Team GB’s Brownlee Brothers: Embodying the Traits of Top-Notch Triathletes

jonny-and-alistair-brownlee-rio-olympics-2jpg — Jonny and Alistair Brownlee on their way to silver and gold at the Rio Olympics.

I have friends who participate in triathlons and ironman competitions, grueling three-stage events of swimming, cycling and running so alien to the ways in which I can or desire to spend my free time, that I can only silently wonder – Are these guys from a different planet?

Alas, triathletes are earthlings like you and me. They are just far more focused, obsessive, competitive and determined about swimming, cycling and running than I am. When I learned that Alistair and Jonathan (Jonny) Brownlee, two brothers from Yorkshire, England, won gold and silver respectively in the triathlon at the 2016 Rio Olympics, I took notice, wondering if the fact that they were brothers helped them to the podium. In fact, this is the second Olympics in a row that the Brownlee Brothers made it to the podium, with Alistair winning gold and Jonny bronze in the London Games.

I learned they are indeed different, not so much that they diverge from homo sapien anatomy and psychology, but that they differ from me by significant degrees. I came across this site entitled “11 Traits of Top-Notch Triathletes“, which showed me that while I may be a tad measure better than some on these traits, I am leagues behind triathletes in all of them.

We can deftly balance a jam-packed schedule.
We are maxed out on self-discipline.
We’re laser-focused about our goals.
We take goals one step further.
Pain management is fun for us.
We welcome obstacles, adversity and pressure.
We’re in love with our sport.
We are persistent and determined (with a dash of stubbornness.)
We are competitive, both with ourselves and others.
We love to share our knowledge and convert our friends.
We know that it takes one to know one.

Here are quotes from the Brownlee brothers, relevant to some of those traits:

We are maxed out on self-discipline.: “…training is what I love. Those sessions have been harder than races: a few times a week absolutely killing myself, going to bed not being able to sleep because my legs hurt so much, getting up in the morning and not being able to walk because my ankles were so stiff. It’s been like that for the last six months with a few bumps and injuries along the way. That’s all of it, but the training is what I love doing. Killing myself to finish a session.” Alistair (ESPN)

We’re laser-focused about our goals.: “I don’t like this attitude of, ‘I had a bad race but it’s a learning experience.’ That’s a very convenient excuse for a lot of people, why it’s a good reason to have bad performances when it’s not.” Alistair (BBC)

We take goals one step further.: “I thought I’d be an awful injured athlete. I thought it would drive me crazy not being able to do anything, but I’m actually very good at changing my goal to a different one. Instead of focusing my training, I was trying to be the best kind of injured athlete I could possibly be. That involved being the best use of crutches in the world – my left leg didn’t touch the ground for four weeks. Straight away, I got on the phone to the nutritionist to ask how I could heal it. What were the best possible things I could eat? I got told all the usual – protein shakes, eat lots of cherries, that kind of thing. I made myself the best sort of nutrition plan in the world. I don’t think I could have done a better job of giving it the best possible healing.” Jonny (BBC)

Pain management is fun for us.: “It would seem quite strange to a lot of people, that you could actually enjoy physically hurting yourself. It doesn’t seem to make sense. I don’t know where it comes from. I think in some ways that it’s not quite escapism, but everyone has a state of mind, or something that they enjoy doing or something that takes them away from everyone else, and maybe that’s been it for me.” Alistair (BBC)

We welcome obstacles, adversity and pressure.: “I’ve had other days where I’ve thought ‘Yeah, I could have done things a lot better there. I didn’t do that well’. And then I’ve had races where I’ve gone into it thinking ‘I’m going to really struggle to win this, I’m only going to win this either by sheer guts or by being a bit clever about it’, and I’ve pulled it off. They’re very, very satisfying races.” Alistair (BBC)

We are competitive, both with ourselves and others.: “We’ve been doing races that are low key and supposed to be fun. In 2012, we raced the Yorkshire cross country championships, and although we were first and second, we’d had a busy week and should just have been running together. Instead, with a kilometre to go, we were absolutely maxing out. It was a couple of weeks later that Alistair tore his Achilles. That race probably went a long way to doing that. If both of us had backed off for the last 10-15 seconds, which we could have easily done, then we would have been fine. We should really have thought, ‘It’s January 2012, the Olympics are eight months away, why are we racing each other?'” Jonny (BBC)

So, is there any advantage to the Brownlee’s being brothers? The answer, as Alistair related in this Yorkshire Post article, is yes.

