We need to find athletes who have the right attitude to win golds’

August 8, 2007

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The World Cup-winning rugby coach takes his philosophy of ‘no expense spared to hire the best’ into Great Britain’s Olympics squad

Owen Slot, Chief Sports Reporter

So here is the good news. A year to the day until the start of the Beijing Olympics and nearly a year after starting his new job as the director of elite performance at the British Olympic Association, Clive Woodward’s appraisal of Great Britain’s sporting landscape is glowing. “What I am seeing is a huge amount of talent,” he said. “There’s no doubt that in this country we are producing incredible talent.”

Good enough to finish fourth in the medals table, he said. He confesses he did not realise how hard it was to win a gold and said: “I’m full of even more respect for people who have done now.” And if you want to hear a positive appraisal of British sport, then get him on rowing, cycling, sailing or his trip out to Font Romeu in France recently to meet Paula Radcliffe: “What a fantastic lady!”

All this is significant because Woodward has never spoken in depth, publicly, about his impressions of the Olympic world. In some respects, he finds it pretty similar to the worlds he came from – but more of that later. And no, it is by no means all glowing, as you realise when it becomes apparent that those old foes of his, the Australians, are once again standing in his way.

“I have just discovered that the Australia team in Beijing will be around 500 strong,” he said. “Ours will be nearer 300. To me, that just doesn’t stack up; that makes my hair stand on end. We’ve got to up the ante to catch Australia.”

You could have pretty much copy-and-pasted that last sentence from any England rugby union address in the late 1990s. But here is the perplexing bit: when Woodward speaks to potential British Olympians, their coaches and support staff about how to beat those Australians and become a world champion, he talks not of Jonny Wilkinson or Martin Johnson but of a 19-year-old amateur golfer from Derbyshire called Melissa Reid.

Reid is his pet project and this is how: she is coached by his friend Lawrence Farmer, who used to watch the England rugby union team training at Pennyhill Park in Surrey. Farmer asked Woodward if he would talk to Reid. “I talked to them both,” Woodward explained, “and then said: what I’d love is to do this really properly. Really see what we can do.”

So Reid agreed to be Woodward’s “role model or guinea pig or whatever you want to call her”. “I’ve been documenting what we’ve done,” he said. “It’s almost to prove to myself that you can make a difference to someone’s life, but it’s so I can show other people, too. She can talk to other athletes and say: this is what we’ ve been doing, this is the difference.”

What have they been doing? “It’s not sport science,” Woodward said, “it’s just Mel understanding what it takes. I’ve had her working with some of the best people in the world, and I don’t say that lightly.” When he says “best people”, he is not specific but he says he means coaches, managers and athletes – anyone from whom she can learn.

It just so happens that Reid won the amateur trophy at the Ricoh Women’s British Open at St Andrews last week – by a five-shot margin – which merely helps to deliver his message. The reason he talks to Olympians about Reid and not Wilkinson is a) because she is in an individual sport like so many Olympians and b) because the work he has done with her is the blueprint of what he hopes to take elsewhere across Olympic sport.

This helps us to understand a little of Woodward’s role – which has perplexed many on the outside. There has been talk of him recruiting a “super squad” of Olympians, but he swears he does not even have a list of super Olympians, either in his head or on paper.

“You won’t find a single athlete who is working with me,” he said. “I’m just saying that if there is someone who is incredibly talented now, their sport – not me – should be absolutely making sure that they are getting five-star treatment now.” Woodward’s aim, then, is to make the five-star treatment available the way it has been for Reid.

His next real port of call will be judo, the first sport that has fully invited him in. British judo has a history of silver medals but has never struck gold and he believes that can be changed. His influence? “To do judo properly,” he said, “you need world-class training partners. Sometimes you need to go abroad. It’s not cheap.

Judo can’t afford that. I say: ‘Fine, let’s see where we can find revenue to make sure the one or two really talented people who we think can win gold medals have the chance to do so.’ We have to make sure they have no excuses. There’s nothing wrong with losing in sport, there’s everything wrong with having an excuse.”

Throughout this journey though the Olympic sports, Woodward has been refining his understanding to the extent where he is now writing a paper on the “DNA of a champion”.

“There is a common thread,” he explained. “Once you have that talent: rugby player, footballer or runner, it’s then: what else happens? What is it that takes that person and not anyone else to win a gold medal or a World Cup?”

His answer comes down to his mantra: talent alone is not enough. “You’ve got to find the athlete with the absolute right attitude,” he said. “I’m talking about the likes of Chris Hoy in cycling. Or the Dallaglios, the Wilkinsons and Johnsons who I think would all have won gold medals if they’d been in Olympic sport. You meet Paula and Steve Redgrave and you know there is incredible talent but also this attitude that you are going to work harder than anyone in your sport. You can throw a million pounds at a talented person, but unless you have the right person with the right attitude, you won’t win a gold.”

Which takes us back to British rowing, cycling and sailing and Woodward’s sky-high estimation of these sports. “It is very clear why they win gold medals,” he said. “There’s no luck involved. They’re very good at finding the right talent and at taking it to a whole new level.

“We’ve got a huge history of gold medals, especially recently in cycling, sailing and rowing, and we’ve got to get more programmes up to their quality as quickly as we can.” That is what he is trying to do – and that is how he will catch the Australians again.