The head doctor who turns ‘chimps’ to champs on golden field of dreams

After years of managing to dip below the media radar, recently the psychiatry lecturer from Sheffield University has had to come out of the shadows – perhaps more so than he finds comfortable.

That’s because, although some of those he works with prefer not to advertise the fact, a few of his famous and very grateful students have gone on the record in crediting the 59-year-old from Middlesbrough with playing a crucial role in their success.

He might blush, but Victoria Pendleton said before London 2012 that Peters was “the reason I’m riding today”; Sir Chris Hoy, six times Olympic gold medallist and 11 times world champion, has said he didn’t think he could have achieved so much without the doctor.

Britain’s first Tour de France winner, four times Olympic gold medallist and six-times world champion Bradley Wiggins has also fulsomely acknowledged the major part working with “head” coach Dr Peters in the last few years has played in helping to banish fear of failure and stay focused.

David Brailsford, performance director of British Cycling, describes Peters simply as a “genius”.

In other sports – his major remit is cycling, but he has helped athletes in 15 different disciplines, including footballer Craig 
Bellamy and snooker champion Ronnie O’Sullivan – he has made the kind of difference which means players go into competition able to give their 
best and in the right frame of mind.

These elite performers work towards a peak of physical performance for every major championships, and the cyclists ride the most technologically advanced bikes around.

What they eat and drink, how they sleep and their training patterns are analysed to the 
nth degree to tailor-make a combined regime that is likely to produce a top performance. What Peters does is train them to manage psychological gremlins which might stand in the way.

Working one-to-one with an athlete for months or years, and giving each unique mental preparation means phone calls and sessions via Skype to men and woman who may be training in different parts of the UK or abroad.

He uses the “chimp” model – describing the dominant irrational, emotional side of the personality as a chimp which 
can take over and dominate the logical side – allows athletes to grasp how their own mind works and better understand the management of any gremlins.

As major championships get closer, the pressure of the daily schedule, nerves and weight 
of expectation can all combine to mean an athlete might find, if practised strategies aren’t in place, that the chimp side of their brain takes over, with fear of failure and inadequacy undermining all their efforts.

“The chimp part of the brain is so powerful because it’s the more primitive side, all about the survival of the species,” says Dr Peters. “For an individual athlete who asks me to work with them, the key is to help them to understand how their chimp works, accept how it is and manage it. You can’t remove it.”

He’s not about to go into explicit detail on the techniques he uses, and anyway they vary from case to case, but the fact that he is so very much in demand and the very real outcomes at Beijing in 2008 and London 2012 in the consecutive achievement of eight cycling golds (which everyone hoped for but no-one dared to expect), says the head doctor is getting it right.

Before he got involved with cycling Steve Peters was never much of a sports fan, hardly ever even watching TV coverage. It’s fair to say that when he first found himself in that world what he knew about it all could have been written on the back of a cigarette packet.

He was (and still is) a senior lecturer in psychiatry, helping to train future doctors. For 20 years he had been in clinical psychiatry, 12 of them spent working in the area of severe personality disorders at Rampton high security hospital.

“One of my former students had become a doctor with the British cycling team. He rang and asked if I would meet and possibly help a cyclist who was having a bad time.

“I worked with him regularly and the change in him and his performance was described by David Brailsford as a miracle.” After that Peters’s role in British cycling quickly grew.

Peters isn’t keen on being picked out as the manufacturer of gold medal-winning performances. He’s one of a team working together to manage all aspects of athletes’ performance, he says.

“I get the privilege of working with an amazing, dedicated and gifted group of elite athletes who are interested in being the best they can be in every department. It’s our job to help them to iron out any problems.”

However much he maintains that what he does is quite simple and logical, there is a tendency to glamorise the idea of the doctor who, by sleight-of-mind, apparently elevates the physically honed, hard-working and disciplined to the level of mentally-indestructible, laurel-crowned gods.

Peters isn’t having that; he shrugs off the idea that he alone can do anything. It’s about team work and intelligent competitors embracing a simple idea, understanding their own mind, working to keep the right balance between logic nd emotion (not banishing emotion) and continuing to learn.

Sir Chris Hoy is a case in point. “Chris came to me and asked ‘How can I use my mind to optimise my performance?’ before the Athens games. He was keen to learn and has continued to take it very seriously since.”

But even after months or years of practice at showing that primate who’s boss, the psychological cavalry are often needed late in the day. During London Olympics and other major championships Peters and a small group of other doctors he has trained in the same techniques were on call 24/7 – and will be again during the Paralympics.

And yes, they do take the odd panicky middle-of-the-night phone call from a competitor whose chimp may be telling them they haven’t a prayer.

Peters has worked with track cyclist Victoria Pendleton since just before the Athens Olympics in 2004. “She’s a fantastic woman but she had a couple of problems back then, couldn’t hold it together and went out in the first round.

“My job was to keep her together when she doubted herself... and there have been a few times when she was close to giving up,” says Peters. Pendleton went on to win gold at Beijing and gold and silver at London 2012, as well as a total of nine world championships before she retired earlier this month.

Part of the psychiatrist’s job is in helping athletes to accept that a best performance on a given day is not necessarily one which yields a gold medal. “In elite sport you can get things out of perspective and lose the fun. A common gremlin is that they’re there to win and are worthless if they don’t. Helping people to change that attitude is important. The acceptance makes an athlete happier, and a happier athlete is more likely to do well.”

Peters’s years of helping Ronnie O’Sullivan to see snooker as fun again and not the single thing that defines him as a person has, the player acknowledges, given his career a terrific new lease of life.

When judo player Karina Bryant asked for help from Peters after losing in the first round at Beijing, suffering what he calls “meltdowns”, the doctor posed the question: ‘If you don’t win gold will you feel you’ve wasted your time or that you’ve enjoyed the journey?’ She said the latter. If she hadn’t he says wouldn’t have agreed.

“She was great to work with, very focused. She won bronze in London, it was a magic moment for both of us, and she said ‘It may as well be gold to me...’”

Peters says involvement with the campaign to prepare British cyclists for Rio 2016 is not a given for him, but discussions about a possible role will be happening “quite soon.”

Before he helps anyone he has to immerse himself for a while in how their sport works and what its demands are. With little hinterland even as an observer, isn’t it difficult sometimes to get inside the athlete’s mind?

“There are times when I don’t feel I’ve cracked it and I ask a colleague to help me. It’s very useful that I’m not alone in 
what I do.”

Almost as an afterthought, he throws in “a whole other story” about how he himself switched from running with a club for fun and fitness, to becoming, at 40 years old, a world champion sprinter at 100m 200m and 400m – 12 times over in different veteran age brackets.

It’s safe to say the good doctor is on familiar terms with that pesky chimp.

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