William T. (Bill) Endicott coached the U.S. whitewater team (slalom and wildwater) from the mid 1970s through the early 1990s. As I mention in my film "A Paddler's Journey," one of the first things I did in an effort to learn more about whitewater racing was buy some books that he'd written about the sport: The River Masters, To Win The Worlds, The Ultimate Run, and The Danger Zone. (Later, when I started to get interested in flatwater technique, I picked up The Barton Mold, Endicott's case study of world and Olympic champion Greg Barton.) Because technique and equipment designs are constantly changing, much of the information in the books was already somewhat out of date by the time I got them; but the books contain over-arching ideas that are timeless. Though I was never coached by Bill directly, his writings have had a profound influence on how I approach the whole business of being an athlete.
In the last couple of decades Bill has written more sparingly on athletic topics, but whenever he does drop an article I make sure to read every word of it. Recently, he has shared his thoughts on his experiences with the Olympic Games as an athlete, a coach, a team leader and manager, and, especially, a TV commentator. I don't think the article has actually been published anywhere; I found it as a downloadable document in the "Whitewater Slalom Alumni and Friends" group on Face Book. It offers fascinating insights on why network television coverage of smaller Olympic sports like canoe and kayak racing is the way it is.
The excerpt shared below is actually sort of a digression from the main point of the article, but I think it contains excellent advice for coaches and athletes of all kinds, and I hope readers of this blog will find it valuable.
Performing right up to your ability: this is another psychological aspect to racing that is fascinating to explore because it’s transferable to other aspects of life. As a coach I used to tell my athletes that all they had to do on the big day was to perform right up to their level of ability as defined simply “by a good day in practice.” They didn’t have to do more than that; they didn’t have to perform better than they had ever performed on a good day in practice, which a lot of athletes think they have to do on the big day, and which causes them to blow it.
And if they only performed right up to their level of ability on the day, they would probably do really well. That’s because most of the other competitors out there would not perform right up to their level of ability because they would be worrying instead about who was going to win the race, which was out of their control.
But performing right up to their level of ability was something my athletes could control, and that made all the psychological difference. We also reasoned that if they did perform right up to their level of ability and still got beat, it only was because the other guys were just better than they were on that day.
We found that by worrying about just performing up to their level of ability, which we practiced thousands of time in training, was something they could control and that alleviated a great deal of the stress of being in the Olympics.
The secret, of course, was to have a large amount of good days in practice, which we did.
Finally, I told them that no matter what the outcome of the race was, if they performed right up to their level of ability, as defined by how they had done it many times before on a good day in practice, then they were the winner in my book because you couldn’t ask for anything more than that.
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