Came across this which did a great job of procrastinating the massive weeding job I need to do in my backyard. The part about Sir Chris Hoy in Athens04 is particularly brilliant.
Mind Games
...a wiry, grey-haired man in his fifties appears in reception... "Sorry about that," says Steve Peters cheerfully. "Now, what is it, exactly, that you want to talk to me about?"
Coming from a forensic psychiatrist, this could be a loaded question. But what I want to ask Peters - now a member of Dave Brailsford's four-person senior management team - is how on earth somebody such as him, who previously worked with inmates in a high-security mental institution, came to be working with the British cycling team? I want to know what he does; and of course I want to find out about his role in transforming Chris Hoy from someone racked with self-doubt at the end of the 2003 season, to Olympic and world champion a year later.
Then there is what Dave Brailsford has told me. Brailsford's aim as performance director was to 'build a team, a hand-picked team, of world experts, and give them responsibility. In any leading business now the guys at the top are similar to me," says Brailsford. You are leading a team of people with more expertise than you have. My job is to create a culture, an environment, in which they can excel, in which their expertise is fully embraced - and can be delivered."
Brailsford's motivation for wanting to find and employ someone like Peters is clear from something else he said: "My job is to create a culture of support for the riders. To really support them, so they can be the best they can be. I want the best support team in the world. Not just equal to the French but across all sports, across the world - the best. If people on my team - riders and staff - don't have that enthusiasm, that drive to be the best in the world... if that doesn't really get you excited and get you out of bed in the morning, then this is the wrong place for you."
The most intriguing thing about Peters is that, of all the world-class people he has appointed, Brailsford reckons he is the best. "He was a massive find," he says. "I first came across him in 2001, and I thought bloooody hell, this guy's something special. Straight away. I really worked hard over some months to get him involved."
The reason he wanted him involved, explains Brailford, is because his modus operandi as performance director is not to see his athletes as machines, or performing monkeys, but as human beings with emotions and issues to deal with. "You have to look at the whole person," he says. "If you've got a problem in your relationship, you're not going to be able to train properly. Some people look at us and say we go too far; we get too involved. If people have got problems we try and sort them out, in a supportive way. Some say that in dealing with athletes you should look at just one aspect of their lives - training and performance - and do X, Y and Z. I totally disagree."
And this - in examining aspects A to W of an athlete's personality - is where the psychiatrist comes in... it explains Brailsford's obvious - and understandable - desire to involve such a person. But what about Steve Peters? Why would he swap the high-security hospital, and some of the most challenging cases in the country, for the Manchester Velodrome, and some of the best athletes in the country?
Peters opens the door to his office - his grey, drab, windowless and uninspiring office. It seems incongruous that this highly respected forensic psychiatrist works his magic in here. In fact, his reputation in the sporting field is now such that 'magician' might not be hyperbole. It has got to a stage where British Cycling even loans him out to other sports...
..."I had two jobs at the time," says Peters. "I was working in the field of forensic psychiatry with people with personality disorders" - specifically those who had transgressed the law but have mental health issues or personality issues." From 1993 to 2005 Peters worked at Rampton Secure Hospital, the high security psychiatric hospital in Nottinghamshire. During his time at Rampton the hospital's patients included Ian Huntley, who murdered the school girls Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman in Soham in 2002. "Very basically," says Peters, explaining his work at Rampton, "it meant trying to restructure someone's outlook on life, and about themselves and their relationships with people, to the point where they would no longer be dangerous to society."
"But I am also undergraduate dean to the medical school at Sheffield University, and one of my ex-students is the doctor here at British Cycling. He range me one day, and said he needed help with a cyclist with mental health problems, and asked, would I do an assessment? I worked with this cyclist; it went well. Then they asked, can you see another, and another?" It 'snowballed' to the point, says Peters, where his employer asked if he wanted to take some time out to concentrate on sport. "And I said, 'Not Really.'"
