TOM FORDYCE

• Jürgen Klopp’s Madrid celebrations uncut – Youtube
• Pareto principle – Wikipedia link
• The Edge documentary – BBC iPlayer
• Connect with Tom Fordyce – Twitter

TOM FORDYCE

They train unbelievably hard. I mean, they are particularly Alistair will force himself to do things that most people couldn’t force him through in terms of the pain of the training and the endurance and everything else. But there’s one fundamental thing that means they can do that and make them successful. And it’s that doing the training or immerse themselves in their sport makes them happy.

Let’s say there was no such sport as triathlon. Yeah, didn’t exist. their dream day would still be to go for a swim in a lake. Go for a massive bike ride through the Yorkshire Dales and then go running at the chevin, which is the big sort of Country Park the hill above Ottey and Guiseley around there. That’s their dream day. So maybe in some ways, they’ve been lucky. And they have found a sport which enables them to do all the things they wanted to do. But I think it’s probably the other way around. Their environment is so integral to what they do. If you took the Brownlee boys and you had them growing up in southeast London, I don’t think it would work the same way. But because they love the Dales with a passion, and the bike rides are an exploration for them. And the running is what’s down that path. And can I get up that hill before my brother?

Do you think that’s there ‘why’ or it’s just more the joy of what they’re doing? Or do you think it’s their driver? Or a combination?

It’s a good question because their background, you know, the stereotypes of successful sports people that people are trying to escape something or get to somewhere. And there’s often a story of deprivation or trying to prove yourself to someone and that doesn’t work for those two, because they’ve got a very middle-class background, parents, both mums, GP a was a GP and dad works at Jimmy’s the Children’s Hospital, in Leeds. So, they’ve got they’ve got nothing to run away from. But Alistair is in particular is an absolute Stone-Cold killer in races in a in a brutal way.

So, if you think about the men’s triathlon, final in Rio in 2016, so the two of them are away on the run leg. So, the final part of the three elements of the race, they’ve pulled away from everyone else. So, they know, it’s those two alone. And Jonny looks at Alistair Jonny, even the younger brother looks at Alistair and says, I think we’ve broken them. And at that point, Alistair that looks at Johnny, knowing his brother as he does and thinks you’ve settled for something here and attacks him, attacks his own brother, which he has to do because they are rivals, and goes away. And I remember watching because you get you get very privileged positions during the job that I’ve done for a long time. And I was right on the finish line. And you are beyond the crowds because the crowds are on the home straight. And it’s just weird intimacy where you see them coming through the line. And you can hear the noises. The slap of the feet on the blue carpet. And then Alastair’s noise as he crossed the line, he lifted up the tape finishing tape and you wouldn’t have heard it on TV, but it was quite primal. And this is a nice middle-class kid from a posh part of West Yorkshire, who has managed to push himself in a way that a lot of people can’t. So, whenever I watched those two, I think, why do you do what you do? And there must be an element of happiness because, again, another one of those narratives we find in sport is the idea that you shouldn’t let elite athletes be happy, should you because they’ll get satisfied…

Apparently, it’s a sign of weakness. And you know, if you start to see people that are smiling, and not frowning and looking concerned, then you’re not you’re not got them in the right place. And I’m totally opposite that. In my experience when I’ve seen these athletes, Carmelo Anthony is a really good example when I was watching him train at the New York Knicks first one on the court and has to get dragged off, you know, and he’s got he’s got a basketball court in his in his house and he invites his mates, most of them NBA stars, to play pickup basketball before the season started, because he loves the game.

It’s like the poem that Kobe Bryant wrote dear basketball, they ended up winning an Oscar for Best Short film. And I’m very much paraphrasing here, but it’s fundamentally dear basketball, I will always be that kid with a rolled-up sock, trying to shoot hoops in the wastepaper basket in the corner is it’s, it’s Why do you push yourself through all the things that elite sport demands of you? And it has to go back fundamentally to why you do it as a kid, which is pleasure and enjoyment.

