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READY, SET, GO OLYMPICS
Issue date: September 10, 2000
The hard work ...
the years of training ... it's all behind them. The path to Olympic
glory now rests largely on the mental preparation of the more than
600 American athletes competing for gold in Sydney.
 Our
Olympic special issue gets behind the tough exterior and into their
minds.
Plus,
delve into what's doing down under with a day-by-day TV
guide.
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WILL
Cristina
Teuscher
Swimmer
For a two-legged creature who spends more time in the water than
on land, mind over matter may be key to Cristina Teuscher's abilities.
Many athletes believe they give a superior performance only through
luck -- some convergence of conditions at least partly outside their
control. But heading into her second Olympics, Teuscher disagrees.
For her, it's all about willpower. During the 1996 Atlanta Games,
Teuscher applied that technique to swim the fastest leg (1:58:86)
of the 4 x 200-meter freestyle team relay in history. In Sydney,
she hopes to capture gold in the 200-meter individual medley.
How does she mold her will? Through a combination of relaxation and breathing exercises, fueled by a desire to be the best.
"I feel like you can will yourself into 'the zone,' " says Teuscher, 22, who lives outside New York City with her family; they emigrated from Argentina before Cristina was born. The zone is a place where Teuscher can clear her mind of all negative obstacles, ignore even physical pain.
"It's definitely a certain mind-set that you need going into a race. I've seen people who've been injured or haven't trained a lot and they still can pull out these amazing performances."
Her other secret? "I like to laugh. Laughing is a great way to relax your body. So I like to be around people who can make me laugh," she says.
For Teuscher, excellence in the pool is all about willing herself to calm down rather than rev up for an event. "Everyone has a different way of getting into a proper mind-set before a race," she points out. "I swim a lot better when I'm relaxed. You can go overboard with getting yourself up and then get overexcited and mess up."
Preparation is crucial in a sport where a win or a loss is measured by seconds. And Teuscher is a known workhorse: She not only graduated from Columbia University this past May on time (she started college right after the Atlanta Games), but she also amassed an impressive college record: four NCAA championships, and in her senior year, earning the prestigious Honda-Broderick Cup as the nation's best female collegiate athlete. Sydney is merely the next step in a well-organized plan.
When you're mentally ready, Teuscher says, "you're just at peace with yourself. And your body knows what it needs to do."
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GRACE
Blaine
Wilson
Gymnast
Ask Blaine Wilson about the demands of his sport, about events
that require both explosive strength and seemingly inhuman flexibility,
and this is what he will say: "It's 90% mental."
Wilson, 26, has dominated American male gymnastics for the past five years with incredible grace. And equating success with being a mind game suits him. A returning member of the 1996 Atlanta Olympic team and five-time national champion, his last win in August made him the only shoo-in on the Sydney team.
In a sport that demands total mental control, he has achieved the rare balance of being a consummate team player without sacrificing his individuality. No other Olympian has had both a pierced eyebrow and a pierced tongue, although he removed the jewelry earlier this year when he began serious training for the 2000 Olympics. The only remaining sign of Wilson's bad-boy image are three tattoos -- on his ankle, chest and lower back.
An Ohio native who has trained in Colorado since 1997, he plans to return to Ohio State University to earn his psychology degree after his gymnastics career winds down. (First: a post-Olympic athletic performance tour.) But it's the mental preparation that preoccupies him now, as he focuses only on the skills he'll need to master the rings, parallel bar, pommel horse, vault, high bars and floor exercises.
"You can tell, when you're standing there and raise your hands to grab the equipment, whether or not you're going to have trouble. It's all in your brain," he says. "If you're questioning what you're doing, then you're ruined before you even start. That's what you try to avoid," Wilson says.
His approach is zenlike: By clearing his mind and focusing on two simple visualizations per event. It helps him to block unwanted thoughts, the mental clutter that only interferes with peak performance. "I'm thinking about two things on every piece of apparatus, and that's the only two things I think about," he says. On the pommel horse, it's patience and rhythm. On the still rings, his favorite event, it's strength and to "stick" on his dismount.
