Swimming, even more than athletics, is a sport in which competitors can and must focus on precise results. Weather conditions don't affect the issue, the 'track' doesn't vary significantly, and the odds are overwhelming that each successive competition will be won at faster times. Adrian Moorhouse, Britain's gold medal Olympic swimmer, likes to quote the American swimmer who worked out that in four years his Olympic event would be won in a certain time and calculated his four years of preparation to take off the necessary seconds from his own performance, year by year.
The intense concentration on times dovetails with focus on winning - which is often measured, as in Moorhouse's Olympic win in the 100 metres breaststroke, in tiny fractions of a second. As he admits, he was 'pretty lucky - in fact very lucky' to win even by that margin: 'It was the worst-paced swim I've ever done.' His consolation, though, is that it was also 'the best race I've ever had.' As often happens in sport and business, the true competitor wins in spite of tactical error: and this was Moorhouse's worst piece of tactics.
'You don't go flat out for a 61-second race', he explains. 'You've actually got to go about 97% for the first length.' After a 'terrible dive', Moorhouse 'took it too slow, and from that moment on I almost threw it away.' He knew that he should have been ahead, not trailing behind. But he wouldn't give in. Above all, Moorhouse kept himself 'just focusing on the end.' He wasn't acttually ahead until the final, winning stroke. As tense, nail-biting viewers round the world will bear witness, 'in terms of racing other people, in terms of a pure race, it was actually a great race' - and he won.
But here the voice of the true, analytical champion intervenes: 'it was organised chaos, not organised racing. It was totally random, which shouldn't happen.' Nothing in Moorhouse's preparation for that one event had been random or disorganised - and the preparation had in effect begun eleven years before. Moorhouse's life was transformed when, at the age of 12, he watched the Olympic swimming covertly upstairs in his Leeds home: it was the first thing he'd seen of the Olympics, and 'the first memory I have of the Olympic Games is seeing David Wilkie win a gold medal.'
Watching the breaststroke champion, 'seeing his emotion on the podium, and then the playing of the National Anthem, I thought, this looks really good. But I had no real idea what it meant.' Moorhouse was already a promising swimmer, having begun at five in the local swimming pool. To start with, he wasn't at all keen on the sport. Despite that, he went to Aireborough swimming pool in the heart of Leeds, where he joined the Aireborough Dolphins. He was racing by the age of eight, which is when he won his first medal, gold in the under-9s backstroke, followed by silvers for breaststroke and freestyle.
Plainly, the talent was there: now, so was the ambition. The day after Wilkie's win, 'I got on the coach, where we all met to go to a competition and was really excited. I had no idea of the gap between where I was and Olympic level. It just seemed like an interesting target, and it all looked so special on TV.' Moorhouse actually lost his race that day, though he 'wasn't that bothered, because I still wanted to win the Olympics.' This wide-eyed dreaming child still had to learn what it took to be a champion.
His evolution into an organised competitor who had targets and a clear focus for realising his dream was excitingly sudden. In April 1979 he joined Leeds, one of Britain's top swimming centres. People kept on asking if he had entered various competitions for his age group - competitions that he knew nothing about. But his coach saw that Moorhouse was capable of times that would place him among the best in England, and encouraged him to train hard. A few months later, Moorhouse was entered in the age-group championship at 200 metres breaststroke: it was only the fourth he had ever swum, and he won.
That first results focus at the age of 14 was on targets that Moorhouse found unbelievable. His coach actually thought he could win the national age-groups which he had never entered before. Between April and August, Moorhouse went from nowhere to national champion in an event for which he had little experience or liking. 'I'd only been swimming 100s and only ever done one or two 200s, and they were hell - too long and too hard.' Moorhouse was told to do two or three more and keep training, 'which I did, and I got better each time.'
The importance of setting 'stretching targets' is well-known in management, but not necessarily well understood. The target shouldn't exceed the manager's abilities, but should exploit them to the full, closing the gap between potential and performance. That raises the sights - not only in the sense of making the specific task more worthwhile, but in giving managers a better realisation of their own powers. In Moorhouse's case, 'all of a sudden I was beating these kids from London, Manchester, Newcastle, and I'd never even swum against them, or even heard of them, and they all knew each other.' But he liked that level of competition, and he liked experiencing the real 'feeling of winning' for the first time.
