Mottram out with old, starts new plan
Jenny McAsey, Athletics |
January 19, 2008
AS Craig Mottram warmed down after his spiritless performance at last August’s world championships, he loosened his racing spikes and left them by the practice track.
When one of his group went to collect them a few minutes later, Mottram’s coach, Nic Bideau, shook his head.
“No, they’re losing spikes. We just leave them behind,” Bideau instructed. The shoes are not the only things Mottram has jettisoned since the disappointment of his third-last placing in the 5000m world title race he believed he could win despite a hamstring injury less than two weeks before.
Mottram and Bideau have canvassed what they did wrong before Osaka and what they will do this year to reverse his fortunes at the Beijing Olympics.
Bideau, normally an invulnerable character who was the mastermind behind Cathy Freeman’s rise from shy teenager to Olympic 400m champion, admits he made mistakes.
For a start, Mottram will train more and run fewer races - exhibition road races such as those he has regularly done in Ireland and New York’s Central Park are off the agenda - and say less in public.
After talking things up in 2007, Mottram has vowed to no longer spruik what he might do or wants to do.
“That is the thing that has changed since his failure in Osaka,” Bideau said. "He is not prepared to do anything else but get ready to race now.
"The only time he will do interviews is after a race.
“He won’t be distracted, he is not prepared to spend his time on things that won’t get him really fit for the Olympics.”
That policy is already in action and he wouldn’t be interviewed before a visit to the US, where he will compete in the 3000m at the Boston Indoor Games next Saturday and then run the mile at the Millrose Games in New York six days later.
There he will face American Bernard Lagat, who ran brilliantly to win the 5000m and 1500m at the world championships.
For the past few months, Mottram has been in the Victorian Alps for hard-slog base training. Now he is ready to exercise his competitive juices.
“He can’t just train all the time. He has been up at Falls Creek for eight weeks in total and eventually you have to get out there and compete, so it will be a measure of how he is going,” Bideau said.
Last year was a sobering one for the coach and his star athlete, who is a dual World Cup winner and Australian record-holder over the mile, 3000m and 5000m.
Self-doubt is not the middle name of either the bold-speaking Mottram or the self-assured Bideau. But after Mottram’s woes in Osaka, a rare uncertainty rattled them. It is somewhat out of character but, to his credit, Bideau admits they lost focus.
“It was the first year ever that I didn’t have any of my athletes win a medal. It was a shock, it really hurt me,” Bideau said.
“I still had lots of people win races last year. I counted them up because I started to doubt myself. I thought, maybe I did something wrong.”
He paused. "Well, we did do some things wrong! That is why we got in that situation.
“We got ahead of ourselves because we had been successful year in and out.”
A few weeks after his 13th placing in Osaka, Mottram revealed in a newspaper column he had suffered a serious hamstring tear - a three-week injury - on the eve of the titles.
Even though there was TV footage of the incident, at the time both he and Bideau denied the injury, not wanting to create a media drama.
He received treatment and they convinced themselves he was OK, arriving in Osaka confidently declaring he could win.
“We had got ourselves in a state of mind where we thought we were still going to be able to deliver. Once you say you can’t win, there is no point, it is all over,” Bideau explained.
But it was beyond Mottram. “I just couldn’t go,” he lamented after the race.
In hindsight, Bideau believes the die was cast earlier in the year when Mottram had two previous injuries which he didn’t reveal.
Instead of resting and returning to a training block, Bideau let him keep racing, not to disappoint meet organisers who wanted the great white hope of global distance running at their events.
“The one thing that we got really wrong, was that when he got injured we should have cancelled lots of races and just concentrated on training and getting ready again,” Bideau said.
"But when you have a star, and people put pressure on you to get him to come to their events, you start thinking you don’t want to let them down, I’ve got to let him go to these races.
"I should have just been tougher and stronger and said he is not running in anything.
“But you think, it worked before, we got away with it here and there, we are invincible.”
In mid-July in England, Mottram raced the dual world record-holder Kenenisa Bekele and was soundly beaten.
“That is the biggest mistake I made, I should have pulled him out of the race in Sheffield and have him train hard for four weeks with no races,” he said.
“You never stop learning in this sport.”
This year, they won’t be pleasing anyone but themselves. "We will be a bit more brutal.
“This time it is just about getting ready for the Olympics. He hasn’t won the big title yet, but there is evidence to suggest he has the capacity to do it. We are going to try even harder to get everything right.”