Who really wants it most?

In the chapter ‘Success is about Mindset, not facilities’, Rasmus Ankersen writes that five-star spas don’t create champions. An extract:

‘Talent tends to get in the way of itself. I often think that people succeed more despite their talent than because of it’ — Won Park, golf coach in the South Korean Gold Mine.

My taxi swings through the gates of the University of Technology in Kingston. The light from its left headlight — the only one that works — lights up the road in front of us as we trundle through the desolate university park.

The rumble of the engine and the reggae music emanating from the car’s speakers are the only sounds here — it’s really early, and the first students will not check in to the university for several hours. We come to a standstill in front of a rusty fence that surrounds what looks like a grass field.

“We’re here,” says my driver, sticking out his left hand towards me for payment.

Am I really in the right place, I wonder? I hesitate for a moment before paying the driver and getting out of the car. I’ve come to visit the world’s most successful athletics club, the MVP Track and Field Club, and I have been told that they (athletes) train here at the university grounds. But there is no athletics track here. No streetlights either. As I get closer I catch a glimpse of some runners moving in the darkness beyond the fence. Once my eyes have grown accustomed to the gloom I can see about 40 athletes out on the grass.

If you started to talk about the world’s most progressive athletics club, most people would imagine a first-class college with cutting edge facilities. But there is no high-tech test equipment here, no cutting-edge fitness centre — not even an athletics track. Just a pile of cones, a stopwatch, some rusty old weights in a dilapidated fitness shed with no air-conditioning and a poor quality 400-metre grass track. Nevertheless, it is here that world record holders, Olympic gold medallists and world champions train.

And Stephen Francis, the founder of the club has no intention of changing anything: “A performance environment should not be designed for comfort but for hard work,” he tells me. “It has to show people that the road to success is long and uncomfortable.”

Not too comfortable

The ethos with which Stephen Francis runs MVP Track and Field Club seriously challenges the modern Western mind-set. We seem to believe groomed fields, top-level technology and comfortable surroundings are necessary prerequisites for success. We would tend to use poor, overcrowded facilities as an excuse for not achieving better results.

Just think of the famous Chelsea FC Football Academy, which has spent nigh on £100 million building a state-of-the-art training centre in London’s prosperous commuter belt. The club has scoured Europe for talented kids between the ages of 12 and 18 and bought them for millions of pounds. At the academy they arrive for training in taxis and are served food prepared by a three-star chef between sessions. When touring abroad they stay in luxury hotels. The results of Chelsea’s talent strategy have so far been about as bleak as a winter day in the Russian wilderness where owner Roman Abramovich grew up. Not a single player from the academy has managed to make his mark in Chelsea’s Premier League team. John Terry, who signed a professional contract in 1997 (six years before Abramovich arrived in London), is the last player to come through the academy and become a first-team regular. In other words Roman Abramovich could just as well be throwing his hundred million pounds at the roulette wheel of a casino in Moscow.

This over-emphasis on comfort and super modern facilities is, however, not just a talent strategy predominant in the world of sport. In business too, companies invest fortunes in spectacular office moves, despite the fact that all the research shows that doing so does not improve performance. They just carry the same problems with them. Other companies send their so-called greatest talents to luxurious spa hotels for away days while they tell them how fantastic they are, lulling them into complacency.

Is there any foundation for the assumption that we develop better performance in fancy facilities? Or might it actually be more productive to train in the kind of humble conditions, which Stephen Francis insists on. Perhaps luxurious surroundings diminish effort, because they leave people with a feeling that nobody striving for top performance should ever have: that of already having arrived. Francis says: “I don’t think they’ve got that message in the US, Australia, Sweden, England, et cetera. When they build big smart training centres they are trying to make life as comfortable as possible for the athletes. But that’s not right. The athletes must demonstrate that they are so keen to succeed that they will ignore the fact that they could have found better, more comfortable conditions elsewhere.”

This makes the world’s most successful sprint coach sound like a dictatorial drill sergeant, driving his recruits through meaningless physical tests in order to break them down psychologically. However, behind Stephen Francis’s provocative words lie intelligent considerations as to how one can make people reveal what it is that drives them simply through their actions. Francis uses spartan conditions to identify factors you cannot read from a certificate, construe from a psychological profile analysis or ask your way to in a job interview. He uses his facilities to penetrate the glossy surface to find out the answer the critical questions: why are you here, really? How much do you care? What are you prepared to give — and to sacrifice? In other words: Who really wants it most?

The conviction Stephen Francis wants to implant in the sub-conscience of his sprinters is crystal clear: success is not about facilities, it’s about mindset.

Rasmus Ankersen is the author of The Gold Mine Effect

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