Super Champions, Champions, and Almosts

The lead-up to the 1992 Olympics featured a memorable campaign of two decathletes who became the face of track and field - Dan O'Brien and Dave Johnson.

Both Dan and Dave had some success leading up to the Olympics. They competed head-to-head in several world championships, and both had gotten the best of one another in competitions. Their friendly rivalry revived the Decathlon and prompted Reebok to sign both of them and run "Dan and Dave," which Dave O'Brien compared to the "Bo Knows" campaigns of the early 90s in magnitude.

Confident that one of these two would win (both were favored to medal at the Barcelona Games), Reebok launched the Dan and Dave campaign expecting to compete with Nike and revive interest and passion in track and field.

The first problem came when the qualifiers arrived. Dan, who himself acknowledged that at one point he "didn't love the decathlon," missed making the team after missing the pole vault during Olympic trials.

This failure ultimately became the turning point for Dan becoming a Super champion.

Defining Superchampions, Champions, and Almosts

In the research, the top-level performers - the Superchampions - have achieved rare status among their peers. They are the multiple World Cup appearance, 50+ international cap type of athlete. They’re marked not only by reaching the highest level of their sport but by staying there over time.

These are the Messis, Ronaldos, Ronaldinhos, and De Bruynes of the world. They are truly the best of the best and are recognized by pros and fans alike for their expertise. They've managed to crack a level of excellence that kids grow up dreaming about.

Champions are the proverbial role player. Though they had competed as long as the Superchampions, their careers were notably less stellar. Of those that made appearances on the biggest stages, none had done it more than 5 times.

The Champions in the studies, by nearly any metric, are still world-class, successful, top-1%-in-the-world people. They’re just not the absolute best of the best - despite similar practices, coaching, and opportunities.

Almosts are the stars that stand out at a young age but never manage to crack the first-level club team. They're players that stood out in youth sports that we wonder, "What happened to that guy?" Minor league baseball players are remarkably talented, and most of them will fall squarely in this category.

The “Rocky Road” to the top

The theory of deliberate practice, first studied by K. Anders Ericsson and later popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers, created the illusion that performance and expertise were simply a function of hours spent toiling.

A side effect of this framing is that we’ve been lulled into believing that development and reaching our full potential should be (reasonably) linear. The more time you spend, the better you get - as long as you do it deliberately. It's a straightforward input and output relationship.

In real-life settings, we know that real development isn’t so simple. It looks much more like a mountain climb, with switchbacks, false peaks, and plateaus. You can toil away for years with no real progress and can traverse a stuck point in a day. It takes years to become an overnight success.

To persist through a path that is largely uncharted and bound with difficulty requires a special mental approach. Differentiated success at the highest levels of anything - sport, work, entrepreneurship, life - is a function of mindset.

Across a given domain, even the best performers will fall into a bell curve, it just is a bit condensed at the top. Those who are the outliers of the outliers consistently emphasize how their mind shapes their ability to perform. Climbing to the most elite level has a lot to do with things like self-regulation, self-mastery, consistency, commitment, and resilience. Here’s what the research suggests differentiates these 3 levels of athletes:

Commitment

Despite having a range of sports that most of the Super Champions participated in them, their commitment to the main sport was a clear differentiator between the Champions and Almosts. I've written before about how the best fall in love with boredom, and commitment is the psychological mechanism underpinning the willingness to even go there.

Reaction to Challenge

The data suggested that Super Champions have a distinct way of responding to (or proactively solving) problems. Specifically, Super Champions nearly universally used setbacks or adversity as a boost for future development. They tended to approach challenges with a relentless attitude that separated them from the Champions and Almosts, in that they were never satisfied with their development and performance.

Champions and Almosts, in contrast, were less consistent than their Super Champion counterparts. And, when the going got tough, they either ignored their weaknesses or simply tried to overcompensate with greater effort. They reacted less positively to adversity as well.

Reflection and Reward

I've written before about the meticulous performance journaling that Alex Honnold did in preparation for climbing El Capitan. That level of detail reflects the approach of a Super Champion.

The data suggest that Super Champions pay extreme attention to detail. Their willingness to explore and uncover their shortcomings and strengths, the desire to pull apart and digest what they've learned, distinguishes them from their just slightly less elite counterparts.

