Winning Conversations with Grant Hackett OAM - Olympic World Champion Multiple world record holder

Oh, great to be on board with you today, Andy. It's been a while.

Yeah, it's really simple. I think for me, I mean, nothing was from great design. Everything for me kind of happened by default. It was more my personality that probably drove me to the place that I'm in today in terms of whether it's my sporting or my business career. So I was always a very competitive person. So it put me in a competitive environment and I always wanted to win and I was always willing to do whatever it took to win in terms of the training or the preparation and the execution for a race or anything else that I was kind of challenging myself around. And the only reason I got into aquatics or water sport was because of my brother. So my dad was a policeman. We moved around quite a bit as he used to get transferred and promoted. We moved up to North Queensland and we joined the local surf club up there called the Ayr Surf Club. He decided to do the surf race. My brother, who's six and a half years older than me, so he was 10, I was four. And he actually did quite well. Mom and dad were interested in football and tennis and played, you know, sports on land. They didn't do anything when it came to aquatics. And he finished third, thought, geez, he did pretty well. But my brother, who is super competitive as well and, you know, big, tall, athletic-looking character, he's 6'4 and even more athletic than me, I would have to say, in terms of coordination and speed and things like that. He finished third, but he got beaten by two girls. And being super, super competitive, he was like, I need to do some swimming lessons. And that's where sort of swimming came into play. Within six months, he was state surf champion. And I was the four-year-old going down to the pool with him, jumping in the public lanes, going up and down, learning how to swim, kind of just enjoying myself. Then one day when I was five, the Red Devil Swimming Club, it was called in Innisfail, they had a race for five-year-olds. A lot of the competitions don't start until you're six or seven, but they had a race for five-year-olds. And apparently I did this race. I can't even remember this. My mom tells me this story and I touched the wall at the end of this race and I pop my head up and I yell out, "Did I win?" And apparently I won by like half a lap. And my mom kind of faded back into the crowd, she said, because she was like, "Who is this kid?" Like, she goes, because you almost seemed docile, like you were just so relaxed. Nothing seemed to phase you, but then all of a sudden you got into this competition and then you didn't even stop to look around. You touched the wall and you yelled out and everybody across the entire stadium heard what you said. And so I think mom and dad got a real shock of, I guess, that underlying character and probably drive that I had. And I think for me, that's... it was just one thing after the other and that's all it is. It's just incremental steps. And I used to love watching my brother compete because he was such a champion. He won, you know, races at national level. He was world Ironman champion. There was a very famous Ironman series in Australia called the Uncle Toby Super Series and they were like rock stars here. He did that for eight years. The guy that finished second to me in Sydney, who won the previous two Olympics, you know, Kieran Perkins in 1996 and 1992, and was a world record holder in my pet event, my brother used to beat as a 13, 14-year-old. They were number one, number two rivals. So I knew about Kieran Perkins for a long time. But for me, I was doing three sports and, you know, I loved my rugby league because we were living in Queensland. It was a very popular sport. I played that for seven years. I loved the Ironman because my brother was doing that and I used to look up to all these heroes from the surf clubs around Australia and, you know, I really wanted to participate in that sport as well. And then I was doing swimming. And then one day in 1993, Juan Antonio Samaranch, the IOC president at the time, read out, and the winner is Sydney. And this is, you know, this is 1993. I'm 13 years of age and I was like, oh my God, we're going to have an Olympics in our own country. And I thought to myself, I'm going to be 20 years of age, so I'm going to be, you know, not quite prime, but I'm going to be in a perfect position to be able to have an opportunity to compete there if I'm good enough. And I was like, that's it. I want to go to an Olympics. And I don't want to just go to an Olympics. I want to win. And I thought that back then. I, you know, I swear in the life of my mom and dad and every family member, my goal wasn't to go to the Olympics. My goal was to win the Olympics as soon as that announcement was made. And obviously I couldn't do that for the other two sports. And as Trevor Hendy said to me, who was a very famous Australian ironman, he said, you can be good at a lot of sports, but you can be elite at one. And it's always stuck with me that, you know, it's kind of like you can master one thing or you can be a jack of all trades. So you've got to kind of pick and choose. And I thought, that's it. I'm doing swimming and I'm going to do everything I can to be the very, very best in the world. And what I did was I thought, well, who is the best in the world at the time at the event that I want to go to the Olympics for? And it was Kieran Perkins. So I went and researched all of his times. And there wasn't Google. I didn't have the luxury of a search engine to, you know, find all, you know, this guy's times across every age group category, every single distance that he swam. I actually went about going through like piles and piles and piles of magazines, of swimming magazines that I collected from here, there, and everywhere to find his times for every single distance. And then I wrote them down and then I went, right, every single year, my goal is to either beat that time or emulate that time and then try and step it up. And his improvement rates, I mean, this guy was the Olympic champion and world record holder, were incredible, were very intimidating, but that was kind of the very brief journey of really getting into swimming. And the reason that I wanted to go to the Olympics, and it was kind of, you know, it was pretty simple for me. Like the formula was, well, I want to be the best. What does the best do? Okay, they do that. So just try and do that, but just do it a little bit better. And that's kind of how I pursued the sport.