That was stage one in the advance from day dream to golden reality. Stage two required focusing on a new target: a record time. As Moorhouse's coach kept pushing him past new boundaries, the swimmer closed on the British junior record. The pair set themselves the target of training to beat this under-16 time. The focus was very precise: 'this is the time you need to beat, and this is your current best time. We have a year in which to beat it.' Moorhouse needed only three months.
That was in January. Another three months, and he was competing in his first senior championship, coming second to Duncan Goodhew, who went on to win the Olympics. Between August and April, the youngster who had never entered a national age-group competition had become a record-breaker and a senior copetitor. Coming second to an Olympic gold medallist stimulated his Olympic ambitions still further: 'the guy I was swimming with everybody knew as this bald swimmer who was going to go on and win the Olympics for Britain, and he did - and then it was real.'
Moorhouse's picture got in the papers, and not only the local ones. He was targeted, aged 15, as a future Olympic champion: Wilkie in 1976, Goodhew in 1980 - it could be Moorhouse in 1984. To the ordinary person, it would all have seemed too good to be true. But top achievers typically ride their successes and don't much remember their failures; or, if they do, regard them positively. Managers, too, don't like to dwell on failure, but too often for different and less satisfactory reasons: because they are averse to confronting the realities of error.
Unless you do learn from your mistakes and failures, though, you're liable to repeat them. Losing to Goodhew in that first senior outing was what Moorhouse regarded as his first encounter with failure: other, lesser defeats didn't count. 'When I swam against Goodhew, it was only six months after I'd entered the first age groups in that April competition. I thought I was going to beat him. When I didn't, I was gutted. I got out thinking, I've failed, this is the end of the line.'
Losing to a 24-year old who was heading for Olympic gold was no disgrace for a lad of 15. But Moorhouse went sadly to see his coach (who was on the British team), convinced that he'd 'blown it', that he was 'no good, because I haven't beaten him.' The constant focus on higher and higher results, faster and faster times, had backfired - and when Goodhew also beat him by about one-and-a-half seconds in the 100 metres, 'I got out really disappointed': he had finished only fifth.
The coach sat him down and administered the perfect antidote: 'Listen, you've actually broken your own junior record.' Moorhouse recalls the 'sitting down, and that realisation that I was still improving was what really drove me on.' Like the pursuit of continuous improvement in Total Quality Management, 'breaking those junior records and getting on that ladder and starting to move up it' kept the swimmer focused: 'that's what kept me going.'
In February 1980 Moorhouse swam with four other young swimmers in the national junior team. They all broke records, and, sitting around afterwards, the others talked about how they were going to win senior team places in April - and for the first time the thought dawned on Moorhouse that he might be good enough for the seniors. His selection is a vivid memory: 'We were picked on time. So you swam out of your skull, and they selected you no matter what your age.'
The selection letter, though, warned Moorhouse that he might have to swim in an outside lane (because Goodhew was Number One), and that the selectors weren't sure whether to give him an England tracksuit. That gave Moorhouse another focus: to earn his tracksuit and depose Goodhew. He focused on new targets, times and records, whereby hangs a management lesson. Much business success rests on long hours of detailed, dogged, uninspiring work: but clear focus on truly worthwhile results provides the missing inspiration.
Nothing in management, though, is quite as dull as swimming ('having my face in the water') for four hours every day - and for Moorhouse the results focus likewise gave him the inspiration to carry on. Passing strict targets at set points along the way, he broke Goodhew's records in 1981 and 1982 and won the Commonwealth Games in his build-up for the 1984 Olympics. First, though, came the 1982 World Championships, in which Moorhouse finished fourth; that didn't rule out the possibility of an Olympic win - but deep down, though he desperately wanted to win, Moorhouse didn't truly believe he was ready.
The media and the swimming fraternity didn't share these inner doubts, and wrongly thought Moorhouse mentally and physically strong enough to be a contender for gold. He was only 19, though, and physically still somewhat slight. In early 1984, however, Moorhouse did swim a very fast time which put him top of the world rankings. This naturally heightened the expectations of the press and everybody involved with British swimming. Moorhouse alone was aware that his main opponents hadn't yet swum seriously: the rankings didn't reflect true strengths in world swimming.
