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
