Hamish Carter: World in a village

Opinion

Gold medallist Hamish Carter explains what an Olympic experience is like for the athletes

As an Olympic athlete you experience a range of emotions.

In every sport you have people who have spent a large chunk of their life pursuing one goal, and this is it.

There are only three medals for each event so you get an immense contrast between those who earn the right to have a medal around their necks - with that feeling of having done exactly what they set out to do - and the rest. It can be incredibly cut and dried in that sense.

When you watch Olympic competition on television, generally speaking you see success. But the vast majority of athletes walk away empty-handed and that can be a tough experience.

Village life at an Olympics is fascinating. You see all sorts of amazing athletes who you've only previously watched on television. In my case, I had first-hand experiences of that with tennis legend Roger Federer and the 2000 Olympic Games 100m champion Maurice Greene.

One thought that can run through your mind as you see all these greats of world sport is a feeling of "Am I worthy? Am I good enough? Do I deserve to be here?"

You come from New Zealand and you can go into an Olympics having had plenty of success on the world stage and feeling like you're among the best in your field.

But when you enter the village the size and scale of it all suddenly dawns on you. When you bring the rest of the world into a village it's all on one page, and that can be really hard to deal with.

You might reflect on how a country of four million can possibly compete with all this. Of course we do, but the hype, the emotion that goes with the Olympics, can be demanding and village life brings that home forcefully.

I recall walking into a gym at one Olympics and the Croatian women's volleyball team practising. There were arms and legs everywhere. I'd never seen such long-limbed humans. Then you had a group of gymnasts, who were five foot nothing and looked about 12.
Then there were the boxers, jogging around in sweat suits trying to shed weight.

In a way it can be quite a freak show, to be honest. It makes you realise that the human body can be developed and specialised to do one thing extremely well.

My involvement in sport these days includes being on the NZ High Performance Sport Board and via SportConnect - a business connecting young athletes with Sky TV's premium advertisers, creating a sponsorship relationship. Eight of the athletes we work with are competing in London and we are so excited to see them there. Others have ambitions to make the Olympics in the future.

My advice to New Zealand's first-time Olympians comes in three parts.

First, remember it's okay to be a bit overwhelmed. You can't block that out.

You have to let a little bit of that fear come to the surface, and by doing that you acknowledge that the next few days of your life are going to be full on.

Next remember there's an awful lot of things at the Olympics that you can't control. You can spend a lot of time worrying about things. There's no point in that.

And finally just focus on what you can have a say in. Remember the need to put your mind on what is important and be very clear that even though it is an Olympic Games, the sport you're doing is exactly the same as you've done many times before. In that sense there's nothing different about what lies ahead. Don't let the Olympics turn you into someone different. That said, it's easy to say, harder to do.

Make sure you enjoy the whole experience, but allied to that you have to front up and deliver. Stay relaxed but keep the focus on the right stuff.

Hamish Carter won the triathlon gold medal at the 2004 Athens Olympic Games.