Relentless: Secrets of the Sporting Elite

Introduction

Want to know the best thing about being a double Olympic gold medallist?

The free kit’s great. The golden postbox? That was pretty cool. Never having to buy a round in your local? What Yorkshireman wouldn’t enjoy that? Then there’s the fan mail – mostly via social media these days, though some people are still refreshingly old school; the marriage proposals (awkward); and the proposals of a rather less wholesome nature (even more so). The sponsorship deals have certainly made my day-to-day life as an athlete a lot easier. And I’ve loved playing a part in giving thousands of young people a chance to experience triathlon.

But, for a sports obsessive such as myself, there’s one perk that beats all others: the access gold medals give you to the sporting elite. Those surprisingly weighty discs are like a currency recognised throughout the sporting world (not that I walk around with them, you understand). The immortals past and present, those setting the pace or leading their fields – all suddenly seem happy for you to chew the fat with them pretty much as equals, even when you feel far from it.

It helps that my sport, triathlon, has exploded in popularity in recent years. Seemingly every sportsman and woman I bump into these days is into their tri, or at the very least reaping the benefits of running, cycling or swimming in one form or another. It used to be that golf was every sportsperson’s second sport. For many years, in certain sports, it was drinking. Times have changed.

I wasn’t about to squander this privileged access. I’m bewildered by fans who queue up to meet their sporting heroes and want only selfies. I want more. I want to sit them down and pick their brains, to find out what it is that makes them tick – and goes on doing so. That’s so much more interesting to me than a gurning photo for a few social media likes.

And what fascinates me more than anything are those who don’t just win, but dominate. Those who don’t shrink on the highest stage, but grow on it. Athletes and sportspeople who through their achievements expand the very parameters of what is thought possible.

I’ve never shared the British appreciation for the underdog. Anyone can run hot, lightning can strike, rogue caps can get awarded. But what of those who do it week in, week out; World Cup after World Cup; grand slam after grand slam; season after season; Olympic cycle after Olympic cycle? Those who refuse to bow to despondency or triumphalism, to boredom, to distraction, to adulation or to enrichment (not a problem for triathletes, I can assure you)?

A sporting career, like life, is finite and over quicker than you might imagine. To stay at the top for 10, 15, sometimes even 20 years – that takes a special calibre of person. Does it actually get easier, given the funding, the support, the seeding, the experience? For sure. But it also gets exponentially harder due to the target on your back, age tapping at the window, and the event or sport you call your own changing almost beyond recognition with the passing of years.

I’ve achieved – but I’m no expert in what it takes to achieve. Really, I’m an expert in just one thing: what works for me. And therein lies my curiosity. I want to understand what it takes – in the words of Seb Coe about his old friend, the decathlete Daley Thompson – ‘to grip your event by the throat and make it your own’. I love that phrase. Any sportsperson would. Choking the life out of it. A dogged, white-knuckled refusal to relinquish.

How do these people do it? What can I learn from them? And, crucially, what do such people share – physiologically, behaviourally and psychologically? These are the questions I’ve always longed to ask. And one day it suddenly hit home: now I’m in a position to do so.

So that’s what I’ve done here: England’s two most inspirational cricketers of the past century; the leading try scorer in Welsh rugby; the lynchpin of Sir Alex Ferguson’s all-conquering Manchester United reign; one of England’s greatest-ever goal scorers; the fastest female marathoner of all time; a multiple Formula One winner who battled through more than 200 Grands Prix and went front-wing to front-wing with arguably the strongest grid ever assembled; a four-time Tour de France winner; the champion jockey who battered himself into submission to fuel his addiction to winning; the man with one of the best Ryder Cup records in golf; the world’s most astonishing endurance athlete; the dazzlingly articulate captain of a team that rewrote the book on teamwork; the most distinctive sprinter, and two of the most dominant swimmers in history; the fastest cyclist of all time; and the most naturally gifted snooker player of this or any generation.

Mavericks and monomaniacs, show-offs and introverts, team players and individual stars – the diversity of characters I’ve met and spoken to is striking. In fact these sporting superstars only really share one thing: they are all, in Seb’s words, bona fide ‘grippers’. Some have trained with me. Others have hung out with me. All have indulged me, and I’m pretty sure you’re going to want to hear what they have to say.

