All athletes have just the right amount of crazy

“I looked straight across to the clock and I was disappointed with the time” – Cathy Freeman reflecting on her Sydney 2000 Olympics 400m gold medal (ABC iView’s Freeman documentary).

In the absence of sport for a good chunk of 2020, the void has been filled with a number of documentaries about successful athletes and teams. The personal insight from these athletes in these documentaries has been so rich, and it’s been incredible to gain an inside look into what has gone into some of the biggest victories in sporting history.

These stories have got me thinking about just what does it really take to become a world champion? Or an Olympic gold medallist? Or a member of a dynasty NBA team? What sets the ultimate champions apart from their peers? Is it simply hard work? Maybe. But all athletes, regardless of how successful they are, have all put in the hours in training to get them to that point of being called an elite athlete, and competing at the highest level of their sport. Is it pure talent that sets them apart and stands them above everyone else? Perhaps, but again, there are a large number of highly talented athletes who have never won a Grand Slam, or a World Cup, or an Olympic medal. Is it simply luck? Athletes being in the right place at the right time, avoiding injuries, getting a penalty in the 90th minute? There’s certainly an element of luck in all sporting competitions, but nobody is that lucky year after year are they?

The difference is more likely to be internal. A large chunk of their success is to do with their mentality, and the willingness to continuously push themselves to always want that one little extra gain. Whether its simply pushing for an extra kilogram in the gym, or an extra millisecond in their race time, or stretching beyond their limits to keep that next ball in play, the most successful athletes never seemed to be satisfied with “just good enough”. Everything they do in their training, their preparation, their competitions is constantly pushing their own limits to be the best. Why is it that at 39 years old, Serena Williams is still a top 10 singles player, and competing in Grand Slams, even after winning 23 already? Simple. She wants number 24. And number 25. Why did Usain Bolt compete at the 2016 Olympics, at 30 years of age, and even after winning 5 gold medals in the previous 2 Olympics? He wanted number 6. And 7. And 8. “I want to be among greats, Muhammad Ali and Pele” (https://www.bbc.com/sport/olympics/37027477). These champion athletes live and breathe by their pursuit of always wanting more from themselves and experiencing that winning feeling again and again.

Jill Ellis, the US women’s national soccer team head coach, and 2 x world cup winner summed it up the best when she addressed her players at their 2016 Olympic team camp following their 2015 world cup victory. “Mountain tops are small and the air is thin for a reason. Because you’re not supposed to dwell on top of the mountain. It’s rented space. You get up there, enjoy the view briefly, and then you must climb again.” (From Netflix’s The Playbook: Coaches rules for life, Ep. 2, 2020). This epitomises the mentality of multiple champion athletes and teams. Enjoy the success once you’ve earned it, but then you have to come back down, and work even harder to get back up to the top again and again.

The highly successful athletes and teams, the ones with multiple gold medals, world championships, premiership flags all have one thing in common. They are simply never satisfied with just one win. Of course, there are teams who win their competition one year, but then they fail to back it up the following season. But those aren’t the teams you would consider in the conversation of successful sporting dynasties.

The insane willingness and borderline obsession with wanting more and more success is the mentality that pushes athletes to do more above and beyond what they have already done, both on and off the field, to taste that success again. An element of crazy exists within these athletes, that pushes them to the top of that mountain again and again and again.

Gee Vee

Tennis is stupid

Grand Slam tennis is finally back! The US Open kicked off last week after the tour took a nearly 6-month break. So to celebrate, I thought I’d take a deep dive into why tennis is stupid.

It’s one of the few sports that doesn’t have a time limit attached to it. It just keeps going on until someone has won either 2 sets (in a best of 3-set match), or 3 sets (in a best of 5-set match). This scoring system means it is incredibly tricky to plan for each match, and make it very difficult to predict what’s going to happen.

The stats below are taken from an actual 5-set tennis match. Have a look at them. Based off these numbers, who do you think won the match?

PLAYER APLAYER B
10ACES25
9DOUBLE FAULTS6
136/219 (62%)FIRST SERVE % IN127/203 (63%)
101/136 (74%)WIN % ON 1ST SERVE100/127 (79%)
39/83 (47%)WIN % ON 2ND SERVE39/76 (51%)
24/38 (63%)NET POINTS WON51/65 (78%)
3/8 (38%)BREAK POINTS WON7/13 (54%)
64/203 (32%)RECEIVING POINTS WON79/219 (36%)
54WINNERS94
52UNFORCED ERRORS62
204TOTAL POINTS WON218

What if I told you that Player A was the winner of this match? These are the stats from the 2019 Wimbledon Final – Djokovic (Player A) beat Federer (Player B) in a 5hr, 5 set epic, ending 13-12 in the fifth set in the longest Wimbledon final ever. But that’s the thing with tennis, and indeed most sports, the stats aren’t the whole story. They’re not even half the story. Looking purely at the stats of this match, you likely wouldn’t be able to pick the winner. By the time the two greats were shaking hands, the only stat that mattered was that Novak won 3 sets to 2.

