In an empty Singapore classroom in 2010, a grand Moroccan lamented in the quiet.
Ten years after he lost in Sydney 2000, overtaken just before the line in the 1,500m, his greatness metres short of Olympic validation, Hicham El Guerrouj’s voice still carried a faint shadow of pain during our interview.
“I woke up (the next day),” said this legendary middle distance runner, whose mile record from 1999 was finally broken this July by Josh Kerr, “and I realised I am not Olympic champion.”
Left unsaid were the questions which haunted him: How did I not win? How am I not good enough? What did I train for?
Triumph is intoxicating, yet it’s the athletes’ turbulent days which are most illuminating for therein lies struggle, frustration, commitment, suffering, all those ingredients which we distil into the word character. Days we mostly don’t see because grief is wept into pillows and anger translated into dented doors; days of waking up to self-esteem which has leaked away; days of that useless, repetitive thought of what could have been.
Yet now and then athletes part the curtains of pain and allow us to witness the effect of defeat before it’s been processed. At Wimbledon this summer, Alex de Minaur said flatly after losing a fourth-round match he should have won, that it “breaks me inside”. Like a porcelain plate fallen from a second floor.
Only athletes have to go find all the pieces and glue them back together, in some version of Japanese kintsugi where gold is used to join broken pottery. A newer version that never hides the journey of the older version. Sometimes how far an athlete has come is clear only when we know the distance he’s fallen.
De Minaur’s words had a haunting quality, a candid, cutting admission of a suffering his tribe rarely verbalises. About falling short so often till doubt accumulates like plaque in the arteries. About how “the goals, the beliefs, the dreams that you have, they kind of start fading away or they feel a little bit further away than when they once were”.
The private cost of falling short
Saurav Ghosal, the former Indian squash star, is familiar with a version of this feeling. He once travelled to England to train and practice with a former world No.1.
Lee Beachill was returning from an injury yet had a timing so impeccable that Ghosal can vividly remember feeling so far away from the level he needed to be. Do I have it, he asked himself. Am I too late? Yet he told no one about this, he didn’t advertise it. “It’s like we want to cast an armour around us. But everyone’s vulnerable in their own way.”
“Dreams come true” is what we say repeatedly in sport, but no one does an accountancy of the dreams that fall, break, crack, rust. It’s not the losing necessarily which hurts, it’s the inability to meet a standard, a standard by which athletes rate themselves and aspire to and accumulate miles for.
“All individuals,” says P. Sreejesh, the outstanding hockey goalkeeper who won two Olympic bronze medals, “have a scale. Where is my potential, what did I achieve?” Always the best athletes interrogate themselves ruthlessly—did pressure tell, did doubt win, did lack of preparation hurt? Having an average day in a team sport can make it even more complicated. “You might have won a medal,” Sreejesh says, “but you don’t feel like a winner. That gives you more pain”.
What hurts sometimes, often just after a race when everything is raw, is the sense of investment gone unrewarded. At the Commonwealth Games, Adam Ramsay-Peaty, who has redefined the art of the breaststroke, came third in the 100m and wept and told The Guardian: “I’m not crying because it’s a bronze instead of a gold, I’m crying because I know that the swim could have been better, and I know I worked way better than that ... I’m like: ‘What’s the point of all the 5.30am starts? What’s the point of being exhausted all the time?’”
Rebuilding after defeat
But athletes endure, and we can shrug and say it’s their job, but it’s this struggle to rebuild, to refind faith, to master something, which is fascinating. So, of course, De Minaur would say in the summer, “I’ll get back up”, and we understood why. “I’m a competitor,” he said.
It’s something to remember as the Commonwealth Games unspools, and then the Asian Games in September-October, all these athletes, so many unknown, but all having weathered rough voyages. Like Georgia Godwin, the Australian gymnast in Glasgow, who throws back her head in a lovely clip on Instagram as if trying to return her tears to where they came from. An Achilles injury over two years ago resulted in a “horrible, horrible road back”, filled with days when she told herself “I can’t do this, I’m too old, I’m too sore”. But she persisted, she prevailed, she won.
And this is where Ghosal feels people misunderstand the inspiration that arrives from success. It’s not the end result, like Novak Djokovic winning a Grand Slam title—or El Guerrouj eventually winning two golds, or Sreejesh winning an Olympic medal after 21 years—but “the journey to that success which is the inspiration. The inspiration which comes from relentless hunger.”
And so even though athletes lose, trip, choke, fumble, it’s what they do after, how they mentally respond, where their worth is gauged. So Sreejesh’s response to tough days was to overtrain. “They’d tell me you can’t train like a kid but that is what I was made of. From training hard, from extra gym and extra goalkeeping sessions, I got confidence.”
Outsiders talk about sacrifice, but for athletes it all lies in a choice. A choice to rise, to work, to believe, to learn, to chase, often in halls and pools on solitary mornings of no guarantee. A choice, says Ghosal, “they must make every single day”.
Rohit Brijnath (@rohitdbrijnath) is an assistant sports editor at The Straits Times, Singapore, and a co-author of Abhinav Bindra’s book A Shot At History: My Obsessive Journey To Olympic Gold.