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Athletes aim to win the mind games in Olympic race for glory
In sport, if you don't win you should at least have a good excuse for failure.
When Ronnie O'Sullivan let an 8-3 lead slip in the 1997 Masters final, he claimed the shock of seeing a female streaker had broken his concentration. It was tight-fitting shirts and the wrong trousers which caused the demise of the Sri Lankan cricket team in the 2001 ICC
Champions Trophy and Sir Alex Ferguson, the grandmaster of
scapegoating, once famously blamed defeat on the colour of his side's shirts. They were grey.
At the Olympics, the world's biggest and best sporting showcase, the excuses just get even more outlandish.
At the Sydney Games, finely- toned athletes who had blown their chance of a medal could be heard muttering about jetlag.
In Athens, a Finnish javelin competitor said she was so surprised by the size of the Athens stadium her technique went awry and, in Beijing, fears of heat and humidity caused some competitors to throw in the
towel before the opening ceremony had even begun.
For some, the pressure of stepping on to the international stage proves simply too much and when British athletes get to the starting line of London 2012, the stakes will never have been higher.
Aware that mental fitness is just as important as physical training, Team GB is now working with a team of psychologists in the hope of preparing the athletes for the first Olympics on English soil for 64 years.
"The London Games poses unique challenges and opportunities for British athletes," says Mark Bawden, head of psychology at the English Institute of Sport and former lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University.
"The combination of home crowds, familiarity with conditions and home-based officiating and staffing can all be seen as both advantages and disadvantages.
"A home Games presents a different environment which athletes need to be ready for and have the mental endurance to cope with, no matter what sport they're in or what their medal prospects are."
Athletes always face intense training and pressure in the run-up to an Olympics, but a home Games adds a stronger media spotlight, demands from sponsors and national excitement to the mix.
In an attempt to harness the positive effects of pressure, Mark and his team are now working with trainers to target the psychological demands athletes will experience.
"While we can't recreate thousands of people watching you at an Olympic final, we can recreate the same sensations athletes will go through," he says. "One key tool we have developed is pressure training whereby you create deliberately intensive situations so that athletes get used to dealing with the expectations and consequences of performing at the very highest level.
"The trick is finding a way to use the added pressures to bolster
rather than burden the athletes."
Mark has seen first hand how destructive pressure can be. While at Sheffield Hallam, he carried out research into the "yips" which can destroy the careers of even the most talented golfers and cricketers.
Many theories have been put forward as to why the brightest sportsmen suddenly lose their ability, but Mark is convinced it is simply down to a massive loss of self-belief.
"The yips happen when a bowler starts thinking about cricket skills that he hasn't thought about for years," he says, "What would normally be a subconscious right-side brain function, becomes an analytical left-side brain function.
"When you start to consciously control what you're doing, the natural rhythm breaks down. It's an extreme experience and the players who tend to suffer most are those who are naturally quite analytical and self-conscious."
The yips have ruined careers, but Mark believes there is a way back
even from this most severe loss of confidence.
"Because every part of a cricket match becomes a psychological trigger, you have to strip them away and start again. You have to video the player bowling well in the nets then get them to watch the video over and over again, so that image becomes stronger than that of bowling with the yips.
"Then you gradually put a batsman in, you take the nets outside, then you remove the net and introduce fielders. Eventually, you get back
towards that match situation and, while it's not a foolproof process, it is one with which we have had quite a lot of success. As with
everything, it's about developing mental toughness."
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