliver just that.

Throughout the two-year process the focus was on developing something that would not only be unique to me but would help me perform better by being based on my specific needs, given my body mechanics and the events that I competed in. At one 200-metre race Nike set up high-speed cameras all around the track that were focused on my feet from start to finish. The cameras allowed us to view the actions of my feet during a competition at 1,000 frames per second. This allowed us to really understand the movements of my feet and how the shoe interacted with my foot and the track. We found that the interaction was different on the bend from what it was on the straight. We found that it was different for the left foot versus the right foot. We found that it was different for the 200 metres versus the 400 metres. So we accommodated for all those particulars and developed one pair of shoes for the 200 metres and a different pair for the 400 metres. In both pairs of race shoes, the left shoe differed from the right.

Over that two-year period I would meet with a team of shoe designers about once every month. As we got closer to the 1996 season we met even more frequently. They would come to the track with huge bags of prototypes, using all different kinds of materials, for me to try during training sessions. I would give them feedback and they would make adjustments.

Once we finally settled on a material, the project became really fun. With Nike having invested so much time, money and resources to develop a one-of-a-kind, revolutionary sprint spike, it was a given that the shoe that would make its début on the most popular athlete in the sport as he attempted to make history in the Olympic Games, in front of the biggest consumer market in the world, must look cool, different and special. Nike had been known for years for its marketing mastery and branding genius, and now I got to be part of their decision-making process.

We considered a number of looks, including a clear shoe that made it look like I was wearing no shoes at all. One of the looks we narrowed down to was a reflective, mirror-like finish. Up close it was very shiny and looked really cool. We all liked it. ‘It’s so bright that it’ll stand out and be visible even to people sitting high in the stadium,’ one person said enthusiastically.

As I sat in the meeting and thought about that I asked, ‘Do you guys think it might look silver?’ After silent thought and a minimum of debate, we agreed that a shoe that looked silver would be a problem, given our objective.

‘They should be gold,’ I thought to myself. Then Tobie Hatfield, a brilliant shoe designer who was the lead on the project and who remains a very good friend of mine today, looked at me and said, ‘What do you think about gold?’

I have never been a flashy person. I never wore a lot of jewellery, only a simple gold necklace which I bought with one of my first cheques after I started my professional career. I wore that necklace as something of a good luck charm during every single race in my career and stopped wearing it after I retired. And I also wore a simple gold hoop earring when running the 200 metres and a simple diamond stud when running the 400 metres. So while I don’t think anyone would describe me as flashy, they wouldn’t characterise my dress or my image as boring or drab. They both pretty much follow my personality. I’m confident but not brash. And while I like to perform efficiently and effectively, that certainly doesn’t mean that I’m conservative, either in my running or in my style.

The Nike design team left the meeting, saying that they would return in a month or so with a gold version of the shoe. I never thought once during that time that the shoes would get as much attention as they did or that people would remember them decades later. I never looked at them as a statement; nor did I think even once about the consequence of losing while wearing gold shoes. Failing to capitalise on the amazing opportunity to make Olympic history at home would far overshadow any embarrassment over wearing gold shoes during that attempt. The big question was not whether the shoes’ aesthetics would make history, but whether I would. I was about to find out.

RUNNING MY RACE

At ten minutes to the scheduled start time I went through my normal routine, setting my starting blocks and doing one practice start. That was all that was needed. In the 400 metres the start out of the blocks is not as important as in the 200 metres. Because of its greater length there are lots of decisions that have to be made during the race. The critical objective is to limit or if possible eliminate any mistakes. So, after my one practice start, I sat on the box indicating my lane number behind my blocks and ran though the race again in my mind as I waited.

As I sat there waiting for the start, I took the opportunity to look into the stands to get a sense of the atmosphere. The stadium was full, and it made me think for a brief moment about the fact that I was about to win my first Olympic gold medal. That, of course, made me think, ‘In order to do that, you can’t make any mistakes.’ So I turned my attention away from the crowd and back to the race, which was about to start.

The gun went off and I started to execute my race strategy, getting up to race pace as quickly as possible with a good, fast start. The first phase of the race went really well – I made no mistakes and nothing unexpected happened. Feeling comfortable on the back stretch, I tried to relax even more. I focused on Davian Clarke, two lanes outside of me in lane six, because he was normally a fast starter. He didn’t seem to be taking much out of the gap between himself and Ibrahim Ismail Muftah of Qatar outside of him. That signalled to me that the athletes outside of me were not running very fast. Then I started to try to get a feel for where Roger Black was behind me. I couldn’t look backwards since that would throw me off my own pace, so I started trying to see if I could feel his presence. When I did, I realised that I really wasn’t running as fast as I wanted to and I might be a bit off my desired pace.

Normally I would make up the time in the 200 to 300 phase by running harder than normal, but I knew I was in really good shape and I really hadn’t felt any fatigue at all at this point. So I adjusted immediately and at about 180 metres started to run at the speed and effort that I would normally move up to at 200 metres. I also decided to really double down on this strategy, and run even faster in this phase than originally planned. I passed the Jamaican Roxbert Martin, then his compatriot Davian Clarke. Ibrahim Ismail Muftah in lane seven dropped out of the race at about 275 metres. As I went around the curve I could only see Iwan Thomas from Great Britain out in lane eight. When I came out of the curve and out of the third phase of the race and went into the final phase with 100 metres to go, I was far ahead of the rest of the field. I knew that I would win this race big.

I continued to sprint down the track just trying to maintain my technique. Normally with 75 or so metres to go, a little bit of fatigue starts to set in. I never felt the least bit tired that day. Since I knew I was going to win the race for sure, I decided to go for the world record of 43.29. I gave it everything I had, crossed the finish line and immediately looked at the clock – 43.49 seconds, my third fastest time ever but still two tenths off the world record. I knew exactly where I had lost it. In the second phase from 75 metres to 150 metres I had relaxed far too much and I knew it.

I thought about that for a second, then realised I had accomplished what I wanted. I had won. I was the Olympic gold medallist for the 400 metres. I no longer had to fear finishing my career as one of the greatest sprinters never to win an individual Olympic gold medal. That brought a smile to my face. I turned around and saw Roger Black, from Great Britain, for whom I’d always had a lot of respect. The look on his face told me he had won the silver medal. We shook hands and congratulated one another.

On my victory lap I started thinking about the 200 metres. I wasn’t worried about how I would hold up. ‘I could go out right now and run the first round of the 200 metres,’ I told the press during my post-race interview. I wasn’t exaggerating. I felt that good.

Before the medal ceremony, I was still thinking about the 200 metres as I walked around the holding room. The 400 metres had seemed like a formality, something I had to do before I could get to the 200 metres and make history by becoming the first man to win both in an Olympics. Then Roger came in, his excitement evident. When I mentioned the 200 metres, he said, ‘Michael, savour this moment. This is special and you’ll want to remember this for the rest of your life.’

He was right. As we walked to the podium, I thought about my parents and brother and sisters in the stands and how much they had knowingly and in some cases unwittingly supported me. I was the youngest, and my three sisters and my brother would always chase me around and tease me. I had to get fast!