...One thing that I am curious about is the distinction between psychiatry and psychology. Sports psychologists are ten-a-penny in the modern era. But I had never heard of a sports psychiatrist - and Peters admits he isn't aware of any other psychiatrists working in the sports field.
"Sports psychology uses psychological techniques in training and competition," he says. "And that can be very useful. But I look at the personality. I reconstruct the personality, someone's beliefs around themselves, their understanding of their own mind, how it functions. It's a medical model." Perhaps aware that I am struggling to follow some of this - very kindly, he repeatedly asks, "Does that make sense?" - Peters employs a neat analogy: "A psychologist can teach you how to drive the car, but the psychiatrist lifts the bonnet, looks at the machine, takes it to pieces and reconstructs it. And then," he adds with a smile, "I teach them how to drive the car."
"My own feeling," he continues, "is that if you're a really balanced person then sports psychology will hit the nail on the head. You're talking about little adjustments.
"But my experience of being with a lot of elite athletes is that they're not really balanced." I laugh, but he's not joking. "That's no indictment on them," he stresses. "I believe all people are nuts. That's my starting point - that we're all crazy. So I like to do the groundwork on the crazy bits, get you in control of your mind and your emotions, and, when you've got that control, then apply it to sport."
It is not an original view this, that elite athletes are unbalanced. But coming from a forensic psychiatrist, whose previous work was with psychopaths - though he prefers "people with personality disorders" to "psychopaths" - it is fascinating. It also chimes with something suggested by someone else with considerable experience in the two fields (sport and psychopathic behaviour): the rower, Katherine Grainger.
Grainger, a world champion and Olympic medallist, is undertaking a PhD on homicide, and in an interview with The Observer in 2006 she made the headline-grabbing observation that there might be a correlation between elite sport and homicide, which was inevitably interpreted as her saying that Olympic gold medallists and homicidal maniacs were one and the same. But the point she made was more subtle.
"There are certain threads that are similar," said Grainger. "The same sort of extreme behaviour you get in sports people, which leads some of them to be very successful, can also be incredibly disruptive in other people if led in the wrong direction. There is a link to sport when you look into the darker parts of homicide... and examine why people do what they do."
There is the perception, of course, that a psychiatrist is concerned with people who are - for want of a better word - nuts. When Peters began working with the team this perception must have presented a formidable challenge, I suggest. Surely the athletes would have been aware of the stigma if word got around that they were seeing a psychiatrist. A big part of the athlete's armoury, after all, is the creation of an aura: a sense that they are all-powerful, invulnerable, in control. A meeting with a psychiatrist would be perceived as an admission of weakness, would it not?
..."I don't think that is right. I think that is the general perception. But let me tell you a story. I went to a World Cup in Moscow, very early on in my involvement with British Cycling, and I spoke to the team. Most of them didn't know me. And I said I'd put a post-it on my bedroom door. "If you want to come and see me," I said, "then come and put your name on this note, and a time you want to see me, and every thirty minutes I'll remove it. So it'll be confidential."
"Thirty minutes later I went up to my room and virtually every single name was written on the same post-it note. I said to one of the athletes, "Well, that wasn't very confidential, was it?" And he said: "Well no, because we don't see it as admitting to being vulnerable. We see that you can actually add something, that you might have techniques that could improve us." So they didn't see it as, "If you're crazy you see Steve and he sorts your head out..." - although that is something I can do! ...But there's the other side: he can get you from level A to level B. I think that's the angle they were coming from."
And now, says Peters, the perception has turned full circle. "As one of them said to me recently," he says, "the view now is not that there's something wrong with you if you see Steve, but that there's something wrong with you if you don't go and see Steve... One of the riders calls it a mental MOT - he comes in every so often for his mental MOT."
...Sometimes, Peters admits, he does encounter resistance. "I've gone to new sports and where the immediate perception is, "Who's he seeing? Who's crazy? Who's not coping?"" He won't say which sports. "I've worked with Premier League footballers who have been brilliant to work with," he points out. "It's the public perception that these lads are not intellectual, which is often wrong."
