Matthew Syed - The greatest : the quest for sporting perfection

Also by Matthew Syed

Bounce: The Myth of Talent and the Power of Practice

Black Box Thinking: Marginal Gains and the Secrets of High Performance

The Greatest

Matthew Syed

JOHN MURRAY

www.johnmurray.co.uk

First published in Great Britain in 2017 by John Murray (Publishers)

An Hachette UK company

Copyright Matthew Syed 2017

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ISBN 978-1-47365-367-2

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For Evie and Teddy

Contents

Introduction

When I was in my teens, a careers adviser asked what I wanted to do for a living. When I said that was I interested in writing about sport, she smiled a little, as if to emphasise the naivety of such a hope. Sport isnt a career choice, she said emphatically. It probably wont be very big in twenty years time, anyway.

It is remarkable how common this view was three decades ago. Sport, it was thought, would be superseded by computer games, consoles and the futuristic vision of virtual reality. A new leisure age, driven by technological sophistication, was going to usher in recreational pursuits of which Nintendos Game Boy was considered a precursor.

Why would anyone wish to kick a football around a field when you could be transported into a scintillating alternative reality by immersing yourself in a computer program in your own living room? Children, in particular, were never going to bother with anything as pass as games using balls made from cork, leather or plastic.

And yet sport has demonstrated curious staying power. It has grown over recent decades, not diminished. There are many ways to calibrate this growth, such as the burgeoning space in national newspapers, the way that stories have become front-page news (rarely the case thirty years ago), and how television content, particularly football, has soared in value.

The question, however, is why? Why has sport, as a cultural institution, confounded the expectations of those who so confidently wrote it off? What has driven its growth in the teeth of myriad scandals, institutionalised cheating, and maladministration of a quite epic kind, not least within the Fdration Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) and the International Olympic Committee (IOC)? What are the internal qualities of sport that make it so durable and cross-culturally intoxicating?

This book of collected columns attempts to uncover some of the answers. It examines the way in which sport, while superficially frivolous, is underpinned by themes which are basic to the human condition: heroism, drama, competition, hierarchy, psychology, morality and, perhaps most important of all, the quest for greatness. How do we become the best that we can be, as individuals, teams, and organisations?

Back in 2012, Tim Hallissey, the sports editor of The Times , telephoned to suggest that I travel out to Ancient Olympia, the sanctuary in the Western Peloponnese where the original Olympics took place. It was a long trip, including getting lost on gravel roads with no signal to gain help from Google Maps, but it was, for me at least, a seminal experience.

Standing above the sanctuary on the slopes of Mount Kronos, one could glimpse sport from a fresh vantage point. This festival was a central aspect of Greek culture and unified the warring city states. Every four years, peace emerged so that athletes and spectators could travel to the Games. For almost 1,200 years, it took place without a single interruption. Virtually no other cultural festival can match this kind of staying power.

To put it a slightly different way, sport gripped the imagination of the ancient world, just as it grips the modern. Sport isnt, in that sense, a post-Romantic institution, one that started with the encoding of rules of play by Victorian schoolmasters and moralists, as is sometimes suggested. It didnt begin with the inauguration of FIFA, or the International Tennis Federation, or any of the other governing bodies which effectively operate as monopoly providers of the games that dominate todays landscape. No, sport is far more ancient and quintessential.

I was struck by a quote from Lucian , the great historian, who wrote about his infatuation for the Ancient Games: Oh, I cant describe the scene in mere words, he said. You really should experience first-hand the incredible pleasure of standing in that cheering crowd, admiring the athletes courage and good looks, their amazing physical conditioning, their unbeatable determination, and their unstoppable passion for victory.

Couldnt this have been written about a great sporting event today? Could it not have been written about the Wimbledon final, a long-awaited Champions League showdown or a fiercely contested Test match? Doesnt it capture why we go through the turnstiles and tune in on television? And, on the wider point, isnt it precisely because sport is simple and, in a certain sense, trivial that we can so clearly perceive its dramatic qualities? It seems to transport us to what is essential about competition and, yes, the nature of greatness, too.

There were many pioneering athletes in the ancient world through whom these themes were personified. Milo of Croton, an associate of Pythagoras, won five mens wrestling titles between 536 and 520 BC . Coroebus of Elis, a cook by profession, was the first Olympic champion by winning the stadion (200 metres). Leonidas of Rhodes was an all-rounder, winning the stadion, the diaulos (400 metres) and the hoplitodromos (400 metres while carrying heavy armour) at four straight games from 164 BC . Thats almost as many golds as Michael Phelps.

Today, sport continues to produce cultural icons. Few who have watched tennis can have failed to be moved by the beauty of Roger Federer, the gutsiness of Raphael Nadal or the indomitability of Novak Djokovic. In many ways, the rivalry between these three, joined more recently by Andy Murray, has provided peerless insights into how competition spurs innovation, a never-ending upward spiral as competitors dare each other to greater heights, a theme discussed in Part I.

Success is also about great teams. We have had powerful examples in sport, including the All Blacks, Manchester United under Sir Alex Ferguson, FC Barcelona, Leicester City and, rather improbably, the British womens hockey team, which won gold in Rio 2016. But how do teams become great? How do they combine seamlessly? As we will see, many of the insights of how humans combine are emerging from improvisational jazz. There are also powerful lessons to learn from aviation and the military.

We also look at the dynamics of intrinsic motivation, the fight, flight, freeze response, risk-taking, the ironies of self-belief, and the importance of resilience. We look at the techniques adopted by top athletes, coaches and scientists to build mental strength. Success, in sport as in life, often hinges on these elusive psychological factors.

My own sporting career provided a number of profound lessons about how success happens. When I became the England number one, around half of the top players in the country at that time didnt just come from the same town as me, or the same suburb, but the same street. It was a perfectly anonymous road, snaking a mile or so through the suburbs of Reading, but it was a ping-pong Mecca.