My 10 Commandments

When I was much younger, in my early teens, my dad would make photocopies of sports psychology books for me. Typically, they would describe visualisation and relaxation techniques, and I’d practise these while lying on my bed. The one I have never forgotten was to imagine having taps at the end of your fingers. If you relax, the stress flows out of your fingertips. I would think about racing and visualise walking out to the pool and going through my routine.

At college in Arizona, I took a sports psychology class, which reacquainted me with the mental side of sport. I learnt to aim for smaller, bite-sized goals instead of wanting to go out there to break world records. I started visualising practices, turning up at the pool prepared and treating every training session as a meet. I would lie in bed the night before, visualising the next day. I would see myself doing a lot of big sets, hitting the wall and pushing through it. Distance was probably easier than sprints, because pain is familiar to you and all that’s required to succeed is toughness. In sprints it’s different; it’s about technique. It’s a matter of getting into a rhythm.

I would use visualisation a lot for practices. It built confidence and helped me to think about races. Visualisation has a neuromuscular effect as well. That explosion as you burst off the blocks is exactly how you want to feel.

When you do a broken 100 m (a 50 m swim from a dive, and two 25 m swims from a push on an interval), or dive 100s (diving a number of 100 m swims off the blocks as fast as you can every five or so minutes), you reach your lactic threshold in the last 30 m. You can hardly move your arms and legs. Then you think to yourself, ‘This is the final.’ It prepares you for the moment in a race when you reach that point, so you don’t go, ‘Oh, shit …’ and give up. That’s preparation. Over time I became better at visualisation. It has since become second nature, but I always work at it.

When we swam the relay in Athens and I was on the blocks, the situation was very different to what I had visualised before the race. I had expected three or four guys to come in together, so I had to adapt to a new scenario.

I also learnt that it’s foolish to try to imagine the impossible. Your goals must be attainable. I felt some anxiety before the 100 m freestyle, and it told. I swam 48.80 in the semi-final, which I knew qualified me for a medal shot, but then I made the mistake of relaxing for a second or two in the final and lost focus. In a short race it’s so hard to get it back. Roland took off and kicked my ass completely. The problem was, the harder you try to catch up, the slower you become. I had his number in the lead-up, but he got back at me. It took a while for me to win back my confidence.

These are the commandments I live and train by:

1. Dream big

That’s how everything started for me. It’s important to have goals, but they need to be realistic and attainable. When I dreamt of the Olympic Games, I was already one of the top swimmers in South Africa. I had a chance to get there. Having that dream put me on the road.

2. Take chances: make your own luck

People say I’m lucky, but I take my chances, and that creates luck. If someone had told me in 2000 that I would break my first world record in the 100 m individual medley, I would have said they were nuts. I changed from long distance to sprints and people felt sorry for me, as they thought I was wasting my time. A changeover from one discipline to another had seldom been successfully done before. Once I got freestyle under control, I tried my hand at the 100 m individual medley, the event in which I set my first individual world record. I also won two Fina World Swimmer of the Year awards in the event. You must take chances. To go from being a miler to a world record holder in the 100 m individual medley is pushing two extreme points, but that’s sometimes what it takes.

3. Be prepared: control what you can

Be prepared – it’s the only way I know not to get nervous. Know that you have covered every base. Frank always said there are three simple keys to success: work ethic, talent and mental strength.
Hard work is the controllable element; the others are not.

4. To win is to be best in history of your body

Be happy with own effort and performance. Don’t get too hung up on placing and medals. It’s very nice to win. I’ve won a lot, but if that’s all that matters to you, it can make you very bitter and unhappy. Even though I did my best time at the 2000 Olympics, I felt like a failure. I don’t believe winning is all that matters. I’m one of the most competitive people you’ll ever meet, but I don’t get hung up when I’m beaten by someone who’s better on the day. It’s just sport.

5. Be a 20-year overnight success

The first time most people heard of Roland and me was when we won Olympic gold. It’s like Sam Walton, the founder of Walmart, said: ‘The Walmart story is a 20-year overnight success.’ They were selling goods long before people had heard of them. The same was true of Mark Shuttleworth. He was involved in IT for years, but when he sold his company for millions, people said he’d just got lucky. Nonsense! He had worked his ass off.

6. The same is the same

People don’t like change. Even though I’ve been swimming for almost 25 years, I’m still changing technique, trying to be more efficient. I always believed my shoulder injury to be a blessing in disguise, because it forced me to focus on my legs. Frank made a fundamental change to our training in 2003 by shifting things around. We were all unhappy and there were many complaints. We used to have Wednesday mornings off, until Frank changed that. We had to do weight training. He also put all three groups together for a month and a half, so the sprinters trained with the long- distance swimmers and the individual medley swimmers.

Amid all the unhappiness, Frank spoke up in the weights room. I’ll never forget his message: the same is the same. What he meant was that if we continued with the same training we would do okay, perhaps even make small increments of improvement. But that magical change, that shift upwards, simply wouldn’t happen in routine training. He said we should stick to what works, but change the rest to get better. I was pissed off, but after a while I saw the benefits. Suddenly it all made sense. The philosophy was true not only for training, but also technique. I still make changes in a bid to be more efficient in the water.

7. Determination: fuelled by failure

Success comes from toughing it out. When the South African relay team ended eighth at the World Championships in 2003, the four swimmers pulled together and told each other to remember how they felt. The fear of failure fuelled us. We weren’t happy with the way we’d performed. At the World Championships in Melbourne in 2007 we ended fourth by 7/100s of a second. We all felt we’d done the best we could, however. We had done our best in miserable circumstances.

8. You can achieve more as a team than as an individual

Even when you’re alone in the pool, or on the track, there are teammates, coaches and family on the ‘team’. I’ve been lucky to have a supportive family and great coaches. My coaches in Arizona cared for me as a person. Use your team, lean on them. Best of all, your team won’t bullshit you.

9. Love what you do

There is no way I could swim or spend such a huge amount of time in the pool if I didn’t love swimming. It doesn’t work if it’s forced. So many parents approach me to say that their son or daughter doesn’t want to swim, and they want me to tell him or her to get on with it. Forget it. If it’s not in your blood, there’s no point. You can’t pretend otherwise. People never thought I could make money out of swimming, but that never mattered to me. If you love something enough, you will always make a success of it.

10. Be confident

Michael Johnson had confidence in spades. It’s the X-factor. You can physically be in the best shape of your life, but if you don’t have the confidence to win, forget it. That’s what the Olympics did for the relay team – it instilled massive confidence in each of us. And I believe that that confidence was carried over to young kids who saw us develop into the best relay team in the world. Often, all a top athlete requires is that spark to fire. I call it confidence.