Peters' work with different athletes in different sports has not convinced him that there are traits, or personality types, common to elite sports people. "It's a spectrum," he says. "You'll get highly driven people and you'll get people who lack motivation - that's unusual at this level, but it does happen. You get people who are highly strung and nervous; you get people who are very laid-back.
"I've seen obsessional behaviours, but obsessional behaviours could be for a number of reasons. For one athlete, their obsessional behaviour might work for them. Another could be obsessional because of a lack of confidence. What you have to do is tease that out. You wouldn't want to touch the person who's obsessional for the right reasons. But the person who's not happy, you would look at it. Sometimes you get common outcomes but totally different underlying causes. Athletes are people - we don't seem to understand that everybody feels the same. We're all vulnerable, were all anxious, we all get depression, we all get down."
So how, in a nutshell, might he work with an athlete? "I have a structured way, a structured process," he says. "An eight-stage process of assessment: how you function at the moment and all the influences on you; your biological influences; cognitive factors - the way you think; behavioural influences - familial influences; schemers - the beliefs you have about yourself and your world; the support networks you've got, the environment you live in... and it goes on."
So how, in a nutshell, might he work with an athlete? "I have a structured way, a structured process," he says. "An eight-stage process of assessment: how you function at the moment and all the influences on you; your biological influences; cognitive factors - the way you think; behavioural influences - familial influences; schemers - the beliefs you have about yourself and your world; the support networks you've got, the environment you live in... and it goes on."
Is all this information gleaned through conversation? "Generally speaking it's just by verbal communication and body language; so you're reading people all the time; you read their body language and signs, then you make an assessment. They're not tricks of the trade, as such, but there are techniques whereby you can take people down certain routes and see what they do, and how they respond... and you can apply what you find to sport, because by and large we tend to respond in our personal lives the way we do under pressure in sport. There isn't a change in personality; that doesn't normally happen."
Peters, after several years now of working with cyclists and other sports people, still gives the impression of being a little surprised at finding himself in this environment. And I'm not talking about the dingy office in the bowels of the velodrome. "I didn't plan this," he laughs. "I just enjoy working with people." But he admits there is satisfaction in this field. "To see somebody who has completely collapsed in on themselves... for you to be able to completely collapsed in on themselves... for you to be able to reconstruct them, and get rid of all the little demons within them, and get them so they're functioning to a level where they feel really happy and content... and their performance as a consequence improves. It's very rewarding. Very rewarding. Dave [Brailsford] said to me, "You're not just getting them to perform, they're different people!" Well, they're not different people, they're just being the people they want to be."
...different athletes need different 'handling'. It doesn't (necessarily) mean giving them verbal instructions such as 'Down Boy!' or, in a cycling context, "Wheel!". As Peters says, "If you want to remove anxiety from a dog, you're not going to reason with it - you use behavioural techniques. And, yes, I can use these techniques with people. So you might have a rider with no insight [into themselves], who says, "I don't want to hear any more of this jargon, I just want to get rid of my anxiety." That's when you'll use behavioural techniques."
Peters does keep dogs himself. "Irish wolfhounds," he smiles. So go on then, I ask, what kind of dog is Chris Hoy? "Chris?" He smiles again. "Oh, he's a German Shepherd: an Alsatian." Absolutely certain. Intelligent. Will work for himself and you; team player. Perfect, in fact, for an athlete."
Of course, Hoy described the 2003 season, when he lost his world kilo title in Stuttgart, and failed even to medal in the event, as "a huge psychological blow". He added that he was determined to find answers for the mysterious dip in form, and he adopted what might look like a scattergun approach - which is to say that he approached everyone he could think of, seeking help, advice, counsel. "I realised," says Hoy, "I wanted to leave no stone unturned and to try everything - within the rules, obviously.
