Last week I threw open the floor on Substack and asked what people actually wanted to know about life behind the scenes in professional sport. After more than twenty years inside it, I take things for granted that might not be remotely normal to anyone outside that world.
When people watch elite sportspeople performing on television, what do they typically miss about what makes that person elite? That was the question one reader put to me, and my honest answer was rather unglamorous. It’s the boring bits. The repetition, the graft, the monotony, the thousands of things that happened before anyone switched the television on. One of the biggest misconceptions about elite performance is that it looks extraordinary. Building it usually doesn’t.
Nobody televises Tuesday
We see Saturday afternoon. The eighty minutes, or the ninety. The race, the final, the putt, the kick. We don’t see Tuesday morning. We don’t see someone practising the same skill again and again and again. We don’t see the gym sessions on the days they’re tired, the recovery, the analysis, the meetings, the food, the sleep, the treatment, the hours spent preparing for an opposition they’ve played before and will play again.
What we really don’t see is the absence of negotiation around any of it. Training isn’t something an elite athlete wakes up and decides whether they fancy doing that day. They just do it. There are days when motivation is high and everything feels good, and there are days when it isn’t, and they still do it.
I’ve watched this closely enough over the years to be convinced it’s one of the biggest gaps between how we think performance works and how it actually works. We massively overestimate the importance of feeling motivated, and underestimate the importance of having done the reps.
Then comes the moment everyone sees
Another reader asked what happens when there’s no time left on the clock, an athlete has one shot, and an entire hostile crowd is willing them to miss. How do they stay calm?
