AAGS 2021

34 when I was there. You see players play in seven minutes at a time at once, which is pretty much the maximum, and then they usually rest for about five to eight minutes, but clock minutes. So usually, they also use the timeouts and the breaks on the game. The best players could maximize the amount of time they’re on the court. Usually, you see players playing seven minutes at a time, and they get four to five repetitions of that during one game. In terms of mental preparation for competition. when does it start? Eaton: In my opinion, the mental preparation is really happening every day. Like I said before, the whole point of training is to practice what you’re going to do ultimately at the competition. But practically speaking, I always kind of tried to get in the zone, but just really focus on what I was going to do at the competition. As I started traveling, and that was sometimes a week or two before there was a big competition, like the Olympic Games, or if it was a smaller competition, perhaps a couple of days What that looked like was creating a plan and for the decathlon specifically, there are quite a bit of logistics involved. Do you have things that you need at this competition? Whether it’s javelins, shot puts, pole vault poles, your implements. Just making sure that those things are going to be in the right place at the right time. Second is when you’re competing over two days, do you have all the resources you need, whether it’s food, support staff, like your physiotherapist, your transportation to and from the venue? With these kinds of things, even though it takes a team to organize and help you out, you still must plan for them because again, if something does go wrong, we’ve typically found that that’s where at the very highest levels the mistakes are made, the points are lost, and the medals are lost. So just making sure that’s dialed in and you have a plan for that. From a performance standpoint, I remember my first Olympic Games in London, I was 24 years old, and I was extremely nervous. I think at that point, I didn’t necessarily know what mental preparation was. I remember sitting in my room at the Olympic village the night before just really nervous, I guess you could call it scared. I was thinking what happens if something goes wrong? What happens if this is my last chance to get a gold medal and I get hurt in my career or something. And so, your mind starts playing games with you. And from that experience, I learned that you can really only focus on controlling the controllables. These are your reactions to events in the competition beforehand. These are how you control your emotions when another opponent does something unexpected. So, I think the philosophical answer is all the time, but the practical answer is it’s a week or a few days before the competition. That said, it’s different for every single athlete. And this is kind of the art of coaching, the art of being an athlete. I know some cultures and some athletes are quite different in the way they will mentally prepare, with their mental preparation exercises. So, it’s almost an individual thing. Scola: For a basketball player, it’s very hard to start the preparation at one particular point. You cannot plan it as you play all the time due to the season, but also during the summer break, you are with the national team. I think the most valuable thing from a basketball player’s perspective is how to be ready all the time. And when I was growing up as a player my thing was, how do I get to the next level? How do I get to be a starter? When I arrived there, how do I get to be the best player on the team? Or how do I be the best player in the league? How do I move to the next thing, how do I go to Europe, the Euroleague? And I was achieving those goals. And then eventually I got to the highest level, which is in the NBA. I quickly realized that there are some things that I won’t be able to do here. The level is too high with players that are unreachable for me and the scores are unreachable for me.