"After Stuttgart I went back to just being a contender again. I had to fight to get back up there. It changed my outlook. I was far more open to criticism and more open to advice. I said to myself: "I'm going to go to everyone I can think of who has some area of expertise." Even if I thought they would have nothing to offer, I would go to see them. And that was when I went to see Steve Peters. Two thousand and three had been a bad year in all sort of ways. I'd split up with my girlfriend of six years. I was here, there and everywhere; I had no permanent base; it was all temporary places to live - pretty chaotic.
"I had no problem seeing Steve and talking to him," continues Hoy. "There's this myth that sports people are very confident, but I'd say a high percentage are racked with self-doubt. When you see someone perform at the highest level, you think, how can you not be confident? But ten minutes before the start you'd rather be anywhere else. You're like a kitten... trying to act like a lion." Or an Alsatian with a confidence crisis.
Hoy's state of mind around the end of 2003 sounds as though it might fit a pattern described by Peters. "There are parts of your brain which are going to send you into chaos," he says. "If you invest a lot in something, or you have a belief system around something, and it goes wrong, then you go into chaos. An elite athlete who believes the whole of their value in life depends on them getting a medal... if it doesn't go according to plan then they are likely to cave in, or become aggressive.
On the other hand, Hoyt didn't cave in or become aggressive - on the contrary, he pro-actively sought help, and answers, in order to make a positive difference. When Hoy went to see Peters that winter, Peters realised he didn't need to open the bonnet and dismantle the machinery of his brain. "With Chris there was instant engagement," says Peters enthusiastically. "He more or less knows what he wants: he made that quite clear. He listens and works with you. He's the ideal athlete to work with. There are others like him; they tell you what they expect, they're very positive in their approach, they let you know if something's working, they let you know if it isn't... For the Olympic games the question Chris had was "How do I get into the right mindset to be able to focus on what I do and not be distracted?" How do I avoid thinking emotionally, and lose the game plan?" This was the biggest disaster which he presented to me - which was nice; he had thought about it, and it was straightforward."
This, Brailsford had told me, was what he perceived to be one of the major contributions Peters could make to his team. "Differentiating," as Brailsford puts it, "between emotional and logical thinking. Emotional thoughts can hijack you. Look at a footballer taking a penalty. Whether one person or 10 million are watching, it doesn't change how you kick a ball; what does change is the mind. You start thinking about consequences; ego gets in the way."
The fear for Hoy was a repeat of Stuttgart, when Stefan Nimke, the German, popped up with a sea level world record and panicked Hoy into abandoning his strategy. It had happened, Peters told him, because he had allowed emotional thinking to interfere with his game plan; emotions had clouded his thinking, overriding or displacing his rational thoughts...
The trick, the, was to switch off those emotional thoughts. Sounds easier said than done. But Peters insists it is easy - that it is all in a day's work for him. "In a nutshell" says Peters, "you've got to switch from using one part of your brain to another. You have to learn which part of your brain is operating, and why it's operating, and then when you've learnt that, you switch it off, and switch on the bit you want... and you learn the skill of controlling that. That's what Chris did. And he did it very easily. He could see the reasoning, he understood it, and he learnt to do it. He mastered it."
Peters describes sessions where they worked through various scenarios, all relating to the high pressure environment of the Olympic kilo. "What's your biggest fear?" he would ask him. "What's unsettling you as you sit there? It could be your own ego; the fear of failure; it could be the size of the crowd; it could be the idea of letting your parents down. You have to define what's going through the mind and then determine where it's coming from.
"How would you react to a fast time by one of your rivals while you're waiting to go? How would you react to a world record? You have to visualise these scenarios. I have to dig into a person's mind to do this. But the part of your brain I want to work is the logical part. That part of your brain I want to turn off, or control, is emotional. Your emotions aren't rational. They create irrational thoughts that can mislead you."
Fast forward from those winter sessions with Steve Peters to Athens, on the night of 20 August 2004 - the Olympic Games.
It is the kilometre final: arguably the most gladiatorial of all track cycling events, with the competitors waiting patiently for their turn, watching their rivals, the pressure being ratcheted up as each one goes and their start draws nearer; then stepping up, going through hell for the pleasure of the spectators, and collapsing in a heap of oxygen-debt...
