When it comes to discussing the mental mindset of an athlete, one story comes to mind, and many people know the story by its hit family friendly movie portrayal Cool Runnings.
Over one billion people watched Dudley Tal Stokes and his team crash out of the Olympic Games in 1988 in Calgary. A crash that happened at 80mph, resulting in the team’s helmets dragging along the wall of the run for over 2000ft. Many people remember the team walking alongside their sled with overwhelming applause from the onlookers and fellow teams competing.
For a person who had been a highflyer his whole life, the outcome was extremely devastating. Dudley, a graduate of the RMA Sandhurst and a Pilot in the elite Jamaica Defence Force Air Wing, was recognised as someone who had a winner’s mentality.
Dudley Tal Stokes comments: “Burnout is the term used to describe a lethargy felt by someone towards their mode of earning a living and is thought to be the result of internal and external pressures that cause them to lose motivation and interest in what they are doing. This is often recognised as the longterm condition of quiet quitting. But I was not a quitter …
“I could have easily quit after what happened at my first Winter Olympics, but instead I focused on my key three areas to get up and keep going; physicality, mentality, and ability. A Senior Military Officer for whom I worked with had recently passed over for promotion and explained to me ‘Dudley, you think you are looking at me, but that is not so. This is not me; this is just the kit’. In other words, the body may be present, but the meaningful presence is what is within.
“Everybody will fail, but you have to come back, learn from the previous failure, access the goal and try again another way, and that’s exactly what I went on to do.”
Ultimately, six years after the 1988 games, the Jamaican bobsleigh team became the tenth best team in the world. Hard work and an Olympian mindset paid off. Dudley has since personally competed in two more Olympic Games, and the Jamaican bobsleigh team were 14th sled overall in the Lillehammer Norway games in 1994, beating all the American sleds.
THE INTERVIEW: A SNEAK PEEK
Steve Legg (SL): Growing up did you have a sort of sense of destiny that you were on this planet to achieve something amazing?
Dudley ‘Tal’ Stokes (DTS):
I always dreamt of representing Jamaica. Now, Jamaica is a relatively small place, but the guy who grew up to the west of me went on to win a bronze medal in the 4 x 100 and the World Championships in 1983. And then the guy who was two miles to the east of me, was a guy named Jimmy Adams, who then played for the West Indies for many, many years, in the shadow of Brian Lara. But he actually scored as many centuries as Brian Lara did. Lara scored some huge ones.
In Jamaica you’re rubbing shoulders with athletic royalty all the time. The high school I went to, the coach of the high school was a guy called Herb McKinley, was Jamaica’s first Olympic medalist, and he won medals in the ’48 games at 200 and 400 and came back four years later and won a medal at the 100 meters. This outstanding athlete and he was a high school coach.
You have this sense that there is something for you to do in sport. And I think many, many Jamaican children grow with that. And it feeds the sort of athletic excellence that we produce because it starts very young and people start thinking and dreaming. They build that desire and they do the work and the competitive pressures through outstanding athletes. And I was in those pressures. I wasn’t getting anywhere. I thought I’d lost my chance and then the bobsleigh opportunity came along.
SL: I mean, who would’ve thought it? We fell in love with the movie, Cool Running, the Jamaican Bobsleigh Team. A concept so outrageous it could only be made if it was true.
DTS: Yeah. Well that is one of the things that you just couldn’t make up. There is no imagination that ever lived that would’ve sat down and said, “Yeah, this is how it’s going to be.” Is an incredible story that has unfolded.
SL: Oh man, we’re going to talk about it, but just going back to what you said, I love that mindset. Is it a typical Jamaican mindset that anything is possible?
DTS: Yeah, and I think it has become typical and that’s because examples of it abound and they’re not far from you. You go down to the plaza on a Saturday afternoon and you’re going to run into somebody who has achieved at the highest level. That just happens all the time in Jamaica. It’s not myth. You can see the guy right there, you see Usain Bolt standing over there and you say hi to him and he say hi back and wave. When you’re that close to that level, it is not hard for you to make the association and to start thinking and dreaming about taking such a step yourself.
And I think that’s endemic in Jamaican society and it throws up a lot of performers in the areas in where you have opportunities, in athletics and football, cricket, in those areas in entertainment. Those are the areas, because of the economic realities, these are where the opportunities lie and so the talent goes there.
Listen to the full interview here: The Big Lunch 26 NOV 2022 by KonnectRadio | Mixcloud
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