Coaching and Care of Athletes

MAKING A CHAMPION A coach, I think, must be a pretty good psychologist, and even something more than that. It is half the battle if you can get your athlete to let you shoulder his burden of anxiety by convincing him that all he has to do is to place implicit trust in you and obey your orders, when he will inevitably achieve the best results of which he is mentally and physically capable. Nervous exhaustion, firstly in training, but much more so in competition, is a condition of the athlete which the coach will have to consider very carefully. There never yet was a good athlete who did not suffer from nerves. It is all very well to say that a man should be keyed right up until the starting-pistol is fired or he is taking part in a field event, but there are some athletes who carry the keyed-up condition with them right through the race or event. When I trained J oe Simpson, of Oundle and Manchester University, for the 400 metres hurdles at the World Students' Championships in 1930 he showed no sign of nerves in training. He followed a schedule which very few athletes could have faced, but I knew that it was the right one for him, on account of his vast strength and stamina. We had a great deal of hard work to do, because he simply could not find the ability to take the last three hurdles without faltering, and it was only just before the team left England for Germany that we managed to get that final phase of his athletic education and training into good shape. . At Darmstadt Simpson was just as normal as anyone else until the time came for his competition. In his heat and semi-final he literally made my hair stand on end by a nervous trick he suddenly developed of looking over his shoulder in the middle of · taking each flight of hurdles, so as to make quite sure that no one was close enough up to have a chance of depriving him of taking part in the final. On the day of the final he ate his breakfast all right, and then the trouble started. I could see how fidgety he was, and going down from the Marienhoe to the stadium at Darmstadt the ex– plosion came. An inoffensive old professor, who had obtained a seat in our bus, innocently lit a cigar. Simpson rounded on him with an inquiry as to how on earth anyone thought a man could compete in an important final with his lungs full of filthy cigar-smoke. The cigar was quickly extinguished, and the professor was most apologetic. When we arrived at the ground some enthusiastic person insisted upon taking a photograph of the British Universities 87