I would like to talk to you a little bit about success. What I would like to do is pass on some of the ideas I formulated in the process of going through my sporting journey.

I would like to start first with a question “What is success for you?”

I think some people inevitably think about success being about money, and that’s fine, but I think if the majority of people won the lottery this weekend they would still crave success. You would still have dreams and still have passion to reach your goals as if you hadn’t won that money.  It’s not all about the bank balance.

I believe success is about delivering the best possible performance and getting the best possible results.

What actually is it that I really want? And, more importantly, how am I going to get there?

In the early part of my career I studied athletics right across the board, and I wasn’t so interested in physical make-up. There are some serious physical specimens in athletics but to me it didn’t really seem like it was one of the factors when it really came down to it.  Medals were sorted out with the difference between winning and losing and making finals and not making finals. The physical factors actually weren’t so important.

The factors that I believe were more important are more upstairs, because these people that I am talking about are the ones who would arrive at a competition exuding confidence.  I am not taking about the brash, arrogant confidence that we possibly perceive to be an ugly trait.

I am talking about the people that when they are under pressure and they are staring down the barrel, you can see the whites of their eyes and there is a calmness that you know and they know that they are going to deliver.

This to me was worth investigating, and my findings took me to the successes I had – which were three world records, three Olympic medals and thirteen major championship medals from the four majors in athletics [Olympic Games, World Championships, Commonwealth Games and European Championships].

However my point is that I actually believe that I am pretty normal. We all get nervous, excited and anxious, but I believe myself to be quite normal physically, certainly compared to some of the guys I was up against.

I was able to become at certain points in my career the best in the world by employing the tactics of the world’s best.

Therefore I think there are five key headings to success, and these are:

1. Have a plan

This is one which sounds obvious. Inevitably this isn’t a plan we set when we are sixteen and stick to it throughout the rest of our lives. This is a plan which is constantly evolving and adapting to circumstances we see ourselves in.

What I saw in the most successful people was that they had an even more detailed plan, they had really thought it through, and this seemed to be something that correlated with success. The most successful guys turn up and deliver a plan, and if it doesn’t work then they come back with a different plan.  Either way, they learn from the plan.

The most important point of all is you must believe in your plan, in the detail, unequivocally, both in internal dialogue and within the team.

2. To believe

Successful people believe and that’s true whether you talk about politicians or business leaders or businessman who are successful and reach the top of what they do. They believe in themselves.

When I stood in a stadium with a hundred thousand people I knew I was going to throw the javelin a long way because, I totally believed in myself. Two days prior I would be thinking: “Oh my goodness, how on earth am I going to throw 85m – 90m this weekend?” Two days later I did better.

What I would really like to explore and develop is the concept of actually developing self-belief. If belief is a success trait, then what if it can be fabricated?

3. To know your weaknesses

Some people think you should only concentrate on your strengths and really concentrate on making them as good as you can make them.

But I believe knowing your weaknesses is the difference between people who are arrogant and people who are successful. I think the people who are successful and really know what they are weak at either do something about it, or they find help and someone else can do that part of the job for them.

The most important point from my perception is the most successful people are the ones who have a balance of all abilities.

Being good at everything is what makes a true champion and I believe this really comes into its own when we face opposition who have one huge successful trait.  It helps with your belief.

4. Delivering your maximum

My perception is that we are only really scratching the surface when we say ‘I tried my hardest.’

If you think about the true meaning of trying your hardest I don’t even think we come close. I think there is possibly another level beyond that and I think part of the transition to access that level is the first step to accepting that there is a vast area of unexploited potential.

5. To be passionate

If avoiding failure or being successful makes you passionate then use it to create an abundance of passion in what you do.

I believe in the theory that we only ever make one of two decisions: we move towards pleasure, or away from pain. Ultimately in a sporting context once we know what actually gives us pleasure and what actually gives us pain, only then can we unlock the ability to increase our passion in what we do.

I found this out when I was 19 years old and I was at a competition and at the time trying to break the world junior record. The meeting promoter came down to me and he said “there’s a thousand dollars if you break the world junior record.” And I remember going “right I’m £300 overdrawn, and this was a significant amount of money.”

You would have thought that would be the kind of thing which would make you passionate about being world junior record holder, and I was without question capable of it.  A week later that somebody else broke the record by a few centimetres, somebody that had no right to. This filled me with a real drive, and a week later I broke the world junior record.  What really got me going was stopping someone else having the glory instead of me.

Either way, it doesn’t really matter what got me going.  I think it is more important to look within ourselves, and say “what is pleasure and what is pain in the context of our own sporting endeavours?”

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However, my dream was purely about the Olympics, and it was a dream that went back to when I was only 7 years old. I remember sitting watching the 1976 Olympics from Montreal, and as I sat there in my pyjamas with a cup of coco watching these guys literally battling for their lives, I remember a flame started in my belly, something which has never gone out, about the Olympics.

This was it as far as I was concerned, and those guys were gods.  They were right up there.

When I first started I said my running would take me to the Olympic Games, and off I went.  I wasn’t really good at running if I am being honest, I was the runner up in the County Kent Championships and that’s about as good as the running got.

Quite soon after that I got knocked down by a car and I broke my hip. I was in hospital for 6 weeks on traction which slowed me down a bit, then I was on crutches for six weeks and when I came back to running, it wasn’t so good.

A couple of years later I was still hanging around in athletics and someone said “could you come down and fill in, a javelin thrower hasn’t turned up.”  That day I went down and I was pretty awful if I am being honest. It wasn’t the sort of fairytale where it landed somewhere over the horizon, it landed about 23m away.  It was awful.