For the first time in his career, Moorhouse suffered from muddled focus. He aimed to win the Olympics, but didn't really believe that he could. In hindsight, he might have done better to focus on winning any medal he could. In the event, 'I was actually afraid of not getting a gold medal, rather than targeting getting it. So huge chunks of my time were spent worrying about what would happen if I didn't.' Worried about how family, friends the media and his swimming colleagues would react, Moorhouse 'wasn't focusing on what it required to win the gold medal.'
His self-esteem entering the race wasn't positive. It became downright negative when he lost - and was told he was a flop. Big black headlines recorded his failure to come any higher than fourth, and one newspaper actually advised that 'Adrian Moorhouse should do himself and the sport of swimming a favour and quit'. That's heavy stuff to bear at any age: but being told to retire when you're only 19 is unbelievably harsh. The ability to ride through rough criticism and injustice, though, is a necessity of champions in any activity. The right response is to prove the critics wrong by going back and doing better.
Moorhouse went back - and did worse. Still the best in Britain, he was picked for the European Cup, where he'd won a year before. He came 18th, and didn't even make the B final. Something was obviously and seriously wrong. Tests showed that he had suffered from German measles for six months. 'I thought', he recalls, 'that 18th is really bad, and it makes fourth in the Olympics look pretty good. And then I started to realise how good that actually was. I was fourth in the world.'
It was New Year's Eve, 1984. Moorhouse spent the evening on his own in his parent's house. For the rest of his swimming career, he spent a solitary New Year's Eve, 'and around midnight I sat down and set my goals for the whole year. In 1984, the issue was how to get out of his problem. Fourth in the world, now 18th in Europe - 'what can I do and where can I start?' The first answer was the national championships, just four months away: that became his focus.
Training as hard as he could, Moorhouse aimed to knock half a second off each of his best times. His muddled focus cleared as the times become his sole objectives. With his coach, Moorhouse planned exactly what would happen in the four months. His training sessions - when, how, where - were all written down in his diary and checked off when completed. It all worked. He got all the records, restored his confidence and enjoying a very definite surge of renewed vigour. The Olympics again became his focus, but he was also rebuilding a self-belief that had become fragile.
He started to move up the world rankings. The year 1986, which included the world championships, suddenly seemed wide open. Somebody had to be the best in the world. 'We're all pretty similar, so why not me? That's what I swam for in 1986.' Winning the world championship would establish the mental state required for the Olympics. Moorhouse did win, but was disqualified, to his intense disappointment. But there was a huge difference - he had seen people finish behind him; he had touched the wall, looked both ways and seen clear water. He led by nearly a second, which in Olympic terms is a huge winning margin.
Seeing that clear water was the moment when he began to believe in Olympic victory. That New Year's Eve, his solitary re-analysis was positive. He had made it. The only way now was upwards. No longer the scared 19-year old, he could scare others - for instance, by being the first man, in 1987, to break a minute in his event. That summer, he won gold, silver and bronze in the European Championships. Other wins included the US Open, the American nationals and the European cups. New Year's Eve 1987 thus gave an encouraging vista into the coming Olympic year.
Moorhouse could remember exactly how he had felt in the build-up to 1984: half-scared, half child-like, wanting to win, but not knowing how. He realised that the external pressures which he had experienced four years before would again well up. His strategy was to anticipate the media speculation and interest, and to seek to dissipate the impact in advance, so that nothing would disturb his concentration and planning. The gold medal was his reward - not only for the four hours of daily training for four years, but for the mental strength displayed after the 1984 debacle.
Moorhouse had re-focused his mind and his training to produce short-term goals whose achievement would carry him on to the long-term prize. Looking back, he doesn't believe he would have won without those short-term targets. If he hadn't given himself a focus, celebrating every achievement along the way, he wouldn't have stood on the podium in 1988 - like his hero, David Wilkie, eight years before - to receive the gold medal on behalf of Britain. He couldn't go to sleep that night. 'I just lay there with my eyes wide open, wearing my medal. I just didn't want to take it off.' He wore it all the next day, too.
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