I turned and saw my family in the stands waving at me. As I stood on the top of the podium, Roger’s words crossed my mind again. I looked at the stadium and thought about the fact that I was in Atlanta, in my own country, about to receive my first individual Olympic gold medal. After the officials hung the gold medal around my neck and the US national anthem started to play, I kept thinking about the medal I had just received, where I was and what I had just accomplished. And though I try to be in control and private at all times, I allowed myself to let go and feel the joy, the pride and the relief. That’s when I started to cry. I knew that everyone in that stadium and watching me on television could see me, but I didn’t care.

I celebrated with my family and friends at a restaurant that night, but couldn’t really enjoy the occasion because I knew I wasn’t finished. I had the 200 metres coming up and my competitors were certainly not out partying less than two days before the start of an Olympic competition. So I returned to my hotel and climbed into bed.

TRYING TO MAKE HISTORY

After a day of rest, I awoke really early because I had a morning start time for the first round of the 200 metres. I liked morning start times because I didn’t have to wait around all day. The quarter-finals would be later that evening. I also liked the idea of getting two races done in one day. Both races went very smoothly. As always, I used them to work on my start and the first 60 metres of the race, during which I tried to make up the stagger on each of the athletes outside of me as quickly as possible as we went around the curve.

The following evening, after winning both rounds the day before, it was time to run the semi-final and final. Normally the semi-final is held in the morning or early afternoon and the final much later in the evening. Instead, we would have less than two hours between the races. Regardless, this would be the day when I would either succeed or fail at what I had set out to do.

The short interval between the races challenged all the competitors in terms of what kind of warm-up to do. On our way out to the warm-up track to get ready for the semi-final, Coach said that he had thought a lot about it and decided it would be best if we went back over to the warm-up track after the semi-final, rest for half an hour, then do a modified warm-up of about 50 per cent of what we would normally do. He felt that in view of this awkward and unfamiliar situation it would be best to stick to our pre-race routine as much as possible. The last thing we wanted during the biggest event of our lives was to create a new pre-race routine even in the face of such unusual circumstances. The decision was a brilliant coaching move.

The semi-final went well. When I came out of the curve far ahead, I decided to slow down and conserve my energy for the final. With 75 metres to go in the semi-final of the Olympics, I was so far ahead I could have stopped running and still win. So that’s exactly what I did.

Before the final, I lay on my massage therapist’s table for half an hour, running the race over and over and over in my mind. Coach went to see how the lanes had been allocated. Upon his return I tried to ascertain from his face what lane I had drawn. The preference was lane four or five. Coach didn’t show any emotion. I think he didn’t really care which lane I got because he knew I could win from any lane, but I was intent on running the fastest possible time and wanted every advantage I could get.

Since the 200 is such a short race, I wasn’t as concerned about making an error as I had been in the 400. My main concern was trying to run as fast as I possibly could. Lane five, with its gentler curve than three or four, would be perfect. In addition, it would give me the opportunity to have at least one of the faster qualifiers outside of me in lane six as a rabbit. Instead of lane five, however, I drew lane three. Not ideal, but not as bad as it could have been. Besides, Frankie Fredericks from Namibia, a friend and someone for whom I have tremendous respect, Ato Boldon from Trinidad, and the Cuban Ivan Garcia, who was an incredibly quick starter, would all be in the lanes outside of me. That meant three good rabbits!

I put on my headphones, which I always used when I first arrived at the warm-up track to help me get into my own zone and focus, and to minimise distractions. Although I have always enjoyed a wide range of music from jazz to rap, 2Pac was one of my favourite artists. For the 400, I would always listen to some up-tempo R&B; Dangelo was a favourite. But for the 200 I liked to get into a more forceful mode, so I had a playlist of rap music to match the more aggressive approach needed for the 200 metres. For this race, I chose 2 Pac’s ‘Me Against the World’.

Coach walked over. ‘It’s time,’ he said. I already knew that; I had been looking at my watch every couple of minutes, waiting impatiently for that 30-minute pre-race period to be over so I could start moving again and getting ready. I started to do a modified warm-up which went really well. Then we got back on the bus.

Coach was really serious. I knew he was nervous because he had walked around the warm-up track for almost the entire 30 minutes while I was resting, which was always his tell. He didn’t say anything on the bus back to the Olympic stadium; neither did I. With my headphones back on I started to listen to 2Pac again. Same song – ‘Me Against the World’. The tempo was slower than I wanted, but it was saying all the right things. I did feel it was me against the world. Everyone else in the race – and in any race I was in – could make their careers from beating me. I couldn’t blame them for gunning for me. That’s what they were supposed to do.

‘Watch your start,’ Coach said when we got off the bus, reminding me not to pop straight up out of the blocks, which I tend to do as a result of my naturally more upright running style. Then he just said, ‘Go get ’em.’

In the warm-up area under the stadium where the other athletes waited, I checked in again with the officials, then sat in a corner by myself just running the race over and over again in my mind. I started to think about the camera flashes that would accompany my eighth entry into the stadium that week. I had been told that the flashes actually followed me around the stadium as I ran. That then led me to think about how big this would be if I was successful.

I knew what the next thought would be. How big this would be if I failed. Competing in athletics at the Olympic level is probably more difficult from a pressure standpoint than any other sport. With the Games taking place only every four years, the average Olympic athlete might make two Olympic teams in his career. So he has to go into an Olympics knowing that this could be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity – he may never get another. To compound that sense of pressure, the athlete also knows that it is the biggest crowd he will ever compete in front of, and that the focus at home is on him. Everyone in his country is watching him and wanting him to win. This is not just any other competition.

So then how do you approach it from a mental standpoint? You know that it is special and the history and the magnitude of the Olympics can’t be ignored. But if you are to have your best performance, the type of performances you have had to get to this point, you must compete the way you competed in those competitions. So as an athlete you must strike a balance: on the one hand understanding the special nature of this competition and the rarity of the opportunity, on the other preparing and competing the same way you would in any other competition. That’s not easy to do, and it takes tremendous mental toughness to strike that balance and to resist the natural temptation to compete harder when the stakes are higher and the opportunity is greater. Competing harder can be dangerous. You can now run tight or overdo the preparation or the execution.

I was certainly at risk in that way. Having just completed four rounds of 400-metre races, including the final just two days before the start of the 200 metres, I was now about to run my eighth race of the Games. Certainly fatigue would have started to set in. I had known all along throughout my preparation and training for this task that it would be difficult and I would have to run a mistake-free race because so much was at stake. But even thinking about the stakes could easily stymie my ability to execute.

I immediately started running the race in my mind again. I knew that when I needed to be focused it wasn’t enough to tell myself not to think about things that didn’t matter or that were a distraction from the task immediately ahead. That didn’t work. I had to, first, recognise immediately when I was becoming distracted, and then replace that thought with something else. And the best something else was always the task at hand. So I always started with the bang of the gun and me reacting to it, and then visualised, step by step, myself executing the race to perfection.

Finally the official notified us that we had five minutes before going out. It was night-time and the temperature was perfect. I put on my spikes and waited. At this point I would always take the opportunity to look at my competition to see if I could gauge their feelings at this moment. Are they feeling confident, afraid or absolutely scared to death? Frankie’s demeanour was always mellow, which you might take for scared but that would be a mistake. I knew Frankie well and I knew that the fact that he didn’t have an aggressive personality did not mean that he wouldn’t run a fast race. Ato Boldon was the opposite. He always purposely carried himself with confidence. But he had never beaten me and I saw nothing in him that made me think today would be any different.

