Updated March 03, 2019 12:40:59

Photo: Time will tell whether the Gold Medal Ready program has more success than the dumped Winning Edge strategy. (Supplied: Department of Defence)

Australian athletes earmarked for the Tokyo 2020 Summer Olympic Games have begun exclusive training camps with the Australian Army Special Operations unit and a group of former Olympic champions known as the alumni.

ABC's The Ticket program was given exclusive access to the most recent camp in Sydney's west where 100 athletes from almost a dozen sports came together for an intense two-day workshop.

Dubbed Gold Medal Ready, the program was created by the Australian Institute of Sport to address a weak link found after reviewing team performances at the London 2012 and Rio 2016 Olympic games.

Program manager Rosanna Stanimirovic said "mental toughness" and "resilience" were the two themes that kept emerging.

"The management of all sports came together at a forum and talked about where we could make some improvements and identify where we could make the biggest gains for Australian sport to be more successful than we were at the last games," Dr Stanimirovic said.

"We had the opportunity to align with the Australian Army and the Special Operations unit … so we put together a program where we can bring as many of our medal-potential Olympic sports through to give them education and experience outside their daily training and competition environment."

Previous gold medal winners eager to help next gen

Dr Stanimirovic put out a call to Australia's existing gold medal winners hoping to hear from two or three who could volunteer time to mentor the young athletes between now and the games but was surprised when 30 offered to be involved over the next 16 months.

Photo: Aspiring Olympic athletes and coaches perform planking exercises under the instruction of an Australian soldier. (Supplied: Department of Defence)

It's a who's who of Australia's Olympic champions including athletes such as swimmer Leisel Jones, diver Matt Mitcham, cyclist Anna Meares, beach volleyballer Kerri Pottharst, rower Kim Brennan and pole vaulter Steve Hooker.

The gold medal alumni, in sharing their diverse experiences alongside those of the Special Operations soldiers, offer Australia's next generation of athletes unrivalled access in learning how to deal with mental and emotional challenges in unfamiliar surroundings.

Mitcham, the 10-metre platform diving champion from Beijing 2008, believes Australian teams cannot improve unless they build on the success of those who came before them.

"When I was transitioning out of sport into retirement I made sure I was part of the Athletes Commission and made sure I was still involved in sport and could still contribute because I've always thought it's such a great shame to lose all of that experience and knowledge when an athlete retires," Mitcham said.

"You can lose 10, 15, 20, up to 25 years of lived experience and all that knowledge if an athlete just walks away.

"Progress happens when you build upon the knowledge of somebody else so each new generation doesn't have to go through all their own trial and error."

Mitcham said learning how to block out external stress factors to get into a "flow-state" or "in-the-zone" moment was critical for performance at big events.

Photo: The Gold Medal Ready program was created to address a weak link found in a review of Olympic team performances. (Supplied: Department of Defence)

'Being in the zone' can be impossible to replicate

Jones also won her individual gold medal at the 2008 Beijing games, in the 100 metres breaststroke event.

"I think that's the greatest thing too, that feeling of being in the zone and it's so hard to replicate it, it's almost like you will never feel that feeling again, when everything is easy and you don't have to think about anything it just happens for you," she said.

"I remember the ones that were most painful, the ones that didn't work for me and were physically so painful, but to have even just a fraction of that in-the-zone moment again in your life … you would pay money for that because it's just the most magical time.

"That feeling that nothing else matters and everything else fades away and you are in that moment achieving what you always wanted to achieve."

Photo: Athletes worked in groups through a series of problem solving activities. (Supplied: Department of Defence)

The flow-state is a reference that appears frequently in the recollections of the Special Operations soldiers.

"That flow state is one of the most powerful things," one soldier said.

"I'm not an athlete, we call ourselves operators, but we do things that are familiar to sport — we train in complex movements in order to be able to react to things, we move as part of a team, we do lots of things that are very similar.

"Once you get into that familiar flow of the thing you've practised a thousand times, the thing you've seen a thousand times, it gets rid of some of those nerves and it'll help you deal with the feeling of over saturation."

