self-confidence, determination

'I always thought I was going to be the best at something one day', says Daley Thompson. 'I've even asked people who I used to go to school with, and they would say, "God, you used to go on about yourself and tell us how good you were and how good you were going to be." So I always thought I was going to be really good at something, but I just never really knew what it was, until I was about nine or 10, and then I started wanting to be a footballer.'

That was all Thompson ever wanted to be - for a time. 'Then for some reason I went to my local athletics club, basically to get fit to go on tour to play football in Holland for a couple of weeks. I had a really good time and when we came back from tour I went back to my athletics club. After about a month it never occurred to me that I ever wanted to play football again. So after five or six years of wanting to be a footballer, the next day all I ever wanted to be was an athlete.'

Thompson adds wrily that 'I've only ever wanted to be two things in my life, but I've done them backwards, because I'm nearly a footballer now!' He is without doubt the most successful all-round athlete the world has ever seen and also one of the most confident people you could ever meet. But it soon becomes apparent that Thompson approaches life, or has done so, from an angle that differs completely from the typical human attitude.

His raison d'être, as he says, was to be the best at something; the best in the world. He believed that he could achieve this end, because of the crucial difference in his whole thought process. Even among all the famous people he has met in sport, none, Thompson believes, has quite matched his own self-belief. There was nothing he believed to be beyond his capabilities, given a bit of practice. As he says, 'obviously I'm never going to be the fastest runner in the world, but I'll have a very good go at it'.

The difference in his mental approach comes down to the viewpoint 'that I'm good at it until I'm proved otherwise.' Most people, he believes, approach from the other end, feeling that they're probably not going to be very good - and hoping for a lucky surprise. That fundamental difference in mind-set has been with Thompson as long as he can remember. Approaching everything you take on in the confident belief that you will excel is very different from the way in which most people face challenges.

Most people feel trepidation: they are uncertain over how they are going to cope: and almost certainly they have very little confidence in their ability relative to the opposition. Most people can recall lining up for an athletics event when young, or taking the field with a team, already convinced that the opposition was either bigger, or stronger, or faster, and most certainly better. Very few youngesters take the field, in any competitive event, believing that they will convincingly beat all-comers.

Thompson's great innate ability, of course, made it easy to best the competition in his younger years. He remembers all his successes, and how success reinforced success. Probably more important, if he was beaten - and he concedes that he may well have lost sometimes - he doesn't remember the defeats. He only recalls the positive experiences; always, a failure or a defeat would have been registered, learnt from and then forgotten. Defeat never preyed on his mind, as happens with many people, inside and outside sport.

Thompson recognises his abnormal talent, of course, but believes that he's competed against and beaten people who actually possessed greater gifts. True, he is also fanatically determined: again, he thinks there are people (though it isn't easy to believe him) who are more determined still. But Thomson is adamant that nobody he has ever met beats him on both counts. It's the combination of ability and determination that creates unbeatable self-belief.

Thompson fell into his event, the decathlon, as casually as he entered athletics. He was already one of Britain's best junior sprinters when his club went down to a competition in Wales - and found itself one short for a club decathlon. One of Thompson's coaches asked if he would make up the number. Thompson had done the high jump that morning, and the long jump: he'd run the 100 metres, so that was half the first day gone. Did he fancy having a go at the other seven events?

Thompson is one of those who will always say yes; 'I'll have a go at anything'. He was then 16 years old: his coach was Bob Morton - they still meet and talk about football, in much the same way as they used to talk about athletics. Having stumbled into the decathlon, Thompson realised almost immediately that the event was what he'd always been looking for. His astonishing record of success thereafter proves abundantly that he made the right choice. But was his confidence always so supreme?

We were convinced that, somewhere along the line, he must have faced self-doubt at one point or another, however briefly. Daley, though, is admamant that, even the night before a crucial competition, he never had any doubts. There was always a point, he confesses, usually a couple of weeks or maybe a couple of months before, when one day his training would go badly awry; when nothing would seem to go right; when for one reason or another he just wasn't in the mood.