And the pleasure can come from pushing yourself can’t it and having to get through very difficult situations. But the players and the athletes we most enjoy watching are generally those who make it seem like play. You watch Messi, watch Leo Messi. And clearly, he is what I argue the greatest footballer ever, but you can see him the way he runs his body shape the way he takes on players he’s a street footballer, isn’t it he?

Yeah.

Rooney was a street footballer these to say is that just that pleasure in losing yourself in the sporting moment and your body being capable of doing things that most people’s bodies can’t? controlling that moment and just being yourself in that moment?

I guess it’s an understanding then so if you’re a coach on the sideline, you see one of your players doing trying a trick trying something that’s that they want to do because intrinsically It feels good and then it and it’s fun, and it doesn’t work. It goes back to creating those guardrails, a set of agreed rules where inside it everybody feels safety and belonging and purpose and status and security. But all of that, I guess has to be communicated. So, everyone knows what’s, what’s happening.

Do you think the guardrails are vital for success? Or do you think you can be a bit more flexible? Can you have some grey for your star player? Because you need him to get a goal at the weekend, but he might have turned up late or does something he shouldn’t have done the week before. Do you play the long game? Or do you think you don’t have to

The superstars are different, aren’t they? This is the thing if you’re trying to have a guardrail for an entire team. Sometimes the real superstars just operate differently. The story is from Phil Jackson when he was at the Lakers and he had Shaquille O’Neal and he had Kobe Bryant. So, Kobe Bryant was an obsessive trainer, like Carmelo Anthony had to be the first one, the court had to drag him off. Totally obsessive Watch back all the tapes all the time on his laptop, where Shaquille O’Neal in that period, where they’re both the Lakers didn’t want to do the physical training because he didn’t feel that he had to. And he felt better. enjoying himself and then coming to the court and a lot of the problems in that Lakers team. were around those two different models and the two superstars in that team. You know what Phil Jackson is like his into his, you know, his Zen and his, his, you know, the Native American philosophies as well. And he knew at points when he was trying to get Kobe to do stuff. There’s a line he said once, which was, I could feel his hatred. But he was alright with that as a coach, which is difficult, isn’t it? because a lot of coaches in that situation can hang on, on the boss. They’re my rules that these are my guardrails, you have to stick to them.

Yeah, I mean, you’re jumping straight into a thought then for me, which is around ego and managing your egos, because that’s a great example of how important ego can be in sport, it can derail you, if the head coach suddenly decides that it’s my way or the hard way. And he doesn’t want to lose face to a player. Or he can have softer skills on actually understanding that there’s a there’s a point of difference. And there’s some genuine advantage to be made by as a coach sticking yourself in there in the back of house and being a bit more humble. Does that still mean though, that for those guardrails that you’ve seen examples of a team or individuals where you know that he doesn’t have to be there on time, he doesn’t have to turn his phone off at half times. He can do what he wants, he can wear different kit.

Do you think it makes a difference if that superstar or I’m assuming it’s the superstar but the person who’s climbing over the guardrails if they are performing does that give them a get out of jail card with their teammates?

It’s whether again, whether they’re performing this Saturday, but you know that the aggregation of poor behaviours by breaking those guidelines is going to mean that eventually they’re going to do something even significantly catastrophic in the other direction that all that good stuff is going to just suddenly unravel

is that expediency versus practicality, balance, isn’t it? You could tell yourself as a coach, this goes against my principles. But if this player scores, the goals that get us up, I will then have the money to do X, Y, and Z to do all the other things

just wondering whether you’ve seen any other examples where you treat someone differently

