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