We both know how important we have been, pushing each other on over the years. From everything, to just motivation to get out of the door in the morning – if you know your little brother is going to go training you are going to go training, too – to being able to travel the world together. That has been really important over the years. Over the last three months we have done almost every session together, even the very hard sessions where we are pushing each other as hard as we can. There is no-one else in the world that can do that with each other, but we have done that time and time again, four or five times a week in the last three months, and that has been absolutely crucial.

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Security and the Olympics Part 2: Lax Security at the 1972 Munich Olympics

The 1972 Munich Olympics will forever be associated with the most horrific clash of political values during an Olympiad, one that resulted in the murders of 11 Israeli coaches and athletes at the hands of Palestinian terrorists.

While Iron Curtain Spy-vs-Spy shenanigans had been part and parcel of the Olympics in the 1950s and 1960s, and the rhetoric was heating up as the nuclear arms race injected legitimate fear into the lives of ordinary folks, the venues and facilities of the Olympic Games had been sacrosanct, places off limits to tribal conflict. Countries come together in peace during the Olympics. Heck, Nixon went to China that year! Maybe things were getting better.

And so, in hindsight, we can look back on the security of the 1972 Munich Games and pronounce them horrifically bad by today’s standards. Ollan Cassell was at the Munich Summer Games. Cassell, a gold-medal winning member of the US men’s 4X400 relay track team, was the recently appointed executive director of the then American Athletic Union (AAU), which at the time, was the US body recognized internationally in 14 sports represented at the Olympics. Cassell gave a first-hand account in his book, Inside the Five Ring Circus, how lax the security was in Munich.

inside-five-ring-circus-cover At the Munich Games, the ticket takers apparently returned the ticket stubs back to the ticket holder, in essence, giving back the ticket. Perhaps the ticket takers were being nice, thinking that the spectator would want the full ticket as a souvenir and a pleasant memory of their time at the Munich Games. Cassell wrote how he took advantage of that security flaw to get a member of his team into the Opening Ceremonies by going to the fence and handing his ticket stub to his team member, who then easily entered the Olympic stadium with a “valid” ticket.

Not only that, Cassell wrote about how easy the official credentials were to forge. With some care, Cassell wrote of how people created their own credentials to gain access to events more freely than they were initially able to do. He did write about how one person got caught with the fake credentials and was deported, but on the whole, security was filled with holes. Yes, tight security is a pain in the neck. And who knows, maybe the organizers of the Munich Games, perhaps in some way, were trying to overwrite the world’s image of Germany’s last Olympics – the Berlin Games – by prioritizing a relaxed attitude over a vigilant attitude.

But reality slammed home. The Black September terrorists who came to Munich to kill Israelis, took advantage of the security. They had stolen keys that gave them easy entry to the rooms of the Israeli men’s team. They entered the Village grounds in the first place by doing what other athletes did after curfew – by climbing the fence. The thought that terrorists would break into the Village was so remote that other Olympic athletes apparently helped the Palestinians in. There was criticism as well for the German authorities who struggled to contain the hostage crisis, and were, in hindsight, poorly prepared to handle this armed conflict. And yet, they were poorly prepared because they did not believe such a thing could happen at their Olympics.