They lined us up according to lane and we walked out into the stadium. I didn’t look into the stands despite the flashes going off, but I couldn’t help noticing the screams and yells, all of which seemed to be directing me to win this race. ‘Go Michael!’ ‘You’re the best, Michael.’ ‘Give me your shoes!’ ‘I love you!’ Talk about pressure! But I liked being the favourite.

I walked on to the track, sat my bag down and positioned my blocks. ‘If I don’t run as fast as I know I can, it will be because of my start,’ I thought. So I took a practice start, going out about 200 metres. It was a good one. My starts were kind of a mixed bag. Sometimes I would get a good one and sometimes I would get an okay one. Rarely would I get a great one and never would I get a terrible one. I was happy with this one.

I got back to my blocks and settled in for another practice start. I got into the set position and imagined the bang of the gun and took off. I didn’t like my second start at all, but I kept running and focused on the drive phase of the race. If a start didn’t go well there was nothing I could do about it. I had to move on.

The drive phase went well, but it always did. I never had a problem with that part of the race. I walked back to my blocks, sat down and waited for the command to take our warm-up clothes off. I wouldn’t risk another start no matter how dissatisfied I had been with the last one, because that was not part of my routine.

As I sat there I thought about the Olympic 200 metres final I was about to run. Suddenly what had happened during the previous 1992 Olympics in Barcelona flashed in my head. As I normally did whenever I recognised that I had lost focus, I started my automatic default mechanism of visualising myself running the race. But part of my mind continued to dwell on the disappointment I’d suffered in Barcelona. I tried to control my thoughts. ‘Your competitors don’t care about your disappointment four years earlier,’ I told myself. ‘They just want to beat you today.’

Finally, I decided to allow myself to think about 1992. ‘I have run this race over and over again in my mind a million times and I’m ready,’ I told myself. ‘I wanted that gold medal in Barcelona so badly. This is another chance to get it. And I’m not going to let anything stand in my way. I’m healthy and ready to go.’

‘Warm-ups off,’ announced the official. I stopped thinking about 1992 and stripped down to my shorts and tank top. I was happy that I had allowed myself to think about Barcelona. That would be even more motivation for me.

Just moments before the start of the Olympic 200 metres final, I couldn’t help but remind myself, ‘This is not just any other race. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I can win it and I can make history, but to do that I must run a mistake-free race.’ Deep into my focus, I thought about the things that I needed to do in the race along with those areas where I was most prone to making a mistake. I knew that Frankie and Ato, both being 100 metres specialists, were better starters than me. I also knew that a poor start induced by my thinking ahead to the 100-metre mark had caused me to lose to Frankie a couple of weeks earlier. Frankie had improved so much lately that I knew I would have to have a greater advantage over him at the halfway point of the race than I had in previous victories if I was going to beat him again.

While that was good knowledge to have before the race, I knew it was a mistake to be thinking ahead. You must take one stage of the race at a time and you must be focused only on the present stage of the race as opposed to two stages or even one stage ahead. Thinking about what I needed to be doing at the halfway mark meant that I wasn’t fully focused on the start and reacting to the gun. I vowed I would not repeat the mistake that had cost me a win just 14 days before.

After the introductions, which seemed to take forever, the starter finally called us to the starting blocks. At his cry of ‘On your marks’ I wanted to get into my blocks right away because I was ready to go. But that wasn’t my routine. I hated to be in position and have to wait for someone to finally start getting into theirs, so I always delayed a few seconds.

When I saw that everyone was getting into their blocks, I got into mine and waited. The starter announced, ‘Set!’ I rose to the set position and focused on the impending sound of the gun. Bang! I exploded out of the blocks.

My reaction time, 0.161 seconds, my best ever, was so good, I wasn’t ready for it. I drove my left foot off the rear block, pushed with my right foot on the front block and, with all of the force that I had, thrust my right arm forward and swung my left arm back, keeping my head down all through the first driving step out of the blocks. It went perfectly. Then everything switched and now I was pulling my right foot forward and pushing on the ground with my left foot and driving my left arm forward and swinging my right arm back with equal force as in the first stride. That all went perfectly as well.

Normally this process of driving out of the blocks with these steps goes on for at least ten steps. Ideally, the way the blocks are set up, during these ten steps your body is at a maximum 45-degree angle in relation to the track, which allows each step not to push down on the track but to push against the track, propelling your body forward with each push. In order to overcome gravity, a sprinter must utilise upper body strength and power and exaggerate the swing of the arms to prevent tripping and falling over.

I had shot out of the blocks so rapidly – probably due to a surge of adrenaline along with my intensified focus on the start – that my body bent at an angle deeper than the ideal 45 degrees. And my arm swing was not sufficient to keep up with the angle that I had achieved. That caught up with me on the third step. I was going back to my right foot driving forward, and my left foot had already made contact with the ground and I was starting to push with it. Just as I was switching over I felt my upper body start to fall over. To catch myself and stay upright, I had to shorten my right foot stride to hit the ground quicker than it should have.

I had allowed the moment and what I was about to do to take me out of my normal start which, while maybe not as great as some of the other sprinters, was good for me. I had just gotten the best start of my life, but I couldn’t handle a start that good. Focusing on the magnitude of the event and what was at stake, instead of executing the best I knew how, almost cost me Olympic gold and history. Fortunately one of the things that I was always good at and always prepared for is holding composure and getting over mistakes and moving on.

Mistakes are part of competing. You know that they will occur and you always try to minimise them, but when one happens during the race you must move on and determine quickly whether there is an adjustment to be made as a result of that mistake or if you continue with the same plan. I knew that having made a mistake you could not dwell on it or allow it to impact negatively on the rest of your race.

Luckily I had trained myself to deal with mistakes, so despite the stumble I was able to continue executing. I began making ground on the fast-starting Cuban, who I figured had left his best race in the semi-final in which he had come in second. I continued to drive and started to focus on Frankie Fredericks, two lanes outside of me. He was running well, but not making any ground on Ato Boldon, who was also running well.

I stopped thinking about them and focused back on my race, which was going excellently. At 60 metres into the race I was up on the Cuban and gaining on Frankie. I had already taken a lot out of the stagger, which meant that even though Frankie was still ahead of me I was winning the race because he had started ahead of me due to the staggered start. I was beginning to prepare for the transition from running the curve to running on the straight, which would happen at the 90 to 110 metres stage, the halfway point of the race. I was positioning myself so that during that transition I would start to gradually go from the inside to the outside of my lane. In addition to that small adjustment, I also started to gradually straighten up, since my left shoulder was slightly lower than my right as I leaned into the curve. When I came out of the curve I was far ahead of Frankie, Ato and the rest of the field.

At this point I knew I wouldn’t see any of the competition again. I also knew that I had won the race. Now it was all about maintaining form. Unlike the end of a 400-metre race, where you try to maintain form and fight against fatigue, in the last 100 metres of the 200 you try to run as fast as possible and maintain your technique, which is everything when it comes to efficiency and quickness. I was going well. Everything had been perfect except for that stumble. I reminded myself to run five metres past the finish line to ensure I didn’t slow down in trying to lean.