There was a guy there his name was Gary Jenson, who happened to throw on that day a British record of sixty two meters.  I looked at this thing flying through the air and again this captured my imagination. This was going to be the vehicle that would take me to the Olympics.

Now things accelerated quite quickly after that.  By sixteen I won the English schools, by eighteen I had won the European Juniors, so every year was just coming thick and fast, and eventually I had found a sport that I was pretty good at.

The following year got even better again, but all of a sudden I was up against these guys, the guys I perceived to be gladiators or gods.  I was up against them, the best javelin throwers in the world.

There was one particular guy called Kazuhiro Mizoguchi of Japan, and he was the leading javelin thrower in the world in 1989. I pitched up to compete against Kazuhiro Mizoguchi and I though “Oh no its him, I’ve seen him on the telly, and I have been watching videos and studying his technique and now I need to throw against him, what am I going to do?”

All I could do was try and throw the thing out the park, and if he beat me then so be it; it wasn’t going to be a big deal because he was really the man.

We were in Barcelona and it was one of my first trips overseas, and uncharacteristically the rain was coming down that evening.  It was quite tricky conditions for throwing the Javelin, but it didn’t slow me down. I came hurtling in the first round and I threw the javelin for a new British and Commonwealth record 85.9metres. Kazuhiro walked across the javelin runway through the rain and he said before he had a throw: “Mr Backley?” I stood up to greet him and he said “Mr Backley you bastard!”   I beat Kazuhiro that night.

All of a sudden these guys who I perceived to be the best came down to my level, these guys who were gladiators were all of a sudden normal. I beat him that night and all of a sudden the final leg of my journey began because I had taken a scalp off the world’s best. It was all really about the plan. I never lost sight of the plan at that time.

I meticulously planned that winter, and things went even better again. In the early part of the summer in 1990 I threw a new world record of 89.58 on my opening throw.

This is still 2 years before the Olympics before my first experience at Olympic Games as 1992 was Barcelona.  In 1990 I was thinking if I could throw a world record then all I need to do is stay the same and two years later I would beat everyone again – simple.

So all I did, quite literally, was wait, which was probably my first and biggest ever mistake. 

I perceived successful people to be the ones who could set themselves a target, set themselves a mountain to climb, climb to the top and be able to sit at the top and enjoy the views and just enjoy themselves and stay there. Nothing was going to knock them off the top of the perch if they didn’t change anything.

But by not re-inventing and pushing on and having a new plan, set-backs came my way, and I got injured. I got hurt, I pulled an adductor muscle and all of a sudden I knew what injury was all about. It slowed me down incredibly and it probably was the start of the two year build up to Barcelona of what I probably can only best describe as Sporting Hell.

I lost my way and I didn’t really have a concrete, detailed, defined plan of how I was going to take it to the next level and how I was going to beat people. I was looking over my shoulder thinking “Who’s going to beat my record?” “Who’s going to come and throw 90 metres?”

It wasn’t a complete disaster because I did come away with an Olympic medal a Bronze medal from Barcelona Games.

The reason I asked the question at the start - “what is success for you?” - is because for most 21 or 22 year-olds, an Olympic Bronze medal would be a success.  But at the point in my life this wasn’t a success, and whenever I look at this medal I think more about what it taught me rather than what I gained. Not because it’s a bronze medal and it’s not the right colour, but because it reminds me that I had lost sight of my plan.

I remember standing down track side during the competition and just before it started the PA announcement said “Steve Backley, Great Britain’s world record holder!”  I remember thinking “someone sitting at the back of the stand was probably looking down at me thinking he must feel pretty good, he’s in the Olympic Final and has just been introduced as world record holder.”

The reality is I didn’t feel like that.  I felt awful and I wanted the ground to swallow me up, I didn’t want to be there. I got completely overwhelmed by the Olympics because I got there and I didn’t really have a plan.

There is an entry in my diary on May 22nd 1992 which was two months before the Olympics. The entry said “continue to be the best javelin thrower in the world” which was not the best plan I’ve ever had.

Staying still and resting on your laurels is of course not an option for anyone who wants any degree of success. I came away and I made two vows: I vowed that I would turn up at my next Olympics injury free and fresh, and I also vowed that I would concentrate on what I did want rather than what I didn’t want.

One thing I did have was belief, not in huge amounts but there was an underlying level of belief that I could get out and do better than this through time.

I believe we can access a level of belief for the duration of our sport that is appropriate and makes us perform ultimately. In other words we can possibly introduce a character or role play to get into to do our jobs exceptionally well. I think this is what successful sports people do. Some of them don’t come out of character, which is a bit of a worry, but I think the skill is to get into character, to do your job, and to come out of character.  

There are two really important parts of how to get into this character. It frustrates the hell out of me when I talk to athletes and sports people and they say “I just had a bad day.” This is rubbish.  We are in control of it. If you believe that you can get into character and you know what your character is, then you don’t just have bad days, you make mistakes and you learn from them without making them again.

What I believe which help us to find this character is belief, and the interim dialogue. This is the little voice which creeps up sometimes when you don’t want it to, when you are under pressure, when the room goes silent and it’s your turn, the little voice says “are you sure you can really do this?”

If you’re not ready to deal with the little voice then it’s going to cut your belief down because it asks questions and it probes and pokes and says really inappropriate things. One that we can all relate to is the little voice saying “why do you feel so tired?” and before you know it you go “oh well I’ve had a few early starts and a few late nights, been pretty busy” and before you know it you have answered the question. 

We can take control of this voice in order to help us deliver.

For example, if we said to ourselves “why do I feel so motivated?” you answer it because you can’t help it. All of a sudden you have answered the question.

The key is to come up with the right questions and the right answers.
 

PG & RO
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