To this list I’ve added a cast of supporting characters: World Cup coaches; the world’s leading experts in human performance and exercise physiology; surviving relatives of athletes who were once unstoppable competitive forces; a multiple world champion turned motivational speaker and high-performance consultant; athletes whose roles in epic sporting moments were limited to a brief cameo; and a professor heading up groundbreaking research into the well-being and welfare of elite athletes.

All these characters provide the context, clarity and colour as I explore themes around performance that have fascinated me from a time before I could articulate them: decision-making, focus, innovation, motivation, conditioning, adaptability, superstition, belief, aura, ruthlessness, passion – and that biggie, the one us athletes never like to dwell too much upon … luck.

I remember attending a dinner at my old school, Bradford Grammar, around eight years ago. On my table was Adrian Moorhouse MBE, who triumphed in the 100m breaststroke at the 1988 Seoul Olympics. A rather self-important Old Bradfordian was quizzing me about how I could possibly continue to train intensively, hour after hour, day after day, year after year, four-year cycle after four-year cycle.

Before I could come up with a response, Moorhouse stepped in. ‘If you can answer the question of why you do it, then you’re in the wrong game.’ It was a neat line, and it seemed to satisfy the old buffer. Thanks, Adrian. But you know what? The further I’ve progressed in sport and the older I’ve got, the more I’ve realised that I want to be able to answer that question: why and how I do what I do – and whether it’s the same for others.

There are a couple of common misconceptions regarding motivation. People tend to think that it’s a binary force for sportspeople – you’ve either got it or you haven’t – and that it comes from a single, unwavering, inexhaustible source, with your career dying when it’s snuffed out. I’ve always found it far more enigmatic than that; the wronged man nursing a burning injustice only works in the movies (though we’ll meet several sportspeople for whom being written off early in their careers, either physically or in some other way, provided the bedrock to their success).

For me, the internal fire of motivation has to be selectively deployed. And it can be drawn from multiple sources. Glory, financial gain, fear of failure, the desire to impress, anger, mastery of the process, jealousy, rage, love of the great outdoors, silencing of doubt (both external and internal) – these are sources I’ve tapped into at some point to aid my performance, sometimes all during the same day.

Over my career, I’ve learned not to judge someone’s source of motivation in a ‘mine is more intrinsic and authentic than yours’ sort of way, but simply to respect the varied wells from which high achievers draw their reserves. If hate gets you over the line – and do dig out footage of the final game of the Andre Agassi vs Boris Becker US Open semi-final in 1995 if you want to see how effective channelled rage can be (Agassi was nursing a sense of burning injustice after a perceived Becker slight) – then great. ‘Just written the other side’s team talk’ is an expression the media like to use in such situations. For all the finely tuned preparation, it can sometimes be forgotten that sport is played by humans.

By the same token, those of us who compete understand that leaping over a bar, kicking a ball over some posts, or – for me – swimming, cycling and running around a course are highly contrived forms of behaviour that have little or nothing to do with real life. And yet we must believe, with every fibre of our being, that the two are inextricably linked. That sport is life, and therefore failure is death (Bill Shankly put it best), and that everything else around us – family, friends, other people, other interests – matters less at that moment. Only then can we begin to scale the heights of training and performance to compete with the world’s best. Cognitive dissonance, I believe they call it. Or as Welsh and Lions rugby legend Shane Williams, who we’ll meet in a future chapter, once put it, a sort of temporary insanity.

Of course, for some, cognitive dissonance isn’t required. I had a comfortable middle-class upbringing in Yorkshire, leaving Bradford Grammar with four As at A level and studying medicine at Cambridge until I chose to leave to focus on being an athlete. The breadline and the finishing line were unlikely to ever be linked in my life. Siya Kolisi, the inspirational captain of the South African rugby team that swept to World Cup glory in Japan in 2019, grew up in a township outside Port Elizabeth, was raised by a grandparent and often trained on an empty stomach.

Undisputed middleweight boxing champion Claressa Shields faced similar early adversity. She endured an unimaginably tough upbringing in Flint, Michigan; she was introduced to boxing by her father, who spent many of her early years in jail. Although we both did the double in London 2012 and Rio 2016, any other similarities between us on the surface would be hard to find.

But this book is not a study of what breeds success: nature versus nurture; the effects of calendar bias in the formative years; the 10,000 hours rule of Malcolm Gladwell’s excellent Outliers. Enthralling stuff, all of it, but that path is well trodden. I want to shift the focus onwards and upwards, to the territory that lies beyond achievement. Multiple grand slams rather than occasional tournament wins. Not just a single Tour de France victory, but a drive to win more than any rider in history. What are the motivating factors in this? Hunger? Insatiable competitiveness? Greed? Habit? Fear?

