More than a billion people will tune in their TVs to watch the world’s greatest athletes show their stuff in Brazil. But while the commentators will provide some insight into the performances that will soon go down in Olympic legend, most people will be left in the dark about how the good become great in the (track and) field of elite sports performance. If you can tear yourself away from the 7,500 hours of programming NBC is planning, give these books a read to gain greater understanding of what sets the likes of Usain Bolt, Katie Ledecky and Michael Phelps apart from the also-rans:
Richard Askwith: Today We Die a Little! The Inimitable Emil Zátopek
Emile Zatopek’s technique was so unorthodox that he was dubbed “The Bouncing Czech” and he looked like each stride was pure torture. However, the former Hungarian soldier shrugged off the criticism, saying, ““I shall learn to have a better style once they start judging races according to their beauty. So long as it’s a question of speed, then my attention will be directed to seeing how fast I can cover the ground.” And his speed proved to be more than enough, as he won five Olympic medals – including an unprecedented triple, claiming gold in the 5,000 meters, 10,000 meters and the marathon at the 1952 Helsinki Olympics (despite having never tried the longer distance before) – and set 18 world records. In Today We Die A Little, Askwith not only provides fascinating background details about Zatopek’s life – such as the time he defied Soviet tanks during the short lived rebellion against Communist rule in Wenceslas Square in 1968 – but also details the Hungarian runner’s pioneering training methods, which included wind sprint intervals long before anyone had even given them these names.
David Halberstam: The Amateurs
Ask most people if they’ve read a book about rowing in the past five years and 99 percent of those who have will tell you it’s Daniel James Brown’s The Boys in the Boat. If you enjoyed this excellent work, then you should also add David Halberstam’s classic The Amateurs to your “To Read” shelf. Whereas Brown’s book centers on the Washington coxed eight team in the run-up to the 1936 “Nazi” Olympics in Berlin, Halberstam fast forwards almost 50 years to four young men competing to be America’s single sculler at the 1984 Games in LA. Though it takes place half a century later, Halberstam’s story reveals that rowers received little extra rewards in the 80s than their forerunners in the 30s. Rowing wasn’t, and isn’t, about big endorsement deals and being on Wheaties boxes like the Dream Team, but rather enduring grueling, lonely hours out on the water in an effort to make an almost impossibly narrow shell not only stay afloat, but seem like it was floating. “The world of American scullers existed, it was clear, in a world of their own,” Halberstam writes. And nobody has done a better job of bringing this world of pain, sacrifice and struggle to life on the page as well as this Pulitzer-winning master.
Jim Afremow – The Champion’s Comeback
We recently interviewed Jim Afremow about how world beaters get their mind right for race day. In The Champion’s Mind, he comes at the discipline of mental conditioning from a different angle, providing a blueprint for how athletes can bounce back from injury, overcome failure and finally reach their full potential. There’s a lot of clichéd advice in this sphere, but Afremow provides a welcome contrast with actionable steps for getting over the fear of re-injury, visualization, creating imagery scripts and other methods that can help athletes of any level overcome setbacks. Almost every athlete at the Olympics has faced injury, a personal crisis, being cut from a team, or some other stumbling block that made them question their athletic future. If the case studies Afremow includes show us anything, it’s that our bodies can surmount any obstacle if our minds are willing.
