WHEN Nicola Olyslagers was eight years of age, she wrote a poem about competing at the Olympics.
Sixteen years later, the Australian sat on the edge of the mattress in Tokyo as a silver medallist in the high jump.
Last week, she won bronze.
The gold medal was taken by Ukraine’s Yaroslava Mahuchikh.
Viewers will have noted the distinct difference in how they behaved in the time around their jumps.
Even when Olyslagers won silver three years ago (under her maiden name McDermott), her very first instinct was to sit down on the edge of the mattress and reach for the cheap green diary she’d bought from Office Works and take out her pen.
The tears running down her face, she gave her jump marks out of 10.
A different mark for each part of the routine. The run-up, the jump, what she did in the air, the landing, all of it.
It doesn’t matter if it’s a routine Wednesday morning at training or an Olympic final, this is what she does for every single jump.
Mahuchikh’s approach could not have been any different.
In between jumps, she would envelop herself in a giant green sleeping bag.
On a few occasions, she laid down with her head on her backpack and rested her eyes.
While others fretted over isotonics, Mahuchikh was seen sipping from a can of Red Bull.
She is the world record holder, having last month cleared a height of two metres and ten centimetres.
So it’s clear: Drinking Red Bull and sleeping at the side of the track beats the unrelenting laser focus of analysing every move you make.
Right? Wrong.
The pair are a fascinating case study in the different approaches taken by top-level athletes.
It is replicated across sport and across history.
What advantage did Rafael Nadal ever get from facing the labels of his water bottles the right way or not stepping on the lines of the court in between games?
Or NBA star Jason Terry from sleeping in the shorts of his opponents the night before a game?
NFL coach Les Miles would eat a handful of the grass off the pitch in the lead-up to a match.
Serena Williams would wear the same pair of socks from the beginning to end of a tournament.
Lyoto Machida, a former UFC light heavyweight champion and karate master, drinks his own urine.
The joy of being an individual athlete is that you can drink Red Bull and lie around the track in a sleeping bag. The only person you’re affecting is yourself.
So if you’re reading this and you have a group stage intermediate club football championship game this weekend, do not panic.
You do need to go to O’Neills and buy the other team’s shorts.
You can wash your socks.
You do not need to spend the week thinking of how you can subtly start eating the grass without looking demented.
And you do not need to drink your own pee.
So is all this stuff nonsense?
Well, no.
These people were serious high achievers and they did these things because they believed that they worked to their advantage.
It feels as though you have to belong to one of the two schools of thinking on all the psychology: That everyone should be at it, or that it’s spoofery of the highest order.
But psychology and preparation are both very individual packages.
What works for you is unique to you.
The need for conformity in every area is one of the biggest failures in management.
Footballers are people first.
Turning them into robots that take the medicine prescribed exactly the way the label tells them to is not the general idea.
Anyone that’s ever been in a team changing room will have figured out pretty quickly how different the individuals are.
You’ll have the guy that sits down at 8pm the night before with his kitbag and arranges everything perfectly.
Experts will tell you that the tidiness and organisation leads to a clear mind, free of clutter, able to focus on the task at hand.
And then there’s the man that stuffs his boots into a plastic bag with one handing while eating with the other, checking the clock, racing out the door and realising there’s no diesel in the car.
But what happens when he rocks up, throws his gear on and produces a man of the match performance? I’ve seen an individual kick a winning score in a county final having turned up 15 minutes late for the bus, just out of bed, coming in with a Mr Happy t-shirt on him.
Some players love football. They like getting stuck in to video analysis. Dissecting games. Talking about it all day.
Others come home, throw their kitbag in the corner and don’t look near football until their next training session.
That doesn’t make them any less committed or interested. It’s just a different way of being.
So many GAA dressing rooms have become a place of absolute conformity.
You can’t be late, you can’t miss training, you can’t have a holiday, you can’t have a night out.
When you lose, you daren’t speak in the changing rooms. Can’t, can’t, can’t.
And sometimes that works out.
Non-conformity can be frustrating for a changing room when it starts to impact negatively.
Some fellas would be ten minutes after defeat in a big game and back in the real world, chatting away in the showers.
The common refrain his direction would be ‘that lad doesn’t care, it’s not hurting him enough’.
Pre-match can be no difference. Silence now lads. Steely focus. No chat. Tuned in. Quit shuffling.
There are players that need punched in the face to waken them up and there are players that want to be punched in the face because it gets them going.
That doesn’t mean everyone needs punched in the face.
It’s all part of the damaging legacy of negative psychology imposed on generations of GAA dressing rooms.
If you don’t want to go into a stupor of darkness when you’re beaten then don’t feel you have to.
The key to it all is performance. As long as you’re playing well, nobody cares if you sleep upside down with Por Ti Volaré looping on your Alexa.
When you hear of the Armagh players speak of one of the big turning points in their year being a day on the beer in Lurgan after losing the Ulster final, you do wonder.
They have players that journal religiously and they have players with other identities outside of the game. Same as every team.
Does that make the secret to winning an All-Ireland going for the odd Monday Club, as long as you write all the other stuff down first?
Yes and no.
The secret is that there is no secret.
There’s only ever what works for you.