Is a good example here the whole Kevin Peterson in the England cricket team, where at the start, it was okay… He’s doing stuff that we can’t do. And then as his career developed, there was that sense of actually, if he’s not in the team, we’re in trouble. Because I remember doing the ashes series in 2010/11 and chatting some of the Aussie players beforehand, they do a little media gathering the Aussies. Classic Aussies very open chat away and one of them said to me that the only batsman in England team who scared them was Pietersen, because he said you got other batsmen who can score 200 but they’ll score 200 over two days. So Pietersen can score 200 in one day. You know, it was that it was the same hold that Flintoff had had over the Aussies maybe sort of five years before and that Botham had had over them what it’d been 25 years before, 20 years before. But there came a point with Pietersen where his behaviour off the field was so damaging to the rest of the team, that clearly they had to say right, you’re out of the team. But because of what he could do on the pitch, that decision weighed so heavily on the people who had to implement it, that that in itself almost became a distraction the debate every time a new batsman came in, and he was going to be compared to Pieterson. And every time England lost the test match, it raised the thing of what will happen if KP had been in there. But you’ve got the sense that he was towards the end that he was unmanageable, that it had become so much about him.

Because sometimes you do hear about you know, those characters that can deliver those world class performances that a certain coach hits all the right notes for them. But then for most of their career they’ve not found that coach. And so for example, the fifth of forth bridge, right, you know, would you drive over If there were no sides on it? Yeah, the chances are no, or you might drive really slowly down the middle. Have you ever hit the side of any bridge you’ve ever driven down? Most of us would say no. So they’re there for containment and hope that you never have to use them and do the better coaches them with those top players is something that they do to give them those, that containment which gives them a bit of safety to be themselves. And that allows them to really be their best version and maybe those other coaches ego gets involved, maybe they get a bit too tight on their on those bridges. They make those the sides a bit too tight for them a bit too obvious or they talk about them too much.

There’s an example from where Fabio Capello was managing England. He was really old school, really old school. So, he brought in some rules which probably made sense to Capello and it certainly worked for him in the past around diet. So, when you’re with England, he banned tomato ketchup. And he banned butter. Yeah. And it just riled all the players. Because they thought, yes, I know tomato ketchup has got a lot of sugar in. And I know it’s got a lot of salt in, but the amount of physical work we’re doing. It felt to them like an unnecessary intrusion from the outside, and that it was Capello’s Italian mentality failing to bend to the English way of doing things.

Do you think it was about the ketchup? Or was it more about the significance on being more professional for me, if you don’t have anything that’s been so going back to the first a few things that are that you picked up on leadership teams, I’m not a massive fan of having, you know, your senior leadership team. And that gets talked about a lot, you know, after all sorts of games in different levels or different sports, they’ll talk about a well, you know, the senior leadership team got together, you know, if you’ve got a proper group of players, group of athletes you’ve got a leaderful team anyway, and you’re creating almost another tier of decision making that potentially could distract you, potentially. And I guess then the second thing is that ketchup was, was there any connection there? So, did Fabio ever say to the players, that I want you to be off the ketchup because I want to show other teams that we’re taking things more professionally, that these small edges can be found everywhere? And that you guys have got to agree to do this? Because actually, it’s it’s about the bigger picture? Or did he just say no ketchup today

So he was asking the players there to make what seems from the outside like a small sacrifice. So, there was other rules that he brought in, which would seem to make a lot of sense. And some of the players liked so he banned mobile phones from the dining room, right, because he wanted his players to talk. And there’s a story of it might be Emile Heskey, or someone had accidentally left their phone in their pocket. And it rang and Capello lost it and you know, the big metal terrines that you might get the past served in just smashing the lid off one of these things. But I wonder whether those things that made sense to him and may well have worked on their own, were harder for the players to accept, because they didn’t feel he was committing to them in the same way.

So he never moved permanently to England, he didn’t really try to learn English. I remember going to his press conference when he was unveiled not far from where we are. In Regents Park jsu over in Lancaster Gate. And he had a few stuttering words of English, but was committing to learning English. And for the players involved the fact that he was asking them to do make these sacrifices change, change, change, that he wasn’t changing that he went back to Milan at the first opportunity that all his backroom staff were his traditional backroom staff that they didn’t, the backroom staff sometimes weren’t even introduced to the players, that they didn’t bother learning English. Yeah. And that the players, when they would go to the team hotel, would see the backroom staff behaving as they would in Italy, which sort of makes sense. They’d be sitting around with their espressos in the lobby, and the players would feel like they couldn’t communicate with them.