The rhetoric of geo-political spats gave way shockingly to savagery and death at the Olympics. And security at the Olympics would be changed forever.

security-at-montreal-olympics — Increased security at the Montreal Olympics in 1976

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Wayde van Niekerk and the 74-Year-Old Grandmother: Another Stereotyped Smashed

Ans Botha, coach for South African sprinter Wayde van Niekerk, talks to reporters during media availability at the Olympic Village in Rio de Janeiro. — Ans Botha, coach for South African sprinter Wayde van Niekerk, talks to reporters during media availability at the Olympic Village in Rio de Janeiro, Aug. 15, 2016. Niekerk won the gold medal in the 400-meter final with a world record of 43.03 (Jeffrey Furticella/The New York Times)

In the world of leadership development, finding the right executive coach is often a matter of chemistry. We often introduce a coachee to two, sometimes three prospective coaches with the hope that one of them will click with the client. So much of a good coaching engagement is the willingness of the coachee to be vulnerable, to allow him or herself to open up and trust the coach. The greater the openness and trust, the greater the commitment of the coachee to change.

The same is likely true in the world of high-performance sports. Not every coach is right for every athlete. While Bobby Valentine‘s cerebral, in-your-face managerial style was perfect for the World Series bound 2000 New Mets, it was awful for the 2012 Boston Red Sox. While Soichi Sakamoto‘s my-way-or-the-highway approach to coaching championship swimmers was perfect for two-time gold medal-winning freestyle swimmer, Bill Smith, in the 1930s and 1940s, it was anathema to fellow Hawaiian swim star Halo Hirose.

When Wayde Van Niekerk of South Africa blew away Michael Johnson’s 19-year-old world record time in the 400-meter sprint at the 2016 Rio Olympics, almost everyone was surprised to learn that his coach was a 74-year-old woman whose white-haired, grandmotherly appearance fooled security at the Olympic Stadium. They would not let the woman see her prodigy, Van Niekerk. After being reassured profusely by fellow South Afrikaner athletes that Anna Sofia Botha was indeed the coach of Rio’s newest star, the coach finally got to see her coachee.

As she explained in this New York Times article, “we just hugged each other. It wasn’t necessary to say anything. We knew in our hearts and in our minds what we thought and what we had achieved.”

Van Niekerk met Botha in 2012, when he enrolled at the University of the Free State, where Botha was the track coach. Even though she seemed to appear out of nowhere, Botha has actually been coaching track for nearly half a century, after competing in track herself. So when she saw this raw talent come to her, and saw a sprinter prone to leg injuries, she recommended that van Niekerk switch from the 200 meters, to the 400 meters, under the assumption that the longer distance would place less stress on his hamstrings.

“I have such a big responsibility to get this athlete to develop to his full potential, and also the responsibility for myself to try to do my very best not to do something wrong which can make or break him,” Botha told the Sunday Times (cited in this Deadspin article.) “The main thing is we listened to what his body said to us. If the body said stop, we stopped, or went a little softer.”

“She’s an amazing woman,” van Niekerk said in this article in The Guardian. “She has played a huge role in who I am today and kept me very disciplined and very focused on the role and who I need to be.” Clearly Niekerk needed someone who could bring the tough love, and Botha confirmed that in the same article.

“I dearly love all my athletes but it’s about being strict … We can laugh, but when we have to work hard, we work hard.”

World-class athletes who self-coach, like javelin champion Julius Yego, are few and far between. The coach can sometimes have a huge impact. Who is the right coach? Well, if you’re serious, you probably should not settle for the first one to come along. The coach right for you is out there. You’ll know it when you meet her.

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Security and the Olympics Part 1: 9/11 and the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics

It was the morning of September 11, 2011 when Mitt Romney was driving past the Pentagon in Washington DC. The Pentagon was on fire, the smoke so extensive it filled Romney’s car. Romney was the head of the Salt Lake City Olympics Committee at that time, and was in DC to lobby, coincidentally, for more government support with security for the upcoming Winter Games to be hosted in Utah.

Romney immediately got on the phone with his COO, Fraser Bullock to talk “about the fact that in less than five months, we were going to host the world and how were we going to keep everyone safe.”

The Salt Lake City Winter Olympics went on to become, from a sports and business perspective, a relative success compared to other Olympics. But prior to the start of the Games, with 9/11 heavy on organizers’ and casual spectators alike, security was a major priority.