Hoy... offers this description of the experience of riding it: "The feeling of being one of the last riders to go, you're riding round the little pen in the track centre, it's gladiatorial; when it's down to the last three you're stalking each other. Then you're up; it's cards on the table time. You have one chance. Your body is on the line and it's cruel, because everyone cracks. You start feeling pain within a lap and a half, so the last two-and-a-half laps are pretty grim, but the awful pain comes with a lap and a half to go. It's just a shutdown; you're fighting a losing battle at that point. The body's slowing down, and if you fight it you slow down even more. You have to try and remain smooth. I used to try and fight it, but you become a mess..."
In Athens, in the closing stages of the kilo competition, Peters is watching from the stand, observing Hoy in the track centre, pedalling slowly in small circles on the warm-up track, deep in thought, 'locked in', headphones on, oblivious to the fact that, one by one, his sixteen rivals are taking to the start line, blasting out of the gate, being roared on by the crowd, and crossing the line; oblivious, too, to the presence, near him, of the other late starters, his fellow-favourites for gold.
So far so good, thinks Peters, who led him through his final 'mental dress rehearsal' two hours before he was due to compete, "visualising everything, stage by stage. What are the demons and gremlins at each stage? How will you confront or deal with each one?" Because the doubts and fears would appear, Peter told him. "You have to be rational; they're going to appear - we're human... But when they come up, do you know what to do to "box" them?"
...The real test on the night comes in the final twenty minutes before his ride. The warm-up is over. All he can do is wait - and watch his rivals; or, rather, not watch them, nor, if possible, be aware of them. He remembers the drills and mental rehearsals he has gone through with Peters: negative thoughts are natural, don't panic when you have one; displace it with positive thoughts. And always, always turn your focus to the start, and the routine: bang! you're in the start gate, breathing deeply, tightening your toe straps, sitting up, leaning forward, gripping the bars, pulling back, lunging forward.
Finally the Olympic gold medal comes down to five riders: Shane Kelly (Australia); Stefan Nimke (Germany); Theo Bos (Netherlands); Arnaud Tournant (France); Chris Hoy (Great Britain).
Kelly thunders around four laps of the track and through the finish line in 1 minute, 1.224 seconds, a new Olympic record; a sea level world record. The 6,000 crowd, many of them Aussies, roars the roof off the velodrome. Hoy glances up at the scoreboard and sees the time. cabernet, he thinks, and feels a ripple of panic. But then: "Okay, it's fast in here, it's warm, my training times have been excellent, I know I'm going to do a personal best," and:
Bang! you're in the start gate, breathing deeply, tightening your toe straps, sitting up, leaning forward, gripping the bars, pulling back, lunging forward.
Nimke goes. The tall, rangy German, who administered such a crushing blow to Hoy twelve months previously, is fast, fluid, a blur of white, black, and yellow, and as he crosses the line the clock stops at 1 minute, 1.186 seconds - even faster than Kelly. Hoy can't help but look again at the scoreboard, and think: "I'm going to have to do a personal best just to get a medal here." But then he checks himself: "I expected that; I knew it was coming." The start gate, the start gate...
Bang! you're in the start gate, breathing deeply, tightening your toe straps, sitting up, leaning forward, gripping the bars, pulling back, lunging forward.
Bos fluffs his start. He doesn't recover: 1 minute, 1.986 seconds is 'all' the young Dutchman can manage.
Now, with only the penultimate rider to go, Hoy is in the chair. "It's like the gallows. That's what it feels like - an execution. In those last few minutes it's the last place in the world you ever want to be. You know it's inevitable now and you've got to do it; there's no getting out of it. You've put yourself in this position; you've committed four years to it, it seems ridiculous..."
Now it is Arnaud Tournant: the ultimate world record holder; invincible until Copenhagen in 2002, but who messed up in Sydney four years ago. Possibly the best kilo rider the world has ever seen; certainly the best never to have been crowned Olympic champion - yet.