So, for me, that hits upon a couple of things. One, one is, as a coach, you’ve got to connect what you’re trying to, to envisage. So, whatever your plan is, you’ve got to sell that to and they’ve got to understand it, but also you can’t, you know, the standard you walk past is a standard that you become that I bang on about a lot. But effectively if you’re head coach, I suggest that you’ve got to lead by example, and have consistent behaviours. There’s a good example there that you gave with Fabio Capello. But then we’ve seen other coaches and other sports that might get some very high short-term success, but they are not delivering the same values that perhaps the team are doing.

It’s where all of that where it sticks, and whether it’s actually important. For me, I think it’s vital. But we might sit down with you about the mobile phones. You know, I ban them from players pre-Olympics and in the Olympic Games. But explain why. And I think if most players were told, you’re not going to be on your phone for two weeks, but at the end of it, you’re going to get a gold medal. Most people would probably like you do that trade, right. But then you hear someone like Steve Kerr, Golden State say that he just couldn’t do that with NBA players. And so, he has to find another way to control something that could be a problem because as he says, someone’s on the phone at halftime in an NBA game. It’s probably not good news his agents not saying you should be defending more or passing more and so it’s only going to be to the detriment, but he said that’s just not controllable. It might be in college basketball but not in the NBA. And I guess its road testing, like, is this important going into this kind of the Pareto’s law that there’s certain things that are going to wave far more significantly on success? Is that what counts that there’ll be one or two things that are the really strong signals, and all this other stuff is effectively just noise. Do coaches even know that they’re finding Pareto? Will Juergen Klopp know that the way he he’s with the players, and that, that love that you can almost see between them, does he know is that that’s actually like, that’s probably the most significant thing he does. It’s not the GPS data he is collecting or the passes, or the signings or the transfers, but it might actually be creating a situation where your boss, you really feel that love, and he’s got your backing, and you can go out and do your thing safely.

Have you seen you probably have there’s an amazing clip on YouTube, and I think it’s about six minutes long. And it’s Klopp, after Liverpool have won the Champions League beating Spurs in Madrid, in 2019. And the clip is simply him going round, congratulating the players. And you’re watching it, and you think it’s quite a long clip. And then as it unfolds, you realise what you’re watching. So let’s say he talks to, it’s not just the players, it’s the backroom staff as well. And it’s the players who have travelled, but not necessarily got on the pitch. So let’s say there are 25 people he goes up to, there’s the fact that he makes the effort to go up to 25 people, not just Divorck Origi who scored the second goal, Mohammed Salah has got the first and then you realise what you’re watching. So, when you and me we’re doing your book, we got our own greeting, didn’t we? Because you were a handshake. And I would go for hugs we’ve got a halfway house, you watch Klopp. And he has got a different greeting for every single one of the players as in, not him deliberately thinking, right, I’ve got a special handshake, it was everything he said to each individual player was unique to them. There was no generic fist bump, or high five, slap on the back well done and move on. He held each them in a different way, and said something different to each of them. And it was a really powerful thing to watch. Because exactly what you said, does he know he’s doing that is that instinctive to the person he is? Has he thought, I’m going to go and speak to each of the 25 people involved here? I don’t know. But you could see the effect. It’s clearly a very emotional moment for all of them. But it’s so intense. It’s so intense with each of them.

And I you can’t hear what he’s saying in their ears, but you just know there is a connection, a really powerful connection between him and every single individual.

So, could you kind of unravel that a little bit? And from that ability to individualize each greeting? Could you then take that a little bit further and say well, that’s because he’s spent time getting to know them? Is it important then to know about their family? their background? Their why their drivers? Does it mean that then because of that individual stuff, he’s consistent in the feedback he gives them? And he’s honest, is your instinct from everything you’ve seen from just that small moment, could you then almost immediately see why they’re successful?