In fact, even if 9/11 had not occurred, the organizers and the US government had already invested heavily in security. After all, it was only about 5 and a half years earlier that a pipe bomb went off in Centennial Olympic Park in Atlanta on the evening of the ninth day of the XXVI Olympiad. Over 100 people were injured, including two who died.

romney-bush-rogge — Mitt Romney, President George Bush and IOC Head Jacques Rogge

While the budget for security in Atlanta was $101 million, it more than doubled to $225 million for the Salt Lake City Games, according to this New York Times article. The Winter Games that year saw a security presence unlike any other Games. More importantly, a wide variety of federal, state and local authorities were coordinated in a manner that had been unprecedented, the result of painful lessons learned about the consequences of various relevant agencies not coordinating information and efforts pre and post 9/11. Here are a few or the major decisions to boost security at Salt Lake City 2002, according to the Times article:

Secret Service agents will be used to secure all areas used for Olympic events. In the past, their role was confined to protecting the president and other dignitaries. The expanded presence represents the federal government’s largest security investment, $27.2 million, according to the government report.
For the first time in an Olympics in the United States — this is the eighth since 1904 — all law agencies, as well as military commanders, will operate as part of a unified Utah Olympic Public Safety Command.
Airspace over northern Utah will be heavily guarded, with AWACs surveillance planes on routine missions, F-16’s from nearby Hill Air Force Base on alert and added radar operating at Salt Lake City International Airport, where plans call for commercial traffic to be stopped at various times, including the opening and closing ceremonies.
In another new effort, the State Department and the Immigration and Naturalization Service are pooling resources to create an instant check on foreign visitors through a database that will let Customs officers determine immediately whether an Olympic athlete or official is on a United States watch list.
In addition, military forces will be stationed in and around the city. Mr. Romney said the commitment could reach up to 10,000 troops, including more than 2,000 from the Utah National Guard, the largest call-up ever in the state.

On February 8, only 151 days after September 11, the Salt Lake City 2002 Winter Games commenced. In memory of the events that took place that beautiful Tuesday morning in New York, the tattered American flag that was recovered from the ruins of the Twin Towers was brought into the Stadium amidst an honor guard of Port Authority, NYPD and NYFD personnel who were in New York that day, with helicopter rotors thumping in the background.

Bullock said that there were objections from influential people about injecting a potentially powerful political statement like this particular American flag being displayed in an event that purports to be politically agnostic. But Bullock said that Romney had to twist a few arms to get to that decision because it “was the right thing to do.” And when the flag appeared, Bullock said, “the world really came together. It was a special moment for everyone.”

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The Olympian Rise of Japanese Halfs: Aska Cambridge and Mashu Baker Redefining What It Means to be Japanese

When around 98% of a nation is perceived to be of the same ethnicity, it stands to reason that nationality and ethnicity are viewed as one and the same.

But Japan has been a magnet for those seeking opportunity as well as for Japanophiles, particularly since the economy boomed in the 1980s. As the influential Japanese television entertainment industry increasingly viewed diversity as a way to get more viewers, Japanese-speaking foreigners became more popular. Children of mixed marriages, those who essentially grew up Japanese, have now become de rigeur on Japanese television.

I was one of those foreigners who came to Japan in the 1980s, but because I am of Japanese ethnicity, I have been able to blend in. I get neither fingers pointed at me, nor praise for my Japanese proficiency. But even though my cultural background is American, I can see why the attention of Japanese still, to this day, perk up when a non-Japanese is in their midst. The non-Japanese is such a tiny population that they really do stick out. Like the majority of the film, Lost in Translation, the minority experience for the “gaijin” in Japan is clichéd. And yet true.