Five metres from the finish line I felt my hamstring go. Had the strain happened 20 metres earlier I wouldn’t have finished the race. But at this point I didn’t even slow down, even though it made the injury hurt worse. I only focused on the clock, which stopped at 19.32. Overjoyed, I threw my hands up in the air. ‘Yes!’ I screamed. I had shattered my old record of a month before. At the Olympic trials I had shaved 12 hundredths of a second off the record of 19.72 that had stood for 17 years. And now I had bettered that by just over a third of a second (34 hundredths to be exact). As the crowd screamed, with everyone on their feet and clapping, I continued to yell ‘Yes!’

As I walked back, Frankie came towards me smiling. I shook his hand and hugged him. Then Ato came over and started to bow down to me as he laughed. I hugged him and he congratulated me.

That’s when I finally grasped what had really just happened. I had completed the double. Relief, joy and elation swelled. Then I started to feel pain in my hamstring. It had been there since crossing the finish line, but the excitement had overridden the pain. I continued to ignore my leg. At that point I didn’t care if it fell off. I had won double Olympic gold!

2.
CATCHING OLYMPIC FEVER

I was an unlikely superstar. I was shy when I was growing up and used to get embarrassed very easily. My biggest fear was always – and to a lesser degree still is – the notion that everyone’s laughing at me but I don’t know it.

My older brother and three older sisters were the exact opposite, so they teased me a lot and embarrassed me even further by pointing out how I would do anything to avoid embarrassment. They thought that was pitiful. I didn’t care what they thought. I just knew that I didn’t like the feeling of being humiliated.

Unfortunately as a youngster that happened to me fairly consistently. When I was seven years old I had a friend named James who was the same age and lived two houses down from me. We played a lot, but whenever he didn’t like something that I did he would hit me. Each time that happened, I cried and slunk back to my house. When we moved to a new neighbourhood a year later, a kid named Keith, who was exactly like James, took over the role of friendly bully. We played together a lot, but it bothered him that I was better at sports than he was. So whenever he wanted to show me that he was better than me at something, he would want to fight me, because he knew I didn’t like to fight. So he would hit me. Once again, I would slink back home instead of retaliating.

My brother and sisters didn’t like that at all. Determined that I shouldn’t go on embarrassing the family by allowing myself to get beaten up, they tried to teach me how to fight. But I just didn’t like fighting. This went on for about three years. One day Keith took my bicycle and wouldn’t give it back. When he finally stopped and threw my bike down, I was so angry I punched him in the face. He tried to hit me back but I pushed him down and jumped on top of him and beat the crap out of him. ‘Don’t stop,’ yelled my brother and one of my sisters, who happened to be present at the time. ‘How many times has he hit you? Hit him back for every time.’ Eventually they pulled me off him and he ran home. After that we played together for years, without a single fight. I had evened the playing field and claimed my own sense of power. I felt good about myself after that and knew I would no longer have to live with that fear and embarrassment of not being able to take care of myself.

Although I could best Keith in sports, I wasn’t great in that department. Of course, that’s a relative statement. At the informal knockabout games at the park that defined my afternoons and weekends during elementary school, I’d get chosen first by my buddies for soccer and (American) football because of my speed. I was not as good at basketball. Not being considered one of the best didn’t sit well with me. So after finishing my homework or in the summers when school was out, I would take the basketball my grandfather had given me and go up to the court to practise shooting baskets. That was the only way I would learn to play better and get chosen first in that sport as well.

Even though I loved playing all sports, I loved experiencing the sensation of speed the most. I loved to run – and run fast. I would ride my bike fast. I had a skateboard and I would ride my skateboard fast. I would find a hill and ride my bike down the hill still pedalling fast, or I would run down the hill because I discovered that I could go faster if I was going downhill.

I was fast from the beginning. I think I first realised that I was fast at age six while playing with a few kids in my neighbourhood. About ten of us had decided to have a race at the park near my house. My friend Roderick who was also six was there, along with some older kids. One of them, Carlos, was my sister Deidre’s age, so he had to be about ten or eleven years old. We all lined up and we were running about 50 yards to a football goalpost. One kid called the start. He said, ‘On your marks, get set, go!’ and by the time he said go half the kids had already taken off. Even though I was late on the take-off, I managed to catch everyone, including the older kids, and won the race. ‘I didn’t even start on time, and I had to catch you all and I still won,’ I screamed to all the other kids. Of course, I had been playing sports with these kids for a while and always got to the ball first. So it was no surprise to anyone that day that I was fast – except me.

Even then, however, there was a difference between outrunning someone on the football field while trying to score a goal, or trying to prevent someone else from scoring a goal, and the lack of any subjectivity or complication in a foot race between me and others. The simple nature of a foot race was appealing to me. There was no skill or technique required at that point. It was simply a question of who was fastest. I wanted to be that person. And most times I was.

I was always very proud of winning. Every year in elementary school we had field day, a competition among all the kids in the school with events like the long jump and 50-yard dash. That was the only event I was really interested in and I won some blue ribbons. I remember one particular field day my mother had come up to the school to watch me participate. I won the race and looked over for her reaction. She was clapping and smiling as she nodded her head to me in approval. Having my mother there to watch me felt really good. I couldn’t wait to get home to hear her tell me how proud she was.

After school was over I ran home with my ribbon. I showed it to her as soon as I burst through the door. She looked at it, told me I had done a good job, then told me to get started on my homework and do my chores. That was the balance my parents showed. They were happy for me to participate in sports if it made me happy, but they never got carried away with it.

In addition to the school field days I also participated in a parks and recreation summer track programme called the Arco Jesse Owens Games. Every neighbourhood had a park, and in the summer kids from all the parks would come together and be grouped by age so they could compete against one another in different track and field events. I competed in the 50-yard dash and 100-yard dash. The first summer my sister Deidre and I participated in the Arco Jesse Owens Games, I had been the fastest in my age group at my park but finished in the middle of the pack at the Games. I didn’t like that feeling. I didn’t even know the other kids. I didn’t know if they were better than me. I just knew that I wanted to win and I had a strong belief that I could win. I told myself I would try harder the next time I had an opportunity to race. I honestly didn’t know what else I could do in the face of defeat.

Winning races had come easily to me up to that point. Looking back on that day, I think I was just so accustomed to winning the races I had run in my neighbourhood and at school that I expected to win. I knew I was fast and I liked the feeling of winning. I liked being good at something and I liked the attention I got from being fast.

Of course, I didn’t share that with anyone.

FAMOUS PERSONALITIES

‘If you look at most sportspeople – and this is the trend, not the absolute – they tend to be more introverts,’ says Sir Steven Redgrave, five-time gold medallist in rowing. ‘They tend to be more interested in what they’re doing – very quiet from that point of view.’

He speaks from personal experience. Like me, Steve was shy when he was growing up. ‘As a kid and even as a teenager, I wouldn’t say boo to a goose,’ he says. Heavily dyslexic, Steve, who had two older sisters, struggled with schoolwork. Sports – any kind of sports – became his outlet. ‘Even if I wasn’t that good at it, I still enjoyed doing it, because it was like freedom in some ways.’ So he played, in his words, ‘a little bit of football’ (or soccer for you American readers) for a team that was good enough to have a couple of its players go on to apprenticeships at professional clubs. ‘Little’ was the operative word since as reserve goalkeeper he sat on the side most of the time. He also ‘messed around’ with rugby week in and week out, playing on a team that needed volunteers from the football team to make up the 15 players required for a match. And as a competitive sprinter during junior school, he was one of the fastest in his home county of Buckinghamshire.