You won’t be surprised to learn which camp, as a well-grounded Yorkshire lad, I lean towards in the perspiration vs inspiration debate. There’s a cracking anecdote I first heard as a schoolboy about the legendary Seb Coe–Steve Ovett rivalry. You’ll have heard it, I’m sure. Coe, the story goes, went training one Christmas morning, desperate to grab an advantage over his great middle-distance rival. But, once showered and changed and sitting down to Christmas dinner, he became beset by worry. What if Ovett were training twice that day? So he went out again that evening. Years later, when the two had become friends, Coe felt compelled to share the story.

‘So you only trained twice that day,’ was Ovett’s response.

Almost certainly apocryphal. Or is it? We’re a crazy bunch, us athletes, and gluttons for punishment. But as I’ve progressed in my career I’ve come to realise something quite surprising: while hard work is the foundation of success, in and of itself it’s largely pointless. I’ve heard boasts of training the most, of training the least, and of pretty much everything in between. The boast of 2021 is who trains the cleverest. You can ‘bury yourself’, to use the endurance terminology – training until your muscles burn, your eyes bulge and your ear-drums are fit to burst – but unless you’re training smart, it’s worthless. Worse, it can be counterproductive.

I’ve known many contemporaries blessed with more extravagant physical gifts than me. And yet I’m a double Olympic champion. Why? I like to think that ‘purposeful practice’ – something about which the journalist, author and speaker Matthew Syed has written in detail – has much to do with it. We’ll look at this, and to what extent it rings true for the sporting greats.

All manner of themes feed into the question of the sources of success: teachability, innovation, adaptability. Not seeing yourself as the finished article and opening yourself up to advances in sports science, one might imagine, would be great qualities in top-flight sport. Psychologists speak of having a ‘growth mindset’ in contrast to a fixed one, and of the ability to view yourself as a work in progress rather than a finished article. But, as I can attest, an athlete is almost completely surrounded by input: from coaches, managers, agents, family, friends, fans, -ologists, the media. Unless you can filter, and at times silence this near-constant ‘noise’, you will quickly become overwhelmed.

Former chess prodigy Josh Waitzkin – whose 2007 book The Art of Learning: An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance is something I’ve turned to again and again during my career – has a theory that you are better off focusing hard on a small range of skills than risking spreading yourself too thinly. Mastery in one skill, he reasons, translates to mastery in others. ‘Work on your weaknesses,’ we all grow up being told. But do the elite really do this, and risk their USP being neglected? Or do they maximise that strength – the Agassi return, Megan Rapinoe’s shooting from outside the box, Shields and her power punches – draw their confidence from this and rely on the trickle-down effect?

As hateful as injury is, at least it punctuates the periods of endless preparation. I train for an average of 1,500 hours a year. That’s roughly four hours a day, every day. Take it from me, maintaining intensity and consistency throughout those long weeks and months is not easy. So it’s not enough for the practice to be purposeful; it also needs to be creative.

Kílian Jornet, the great Catalan endurance athlete who broke into the public consciousness with his twin speed ascents of Mount Everest in 2017, has built a career out of reinventing himself. Ski mountaineering; ultramarathons; sky races; chasing FKTs (fastest known times) on the world’s biggest summits; fell running. He follows his whims and, endlessly inspired and motivated, is constantly achieving. It’s a defence against mental, but also physical, burnout, as the load on muscle groups is shared around. There’s no stagnation. We’ll hear from Kílian in a later chapter.

Any discussion of elite performance in sport has to consider pressure. How are champions affected by it? How do they conquer it? Is it even desirable to conquer it? Riding over the Serpentine Bridge in Hyde Park with my brother Jonny before the Olympic triathlon final in 2012, we were hit by a wall of noise. It was like nothing either of us had experienced before and I’m fairly confident ever will again. And it was only the warm-up. I could have been daunted, but the words of my running coach and mentor, Malcolm, from five years before (as I was preparing for the World Junior Championships) came back to me: ‘Pressure is a privilege,’ I could hear him saying in his understated way.

It’s a much-used phrase – tennis great Billie Jean King wrote a book with this as the title. But, at the time, I’d never heard it before. It became my mantra and, on that day, what could have been a terrifyingly inhibiting factor became a cool tailwind driving me onwards to gold: the privilege of incredible, hair-raising support.