So when the Japanese men’s 4X100 relay team very unexpectedly took silver at the Rio Olympics, losing only to the vaunted team from Jamaica, it was a very special moment for Japan. Not only did the Japanese excel in an area they are not customarily strong in – the sprint – a 23-year-old named Aska Cambridge (ケンブリッジ飛鳥), the child of a Japanese mother and a Jamaican father – was a proud member of those Japanese speedsters. He ran for the Japanese squad, he speaks fluent Japanese, and yet, he doesn’t fit the everyday look of what most Japanese perceive as Japanese.

Mashu Baker and his mother — Mashu Baker and his mom.

When a 21-year-old Japanese won judo gold in the 90kg weight class at the Rio Olympics, Japan cheered. At the 2012 London Games, no Japanese won gold in judo, the most Japanese of all the Olympic competitions. In fact, no Japanese had won the 90kg weight class since it was introduced in 1980. So who brought back the glory? A person named Mashu Baker (ベイカー茉秋), the son of a Japanese mother and an American father.

At first glance, he looks Japanese. But it’s the name that sticks out. Baker is clearly not a Japanese name, and it is written in the press in katakana, the script reserved for foreign words. Interestingly, the first name “Mashu”, while spelled out in Chinese characters, was likely chosen because of its close approximation to the name “Matthew”. I don’t know what’s written on his US passport, but it’s possible the Bakers decided they wanted their son to be identified in Japan as a “ha-fu”, a child of mixed parentage.

“Ha-fu” over the decades, perhaps centuries, have on the whole experienced more prejudicial than preferential treatment. But I do not underestimate the power of role models. I am sure that the brilliant examples of Aska Cambridge and Mashu Baker will continue to help revise how Japanese, and the rest of the world, perceive what a Japanese is.

And that’s a good thing.

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Wilt Chamberlain’s 100-Point Game Part 2: Doing Something Dumb Even When You Know it’s Dumb

Rick Barry and his underhanded free throw technique

In Malcolm Gladwell’s podcast, Revisionist History, he tells the story of Wilt Chamberlain and one of the most incredible basketball games ever played. His Philadelphia Warriors beat the New York Knicks on March 2, 1962 by the score of 169 to 147, and Chamberlain, incredibly, scored 100 points in that game.

As Gladwell points out, a good reason he got to 100 was because he knocked down 28 free throws, missing only 4. That’s an accuracy rate of 87.5%. And he did it shooting underhanded, as I explained in the previous post.

This is a technique that Rick Barry, considered one of the 50 Greatest Players in history, employed. Barry held until recently the record for career free throw percentage at over 90%, where the overall NBA free throw average over the decades is around 75%. For every 100 free throws, Barry accumulated 15 more points than the average NBA player. Imagine if Chamberlain hit free throws on the par of Barry. As Chamberlain’s coach once said, according to Gladwell, “if you shot 90% we might never lose.”

But the next year, Chamberlain gave up on the technique. Barry and Chamberlain knew each other as their careers overlapped. And Barry would kid Chamberlain for conceding a huge number of points by not using the underhanded throw. Why did he give it up?

Well we call this technique the “granny throw” because it looks like you’re shooting “like a girl”, or “like a sissy”. Before Barry was coached by his father to shoot underhanded, Barry himself was worried about shooting underhanded. And he also hated being called a sissy. But he got results. And that’s all that mattered to Barry. But Chamberlain, despite seeing the results himself, could not stick to the plan. And according to Gladwell, Chamberlain wrote in his autobiography the following:

I felt silly, like a sissy, shooting underhanded. I know I was wrong. I know some of the best foul shooters in history shot that way. Even now, the best one in the NBA, Rick Barry, shoots underhanded. I just couldn’t do it.

In other words, as Gladwell explained, “Chamberlain had every incentive in the world to keep shooting free throws underhanded, and he didn’t. I think we understand cases where people don’t do what they ought to do because of ignorance. This is not that. This is doing something dumb even though you are fully aware that you are doing something dumb.”

The underhanded free throw – clearly an easy way for almost any coach to add more points per game – remains a technique banished to the dustbin of history because people were afraid of how they looked.