Wilson's body, on the other hand, is on cruise control. "Everything happens involuntarily because you've done it every day in the gym for the past four years," Wilson says. "You turn your brain off and let your body do the work. That's what it feels like. It's like an out-of-body experience. You just watch yourself do gymnastics."
On those occasions when his mind and body are perfectly aligned, Wilson is transformed: "If you can get into that groove, a sport that before was so painful, all of a sudden, becomes so easy."
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TRUST
Sue Blinks
Equestrian
Equestrian Sue Blinks relies more on her partner's muscles than
most Olympians. The cues she gives her horse, a 1,300- pound, 13-year-old
Hanoverian gelding named Flim Flam, will largely determine how well
she does in Sydney. There, she competes in the three days of "dressage"
("training" in French), a series of rider-led equine maneuvers that
balance mental gymnastics with syncopated steps and reflect the
technical precision and trust required by its competitors.
Blinks and Flim, on whom she has competed since 1990 (his owner is Fritz Kundrun of Mount Kisco, N.Y.), earned the highest average score of U.S. competitors on a pre-Olympic European summer tour, guaranteeing her one of four spots on the team in Sydney. While most athletes at the Games are closer to age 20, she finds herself a first-time Olympian at 42. It's the culmination of a life-long dream for personal excellence, says Blinks, whose love for horses began on a neighbor's ponies, otherwise used only for children's birthday parties.
Years of finely honed concentration and absolute trust in her horse paved her way to Sydney, where she will perform a traditional mental ritual. "I disappear into my bubble about an hour before I compete. I've developed skills where, through deep breathing, I can bring down my respiration and my pulse rate," she explains. "Then I do a lot of [laughs] 'hallucinating.' I visualize the warmup I'm going to do, the exact program, what feelings I want to feel when, what exactly I'm technically going to do, and then I visualize the [dressage] test. I try to get myself at optimal performance level emotionally and physically so that when I tack the horse up and get on, I start at least in that place."
But her success largely turns on her close relationship with Flim, who, she says without irony, "expects to be treated like royalty." In a working relationship that relies so heavily on the horse, his rider happily complies. Religiously, three times a day, Flim leaves his stall for workouts, turnouts and conditioning jaunts, interspersed with magnetic blanket treatments and baths. After rides, his legs are iced and powdered before protective wraps go on. Flim also gets chiropractic, acupuncture and deep-muscle therapeutic massages (the same masseuse works on Blinks).
The demands of international competition on human athletes -- tiring schedules, long distances, endless rules -- is further complicated when you're a horse. During a six-week stay in California before Sydney (two weeks for quarantine), one of the many things Blinks was preoccupied with was how Flim's high-tech diet would be replicated, because U.S. feed is not allowed in the country. Even Flim's shoeing schedule began last spring on the chance the duo was Olympic-bound.
Still, Blinks says, "You never know how 50% of the combination is going to be on any given day." That's where trust comes in.
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UNITY
Chris Humbert
& Brad Schumacher
Water Polo
Physical
contact is the rule, not the exception, in water polo. None of a
team's seven players can ever touch the bottom of the pool during
a match, and only the goalie can grip the ball with both hands.
(Flying balls can clock nearly 60 mph.) Fast, rough and exhausting,
it requires fluid, complicated teamwork.
Even in such a chaotic group sport, athletes can feel the unity that propels them to work as a unit. Few power plays are made alone. To succeed, each time they enter the pool, they must become a relentless force, a sea storm, against their opponent. "It's one thing if one person is hot," notes Brad Schumacher, 26, a two-time '96 gold medalist in swimming. "But to win at the highest level, everyone has to be right on their game, and everyone has to know what everyone else is doing."