This makes it sound easy, but handling pressure and expectation is of course anything but. The list of top-class performers who have wilted in their glare is long and distinguished. Opening Test batsmen (my respect for whom has grown enormously with this project) who succumb and are never the same again; boxers who quit on their stools; elite tennis players who double-fault their way through multiple championship points then tailspin to a crushing defeat.

Few have witnessed sporting pressure close up like Donna Fraser. The British 400m runner was training partners with Cathy Freeman in the summer that preceded that crazy night in Sydney in 2000 when the Australian athlete carried the expectation of both her nation and her Aboriginal people on her bodysuited shoulders. Did Freeman win in spite of this pressure, or because of it? Fraser, who finished just a few yards back in that Olympic final, with a front-row seat to one of the most highly charged sporting moments of recent decades, offers her insight.

What else? Well, we’ll certainly take time to consider the role of ruthlessness among leading sports stars. To what lengths would you go to win? Four kilometres from the finish in the Olympic final in Rio in 2016, Jonny and I were out in front together – clear of the field but locked in an unspoken battle for gold. It was hot and we were both feeling the effects of the punishing pace we’d imposed during the cycling stage to open up the field.

Jonny was first to break the silence. ‘Relax,’ he said, between deep intakes of breath. My ears pricked up. It was just one word. But, knowing him as I do, it was far more than that. It was a tell. He was struggling. ‘Go, go, go!’ something inside me screamed, and I did – cranking up the pace, kicking on, and embracing the agony because, whatever hell I was suffering, I knew with the certainty of a thousand training runs that Jonny was feeling it just that little bit more.

We’re brothers. We’ve trained together for years. He’s been instrumental in getting me to where I am today. Without our rivalry I’d be half the athlete. Yet here I was, preying on his weakness. Do I regret it? Not at all. I like to think he’d have done the same. And that’s the ruthlessness I believe is an essential component in all champions – in the arena of competition but, just as importantly, in their daily life, too.

The Wimbledon winner clearing out their support team, without sentiment, in pursuit of that extra 1 per cent. The jockey missing the birth of a child to chase winners in a second-tier jump meet. The boxer parting with the promoter who brought her to the big time. Whatever shape or form ruthlessness takes, it must surely be a central component. Elite sport, someone once told me, is not the place to make friends.

And no study of sporting mastery would be complete without an assessment of what I see as perhaps the two biggest determiners of sustained sporting success: passion and luck. The more passion you have, the more prepared you are to act with conviction. And the more conviction you have in a decision, the more passionate you will be about it. It’s self-perpetuating.

In footballer Steven Gerrard’s autobiography My Story, he summed it up in pyromaniacal terms: ‘If Gérard [Houllier] had left me out for the Ipswich game I would have set fire to his office. I hate being rested. Hate it. Even if I know it is for my own good. I’m a nightmare, kicking up a stink, turning the air blue. Play me! Being deprived of football is like being starved of air. I live and breathe the game. Missing one minute of one match feels like death.’

Hyperbole aside, that’s a pretty articulate illustration of what I’m talking about. What is pressure, form, performance anxiety and the like, measured against such all-consuming passion for what you do? And I’m not sure this can be manufactured. That passion isn’t always for the most obvious things, too. For a footballer, it might be training drills but not fitness work; or the thought of a backs-against-the-wall relegation battle but not trying to break in to the top three. I’ve definitely encountered endurance athletes with a deep, intense love for six-hour training days – but not for putting the resulting fitness into racing. The swimming great Ian Thorpe, for all his victories, always made clear it was the training that he truly loved.

Sportspeople like to believe that practice makes you lucky, and practising more makes you luckier. I wouldn’t dispute that, but nor would I pretend that I’m anything approaching the master of my destiny. The uncontrollables are never far away. Those injuries, of course. But also the punctures. The crashes. The scandals. The geo-political fluctuations. The global health crises.

Ask Vanderlei Cordeiro de Lima, attacked by an unhinged spectator while leading the 2004 Olympic marathon in Athens and limping home in third place. Ask tennis star Monica Seles, stabbed by a mad fan when at the peak of her powers and her rivalry with Steffi Graf. Or ask Eddy Merckx, punched by a spectator in the 1975 Tour de France on his way to the summit of the Puy de Dôme, denying him a shot at a record sixth victory.