And yet, I believe there is a coach out there, perhaps of a division three college in the US, or a poorly performing team in the Spanish professional league, or of a national team of a small country, that’s thinking….”I will do anything to squeeze more points out of my boys.” Maybe it’s someone new to coaching basketball and indifferent to how the players or the fans feel as long as they get results.

My guess is there will come a time when we see an entire team shooting free throws granny style, hitting 82%, then 85%, then maybe even 90% of their foul shots. And when it becomes clear that their 1-point, 2-point victories are because they hit 18 of their 20 free throws underhanded, who knows how long it will take before another coach feels he or she has nothing to lose except a few laughs from the stands in the early going.

That coach may one day say, “I may be stupid, but I’m not dumb.”

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Wilt Chamberlain’s 100-Point Game Part 1: The Secret to Free and Easy Points – The Granny Throw

Wilt Chamberlain 100 — On March 2, 1962, Wilt Chamberlain scored 100 points in a game.

Australia has yet to medal in men’s basketball in the Olympics. And they fell so agonizingly close in their one-point loss to Spain in the bronze-medal match at the 2016 Rio Olympics. You can’t blame their free-throw shooting, as they went 13 of 15 for the game. That’s an excellent 86.7%. Spain on the other hand could have had a far easier victory if they had shot better from the free-throw line, as they hit only 15 of 22 free throws.

Perhaps more critically, Croatia loss to Serbia by three points, while shooting a decent 78.9%. This was out of 38 attempts to Serbia, which only had 25 attempts, which meant that as a team, Croatia was effective at getting fouled and getting to the free throw line. If only they had hit three more free throws, Croatia could have had a shot at gold against the Americans instead of Serbia.

Coaches are always scheming to figure out how to gain more points than the other team, either via offensive or defensive schemes. But when it comes to the free-throw, the coach can only hope and pray that the shooter has practiced enough to hit the free throw with regularity. After all, no is guarding you. It’s just you against the basket.

The question is, would an improvement in free throw shooting impact a team’s win-loss percentage?

Let’s look at the 2015 Detroit Pistons, which shot 66.8% collectively for the season. They hit 1,399 free throws over 2,095 attempts. Now if they hit 80% of their free throws, like the New York Knicks did that season, the Pistons would have had a total of 1,676 successful free throws, or 277 more points, or 3.4 more points per game over an 82-game season. Would that have taken considerably higher than their 44-38 win-loss for 2015? Possibly, perhaps enough to help them finish ahead of the Indiana Pacers for second place and avoid a first-round meeting with the Lebron James-led Cleveland Cavaliers.

In other words, if you had an idea how to instantly improve free-throw shooting percentage by 10 to 20% points, you would think any NBA or national team coach would be hiring you for tons of money to teach them your secret. You would think so, wouldn’t you?

Wilt Chamberlain shooting the granny shot — This is how Chamberlain shot free throws in the 1961-62 season.

And yet, as Malcolm Gladwell recently explained in his fascinating podcast, Revisionist History, basketball coaches and players at all levels of basketball have resisted one of the proven, most effective ways to make free throws. In this podcast, Gladwell told the well-known story of Wilt Chamberlain of the Philadelphia Warriors, and the game on March 2, 1962 when he scored 100 points against the New York Knicks. What is less well-known is that Chamberlain hit 28 free throws, still an NBA record.

Chamberlain had improved his free-throw shooting from 50% to a career-best 61% that season. In that 100-point game, he hit 28 of 32 for an amazing 87.5%. What is even more amazing, he did it using the “granny throw”. That is the technique basketball great Rick Barry made famous.

It’s a throw that starts with both arms hanging naturally in front of the body. Then with an easy upward swing of the arms, and simultaneous flick of both wrists, the ball is lofted lightly toward the hoop. Barry hit 90% of his free throws over his career with that technique, the best in NBA history at the time of his retirement. And Chamberlain hit the century mark that wonderful night in Philly over 54 years ago because of that technique.