Yeah, there’s something I noticed with you, Ben, in terms of how you coached and it’s summed up by the image where your Fiji team has won Olympic gold. And this is the image that ends up appearing on currency in Fiji. So you’ve got you’ve got your team who are celebrating, and then you’re on the shoulders of whose shoulders we’re on?

Apisai Domilaili.

And bearing in mind that you’ve just your team has just won Olympic gold. Your celebration is somewhere between self-effacing and embarrassed, like, you’ve sort of got your arms up, but you haven’t. It sounds like you don’t quite know what to do with it. And when I look at that, I think about how coaches can sometimes make victory all about them, that they are the most important person and you are naturally quite self-effacing, aren’t you? But in that moment, that seems for me, one of the many reasons why you’re a great coach. It was you’d always had that thing about almost making yourself redundant, hadn’t you? Whereas for a lot of coaches, it’s the opposite. If you think about someone like Jose Mourinho, his whole strategy is to take the heat off his players by making it all about him. So let’s say they’ve had a bad game he will say something controversial in the press conference knowing that will be the story. So, he’s totally the same sort of thing which is look, help his players but make it all about him. I don’t know many other coaches who’ve been able to push their ego to one side as much as you have like Capello couldn’t do it Capello It was about him as a figurehead. So how could you do that? Is that just something which is your personality that other coaches could borrow.

This might sign it sound a bit trite. Some of it’s actually from a joke about a lot being ginger that you often like, feel like you haven’t got a voice when you’re growing up. You know, you’re the odd you’re the odd one. You’re not seen as being particularly attractive. You’re the one that can be a butt of jokes, but it’s really okay because they are ginger and perhaps you slowly kind of just find your way in the pecking order for things and, and then you remember that when you’re moving through about how to treat people well, but I also think that I’ve definitely had issues with my ego in the past. And, you know, you wonder why you suddenly like you’re climbing into a referee during the game or having an argument with your assistant coach or physio I’ve, I’ve changed defensive patterns when the when the defensive coach was, was away for the week, because I just got on my high horse about something and it just suddenly ran away from me. So, I think experience is a lot to do with that. But I’m absolutely certain that ego has to be parked as a head coach to allow the programme to flourish, really, but I guess it I guess, it’s all that art science, and it’s all about personalities fitting into different areas. I think it was maybe it was Sven Goran Eriksson that coined the phrase or talked about at first about cultural architects in teams. And so for me, I’ll say Osea Kolinisau the captain. Now he was my cultural architect. So he was then saying the same things acting the same way consistent behaviours, same messages, and so was my team manager Rapate Kauvesi. And so, I think in great teams, I mean, I don’t know who would be doing that role in Liverpool at the moment, for example, that would also be somebody that was aligned to watch Klopp or are they all aligned

maybe Henderson, yeah.

Or could you even argue in the great teams, they’ve all they’re just full of cultural architects the perfect bit where they’re all full of as a leader for team, and they are all culturally aligned as well.

And there’s that line from Andy Flower when he was coaching the England cricket team. I think it’s in the documentary, The Edge, which is about how they got to number one. Yeah, good, isn’t it, how they then fell away. And he’s clearly a very driven individual who’s not particularly naturally warm, isn’t he’s almost the opposite of Klopp. So, he made himself into a great batsman, although technically, he maybe wasn’t because of his determination and doing things properly. And there’s a bit towards the end in that documentary, where he’s stumbling towards, you can see him trying to process some of the stuff that the players have said to him, and just stumbling towards what his learnings from that experience would be. And I think he says something like, if I did it again, I’d spend more time coaching the man, not the player. That is, it, isn’t it? He would be trying to get to say Steve Finn the bowler to release the ball slightly differently. So, he wasn’t no balling all the time, or he’d be trying to get Jonathan Trott to, to, you know, maybe change his initial trigger movement at the crease, but fundamentally, it was what Trott was going through as a man that affected his batting. And it was Steve, Steve Finn’s lack of confidence in what he was doing that was breaking down the physical processes. Yeah, but that seemed from the outside to come quite naturally to you with Fiji. I don’t know if you had to make a if you went over there and thought this is something I haven’t done before I want to do or this is something that’s worked for me before,