Yeah, this is a really interesting question for me because I think it's something that I'm naturally very good at just in terms of the way my genetics or psychology or whatever is built inside me because when I get closer to a bigger moment, I get more relaxed and more focused just naturally and I always have. If I stub my toe or I hit my shin on a toe bar, I will say every swear word under the sun and I get frustrated at little things really easy, but put me in, you know, the middle of a nuclear war and I'll know exactly what to do and when to do it and how to do it and do it relaxed. I just seem to be that type of personality. So you've kind of got to know what you're naturally good at and what you're not good at. And it's the little things for me that I actually have to work on as a person. Like I can't, I shouldn't get frustrated at those sorts of things, you know, I can be a better person like that. Put me in an Olympic final or a high-pressure situation, I think I'm so good in those types of situations because of my preparation and the belief that I have in my preparation. So I've always had that strong sense of belief that I can do the things that I really set out to achieve if I do everything right amongst all the little steps that you have to do in a very long and arduous and challenging preparation, which, you know, to give people an idea of that, I basically swam from Sydney to LA and, you know, halfway back every four years to train for Olympics. And I couldn't just swim it, I had to swim it faster than anybody else in the world for my events. So that's what it was like for me. So I think for me when I'm coming into, say, an Olympic final, one of those really high-pressure situations, for me I really try and break everything down to something very, very specific. Sorry about that. I just had a bit of an interruption on the call. I try and break everything down to very, you know, specific things that need to be done. What time do I need to start scratching? What time do I need to enter the warm-up pool? What time do I need to see the masseuse? What time do I need to get to the marshaling area? When do I put my suit on? Everything for me is really, really structured, but I'm also good at going, if it doesn't perfectly go to plan, that's okay. If there's something that happens that I can't control, that's still okay. So I make sure I have everything really structured and planned out and clearly articulated in my head and written down as well and agreed to with my coach. And then I just go through those processes and I find that makes me very relaxed. I find that methodical process and focus and belief then in the entire preparation that I've had over many months or even years in a lot of cases puts me in a really good frame of mind. And look, sometimes it doesn't go well. Sometimes you can be in the middle of a warm-up and you're hitting times with way too much effort for that particular time. And so for me, I had this one situation where I just couldn't hit the right times in the warm-up. And I was sort of... it was doing my head in a bit. I wasn't quite relaxed. I wasn't my normal self going into that race. But I kind of always managed to just let go of everything once I'm up on the blocks and just focus on the execution. I was good at that. And I did that for that particular race. And I nearly broke the world record. And I wasn't in world record form. It wasn't like I was tapered and rested and shaved down. And I thought to myself, you know what? I actually don't need everything to go perfect in a warm-up to do an amazing race. So it gave me this other sense of belief or insight or new perspective just on that too. And I think that's where I learned that, hey, if you've done the work overall, if things aren't necessarily going right in the lead-up, if you can have that ability to let go and almost... it's not that you don't care, but it's like whatever happens will happen. I just need to focus on the execution now and do the very best I can. That alleviates a lot of pressure, but it also allows you to focus on the right things around the execution too. Because I find what a lot of people do, why they stuff up in the moment, is they keep thinking about stuffing up in the moment and keep thinking about what's going to go wrong. Where if you take a mindset, you go, I've done everything now. No one can help me now. It's all over. I'm just going to do the very best I can. You kind of relax for a little bit because you go, whatever the outcome is, the sun's going to come up tomorrow. Life's got to go on. So you kind of take that pressure off, but then you find yourself really focusing on what matters and you're focusing on the execution, listening to the start gun, getting the underwater right, getting the technique right, whatever it is for a particular event. And so I think I was naturally good at bigger situations than what I am in smaller situations, but I think I really learned to refine my process over time. And I really took notice of what I was good at and what I wasn't so good at too. And I always continue to try and improve that.

I have to say something because you reminded me of a story because you're right. I've spent a lot of time, I've lived with Michael on a couple of occasions and there's this story he was telling when we were at ASU at Arizona State and we're in the middle of the basketball court and he's in the middle there, you know, it's a big coliseum-like area and he's giving the story about the Olympics and he shares a story of the 200-meter butterfly in 2008 when he won the eight gold medals, you know, something that I don't think we'll ever see repeated, never say never, but just an amazing feat. And I think this was probably his fifth gold medal he was going for at the time. And he dived in and his goggles leaked. He couldn't see. Like, can you imagine being at that level and being that good and you do a mistake that a seven-year-old makes? It's like your goggles going to come down around your neck. And it's really funny because he could have panicked. And what actually happened is he said he did panic for a second because in butterfly you've got to get the touches right because you have to touch with both hands. It's not like freestyle where you can flip. You've actually really got to get it right. So your vision is very important in that particular race. And what he did was he ended up closing his eyes and counting his strokes because he was so well prepared. He knew exactly how many strokes he was going to do, where he was in the pool, how he was moving intuitively. He had everything so well trained that he then ended up breaking the world record that was then held for almost the next decade and winning, I think, his fifth out of his eight gold medals at that particular point in time. And I said to him after that speech when we were on the way home, I said, were you like just kind of making that up a little bit? Were you pushing the boundaries? He goes, "No, that's exactly what I did. I closed my eyes and I counted my strokes the whole way through and that was the result." So it says a lot about believing in your preparation and being so well prepared. It doesn't matter what anybody throws at you, you're ready to take it, absorb it, and move forward. And you just reminded me of that story because it exemplifies that exact thing that you were talking about.