Endless practices together help to orchestrate the synchronicity. And at those times when the whole team hits a peak performance together, the feeling of unity is unforgettable, says Chris Humbert, 30 (left), who has competed in the past two Olympics and in Sydney will be the hub for the offense. Unity, he says, is a winning strategy, "but the problem is finding it." They found it at the '97 world cup, where they took first place, Schumacher says. "That's when we have our best success -- when everybody is working for each other, with each other, the whole time."
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FAITH
Lisa Fernandez
Softball
Simply put, softball is Lisa Fernandez's life. Her routine is designed
to make her, in her words, "unstoppable."
"Sometimes when i throw that ball, I feel as if the ball is already past the hitter -- that's the kind of euphoric feeling you can get," the 29-year-old pitcher says.
That unshakable faith in her abilities is one of the reasons the U.S. women's softball team is favored to win the gold medal in Sydney, as they did at the 1996 Games, under her pitching wizardry. And winning gold again may ride on her arm.
Her supreme confidence doesn't stop Fernandez from constantly working at improving her skills, which she routinely does after coaching the women's softball team at alma mater UCLA (where she was A four-time All-American). Then, there's regular workouts at a park near her Long Beach, Calif., home.
In softball, Fernandez says, no single player can win a game alone, no matter how overpowering the performance.
But her famously perfect pitch inning after inning gives the team a massive advantage. (She's also struck out a string of major-league U.S. ballplayers -- David Justice, to name one -- at benefit matches.)
Whenever she experiences that kind of athletic dominance, Fernandez notes, a sensation of invincibility comes over her. "We live for that moment. That's what we train for. There's no other reason to push our bodies to the limit other than to get it to do things that you never thought were possible."
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ENDURANCE
Curt Clausen
Race Walker
 Photo by Jeffrey Brown for USA WEEKEND. |
Curt
Clausen finished dead last in his first race. He was 13 years old
but kept at it, and now, at 32, he is competing in his second Olympic
Games.
For Clausen, the road to success has been a test of his endurance. He points out that the longest track event is not the 26.2-mile marathon but the 50-kilometer race walk, which stretches 31 miles.
In a sport that requires a dancer's precise footwork, Clausen measures success step by step. Since finishing in a disappointing 50th place at the 1996 Olympics, he has dedicated his life to a single goal: making the most of a second chance.
He quit his job as an administrative analyst in Chapel Hill, N.C., to devote his time to training. "I realized I had to do a lot more than just work out for a couple hours after work," he says. Clausen also made small changes in his technique (lowering his arms, for one).
The results: a fourth-place finish in 1999's World Outdoor Track and Field Championships, where Clausen fought severe muscle cramps in 107-degree heat, and a record win at this year's Olympic trials despite frigid rain and gusting winds.
The weather looks better for Sydney. Clausen calculates it will take three hours, 45 minutes to win a medal. "You have to accept you've done all you can do. And hopefully, I'll find that podium."
Olympic profiles by Scott Gummer, Bob Knotts and Elizabeth McCall
Editor: Kathy Balog
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About the
photos
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| On an Olympic
shoot: E.J. Camp, right, with assistant Shawn Bishop |
Photographer E.J. Camp spent weeks tracking down athletes more
focused on winning a spot on the Olympic-bound U.S. team than on
posing for a camera.
Many, fearing injury, were nervous about doing anything physically
risky. "When I was first given the assignment," she says, "I was
told to do action pictures. But I was finding more eloquent portraits."
The Los Angeles-based Camp, who normally shoots celebrities, tried to uncover a side of the athletes few people see in competition. By focusing on them in their work environment, her lens captured the intimate connection each has with his or her sport. There were surprises. Such as when she poured a bucket of cold water over swimmer Cristina Teuscher. "I wanted to see her face. I wanted to see who she was rather than watching her dive into the water," Camp says. Or seeing mirrored in gymnast Blaine Wilson's rib cage the ripple of the rope used to hold the still rings.
Most athletic shots "are about an explosion of energy," she says. "Here, you get an intimate feeling for these subjects you don't get when you see them performing. These pictures are in tranquility, in repose. I was able to tell a story."
(Camp's photos are no longer available on this site.)
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