I think I think, I think a combination, I think it’s probably is more me than not me. And I think I learnt perhaps doing it the wrong way with England only because sometimes. And I guess you’ve seen this, like the increased amount of people getting involved in systems, the amount of technology the amount of data amount of noise. So even for something like an England seven setup or England rugby setup, you know, these guys are going into training with a GPS unit on their back and a heartrate monitor on their front, they’ve probably done a hydration osmolarity test to get their hydration level, they’ve done a wellness questionnaire when they’ve woken up, they might even have an accelerometer on their mattress to measure how good their sleep is. And then they’ve gone in to do a meeting with the with the doctor or the physio, and they’ve done their prehab and everything out and that’s before they’ve even stepped onto the field. But all this becomes your noise. And if you’re not careful, you forget about actually what’s going to make a difference. And whenever I see a team that doesn’t operate as well as they possibly can, or something goes wrong in their programmes. It’s never because so no one’s turned on the GPS or, you know, sound slightly over hydrated or their heart rates been heightened by something it’s normally because something in their culture or something in their relationships generally in teams, head coach with an athlete, athlete with athlete breaks down. But I guess part of all the chats having on this is road testing this and whether it is as important as perhaps you think it is.

But it’s there’s something else when you’re talking about that the consistency that I thought of as an example and Team Sky or team INEOS have had admirers and their detractors down the years, and I think probably rightly so they’ve done some things really well and some things where they’ve really fallen short of their stated aims and the ways of doing things. And Dave Brailsford as the team principal was probably done both those he’s done some things which have changed the way sports teams will be run in the future, but also some things that he will probably regret around the way he’s dealt with some people. There’s one thing he does really good and there’s a phrase that stuck in my mind, and its compassionate ruthlessness. Some people can relate to this outside of sport as well. It’s basically how do you deliver bad news so you got to do that as a coach all the time, haven’t you? I’m not picking you, I’m picking this other guy, or I’m going to sell you, or you need to do this basically delivering bad news. And that temptation that all of us have wanting to be liked, and then maybe wanting to take the edge off it. But as a coach or a manager or whatever is in high performance, you have to be honest, because if you lose the honesty, you’ve gone. And what Brailsford seems to be good at is that compassionate ruthlessness, so being able to say so when Bradley Wiggins becomes the first British man to win the Tour de France in 2012, and he appears at the opening ceremony, the London Olympics a month later, and he wins BBC Sports Personality and he’s got his sideburns. Brailsford had already realized that Chris Froome, who finished second in the 2012 tour, was a better long-term bet. So, he picked through as the team’s leader for the 2013 tour, and not the national hero this great this man had won it all. And that’s really hard decision to make. And then he’s done it again recently where he decided not to renew Chris Froome’s contract. Chris Froome, who is now won four Tour de France and eclipsed Wiggins achievements on the road. But again, he’s made this decision Actually, I’ve got Egan Bernal I’ve got Geraint Thomas I can’t fit all three in. So, he’s had to have the conversation with Chris Froome, who is shared all these great victories with to tell him basically, I’m dumping you.

The trick to be able to exit someone from our programme at just the right time is, you know, it’s a special skill that not many of us have really, do you think that is absolutely vital in any sort of high performing programme to be able to have those honest conversations said the right way.

