The Olympic Sweet Spot
Australia's triathlon head coach Bill Davoren said that there is limited window every four years for athletes to have their moment. It sounds like a really obvious statement but often we only concentrate on the moment and not at the precision it takes to get the human body to perform at its' best. Resident wordsmith Campbell Maffett has been glued to all the action and checks in with his thoughts on this very idea.
The best athletes don't always win. Most of the time they do, but sometimes when it really counts, they don't. Welcome to the Olympic Games, when winning counts most of all.
You'd think that with 4 years to prepare - 1461 days - they would be ready enough. And perhaps they are fitter than ever before. But there's more to winning than being the fittest. The winner is the person who races - or competes - best. The person who knows how to hit their sweet spot at exactly the right time. The rewards for doing so are immense...which all contributes to the scale and importance of the occasion.
In John Jerome's timeless classic The Sweet Spot in Time, first published in 1980, he writes "The goal in the record-keeping sports such as track and field is to go over the edge of what is possible; to venture into unexplored territory, out there beyond the current realm of human experience, where no one has gone before.".
"One way of ensuring that the athlete can approach those edges most consistently and most fruitfully is by the proper management of the body and mind." For Jerome, the "sweet spot" is the point in time where an athlete performs a given action perfectly because each of the individual physical acts leading up to the run, jump or stroke has been of maximum effectiveness.
So how and why does an athlete hit a sweet spot - the sweetest spot - at the right time? It comes from years of learning, digesting, analysing, reflecting, evaluating every moment of every training session and every race that an athlete comes to inherently understand the little adjustments, tweaks, movements, thoughts, emotions and more that are part of their optimum performance sphere.
It's a combination of supreme control of emotional intelligence and physical intelligence of oneself to create a closest to perfect scenario on demand, when it counts. And in a competition fought out in miliseconds, an athlete who can fine tune their performance exactly at the right moment may just have the edge necessary to prevail over 'better' athletes. To hit their sweet spot in time.
The title of Olympic Champion has currency that lasts a lifetime.