His sports escape routes broadened when the head of the school’s English department introduced Steve to rowing. ‘Our school was mainly a soccer school. Because he had a love for rowing, he used to go around and ask a few individuals if they’d like to give it a go. I hated school, so being asked to go out on the river in a games lesson once a week was a no-brainer from my point of view. The only problem is after two or three weeks we started going down every day after school. He asked 12 of us from my year. Within two weeks there were only four of us left that were committed to doing it.

‘He just made it so much fun. It wasn’t about maybe going to the Olympics or even racing anywhere; it didn’t even cross my mind. It was just about doing something a bit different that the other kids in my school didn’t get the opportunity to do.’

That first time out, Steve won seven out of seven races. Even though that gave him confidence, ‘I still wouldn’t have gone in town and told anybody,’ he says.

Daley Thompson may well be Steve’s polar opposite. A supremely confident athlete from the start, Daley made his mark in the 1980 Moscow Olympics by winning the decathlon, which consists of ten track and field events: 100 metres sprint, long jump, shot put, high jump, 400 metres sprint on the first day, and 110 metres hurdles, discus throw, pole vault, javelin throw and 1,500 metre race on day two. He then followed it up by successfully defending his title four years later in the 1984 Games. These Olympics were considered to be the Carl Lewis Games, because Lewis had established himself as the greatest track and field athlete since Jesse Owens. In fact, Carl was attempting to duplicate Jesse Owens’s amazing history-making moment from the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, when he won gold in the 100 metres, 200 metres, long jump and 4 x 100m relay. And Carl was attempting it in his home country during the Los Angeles Games. Daley, however, thought he was the better athlete and that the world should know. So he created a T-shirt, which he wore to the press conference after winning his second gold medal, which read: ‘Is the world’s second-greatest athlete gay?’

Although he later insisted that ‘gay’ meant ‘happy’ and that he hadn’t necessarily targeted Carl Lewis with the statement, the brash move created a firestorm. Fortunately, during his career his athletic performance was so superior that the sporting headlines outshone the others.

Daley was a very good athlete from the very beginning. He played football and found that he was superior athletically to the other kids. He would discover the same thing when he wandered down to the local track club a couple of times a week at the age of 15. He was so good that he actually made the British Olympic track team the following year and found himself competing at the 1976 Montreal Olympic Games on his birthday. ‘Day one of the decathlon was my birthday,’ he recalled. ‘I was 16 on the first day and 17 on the second day. I didn’t win that year, but just being on an Olympic team and having that Olympic experience was the most fun I ever had.’

Paralympian Tanni Grey-Thompson, who won a mind-boggling 16 Olympic medals including 11 golds, garnered a bronze medal during her first Olympic Games. She would go on to compete in four more Games, a feat as astonishing as her medal count.

‘I remember watching the 1984 Games on TV and thinking, “Wow, that would be really good to do that,”’ she told me. She had realised that she wanted to seriously compete in wheelchair racing several years earlier after participating in a race and coming in fourth. That proved to be a defining moment for her. ‘At that moment, everything else took second place,’ she recalls. Racing was exhilarating and fun. Not winning, however, was not. She says, ‘I remember thinking, I want to be better; I don’t want to come in fourth again.’

Over the next three years she continued to race competitively without making much of a mark. ‘In 1984 I wouldn’t have been on the radar of anybody,’ she says. ‘But as I watched the Games I thought, “I could do this if I worked really hard.”

‘I remember getting the letter saying I had made the 1988 Olympic team. I was at university and I’d come home for the Easter holidays. I came in through the front door on Saturday morning and my mum said to me, “There’s a letter there from the Paralympics Association.” I picked it up and looked at it, turned it over, and opened it. It said, “Dear Tanny, Congratulations.” I just screamed. My mum was like, “What? What?” I was hoping I’d make the team but I wasn’t expecting it. I’d made big improvements through 1987 and 1988 in terms of where I was in the world. But at 19 I was right on the borderline for going. So they took a real chance with me.’

Most people catch Olympic fever and work as hard as they can to earn a spot on the team. Daley’s success happened so fast that making the team provided him with the inspiration that would fuel him in the years that followed.

‘What was your first memory of the Olympics?’ I asked.

‘Watching Valeri Borzov on TV in the 1972 Olympics,’ he said. ‘I was really impressed with Borzov and how he carried himself.’ As Daley recalled, Valeri, a Russian 100-metre runner who was known as being a really tough competitor, ‘delivered a really great piece of work’.

As a two-time gold medal decathlete competing in ten different track and field events, Daley would go on to become the greatest athlete of his time. When I asked him about how he dealt with the pressure, he said, ‘I never felt pressure.’

I wouldn’t believe that from a lot of athletes, but I believe it with Daley. I don’t think he felt pressure, because where does the pressure come from? It comes from being afraid that you’re going to underperform – not necessarily compared to what other people expect but in terms of your own expectations. But Daley didn’t care. He just figured, ‘If I lose, I’m going to come back and I’m going to win the next time.’

Sprinter Usain Bolt says much the same thing. ‘People always say, “Why are you not worried?” I said you can’t be worried. If you’re the fastest man in the world, what’s there to worry about? Because you know you can beat them. All you’ve got to do is go execute,’ he told me when we talked in Jamaica in 2009. ‘I’m not saying every day you’re going to get it perfect, but if you’re fast there’s no need to worry. If you’ve had a bad day, you just had a bad day. Next time you bounce back.’

Despite his antics on the field, Usain isn’t exactly an extrovert. He prefers to chill at home or in his hotel room rather than to go out on the town. But when it comes to introverted champions, Cathy Freeman has us all beat.

Cathy’s quiet and reserve (her words) define the word calm (my word). And yet she’s won gold in two World Championships, four Commonwealth Games and the Olympic Games on her own home turf.

She discovered the Olympics at age ten, while watching a made-for-television movie about American indigenous distance runner Billy Mills, who won a gold medal in the 10,000 metres during the 1964 Tokyo Games. ‘I was at an age where, oh, there’s a runner who’s indigenous and American, and he’s sort of similar to the indigenous people over here,’ Cathy told me. ‘I set in my mind that I wanted to be a runner when I grew up.’ Watching the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games unfold the following year cemented that aspiration. By then, thanks to her stepfather, she already had the words ‘I am the world’s greatest athlete’ posted on her bedroom wall.

That set the bar. ‘In 1990 I made my first Australian team for the Commonwealth Games,’ Cathy told me. ‘Two years later I went to Barcelona. Each year that went by, it became clearer to me where I had to be and what I had to do, the sort of person I had to become.’

TUNING IN TO THE OLYMPICS

A number of Olympic champions fell into their sports and went on to make history. For many, watching the Olympics served as a catalyst. Mark Spitz, who holds a remarkable nine Olympic gold medals in swimming, didn’t join a swimming team because he loved the sport or had been inspired by the Olympics. At least not at first. At the age of nine his mother had put him into a YMCA camp programme just to give him something to do. The problem was that the programme involved arts and crafts instead of sports. Mark, and the friend who had also been put into the camp by his mother, ‘didn’t want to sit around with a bunch of girls doing stupid stuff’. It turned out that a brand new swimming pool had just been completed and programmes would begin being offered the following week.

