Don’t stop.
Don’t hesitate. Don’t step back from what you’re doing. Pull hard in the water till everything aches. Do an extra crunch when you’ve finished 200. Row till your hands bleed. Just your normal everyday superhuman stuff. Don’t pick up your phone and scroll. Don’t open news websites. Don’t listen to officials who issue a quote about the Olympics and retract it. The rower, Joan Poh, saw the item about a Japanese politician talking about cancelling the Games and then she wished she could unsee it.
Don’t look because you know it plays hell with the brain and it messes with the mindset. It’s hard enough trying to improve but it’s harder amid this drip-drip of conflicting opinions from politicians and officials about whether the Games will happen.
It’s a tough time, unprecedented in fact, and we appreciate that, but it would be helpful to everyone if people who are organising and hosting the Games spoke in one voice. But the talk will continue. So you go deaf. Put on headphones, raise the volume, skip till your socks are wet with sweat. You can’t control other people but you can control your own training. Remember coaches telling you about tunnel vision? This is that time. Remember also that this uncertainty you feel right now is good training of a sort. Because on the night before your final you will be assailed by it.
Don’t let us tell you that life is unfair because you’re an athlete and that’s part of the job description. You know bad luck, hardship, goals off the post, faulty equipment. You know unfairness better than most of us. But you never let it stop you then, so don’t stop now.
Don’t let me lie to you. This Olympics may not happen. To be honest maybe it shouldn’t even happen. Things appear normal in Singapore but that’s scarcely true for the rest of the world and a “celebration of humanity” at a Games can seem inappropriate at a time of inadequate hospital beds. If nothing else the Olympics needs to be cautious with its rhetoric.
Sport is a necessary expression of life but it never outweighs life. You know that. Every athlete I’ve spoken to this past year in Singapore has said that. They say it because they’re humans first and sportspeople second. You know people are dying, out of jobs, their savings exhausted and so a run down the track suddenly doesn’t mean as much. Yet, it’s what you do.
So don’t stop doing it.
Don’t think, “Oh IF it’s cancelled, imagine the waste, the time invested, the classes missed”. Because IF means nothing in sport, you know that. IF won you nothing, IF didn’t get you to this point. And this point is one where you’ve discovered some version of your own excellence. It’s a powerful thing.
Don’t forget what every coach, champion, psychologist has ever said, a cliche ragged and torn but unbreakably true: It’s the journey not the destination. It’s how you’ve set your mind, worn the pain, challenged yourself, repeated a skill 30 times a session, twice a day, six days a week, every week a year, just to be better.
Don’t undersell what you’ve achieved. Don’t stop chasing what you can be. Don’t stop because no whistle has blown yet.
Don’t get disheartened. Don’t reach for anything but positivity because that’s your reflex. Don’t think, ‘Man, five years I’ve worked for this”. Don’t drop your shoulders. Wars have interrupted the Games. Boycotts have killed dreams. But athletes never forget what they made of themselves. No virus can erase how far you’ve come.
No one, ever, can take that away from you.
From straitstimes