Sergey Bubka raised the bar, literally, in the men’s pole vault 35 times in his career but had a modest Olympic record. Injury, disqualification, boycotts – all contributed. Two months before the 1984 Los Angeles Games, to which Russia refused to send a team, he vaulted 12cm higher than the height that would claim gold. Yet the record books don’t show context, they just show records, something I’ll discuss with the great Michael Johnson in the final chapter.

But while luck (and whether your country invades Afghanistan) is out of your control, how you greet its fleeting appearances, or infuriating desertions – without getting all Kiplingesque about it – really isn’t. Josh Waitzkin talks about the way momentum can work both ways, the ‘deadly pattern’ of error begetting error, and how the ‘downward spiral’ can be stopped by a simple act of mental resetting. How often over the years have we seen the likes of Roger Federer or Steffi Graf or Alastair Cook regard an error with a sort of detached curiosity, mentally give a little shrug, then continue with the business of dismantling, or thwarting, their opponents?

To what extent is there a correlation between this fiendishly difficult trick, and protracted sporting accomplishment? Ronnie O’Sullivan, who has struggled more than almost anyone with this, is particularly enlightening on the subject, as we’ll see.

I think back to receiving my second consecutive gold medal in Rio in 2016. Podiums are awkward places at the best of times, but this was on a different level. It was stiflingly hot, and I was shattered, physically and emotionally, from the strain and strategising of the race a few hours earlier. The months of preparation and expectation, training and fine-tuning, had taken a huge toll.

The pressure was gone and I was dizzy with relief. But I don’t think that entirely explained the nagging discomfort I felt as the medal was hung from my neck. It was something more instinctive: I simply didn’t know what to feel. ‘Beyond my wildest dreams’ is a cliché that many a sportsperson turns to at such moments. In this instance, it was apt. My dreams (wild and, mostly, not) only extended so far.

Children grow up wanting to play for their country, not collect 100 caps. To conquer Mount Everest, rather than tackle it twice in a week. And my Everest moment had come four years earlier on that unforgettable day in London 2012 when the home crowds stood 20 deep around the Serpentine, and Hyde Park seemed to pulsate with partisan energy: Olympic glory.

But now I was a double Olympic champion, and the first man to successfully defend an Olympic triathlon title. I’d joined an elite club of back-to-back gold medallists. And yet I felt … entirely normal: Al, the down-to-earth Yorkshireman who loves nothing more than haring round the lanes and trails of the Yorkshire Dales; whose friends call him ‘thin fat lad’; who probably drinks one too many pints of Yorkshire bitter for someone practising a sport that’s built on the finest of margins (the pitfalls of having, until a couple of years ago, a pub a few yards from my house).

Given the obstacles I’d faced, and the field I’d beaten, I was perhaps prouder of this gold than the one four years earlier: the personal battle to come back from surgery on my ankle 10 months before; the hurdles I’d had to deal with along the way; the unfamiliar climate Jonny and myself had needed to overcome (Yorkshire is decidedly un-Rio at the best of times). Above all, the knowledge that backing up victory is so much harder than achieving it first time around. And yet.

‘Don’t cry, you big softie,’ I whispered to Jonny as the anthem started. It was the identical, admittedly lame, comment I’d made to my brother at the equivalent moment four years earlier in London. How’s that for consistency? Jonny flashed me the sort of withering look that only siblings can. Same old Al. Yes, whatever a sports ‘star’ was meant to look like, I was pretty sure I wasn’t it.

Someone once said to me (and I think it was a compliment): ‘You’re so normal, and when I see what you’ve achieved, it makes me think that perhaps anyone could.’ It’s an intriguing prospect, isn’t it? I don’t think anyone is naïve enough to think that talent and sporting success follow a neatly proportionate ascending scale. Hard work; decision-making; focus; pressure management; motivation; versatility; teachability. Weave all these together into the optimum mix and have you actually got what’s misleadingly known as talent? There are plenty of intangibles there – but not unreachables.

If we as sportsmen and women are guilty of a distorted outlook, then surely fans, myself included, are equally so. We use the tag of genius all too easily. We’re hardwired to do so.

Watch Usain Bolt in full flow, as I did on the night of my Rio victory when I sneaked into the Estádio do Maracanã for the 200m final, or Ben Stokes’s 135 not out at Headingley in 2019 to square the Ashes, or Katie Ledecky smashing yet another world record in the pool, and you’ll hear talk of these sorts of