Mark told me about what happened next. ‘On the very first day in the class that I was in, the instructor said for everybody to line up. They put us all alphabetical and they told us to jump into the pool and hold on to the side. So we were all on the length of the pool and the instructor said, “When I call your name, I want to see how you swim across the width of the pool.” Well, it was a heated pool, but when you fill up a pool, the first day or so, it’s not really heated, so I was freezing my butt off. By the time they got to the S’s all I did was swim across the pool without stopping. Little did I know that the guy who was the instructor of that class was looking to see who didn’t stop. He had set up criteria, unannounced to anybody, that if you didn’t stop he was going to ask you to go out for the swim team. Well, my buddy, his last name was Cooper, got halfway through the width of the pool, stopped and looked at me and was waving and showboating – ‘Ha ha, I got to go first!’ – because that’s what your buddies do, right? So he never got asked to go out for the swim team. There were probably four people in that one session that didn’t stop for whatever reason.

‘So I went out for the swim team. I didn’t know a whole hell of a lot about swimming at the YMCA level. It was designed as a novice programme. At the end of that summer programme we went to a swimming meet. I don’t even remember what I was swimming, but I remember that it was time-based only. My mom took me over to the end of the pool where there were three circles on the deck that said 6-5-4. There was also a little staircase that said 3-2-1. They put me on circle number 5 and handed me a purple ribbon. I looked to my left and I noticed the guy that was on the staircase, he got a white ribbon. The guy on the next step up got a red ribbon, and the guy at the top got a blue ribbon.

‘I came back to my mom crying and gave her that purple ribbon. That was the first time I recognised that I would get a reward for doing something in a sport. I didn’t understand about why I got the reward, or even that someone had given me a time or had a stopwatch on me. The fact was that I didn’t like the purple ribbon because it was quite obvious that that guy on the staircase with the blue ribbon had been treated as more special than I had. I wanted to be on that top stair. How was I going to get there? I had no clue. But I know that to this day I don’t like purple.’

Ironically, Ian Thorpe, who hopes to add to his five gold medals in the 2012 Olympics, also fell into swimming. ‘My sister swam. She only swam because she broke her wrist, so the doctor recommended she swim to strengthen her wrist, but she ended up being quite a swimmer. She made our national team. When I was young, I basically decided I’d take up swimming because I was really bored being dragged along to all these swimming carnivals by my parents to watch my sister.’

Ian already played a few different sports at the age of eight, and it’s probably safe to say that he was better at most of those than he was at swimming. ‘When I was young I wasn’t that good a swimmer,’ he told me. ‘I was allergic to chlorine, as well, and was getting sick from being in the pool. But I enjoyed it. My mum had to take me to the doctor, and basically the doctor said, “Your son’s allergic to chlorine. It has to do with how the adenoids mature in your nose. When he hits puberty it’s not going to be a problem as much any more. If you think he’s going to be a champion swimmer, it’s probably advisable that you have them taken out.”

‘My mother didn’t think I’d be a champion swimmer, so we opted to do nothing and I continued to get sick from swimming from time to time. That took me out of the pool every once in a while. In the pool I had to wear a nose clip, which is probably the uncoolest thing you can wear when you train. But I was like the nerdy swimmer when I was little.

‘My parents wanted me to stop swimming, figuring it wasn’t good for me. But by the time I was ten or eleven I was pretty much winning everything in the pool in the age group competitions. By the time I was 14 I made the national team. I missed every development team on the way because I didn’t meet the criteria. I was usually too young. At 14 I went away on my first trip, which was the Pan Pacific Championships in Japan, and came second. Then, the following year, I was world champion. The year after that I set four world records in four days. Then, the following year, I was Olympic champion.

‘As a pre-teen, my goal was to become an Olympic athlete. I dreamed of winning Olympic gold. At that point, however, I thought maybe Athens would be the first place that I could go and then look at the Olympics after that. My winning the World Championships at 15 was a shock to everyone around the world, and it was a shock to me as well. I’d done things in training that no one else had done, and I was the deserved winner at that race. At the time, however, I just thought I was doing these laps. I didn’t know how it would equate to a performance that meant that I was world champion. I didn’t realise that that win probably meant that I would be favoured to win at the 2000 Olympics. I didn’t even realise I’d make the team.’

TAPPING ONE’S GIFTS

Mark and Ian may have fallen into their sports, but they sure made the most of the opportunity. I believe that everyone, no matter who, is blessed with a natural talent and ability to do something well. It may be running fast like me, it may be overall athletic ability in all sports, it may be mathematics, it may be teaching, it may be an incredible ability to remember and recall things. Maybe it’s something that one can use to make a living with. Maybe it’s something that you love to do, especially since as Steve Redgrave points out, ‘the better that you find you do something, the more you enjoy it, and the more you like doing it, the more you get success from it. It’s self-propelling in some ways.’ In the case of most Olympians, including me, it is a combination of both.

Some people never find their inborn gifts, some find them late in life, and some, like me, are fortunate to find them early on. I was very lucky that when I was growing up we spent most of our free time in my neighbourhood playing games and sports with the other kids. That’s how I discovered that I was fast. Even then, however, had I just followed what my friends did, I would have only played football, which is like a religion in Texas. I would never have found my love for track as a sport and never would have discovered just how good I could be, which ultimately turned out to be the best in the world.

That is why I encourage my own son, and any young people I talk to, to try different things. But that’s not the national trend. Instead of competing in after-school pick-up games, most kids these days grow up playing organised sports as part of youth teams and leagues which have become big business. As a result, most of the kids who come into my sports performance training centre, Michael Johnson Performance, have already started to specialise in one sport as early as age ten, so they lack the athleticism that we kids from the seventies developed from playing multiple sports. I developed my speed from sprinting, for example. But I also developed explosive power, which helped me to be a better sprinter, from playing basketball. I developed my quickness – the ability to make short bursts of speed in different directions – from playing football.

The kids who specialise early also never get to search out what really stirs them. I want my son to play a sport, to learn to play an instrument, and to try new things, so that he can discover what he is passionate about and in what areas he is gifted. Of course everyone believes that because he is my son he must be fast, and they immediately ask about his speed and whether he’s going to be a sprinter. But the fact that he’s my son doesn’t automatically make him naturally gifted at athletics or any sport. And it certainly doesn’t guarantee that he will be passionate about – or even like – athletics or sports. I understand that, so the last thing I would do is push him to participate in athletics or try to become an Olympic athlete. It is his life, and it’s up to him to decide what he wants to do with it and to discover what he enjoys and what talent he is blessed with.

At this point in his life (he’s 11) I do mandate that he participate in some sport, since I know that there are incredible lessons to be learned from taking part in sports. But I give him the right to choose which sport. If he decides to get serious, I’ll make sure he has the coaching support that he needs. But we won’t be talking about the Olympics or any other top-level competition right off the bat.

Unfortunately, too many parents and/or coaches these days do exactly that, telling students that they can aspire to the Olympics or the NBA or the Premier League the moment they show any promise. As a result kids are aiming for the Olympics or professional sports before they’ve even won their school’s championship.

NOT SO FAST

Even those high school athletes who are highly sought after by the Colleges start getting ahead of themselves. Right away they start thinking Olympics, they start thinking professional career, they start thinking endorsement contracts and deals. There’s a danger to that, which we’ll explore at length in Chapter 4. Conversely, focusing on how to improve performance instead of where that performance might lead seems to contribute to the kind of success that builds Olympic champions.

