He became a devotee of Dan Pfaff and made numerous visits to him when Dan was in Texas. They corresponded a lot. Dan’s philosophy and his results (especially leading into and at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics) are persuasive and MK virtually remade his own vision in the image of Dan’s.
It must have been reassuring to MK that he was being mentored by someone who had produced an array of champions in a wide number of events, not least of whom was Donovan Bailey who shone in Atlanta.
However MK’s results with Shirvington (10.03 at 18 in 1998) were not exceeded with any amount of input from Dan. And thereafter MK’s most notable improvements came in the area of 400m, an event for which Dan is not particularly known.
It would be easy therefore to say MK would have been better following his own vision rather than Dan’s. However Shirvington made such a meal of his GPP so many seasons in a row (by taking a vacation for a month, for example, in the middle of the pre-season one year) that it would be hard to know whether MK under Dan’s influence did improve as a coach because the results on the clock with his finest athlete simply were not there.
I suspect that was as much Shirvo’s fault as MK’s, but at least the coach now is presumably much wiser. Sometimes though we need to listen more carefully to people who’s ideas we instinctively disagree with, rather than those whose thoughts immediately concur with our own.