But after that season, Chamberlain gave it up, and reverted back to being a very poor free-throw shooter, a rate which waffled between 38 to 50%. Why would he abandon a huge part of his offensive weaponry? Why would one of the most fouled players in NBA history give up easy points by shooting his free throws holding the ball as everyone else does, starting from around his forehead?

Ah…the answer is both complex and simple, and I defer to the great Gladwell to tell this stunning story about why people and pride get in the way of results. See my next post.

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Vénuste Hiyongabo of Burundi: 5000-Meter Olympic Champion and a Beacon of Hope

Burundi is a dot in the middle of the African continent. Agonized by decades of tribal conflict between Hutus and Tutsi, and one of the world’s poorest countries, the former French colony is not a sporting hotbed.

Despite the challenges, the International Olympic Committee finally recognized Burundi when it established a National Olympic Committee (NOC), allowing this landlocked and resource-poor country to join the Olympics at the 1996 Atlanta Games.

New countries rarely do well in the competitions. Their’s is an opportunity to compete, experience and learn. In fact, 75 of the current 206 countries with National Olympic committees have not won an Olympic medal, including Bangladesh, Cambodia, Honduras, Libya, Nicaragua and Rwanda.

But Vénuste Niyongabo helped Burundi beat all the odds, and has given hope to all nations bereft of Olympic glory. He was a 1500-meter runner, a rising star on the international circuit in the 1990s, and in 1996. When the IOC recognized Burundi’s NOC, Niyongabo was indeed considered a favorite for the Atlanta Olympics. But in a nod to an aging compatriot, Niyongabo gave up his spot in the 1500 meters to Dieudonné Kwizera. If Burundi had had a NOC prior to 1996, it is likely that Kwizera would have competed at the Seoul and/or Barcelona Games. Thanks to Niyongabo, the 800-meter specialist became an Olympian for the first time.

Niyongabo moved up to the 5,000-meter competition instead, an event he had run in only twice previously. Although he had won both, he was not favored in Atlanta. And in fact, sat towards the back while the Kenyans led for much of the race. But win he did, and convincingly. Here’s how the New York Times described it in 1996:

With 200 meters left, his (Niyongabo’s) lead was comfortable over the eventual silver medalist Paul Bitok of Kenya and the eventual bronze medalist Khalid Boulami of Morocco. When Niyongabo crossed the finish line, Dionisi was already hopping up and down in the stands, waving a Burundian flag. Before long, that flag was being waved on an Olympic track for the first time in history.

In the end, Niyongbo put his victory in context, reflecting on the decades of internecine conflict in his tiny country. “All I want is peace for my country,” Niyongabo said. “I hope this can help the healing.”

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“Yes I Can!”: Channel Four’s Incredible Rio Paralympic Promotional Video

The 2016 Summer Paralympics will take place in Rio de Janeiro from September 7 to 18. And while these are the eighteenth Paralympic Games, and they get considerably less press and attention than the Olympic Games that precede them, there is no doubt that the participants in the Paralympics are athletes, amazing athletes, in ways difficult for the majority of us who have a body with fully functioning parts to comprehend.

To many of us, those who are, for example, blind or deaf, have a missing limb or two, are thought to be at a disadvantage. My current understanding is that the world and the rules we live with were built first for the average person in mind. But with the changes in laws and mindsets in many countries, and thriving disabled role models reflected back to us in film, television and sport as enabled athletes, the perceptions of many are changing.

In Japan for example, the government has challenged the private sector with the task of ensuring that 2% of its workforce is made up of disabled or special needs employees. In the early years, companies struggled to find the talent who could be employed and do work that was meaningful for both the employee and the employer. Today, leaders and employees alike are far more experienced in the hiring of and adjusting to the disabled, and they in turn are become more experienced in the workplace, gaining greater skills and knowledge.

Role models, as I have written several times in the past, are so important. Channel Four, one of the major television stations in England, is the broadcaster of the Paralympic Games for England. And to promote the 2016 Paralympic Games, they produced an absolutely fantastic video that showcases “superhuman” abilities. You have likely seen it. The nearly 3-minute video is called “Yes I Can”, a Sammy Davis Jr classic.