As a teenage competitor, I just wanted to be the fastest 16-year-old in Dallas. To my benefit, I didn’t think beyond that. I’m far from being the only Olympic late bloomer. For many Olympic champions the notion of even participating in – let alone winning – the Olympics took a while to set in.

‘I think I ought to say something to you,’ Sebastian Coe’s father and coach Peter said to his son on a rain-soaked night in the late 1970s as they walked off the training field. The middle-distance runner readied himself to hear a message about the training session he had just completed or his upcoming race. Instead, his father said, ‘I think you’re going to go to the Olympic Games. I’ve watched people get to Olympic Games and not deal with it that well, and I’ll just guess maybe it’s something we ought to start thinking about.’ Seb just smiled. Although the notion seemed too improbable to take seriously at the time, he would go on to set eight outdoor and three indoor world records in middle-distance track events and win four Olympic medals, including the 1500 metres gold medal at the Olympic Games in 1980 and 1984.

Even though I didn’t see myself as an Olympian at first, I always thought I would do something special. Although my family didn’t have a lot when I was growing up, I figured I would be successful. I assumed, however, that my dream of controlling my own situation, having the things I wanted and travelling would come from having my own business. I had no dream of being a professional athlete. And since I spent most of my time playing outside rather than watching a lot of television, I really knew nothing about the Olympics.

Until well into high school, sport was just something I did for fun. Sure I liked being the fastest. But there was no strategy involved. I just went out to competitions and started running when the gun went off. Then in my final year of high school, as the best on my high school team, people started to talk about my potential to be district champion, regional champion, or maybe even state champion. The biggest prize for a high school athlete is being a state champion. In order to compete to be a state champion you have to finish in the top two in your district. Then you advance to your region and must finish in the top two in the regional competition. I lived and competed in the hardest district in the country, so just advancing out of district was extremely difficult. There would be kids that I was a lot faster than who would get to state because they came from an area where there weren’t many fast athletes. I had to learn how to compete when you are up against athletes who are similarly or equally talented.

This was the first time I started to have to think about how I was going to beat other athletes. How was I going to run faster than them? I had to learn to prepare to compete against them. If a racer was in front of me and I had to go get him, what should I do? Did I just try harder? Did I need to be patient?

You need to think about those things before the race starts. In addition, because you know the athletes you’re up against, you know what they’re capable of, it makes you nervous. How do you deal with that? And how do you deal with the expectations and the pressure and still deliver your best performance? When you put all of that together, what you’re doing is learning to compete.

I would have to wait a few years for that. By the time I was 13 I was already faster than everyone on my school track team, but in competitions against other schools I would win some races and lose some races. I won more than I lost, but when I lost I was disappointed because I didn’t like the feeling of losing any more as a young teenager than I had as a youth. I don’t know what it was that I didn’t like about losing other than the fact that if I was losing, then I wasn’t winning, and I liked winning.

At that point in my life I didn’t know what to do about losing except to work harder at whatever drill my coach was giving me during practice each day, and to try harder in the races. This seemed to help somewhat but still didn’t guarantee me victory every time.

What I know now, as an owner of a performance training company training youth athletes between the ages of 9 and 18, is that it’s between 12 and 15 that most kids will make a major leap in their natural athletic ability. Some will develop faster than others. I remember that one of the kids I beat the first time I raced him proceeded to beat me every other time we raced. I don’t know what his real name was, but he went by the name Tank. As his name might indicate, he was bigger than me. I remember that he had very thick legs and already had a moustache. Knowing what I know now, I would say that Tank was probably a bit ahead of me in his development.

I took two years away from sport from the age of 14 when I first started high school. My school was a special career development school that only accepted the best of the kids who applied, and each student chose a career focus from many different offerings. At the time I dreamed of becoming an architect, so I spent half of the day learning about that particular career. Eventually I missed sport and came back to track.

When I started competing again at the age of 16, having not played any sports for two years, I had made a big leap in my athletics development, in large measure because I had matured physically. I was immediately winning races easily and working hard which had become standard procedure for me. But I still wasn’t winning every race and I still hated that. In my third year of high school I had won every race until the district championship which I lost, finishing third, and it ended my season. Roy Martin and Gary Henry, who were older than me by one year and in their final years of high school and also very good athletes, had both finished ahead of me.

GOOD COACHING HELPS

The more I thought about why I had lost, the more I put together different things I had heard from other people about the impact that good track coaches who trained their athletes all year could make. My coach, Joel Ezar, was a wonderful man with whom I had a great relationship. But he was not a great track coach; he was a football coach who coached track in the spring when the football season was over. So I simply wasn’t as ready as those other athletes I was losing to. In addition, they knew more about what they were doing on the track than I did.

I didn’t know what to do about the coaching gap, but believed that I could solve it by working harder. The next year, my final year of high school, two other athletes/friends and I began to go out on our own after school and run. We didn’t really know what we were doing but we didn’t know that. We just felt that if we worked in the autumn instead of doing nothing we would be better in the spring.

I hadn’t yet developed my absolute hatred for losing (rather than mere dislike of it). Even so, I was always looking for a way to prevent myself from losing. Throughout my life, as I matured and moved from one level of training and competing to the next, it became clearer exactly what I needed to do to be the best I could be. I just always believed that if I was the best I could be, I wouldn’t lose.

I’ve always said, and I always tell athletes, that if you run your best race and you lose, you have nothing to be ashamed of or disappointed in. I still believe that. But I, personally, never had a loss where I felt it was my best race. Even when I competed to my best ability in high school and lost, I didn’t feel it was my best race because I didn’t feel I was as prepared from a training standpoint as I could have been. A big part of my decision when I was deciding which university to compete for was which coach would be able to help me achieve my best.

In spite of not having a real track coach during my high school career, I still managed to win both the district and regional championships. At the state championship I finished second in the 200 metres behind Derrick Florence, who still holds the high school record for 100 metres and to whom I would never lose again. I wasn’t happy about not winning, but I was more excited that I would be competing at college than I was disappointed that I had lost the state championship.

Originally I viewed the track scholarship I’d accepted from Baylor University only as a means to go to a better college than I would if I had to pay for it myself. But in 1986, between high school and college, I finally start thinking about professional track. I was working in an office that summer, when I started seeing newspaper headlines about the US Olympic Sports Festival in Houston. Reading about Carl Lewis, Calvin Smith and Floyd Heard arriving in Houston to compete in this high-level competition triggered my initial aspirations to run and compete professionally. After finishing the article I found myself for the first time daydreaming about competing against the best in the world and envisioning myself being at this competition with these athletes. I started to really believe that I could be great, because I knew that I hadn’t reached my full potential in high school.

At Baylor University I was in a serious training programme for the first time. It was tough in the beginning. I hated the weight workouts, which I avoided. But I loved training on the track each day and looked forward to it. I approached each day like a competition because I could feel myself getting stronger and better.

AIMING HIGH, HIGHER, HIGHEST

Even though I made some great strides during my first year, I got injured at the end of the season and wasn’t able to compete in the NCAA (National Collegiate Athletic Association) university championships. So the following year I focused on becoming an NCAA champion. I hadn’t even considered higher-level competition – let alone the Olympics – until one of my team-mates, Raymond Pierre, went on to compete in the US national championships after the college national championships. Raymond did really well at the US championships, finishing fourth in the 400 metres. This earned him a position on the US national team for the 1987 World Championships, which would be held later in the summer in Rome. Raymond spent most of the summer in Europe competing on the international circuit and once competed as an alternate for the US team, running in the preliminary round of the 4 x 400 metres relay team that won the gold medal.

