Introspective Political Science (aka Self-Talk)

It has been said that the first step to solving a personal problem is admitting to yourself that you indeed have one. Well, my name is Jesse Winter, and I am a recovering head case. Seriously…just ask Sara, or Eric, or any of my other teammates. I first began to realize this about myself last winter after a less than encouraging experience at World Junior Trials in Rossland BC last January. I ended up with a nasty, persistent cold at precisely the one time in the winter when I needed to NOT have a nasty, persistent cold. And while it would be easy for me to catalogue my misfortunes at Trials as “you were sick, end of story” that would not be entirely true. While having a cold is a serious detriment to an athlete’s ability to perform, they are sometimes unavoidable. Despite our best (and often obsessive) efforts to stay healthy, once in a while every athlete gets sick. We can hope it’s during the summer, or better yet during the spring, but hope (and use up copious amounts of hand sanitizer) is usually the best we can do. We all get sick.

“Ok Jesse, where are you going with this, and what does it have to do with your admitted case of mental fragility?” you might ask. Bare with me, I’m getting to it.

Everyone gets sick, and world cup skiers fall into the ‘everyone’ category (ok, they might happen to be crazy fast, inspirational super-skiers, but they’re still everyones). So, if they get sick like the rest of us, how are they able to still ski as fast as they do? Well, there are two possibilities. The first is that they only ever get sick during the spring, and thus their training is never compromised, they never have to race with a stuffed up nose, and they must be immune to the seasonal cold virus. I list this as a possibility because it is indeed possible. However, there is a difference between possible and plausible, and while these guys and girls must be incredibly adept at staying healthy when they need to, it is unlikely in the extreme that they never get sick during race season. The second, and more likely possibility is that they have some means of counteracting any cold related setbacks they encounter. This brings me (finally) to my main point. Having a cold sucks, and staying healthy is incredibly important to racing fast. However, feeling under the weather isn’t the end of the world, and you can beat it with your brain. There, I did it….I tied my thoughts together cohesively. Happy? Good, let’s continue.

One of the aspects of my racing that I’ve been working on a lot with Eric this year is my head game. As I said in the opening to this article, I’m a bit of a head case, and this has impacted my racing performance in the past. One of the tools Eric and I have been using to overcome this is the idea of giving cute little names to various aspects of my mental filing cabinet. Basically, how this works is we develop cue words that allow us to jump back and forth between ideas without having to rehash the entire conversations (sometimes hours in length) that produced these ideas. For me, since music has always been a large part of my life, I find I can identify with certain lyrics, and they provide the perfect cues to various mental filing cabinet drawers. Some of my favorites include Stan Rogers, the Dropkick Murphys, The Foo Fighters and Rage Against the Machine to name a few. Wow, I’m starting to sound like a confused psychology major. What all this boils down to is that I’ve been working very hard on perfecting how I regulate the ideas that flow through my head, my mood, and my general feeling of ‘pumped up-ness’. The goal of all of this is to (hopefully soon) be able to control how I think about things, and how I approach difficulties. Here’s an example that I hope will clarify things a bit for you:

Lets say its 4 years from now, and I’m sitting in a hotel room in Norway on the eve of my world cup debut. I just sneezed, and a bunch of green goop came hurtling out of my nose and into a hastily raised tissue. Crap, I’m sick. Now what. I have two options. I can let my mind wander to all of the negative aspects of being sick, think about how much is sucks and what I must have done to deserve this bad luck, OR I can flick the switch I’ve developed in my head and immediately start looking at positives. Aside from making me feel better, this positive outlook will actually result in some concrete benefits. I’ll have a little more energy, I’ll feel more in control of the situation and I’ll be that much ahead in terms of solving the dilemma. I’ll be more likely to do what I need to in order to get rid of the cold, and in the morning I’ll wake up and be that much closer to feeling ready to race. Yes, I’ll still be sick, yes I probably won’t race to my full potential that day, but I’ll be a hell of a lot faster than if I sat in bed all night and worried about how crappy the situation is. This ability is, in my opinion, one of the key things that separate world-class athletes from potential world-class athletes. Anyone can race fast when things go perfectly as planned. Its what we do when things to badly that proves our real mettle. Whether your roadblock is something small, like your sinuses feeling like a clogged drainpipe, or something far more devastating like a serious injury, your best defense is inside your head. I myself have not yet perfected this technique, but I’m working on it, and that in its self is as good an illustration of what I’m talking about as any.