What’s wonderful about this promotional video is Channel Four’s emphasis not just of amazing athletes, but also of “ordinary” people: musicians and dancers, office workers, moms and kids. The video opens with Canadian drummer, Alvin Law, who was born without arms and has played drums with his feet for 45 years. “It’s so weird that this song is called ‘Yes I Can’ because it was my mantra in our home growing up. My mum and dad said it till I was TIRED of it. There’s no such word as can’t. This is sort of that same thing but with an incredibly positive spin and makes perfect sense to me.”

Law went on to say that “this is not about disability, this is about crazy talent.”

I could not agree more. I can almost feel the soft abrasions of my perceptions shifting as I watch this amazing and uplifting video.

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No Coach, No Problem: Silver Medalist Javelin Thrower Julius Yego and The YouTube Generation

Julius Yego and his only Javelin Throw — Yego’s first and only throw at the Rio Olympics

He had won gold in the 2015 Beijing World Championships, so YouTube Man was expected to compete for gold in Rio.

His first throw was strong 88.24 meters. But quite unexpectedly, that would be Julius Yego’s last throw. While it is still unclear what happened, Yego severely injured his ankle and was carted off in tears. Instead of attempting to throw over 90 meters, which he did in Beijing, the Kenyan had to watch from the stands as German Thomas Rohler managed a throw of 90.3 meters. Still, amazingly, his first throw was good enough for silver.

One could only imagine the pain of inactivity was greater than the pain in the ankle. Yego promised he would be back though. “It was that painful, but I thank God it not serious as I thought! I am going to be back stronger guys, love you all my fans wherever you are. Your tremendous support can never go unnoticed! You always cheer me up even in hard times! God bless you all.“

Yego was a favorite to win gold, which is amazing if you consider his story – a teenager from a farmer’s family who liked throwing a javelin so much he learned how to do it on the internet.

Way back in 2000, Thomas Friedman wrote the seminal book, The Lexus and the Olive Tree. He posited that globalization, particularly the pace of global commerce was occurring due to three factors: the democratization of technology, the democratization of finance and the democratization of information.

In reference to the last factor, the democratization of information, Friedman swooned at the thought of a future pioneered by the likes of Netscape, and its gateway browser to the internet, and the promise of high-speed broadband. “Never before in the history of the world have so many people been able to learn about so many other people’s lives, products and ideas,” wrote Friedman.

Only a few years after Friedman published that book, a school boy named Julius Yego of Kenya got hooked on the javelin throw watching his fellow primary school students send their wooden javelins flying, and was inspired by his brother who was pretty good at the discipline.

But he did not have the resources, nor were there any coaches at his school. In 2009, believing he had a chance to become a world-class thrower, he was frustrated that he could not get the help he needed. That’s when he turned to YouTube. “Nobody was there for me to see if I was doing well or not, so I went to the cybercafe,” he told CNN.

He would watch champions Jan Zelezny and Andreas Thorkidsen, examining their technique, and learning the right ways to train to thrown a two-and-a-half meter spear nearly the length of a football pitch.

In 2010, the self-taught Yego won bronze at his first international tournament at the African Championships in Nairobi, throwing the javelin 74.51 meters. Finally gaining visibility, Yego got some support, earning a scholarship to train in Finland for two weeks in the cold of winter of 2011. There he met leading javelin coach, Petteri Piironen, who saw potential in Yego, who was then reaching distances of around 78 meters. Yego visited Piironen again for three months in the run-up to the London Games, where he finished 12th.

While he continues to seek advice from Piironen, Yego continued to self coach, and also to progress, winning championships at The Commonwealth Games, African Championships in 2014, and the World Championships in 2015.

In a CNN interview, the javelin world champion recalled in 2011, when he found success at the All Africa Games, “people wanted to talk to his coach, to know what I did before the competitions, the championships. By then seriously I didn’t have a coach. I didn’t go with a coach. They asked me, ‘Who is your coach,’ and then I told them, ‘YouTube’.”

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