The day he returned from Rome, school had already started and the team had already started training. Raymond came out to the track wearing a USA team uniform shirt. The only way to get your hands on any official USA track team gear was to make a US team, which was a great accomplishment, so having the gear was a badge of honour. I had seen in my freshman year a handful of athletes from other universities who had competed on US teams wearing USA team gear, and I wanted that. It seemed really cool, because it showed the accomplishment, and signified how good the athlete was.

Raymond was an athlete whom I knew well and who had become a friend. He was the only person I knew personally who had actually competed on a US national team and on the professional international circuit. After practice he invited me over to his apartment. When I got there he was still unpacking his bags. He had become a Nike-supported athlete, which meant that since he wasn’t a professional athlete yet they couldn’t pay him but they could send him all the shoes and gear he wanted. He had bags of new Nike gear and USA team gear. He had picked up gifts that were given to him at the international competitions he had taken part in. There were CD players too, which in 1987 was a new technology and a very cool thing to have.

My eyes opened as wide as the Olympic medals I would eventually earn. I couldn’t believe all of the free gear and gifts he had received. And he had actually had the experience of competing on a US team and the international circuit, which he told me all about. I wanted that experience myself. To top all of that off, a week later Raymond drove up to practise in a really cool new red scooter. Those had become really popular in the US then, and he had been able to buy it with the expense money he received from his trip to Europe. I was hooked and needless to say inspired. I asked Raymond questions for weeks after his return, and he was happy to share every detail of his trip and experience with me.

Unlike me, some Olympian champions caught Olympic fever early on. ‘That’s what I want to do in life,’ Sally Gunnell realised at the age of 14 as she sat glued to the television during the Moscow Olympics watching anything that moved. Entranced with Nadia Comaneci and Olga Korbut, she decided to join a gymnastic club. Only after another girl at her school announced that she was going down to athletics did Sally decide to go along. ‘I thought it would be better to go with somebody rather than go on my own,’ she recalls. So she joined the athletics club and went on to win a gold medal in the 400 metres hurdles at the 1992 Olympics.

Steve Redgrave found success so early in his rowing career that he simply assumed winning the Olympics was inevitable. ‘The first year, we thought we were brilliant,’ he says. After just messing around in the water, the team had entered their first race for fun and actually won. The following season they entered seven events and won all seven. ‘We were God’s gift to rowing,’ he said. By the time Steve was 15 people had begun to tell him, ‘You’re really good at this. One day you could be a world champion.’

‘I thought, “World champion sounds nice; why not Olympic champion?” I knew I wanted to be an Olympian, because I was the best in the country. Why not?’

That sense of inevitability would prove to be both his great motivation and, initially, his downfall. ‘I figured, “All I’ve got to do is follow what the coaches are telling me to do and it will happen,”’ he recalls. ‘It wasn’t until 1983 when I went to the senior world championships as a single sculler and I got eliminated – I didn’t make the top 12 – that I suddenly thought, “I am good domestically, I’m okay internationally, but not the same sort of level as people are saying I am good at.” Suddenly it dawned on me that if you have an ability you’ve got to bring that ability out. It’s about how hard and how well you prepare. That was the turning point in my career.’ It would also prove to be the turning point in his life, transforming him from ‘shy goose’ to confident five-time gold medallist.

RUNNING INTO THE RECORD BOOKS

Jackie Joyner-Kersee, the Greatest Female Athlete of the 20th Century according to Sports Illustrated for Women magazine, was the opposite of shy from the very beginning. ‘I was very outgoing,’ she told me. ‘I was one who would put my phone number down and have people contact me, and my mom would have to tell me, “You stop putting your number down on everything, because I’m tired of all these strangers calling the house.” Because I wanted to be involved in everything.’

Jackie, three-time Olympic gold medal winner who would become one of the all-time greats in women’s heptathlon and long jump, thought she was good at track and field from the moment she and her sister signed up at the community centre. She had long legs and could jump high. Of course she was good, the nine-year-old reasoned. ‘My first race, I finished last,’ she told me. ‘That challenged me to really continue to run. Then some of my friends made the relay team. I wanted to be on the relay team but I was number six or seven. So I just set my sights on trying to improve a tenth of a second if I was running or half an inch if I was jumping. That was to let me know I was getting better, that the work I was doing was paying off.

‘I didn’t really know what a track looked like, because we ran in a park, and we ran on cinder. This park had just one big dirt track around. The coaches told us it was about 400 metres, but as we got older we realised it was like 1,200. When you’re younger they can pull that stuff on you. I could never finish the lap, and I was like, wow! So the goal was to try to go one lap around without stopping. All this started at the age of nine. It wasn’t until I was 14 when I saw the 1976 Olympic Games on television that I saw girls doing what I was trying to do. That’s the first time I ever saw girls or women on TV doing sports. I thought, “Maybe I will go to the Olympics one day.”

‘It was really the idea of being on television that most attracted me. For real! I had to get on TV and it seemed like everyone was talking about the Olympics. Our coaches told us to watch. I saw sprinter Evelyn Ashford [win gold]. I saw Nadia Comaneci who was the same age as me earn a perfect score. At that time I was like, “I’m going to be a gymnast, too.”’

The gymnast fantasy came and went, but Jackie’s dedication to track and field held firm. Although Jackie didn’t know if she could ever be good enough to get to the Olympics, even imagining the possibility motivated her. Besides, hanging out at the community centre and doing sports got her away from home, which she found hugely appealing. Mostly, however, she just wanted to see whether hard work would continue to yield progress. ‘I practised hard, and the results were coming. It took me a while to get out of last place and then sixth place, but the placement didn’t matter to me because I saw my times improving.’

It didn’t take long for people to start recognising Jackie’s potential. ‘People would say, “You’re gifted. You’re talented.” But I really didn’t know what all that meant. I was kind of rough in those days. I would fight another girl because she was seeing my friend’s boyfriend – all kinds of crazy stuff that would get me into trouble. One day the Assistant Principal pulled me off a girl I was fighting and said, “Get up to my office.” When he got there he told me, “You know, we expect better things out of you.” I’ll never forget that. It was like, wow, people see some greatness in me.’

That helped Jackie decide to commit to her training in a serious way. ‘I remember telling my girlfriends when I was in junior high school that I was going to go to the Olympics. They thought I was crazy. From that day on I said to my friends, “No, I can’t meet with y’all.” We were basically a gang, and I just knew that wasn’t good.’

As luck would have it, her school started complying with Title IX, legislation guaranteeing girls the same access to sports as boys, which had been enacted four years earlier, just in the nick of time for Jackie. ‘My first year in high school, which would have been my sophomore year, we couldn’t practise until 6:30 p.m. after the boys finished their practice. My mom, who was really strict, wasn’t going for that. I’m going to come home and then go back up to the school and practise? She wasn’t feeling that at all. My mom was just going to pull me out of sports altogether because her philosophy was that I had to be home before the streetlights came on. Then the coaches started pushing the Title IX issue because they said that wasn’t right. From there, they changed it so that we could practise before the boys. That made a big difference.

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