I think it’s hard to argue with honesty, isn’t it? If someone presents a cogent case to you of why they’re making a decision, it almost strips the emotion out of it. And it doesn’t become the coach doesn’t like me, or I’ve done something wrong. It’s you don’t need to take this down to the sort of the numerical example of here are a pile of stats that show that x is a better option than you. But it at least explains that decision. And there have been other coaches where they didn’t think it was, they had to explain the decisions because they were the boss, you just accept it. And I think in those cases, particularly now, the way that players expect or athletes expect to be treated, you have to do more of that explaining, you have to show your show your workings out otherwise it will spread through the rest of the of the group, there’ll be that well hang on, if it’s happened to them, it could happen to me. And then people are starting to lose their confidence. And they’re starting to play within themselves and take less risks. Because we’ve all seen that in elite sports, haven’t we, where players play safe, because they don’t want to take get criticism. And it’s not hiding per se, because there’s that out there. But they’re just in that split second. They’re not trusting their instinct, they’re taking the safe option, because it’s the I won’t get in trouble option.

Cycling is an interesting one. So, coming into the next Olympics, now you know that they’re not one of the top operating nations, but there’s things that they’re probably do to get those additions and the tech is one of them, the tech packs that are put on and every everything else, I work with Nike and innovations. And some of the projects are about, you know, something that might help across in football or, you know, just a bit softer touch or whatever it is. Is that something that could distract? Or do you think there’s a place for it and modern sport,

From the people I’ve spoken to it’s a weird thing in that it can have absolute practical applications that help you. But there’s also the placebo effect. So, the British cycling track team going into the Beijing Olympics, knew they had these amazing Space Age suits. And when they’re when they’re at the World Championships, earlier in the year, they deliberately wore all their old kit. And they were still beating their archrivals, the others in the team pursuit they’re still beating the Aussies. And that gave them this massive psychological boost. Because they had total faith in the secret squirrels, as they called them, the guys coming up with the technological jumps. And it was okay, we’re performing like this in the old stuff. So, when we put those skin suits on, it’s like a superhero pulling on his cape. And maybe that was as important to them. And it certainly had an effect the other way. So, I think it was coming up to London 2012 where the French track team got absolutely paranoid about the new wheels that the wheels were somehow rounder. Yeah, the team GP had rounder wheels. And imagine if you’re French rider and they’d say, some super riders particularly in the sprint. And you’ve always been best in your age group, and you have committed totally to your sport, and you’ve fulfilled all the protocols you have to do. You’ve qualified the Olympics, and you’re going to the absolute peak of your sport and you’re in great shape. And then something is just planted in your head that there’s something that you it’s not quite a reason for failure, but it almost gives you an excuse doesn’t it’s almost well I can’t compete with that. Hang on. They’ve got rounder wheels. That That must be you have to be incredibly strong mentally to not let that that little burr stick to you somehow.

Yeah, that’s an interesting one, isn’t it? Because I suppose if you can find those small advantages, those little advantages. And they then sow that seed and the opposition that actually, whatever we do today is not there’ll be enough. Yeah, they’ve got something and, you know, back is less than now, but the All Blacks and you know, before they even walked out, there’s an aura around them and their standards and their cultures, some of which was true, and some of which, you know, I’ve seen absolutely opposite at different times on tour. I suppose that’s maybe one of the keys, you know, GB rowing would talk about, you know, anything they wanted to do, will it make the boat go faster? But I guess, maybe it’s all about making the opposition boat go a bit slower as well.

Yeah, in a strange way by because we’re meant to think positively all times in sport aren’t we? Steve actually told me something interesting once, which was about the power of negative thought. So, he would try to think it was sometimes it would happen naturally. The thoughts were bubbling through his head. Oh, no what If this happens, what happens if this happens? So he’d be thinking, what happens if an Olympic final, if I’ve got my Javelin spikes on I’m pulling them a lace snaps? God, that’d be awful. And then he came up with a solution which was quite silly. Well if that happens, I’m going to put a what I’ll do is I’ll put a spare pair of laces in my kit back. And then he found himself. catastrophizing, almost pretty much going to what’s the worst that can happen. But then by doing that, by thinking negatively, he then found a solution to all those potential worries which went when he went into competition, he was totally liberated, because he’d gone through all the worst-case scenarios and found a solution to it.