According to Special Operations Major B, the attributes that make a good athlete and a good soldier are similar.

"Most of the guys that do well in the special forces environment have some experience in a team sport environment."

"Having the trust to rely on someone, having the responsibility and accountability to make sure you are doing the right thing for your team, being professional — all those attributes are very consistent with athletes at this level."

Photo: Many special forces soldiers have experience playing team sport. (Supplied: Department of Defence)

Mental robustness the most desired attribute

In the past week alone, 100 athletes from sports such as boxing, canoeing and rugby sevens spent time at the Special Operations Education and Training Centre (SOTEC) in Sydney.

Athletes worked in groups through a series of problem solving activities that pushed them to a level of physical and mental stress, designed to teach them how to recognise their individual responses and build coping strategies.

"We've done quite a bit of this with other sporting teams but this is our first experience in the Olympic setting," Major B said.

"All the men I work with at the moment get real satisfaction out of imparting their knowledge and mentoring, developing, teaching, and instructing in their field.

"To be able to work with young people preparing for the Olympics is a reward in itself … feeling like you've had a little bit of a part to play in that, knowing that your experiences can benefit someone else.

"The attribute we are most keenly after in an individual is mental robustness — the ability to step out of a situation, reframe it, adopt a different perspective if you need to and getting your emotions under control to perform to your optimum level.

"That is very similar for a soldier and an athlete."

Turning stress into a positive

Jones said it took her years to learn how to turn stress into a positive, having made her Olympic debut aged only 14.

"I am the perfect candidate for someone who is always very anxious … I would be very nervous for about four weeks before I raced and I didn't realise that I could learn how to control it," Jones said.

"I had a lot of the symptoms related to anxiety — I always wanted to throw up, I always had diarrhoea — but it's about learning to embrace all those symptoms and recognise that's how I was as a person.

"It took me about a 12 years to realise that my skill was talking to people.

"So when I was in the marshalling area I used to talk to everyone — competitors, people in events after me, everyone … and the best thing is it was a double-pronged approach — it made me calmer and it put the other competitors off."

The commanding officer at SOTEC said the opportunity to partner with the AIS in preparing athletes for Tokyo was of mutual benefit.

"We see some reflections between us and these elite athletes going off to represent Australia in a year's time … we see some similarities between that and what we do as Australian Army soldiers — our job is to represent Australia in operational deployments around the world."

"The second thing is we're hoping that whilst we've got the opportunity to transmit some of the things we've learned about training and preparing for combat, we can draw out some of the things that the athletes, the coaches, and the sports scientists can bring back to our organisation.

"It's about a mutual co-operation and I guess that's why General Burr, our Chief of Army, has established this relationship.

"I know he's deeply invested in ensuring our people get access to the best knowledge and understanding of the human performance space so we can bring that into the organisation and develop all of our systems to invest in our people, its an absolute priority for Army.

"Special Operations Command really is about small team excellence and so within this system we are focused on creating excellent small teams … we focus on the psychological and the physical but we are putting a lot more emphasis — like we are today with the athletes — on the cognitive aspects, on building up the resilience of our people to operate in high-stress environments."

Sport Australia looking to 'spend smarter'

The AIS is hoping the partnership leads to more medals in Tokyo — and a reversal of the slide Australian Olympic teams have seen since the peak in Sydney 2000.

Back then Australia won 58 medals, 16 of them gold, placing the nation fourth on the medal tally.

At the most recent Olympics in Rio, Australia won 29 medals, eight of them gold, placing the nation 10th overall.

Despite increasingly vocal calls for more government funding of sport in Australia, it appears unlikely, in the near term at least.

Given that, Sport Australia appears to be listening to its own advice to national sports organisations — 'spend smarter'.

Time will tell whether the Gold Medal Ready program has more success than the dumped Winning Edge strategy.

Topics: sport, olympics-summer, army, sydney-2000

First posted March 03, 2019 12:22:34