They also tend to engage in "self-reward" in a more intrinsically motivated way. Super Champions recognize the progress they've made during the reflection and reward themselves appropriately. As a result, they're able to sustain their engagement and commitment in a deeper way over time.

Perhaps most notably, Super Champions are remarkably self-referenced in the way they judge their progress. Though sport, business, and other endeavors are marked by wins and losses, Super Champions tended to focus on their own self-actualization and what they could do, rather than what their peers were up to.

Champions and Almosts took a different tact. They tended to examine results more and compare themselves to others, and as a result, had a more difficult time discerning when to reward themselves. Comparison inevitably leads to some degree of extrinsic motivation, too, which hurts engagement over the long term. In this case, comparison really is the thief of joy.

Relationship with Coaches and Significant Others

Though this is no surprise to those who have worked in high-level sports, it may come as a surprise to the overbearing parents who believe the path to their child's superstardom is constant pressure and time on the field...

Super Champion parents were positive facilitators of sport - they drove their athletes to practice, supported them at their games, and encouraged them gently - but were described as taking a "back seat" in the development of their future superstar. These parents were interested in their child's development but left much of the actual development to be done by the professionals, and instead made sure to support their child as a full person - not just a performer.

Coaches of these athletes, too, seemed to take a more "chilled" approach to their athletes' development - sometimes in direct contradiction to what the athlete expected of themselves. These coaches maintained a healthy perspective and took a long view of development. They recognized that becoming a Super Champion is a long game, best supported by progressive skill development, encouragement, and the creation of an environment that facilitates an athlete continuing commitment to the sport.

Champions and almosts, in contrast, had parents that were much more hands-on. Almosts, in fact, had the most intensive parents, which they described as "ever-present" and more demanding than their Super Champion counterparts. Coaches, too, were more demanding in this group (and as a result, perhaps because they weren't actually all that great, tended to change more frequently).

If you want your child to really reach their full potential, you can't try to force it for them - instead, you need to create the conditions for that potential to emerge in its own time.

Becoming a Superchampion

Despite the lack of linearity to the top, there do seem to be some consistent themes that emerge in the separation of the best from the rest. What it seems to boil down to most is the consistent development of skills (mental, physical, tactical, technical) and confidence in the ability to actually use the skills when it matters. No skill and no confidence, no performer.

A tangential line of research to the Superchampion thread suggests that there is a core set of "psychological characteristics of developing excellence" that can make up the "mental" part of the skills bucket.

Here's what those skills are and some suggestions for training them:

You'll notice some commonalities between the skills for developing excellence and the requirements for becoming a Superchampion (e.g., commitment, quality practice).

These are the skills to begin infusing regularly into your training - in the weight room, classroom, board room, practice field, wherever - if you want to facilitate the development of top-level performers.

Beyond the deployment of any mental skill, however, one bit of this data jumps out when it comes to being truly great: it requires relentless commitment.

None of the Superchampions could reach that status without a firm commitment to their craft and their own development. While many of them disagreed with the idea that excellence requires a myopic focus, they all agree that unwavering commitment to improvement is the key ingredient to sustaining greatness over time.

If you're a leader, and you want to build Superchampions on the field, at work, or at home, your main task is to foster this commitment regularly. That means finding ways to make the work, training, or competition enjoyable, to recognize and reward progress, and to address the needs of the performers themselves.

There's no replacement for this level of high-quality support.

The path to being the best in the world is rife with difficulty, but this data suggests there’s a way to approach your craft that facilitates reaching your full potential. Dan O’Brien embodied that approach in the subsequent 1996 Olympics.

When asked about the 4 years in between his failure and standing on top of the podium, here’s what he had to say about the way he prepared and competed:

This is what it sounds like to reach the top of your game.

Credit to Dave Collins and Aine MacNamara for their incredible work in this domain. The figures above and ideas reflected in this article are possible because of their research contributions to the field of sport psychology.

References:

Collins, D., MacNamara, Á., & McCarthy, N. (2016). Super champions, champions, and almosts: important differences and commonalities on the rocky road. Frontiers in psychology, 6, 2009.

Collins, D. J., & Macnamara, A. (2017). Making champs and super-champs—Current views, contradictions, and future directions. Frontiers in psychology, 823.