But what if we dig a little deeper at some of the other tactical aspects of each player? Performance analysts all over the world, in every single professional sport have the task of coding, analysing and assessing future opponents in an attempt to get the edge over them in their upcoming battles. The four Grand Slams and the ATP and WTA provide so much of this information through Hawk-Eye data collected during matches. And I can guarantee both Djokovic and Federer did this same research before the 2019 final (even though they already know each other’s games inside and out). Tactical trends, serving patterns, tendencies on important points, where they hit the most errors from or to, or even what each player might do when they’re up or down a break. All of these questions would have been asked and answers would have been searched for prior to their matchup.

Zverev 1st serve placement v Nadal in ATP finals November 2019
(picture courtesy https://www.atptour.com/en/news/zverev-nadal-nitto-atp-finals-2019-monday-hawkeye-analysis)

But again, that’s the beauty of tennis. This information may not even matter once the two players get out onto centre court. My PhD research focused specifically on how players use this information when returning an opponent’s serve. I interviewed past and present tennis players about how they used this type of information when returning their opponent’s serve. Surprisingly, most players said that they would take this information into account early on in the match, but after a while, if their opponent’s serving patterns changed, they would adapt to that change – not the previous analysis of the opponent. There may have been a million reasons for this change. Perhaps their opponent’s strongest serve was going into their strongest return, so they had to serve differently; maybe the returner was getting on top in the match, so the server needed to change it up; maybe they were slightly injured so couldn’t hit a kick serve, and instead had to slice it. Many of these little tactical cat and mouse games are going on during a tennis match, not just during the serve, but in every rally of every point. And it’s these little battles that make it such an entertaining sport for viewers, a nightmare for analysts, and frustrating for players when they lose.

Like I said, tennis is stupid. But it takes the smart players to be able to beat this stupidity, and they’re usually the ones on the winners list.

Gee Vee

Context will always be King

First thing I wanted to cover off in this blog series was to highlight the importance of context in all sport science disciplines.

Although sport science, strength and conditioning, mental performance, and many other areas of sport performance have come such a long way in the past 20 years or so, it is important that the information and programming prescribed to the athletes is applied within the context of their chosen sport. Sport performance has four elements that are imperative for performance – physical, technical, tactical and mental. Athletes must master these skills in their respective sport to be successful.

In an elite sports environment, each of these skills often have dedicated practitioners to help athletes improve these skills individually e.g. Strength and Conditioning coaches for the physical, Sport Psychologists for the mental etc. The individual focus on each of these elements is important for honing in on, and building strengths and improving weaknesses for the athlete to reach the best of their capabilities.

Firstly, these practitioners must be able to help their athletes within the context of their chosen sport. There’s no point applying a cookie cutter method to every athlete out there, while disregarding the specific demands of their sport. It’s about combining that perfect mix of art and science within a specific sport. An obvious example of this is trying to apply a heavy strength program that a rugby player would complete for an artistic gymnast. Yes, it’s true that all athletes must undertake certain strength and conditioning programs to ensure they are able to reach the peak of their abilities and help reduce the risk of injuries by becoming more robust athletes BUT if you can’t relate your programming back to what that athlete will do during competition, then you probably won’t get the desired results.

The second, and perhaps more technical point, is how sport scientists, performance analysts, and data scientists report on the metrics they are collecting. Advances in sports tech has contributed to the exponential improvement of sports performance over the past few years, especially when it comes to things like GPS tracking, hawk-eye, and video analysis software. These things have contributed greatly to helping coaches and performance staff plan, prepare, and monitor athletes to ensure they are available to compete at their highest level possible, as well as providing critical trends and insights into their athletes or team’s performance. But the important thing to remember with sport scientists and performance analysts is that they’re not technicians who simply operate the equipment and spit out pages and pages of reports and numbers (at least they shouldn’t be!). The best scientists and analysts are the ones who can take the numbers and the stats from the weekend’s game, and look beyond them to see how effective the athletes were in contributing (or not) to the outcome of the game. Just because an AFL midfielder ran 200m in their highest velocity band, doesn’t necessarily mean that all 200m of that contributed towards an effective outcome during the game. Some of those metres may have been from sprinting off the field for an interchange, or running to switch positions with a player playing in the forward line. Similarly, how much of this distance is players being reactive to their opponent in an attempt to chase them down and tackle them, and how much of this distance is spent in offence trying to break through a pack and away from their opponents?

If you can’t provide context to the numbers, then the meaning of the information gets lost and becomes devalued by the athletes and coaches. The numbers cannot just be taken at face value – they need to be able to tell a story. That’s why context will always be king.

Gee Vee