Now, if you’ll excuse me I’ve got some…no, you know what, I’m not going to end this article with some clichéd turn of phrase. I’ll let Stan finish it off for me.

“And you to whom adversity has dealt the final blow,

with smiling bastards lying to you everywhere you go

turn to and put out all your strength of arm, and heart, and brain,

and like the Marry Ellen Carter, rise again”

Olympic Chess Pieces

264 days and counting. The lead up to the 2008 Summer Olympic Games in Beijing is in full swing, and even the often reserved Michael Enright is weighing in on the action. In a CBC Radio One broadcast last week, the renowned talk show host made his views on the upcoming games abundantly clear.

Ok, before I go any further, you should probably know a little background about me, and my radio listening habits. I’m a CBC kid, born and raised. In my parents’ kitchen in South River, the station is on literally 24 hrs a day. The drive home from Tuesday and Thursday night practice with the North Bay ski team was a full hour of As It Happens. I can recite the phone numbers and email addresses of almost every Radio One show that has existed since I was born. Get it yet?….I like the CBC. This affinity for talk show radio and ‘up to the minute’ news stories has fostered a strong journalistic impulse in me, and lead to my enrollment in a political science program at Athabasca University. Michael Enright, the host of The Sunday Edition is, in my opinion, at the forefront of radio journalism. You could say I have a fairly deep respect for the man. All this contributed to my shock and dismay at Enright’s recent comments about the Olympic movement.

"The International Olympic Committee is preoccupied with keeping the revenue from TV rights rolling in…China is not going to change unless the rest of the world acts…

There's something discomforting about the young men and women and the Games themselves, acting as shills for such a regime,"

Excuse me? Did I hear that correctly? Granted, Mr. Enright’s show is known for not shying away from controversial issues, but this is utterly unacceptable. As Scott Russel so eloquently put it in his rebuke of Enright’s comments, (available here:

http://www.cbc.ca/sports/indepth/russell/column_071107.html ) “To listen to that was offensive. It gave Michael Enright away. He obviously doesn't understand Olympians. Maybe it's because he's never bothered to learn anything about them.”

While I agree with Enright’s view that the worlds ignorance to China’s indirect funding of genocide in Darfur needs to end, and fast, the fact that he is painting Canadian Athletes as some sort of political poker chip is not only disgraceful, it makes my stomach turn. The simple breakdown of the situation is that China supplies the Sudanese Government, through their shady oil field dealings, with the cash needed to pay for the masses of militia that are terrorizing and killing as the government pleases. Obviously this is one of the greatest and gravest humanitarian crises in the world today, but that is not justification for the slander of Canada’s best and brightest. First of all, our current government is far too timid to risk applying even subtle diplomatic pressure on China, let alone advocating that our athletes openly criticize the country that is their host. Secondly, his claim that the dedicated sportsmen and women of our country are in some way being complicit in some sort of smoke screen (dare I say support) for the benefit of the Chinese government is nothing more than the incredibly ignorant and misguided opinion of someone who clearly doesn’t understand the greater meaning of sport at all. The Olympic movement is and must always be one of the purest forms of human interaction we have. It is meant to show that people of every race, creed or background are equal, and can compete on a level field outside the context of the world’s other conflicts. It is a movement of the youth of the world and showcases the power of the human spirit. The Games have survived incredibly serene through a litany of attempts to politicize them. World War One and Two, the tragic Munich terrorist attacks, The Cold War just to name a few, are all prime examples of governments attempting and failing to convert the Olympic Games into a political tool. All were utter (if eventual) failures, and all were just as ill advised as Mr Enright’s comments. Governments, both democratic and otherwise, just and otherwise, are things we all have to deal with, but to drag one of the last bastions of equality and fairness into the giant quagmire of international politics should be unthinkable. Politics is the game of politicians. Sport is the game for the rest of us. Leave it that way.