Tournant flies around the track... The time is 1 minute, 0.896 second: the first ever sub-sixty one seconds kilo at sea level. Olympic record. Sea level world record.
Hoy doesn't see it. He is in start mode. In fact, he isn't. He's had to hit the fast-forward button. An error by an official means that the clock - the countdown to his ride - had started too early. It is supposed to begin the moment the rider mounts the bike. Then he has fifty seconds to settle on the machine... breathing deeply, tightening your toe straps, sitting up, leaning forward, gripping the bars, pulling back, lunging forward.
It's Jason Queally, sitting in the main stand by the start line, who notices what has happened. "The clock's started!" he shouts at Hoy, and Hoy - somehow - hears him. When he realises, he doesn't walk towards his bike, he jogs. He doesn't panic. The negative thought - "cabernet! The clock's started!" - is displaced by a rational one: "In training I can do it in less than fifty seconds."
Hoy's strength is in the start - it goes back to his BMX days. He "really attacks" this one, as he says later. But this time, unlike in Stuttgart, he is not attacking Tournant's time; he is not conscious of chasing anyone, only - in his 'locked in' state - of himself, speeding around the track, getting everything out. There is a palpable urgency in his riding; his mouth is open, his faced fixed in an angry snarl. "The only thing that made me aware of how I was doing during the ride was the crowd," says Hoy later. "I couldn't believe how much support the British had. It was phenomenal - like a home crowd. I heard the roar, and I knew I was up. You don't ride to a schedule. You don't pace it. Well, you do slightly. You go as hard as you can and you just hang on in there."
The roar comes at the end of lap one: 17.984 seconds reads the scoreboard; Hoy is the first to dip below 18 seconds. After two laps he is still up; after three laps he is holding on, the panic kicking in, the lactic starting to burn, the snarl more pronounced, and as he crosses the line the crowd turns en masse, like a tennis crowd tracking a tennis ball, towards the scoreboard. It reads: "1 min 0.711 seconds OR." OR means Olympic Record. Hoy has beaten Tournant by 0.185 seconds. But he does not celebrate. He seems oblivious, circling the track in a daze, a look almost of confusion on his face.
"You watch all my other rides at world level and as soon as I cross the line I'm punching the air," he explains later. "But this was different. I just couldn't absorb it. I have spent so many hours training and thinking about it, and so much visualisation of the ride; then it went so exactly like I'd rehearsed that I thought it wasn't real. I tried to put my hand up immediately when I saw my dad... but then I just rode round with my head down for a bit. I burst into tears because there was this massive feeling of relief and disbelief at what I'd done."
Another factor in his failure to celebrate, reckons Hoy now, is that he had focused so much on on the ride itself that he hadn't considered its aftermath. He and Peters hadn't covered that in their sessions; when the end came, it came as a shock.
Peters, meanwhile, remained in the stand. He had been watching Hoy throughout, "studying his body language". "A big cheer went up when the first guy [Kelly] broke the Olympic record, and I saw Chris look up at the board, which I hadn't wanted him to do. But I said, okay, well if you look at the board then what would happen - we'd gone through that scenario. He knew he'd feel some panic. So: there the demon raised its head and he just chopped it off. He had the expectation that it was going to happen, that negative thoughts would encroach, and so he wasn't surprised. It gave him control; he had control immediately, as it happened. He put his head down, focused on what he was going to do. Same when the next guy broke the record. By then he'd neutralised it."
..."From my perspective, he was brilliant, superb," he says. "And the body language was perfect on the bike, perfect. He was focused, his eyes were in the right place, he wasn't distracted, his emotions didn't come into it, he wasn't looking at the crowd; he was clearly within his own head at that point. In a team game you want them being very visually aware, but this was all internal. He was locked in. When he finished he was still so focused that he'd almost forgotten where he was. For me that was perfection. Perfection."
When Hoy told Peters about forgetting to celebrate - or not being aware that he should celebrate - Peters chuckled. "That feedback was brilliant. There's no point looking at the consequences. You focus on the process.
