JULY 2010 FEATURE

What It Takes To Win: Perspectives from Vancouver 2010
Inspirational stories of women coaches and athletes from the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games

by Penny Werthner

In high performance sport, where millimetres and hundredths of a second make the difference between a medal and oblivion, it is always useful to take time to look back and analyse what happened at a major event. For the purposes of this article, the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games are the point of analysis. What is it we as coaches or as a team missed? What is it we did superbly? What is it we can learn that can help us at subsequent World Cups, world championships, and the 2012 and 2014 Games?

Certainly sport organizations and teams are beginning to do a better job at this type of analysis, but there is always room for improvement and learning. To continue to get better at learning from our Olympic and Paralympic experiences, this article looks at the reflections of a number of key women coaches and athletes at the 2010 Games in Vancouver and Whistler. But before I get to what they had to say, let’s take a few moments to reflect more broadly on how to conduct an effective analysis of sport performances.

I would argue that most of us who have been involved in high performance sport over many years know, on some level, what the “formula” is to help create the environment for successful performances at an elite level. We need committed, hard-working, talented athletes. We need committed, hard-working, talented coaches. We need well-developed plans, both physiologically and psychologically, that are implemented and then regularly assessed and adjusted. We also need ongoing, in-depth analysis of training and performance using multiple perspectives.

Ingredients for success
One attempt in doing just that resulted in the Own the Podium Beijing Report, for which Debbie Muir and I interviewed 30 coaches and 27 athletes from the Canadian Olympic team in an attempt to better understand what contributed to or hindered performances at the 2008 Games. A key finding of this report was the crucial nature of a strong relationship between a coach and her or his athlete. This relationship was a fundamental ingredient of an exemplary performance.

However, we also found that while this relationship was a necessary factor, it was not sufficient, in the sense that several athletes who “under-performed” in Beijing (and what is meant by “under-performance” in this context is an athlete who had a legitimate chance at a medal and did not achieve it) had very good coaches, but something else was missing from the environment that hindered the ultimate performance. Sometimes it was poor planning in terms of training and competing in the year leading to the Games. Sometimes it was mismanagement of injuries or the rest-and-recovery phases in the year of the Games. Sometimes it was a small but significant mental error within two weeks of the Games; it takes only a small error to compromise a performance.

A second key ingredient for ensuring optimal performance was that the athletes had, over a number of years and many competitive experiences, developed a clear sense of who they were and what worked for them in terms of training and competing. Together with their coaches, they had developed comprehensive, well-thought-out plans for training, travel, and competition based on that knowledge. One of the athletes from Beijing said, “As a small team, we worked through our issues, and it was a conscious choice to do so, especially after a poor previous Olympic result.” This quote provides us with a glimpse of the depth of reflection and self-awareness necessary to really give oneself a chance to win a medal at an Olympic Games.

Time to think
One book that explores this kind of in-depth thinking and development of self-awareness is Time to Think (Kline 2003), which argues that our job as leaders is to enable others to think for themselves. Nancy Kline provides the reader with a framework for thinking that consists of 10 components, and a number of these are useful within the context of sport.

First, she argues, taking the time to think involves paying attention and listening to what is being said with respect and interest. Good coaches learn to do that with high performance athletes who have reached a certain level of competence. Coaches and athletes also learn to do this with expert staff they bring on to help them. Kline states that “giving good attention to people makes them more intelligent. To help people think for themselves, first listen.”

Another component from Kline’s top 10 is asking incisive questions, and all of us in sport need to get better at this skill. We always need to be careful about assumptions, and we need to become better at creating an environment where questions such as “How did that happen?” and “How can we go from fourth to first?” are welcomed and asked often.

A third component Kline discusses is appreciation, and she means creating an environment where there is a better ratio of praise to criticism. Praise builds a sense of confidence in an athlete, which in turn is a crucial component of great performances. She argues, rather obviously it seems, but for something that is often not the case in reality, that “appreciation of someone needs to be genuine, succinct, and concrete.”

A final component for the purpose of this article is that of feelings. Kline means that we need to allow space for emotional release before we can expect to think clearly. This is such an important aspect to consider within the sporting context, because high performance sport is so full of emotions, including fears and varying degrees of anxiety. We need to acknowledge and manage these emotions before we can move to effective thinking and analysis. Otherwise, as Kline states, “Repression of feeling represses clear thinking.”