Those are the moments which, for many people, lead to panic or self-doubt. Not for Thompson. He says that he merely walked away, knowing that, the next day or the one after, he would return to training, and everything would come right again. He would be back into his winning frame of mind - and he never had sleepless nights. What he did have, always, was the anticipation - 'I couldn't wait to get out there; it couldn't come quickly enough for me. I just loved it. I loved the moment where you had to put it on the line.'

He's emphatic that 'that's the best thing in the world for me. If you told me to get ready to do some sit-ups in a year's time, I couldn't wait for the day to come and give it a go, just to see.' He didn't 'care about winning or losing'. He only wanted to know if he could achieve what was asked of him. 'That was it - I loved the moment. The moment is the thing for me'. As he discusses the subject, in a T-shirt, over lunch, his arms get covered in goose-bumps. 'There, you see', he says, pointing at the arms, 'even the thought of it still brings me out in goose-bumps; even the thought of competition fills me with adrenalin!'

The recurring theme with Thompson, as with all great achievers, is preparation. His training programmes are legendary. Frank Dick, the English athletics team coach, and Bruce Longdon (who now coaches Sally Gunnell, the 400 metre hurdles gold medallist) put together Thompson's training. As he remembers, it was very well constructed, but enormous in sheer amount: he used to train for five or six hours a day. Not that he minded; as he says, he had nothing else to do.

What he enjoyed, though, was the challenge - doing all the work one day, coming back exhausted the next, but giving it another go, all over again. He wanted to ensure that he trained more than anyone else. As he says, athletes will never give away their training secrets, and nobody would expect them to. But one stimulus that spurred on Thompson to train three times a day was his belief that everyone else only used to train twice, or just once. He aimed to get in at least half an hour more work than everybody else.

Thompson even used to train on Christmas Day, but not for a single session; he trained twice, just in case one of his competitors had decided to train that festive day; 'if I trained twice, I would still know that I was up on them'. His main competitor, a German called Jurgen Hingsen, was so close to Thompson in ability that only three points separated their best decathlon scores - the equivalent of a hundredth of a second in the 100 metres. yet even though there was so little between them, Thompson always won, and he asserts that it was purely for mental reasons.

Mindpower applied in two ways. First, he always trained harder: that was the basis for believing that he would be mentally stronger, secure in the knowledge that he was better prepared, fitter, and physically stronger, if only fractionally. Second, Hingsen would know that the Briton was always in the best possible shape on the day of competition - and Thompson always reckoned that this placed immense pressure on his opponent. Hingsen would realise that he had to perform to his absolute best simply to stand a chance.

Wouldn't Hingsen surely feel the same way? Wouldn't he have been training as hard as he could? Wouldn't Hingsen have thought likewise - that Thompson would have to be in the best possible shape even to have a chance? The questions produce a slow smile across Thompson's face. 'I've always come from the positive side, and his best was still not good enough for me'. You might read this self-belief as sheer loud-mouthed arrogance: but when we looked behind the bravado at the training, the mental logic became apparent.

Thompson maintains that he trained too hard to get things wrong. Training those two or three times a day, he might be getting in 2,000 throws a month. Basically, he would go through exactly the same routine with his throwing, which is why he trained so much. He wanted to ingrain everything into his training, so that 'I could do it almost with my eyes closed, and it would always get to an acceptable level'. Therefore, his worst would always be good enough.

The target in Thompson's training was higher still: to make his worst better than anyone else's best - and he believed that it nearly always was. On all his ten events, hours and hours were spent to make sure that, even under the most intense pressure, his performance would remain almost instinctive. The programme was highly structured so that Thompson could peak at the moment that meant the most to him - the Olympic Games. World records, he maintains, were almost irrelevant, but not quite.

The Olympics were the spur. It's almost a level playing field; everyone knows that, in four years' time to the exact day, they have to produce their best. To structure your training and your life, to overcome all the barriers and the problesms that present themselves along the way, and then prove yourself the best in the world, is to Daley Thompson the ultimate challenge.

Thompson won his first gold medal at the 1980 Olympics, but carried on in the belief that he had barely scratched the surface of his potential, that he could do very much better. Even now, in retirement, that's his frustration: in his total self-confidence, he feels that he never realised his full potential, never performed as well as possible. Having to carry injuries was the big disappointment that stopped him from achieving the supreme decathlon performance, the best of which he was capable.

He competed in his first Olympics in 1976, at 17, only a year after that first chance entry in the event. He came 18th. On the day he returned home, Thompson wrote in his diary that in 1980 he would get an Olympic medal - possibly gold: in 1984 and 1988, however, he would definitely win. The man who thus reckoned to win up to three Olympic decathlons won only two, and for Thompson that isn't enough. He still maintains that he could have done better.

Like all great champions, Thompson competed above all with himself. He knew that, with his basic capability, he would always be among the first four. Performing reasonably well, he was certain of a place in the first two - but ninety-nine times out of a hundred, he knew, he would be first. He was obsessed with striving for perfection. Competitors became almost irrelevant compared to this effort to achieve the perfect decathlon. 'Perfect' is the man's own honest analysis of his true potential.

Compared to that, even the crowd was unimportant. As he says, the people watching couldn't make him try any harder. 'I only have one gear, and that's 100% - that's all I've got. What you see is what I have. It was too important for me to worry about a crowd.' So what would have happened if he had lost the Olympics? Fit, 'it wouldn't have happened.' He only came fourth in 1988: 'I got hurt and I had a bad leg, and I came in fourth. But for me it was no big deal, because I was only 150 points off winning, which is nothing. I could have done that.'

Thompson therefore 'never had any problem' with the 1988 defeat. It didn't disturb his overall philosophy of confidence. 'It never occurred to me that I would ever lose anything. I had come from the other way round' - from total confidence in victory: 'I had lost because I was injured.' By 1992, circumstances had changed irrevocably: 'I was an old man.' The confidence, however, was irrepressible: he still 'thought I might have won it.'

That may chime oddly with the statement that 'I have always been really positive, or mostly realistic, about whether or not I can win things' - for right to the end, there was no 'whether or not': Thompson always thought he could win. Part of the reason is that 'throughout my athletic career, I hardly ever messed up a competition.' As noted earlier, that didn't apply to training, which he 'messed up loads of times, because you have down days and off days.' Down or off, though, 'you've still got to put in some time and still try to do it well.'

Thompson remembers that 'there were just days when I couldn't throw, and things just weren't happening. Then you just cut your losses and hope that it's going to be better the next day. I always knew it would be.' That encapsulates a vital truth about self-belief. It isn't just conceit. Beneath all the confidence lay Thompson's crucial ability to analyse, with total honestly, exactly what he could do. His normal standard was best in the world. On the rare occasions when he did lose, he knew why. There were no excuses, just cold, hard facts which had to be understood and accepted.

His self-belief was unaffected because, in the final analysis, he only set himself achievable goals: they tested him to the very limit, but never exceeded the bounds of a capability which he always knew exactly. To Thompson, athletes who are full of doubt - and he has come across them all the time - are a puzzle. To his mind, provided that you have a certain level of talent and put in the requisite work, your performance will match your ability. You have to be realistic about whether the best of your ability is good enough for a medal or some lower ranking. If you are honest, and achieve that level - the best of your ability - you should never lose confidence.

Another puzzle to Thompson is why athletes get so wound up over their performance on the day of competition. That, he believes, should be the easiest day. 'Because if you're doing 5,000 throws in training, three during the competition should be easy. You should look forward to doing three, because you should be able to do three good ones, instead of having to go through the repeat, repeat, repeat of training.'

As Thompson recalls, 'that was so boring - but importantly, it enabled me not to have to worry on the day.' He could enjoy the competition, 'because I knew I had put the work in.' Unlike most competitors, Thompson couldn't wait to get out there, on the field. He loved playing, loved the competition, loved the tests which showed whether he could 'push the envelope' a little bit further. The vital point is that they were tests, not of his self-belief, but of his capability. Confidence helps you to make the most of your talents. Self-doubt causes you to underperform - and that Daley Thompson never did.