Gold Rush. Michael Johnson

1987 and 1988 in terms of where I was in the world. But at 19 I was right on the borderline for going. So they took a real chance with me.’

      Most people catch Olympic fever and work as hard as they can to earn a spot on the team. Daley’s success happened so fast that making the team provided him with the inspiration that would fuel him in the years that followed.

      ‘What was your first memory of the Olympics?’ I asked.

      ‘Watching Valeri Borzov on TV in the 1972 Olympics,’ he said. ‘I was really impressed with Borzov and how he carried himself.’ As Daley recalled, Valeri, a Russian 100-metre runner who was known as being a really tough competitor, ‘delivered a really great piece of work’.

      As a two-time gold medal decathlete competing in ten different track and field events, Daley would go on to become the greatest athlete of his time. When I asked him about how he dealt with the pressure, he said, ‘I never felt pressure.’

      I wouldn’t believe that from a lot of athletes, but I believe it with Daley. I don’t think he felt pressure, because where does the pressure come from? It comes from being afraid that you’re going to underperform – not necessarily compared to what other people expect but in terms of your own expectations. But Daley didn’t care. He just figured, ‘If I lose, I’m going to come back and I’m going to win the next time.’

      Sprinter Usain Bolt says much the same thing. ‘People always say, “Why are you not worried?” I said you can’t be worried. If you’re the fastest man in the world, what’s there to worry about? Because you know you can beat them. All you’ve got to do is go execute,’ he told me when we talked in Jamaica in 2009. ‘I’m not saying every day you’re going to get it perfect, but if you’re fast there’s no need to worry. If you’ve had a bad day, you just had a bad day. Next time you bounce back.’

      Despite his antics on the field, Usain isn’t exactly an extrovert. He prefers to chill at home or in his hotel room rather than to go out on the town. But when it comes to introverted champions, Cathy Freeman has us all beat.

      Cathy’s quiet and reserve (her words) define the word calm (my word). And yet she’s won gold in two World Championships, four Commonwealth Games and the Olympic Games on her own home turf.

      She discovered the Olympics at age ten, while watching a made-for-television movie about American indigenous distance runner Billy Mills, who won a gold medal in the 10,000 metres during the 1964 Tokyo Games. ‘I was at an age where, oh, there’s a runner who’s indigenous and American, and he’s sort of similar to the indigenous people over here,’ Cathy told me. ‘I set in my mind that I wanted to be a runner when I grew up.’ Watching the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games unfold the following year cemented that aspiration. By then, thanks to her stepfather, she already had the words ‘I am the world’s greatest athlete’ posted on her bedroom wall.

      That set the bar. ‘In 1990 I made my first Australian team for the Commonwealth Games,’ Cathy told me. ‘Two years later I went to Barcelona. Each year that went by, it became clearer to me where I had to be and what I had to do, the sort of person I had to become.’

      TUNING IN TO THE OLYMPICS

      A number of Olympic champions fell into their sports and went on to make history. For many, watching the Olympics served as a catalyst. Mark Spitz, who holds a remarkable nine Olympic gold medals in swimming, didn’t join a swimming team because he loved the sport or had been inspired by the Olympics. At least not at first. At the age of nine his mother had put him into a YMCA camp programme just to give him something to do. The problem was that the programme involved arts and crafts instead of sports. Mark, and the friend who had also been put into the camp by his mother, ‘didn’t want to sit around with a bunch of girls doing stupid stuff’. It turned out that a brand new swimming pool had just been completed and programmes would begin being offered the following week.

      Mark told me about what happened next. ‘On the very first day in the class that I was in, the instructor said for everybody to line up. They put us all alphabetical and they told us to jump into the pool and hold on to the side. So we were all on the length of the pool and the instructor said, “When I call your name, I want to see how you swim across the width of the pool.” Well, it was a heated pool, but when you fill up a pool, the first day or so, it’s not really heated, so I was freezing my butt off. By the time they got to the S’s all I did was swim across the pool without stopping. Little did I know that the guy who was the instructor of that class was looking to see who didn’t stop. He had set up criteria, unannounced to anybody, that if you didn’t stop he was going to ask you to go out for the swim team. Well, my buddy, his last name was Cooper, got halfway through the width of the pool, stopped and looked at me and was waving and showboating – ‘Ha ha, I got to go first!’ – because that’s what your buddies do, right? So he never got asked to go out for the swim team. There were probably four people in that one session that didn’t stop for whatever reason.

      ‘So I went out for the swim team. I didn’t know a whole hell of a lot about swimming at the YMCA level. It was designed as a novice programme. At the end of that summer programme we went to a swimming meet. I don’t even remember what I was swimming, but I remember that it was time-based only. My mom took me over to the end of the pool where there were three circles on the deck that said 6-5-4. There was also a little staircase that said 3-2-1. They put me on circle number 5 and handed me a purple ribbon. I looked to my left and I noticed the guy that was on the staircase, he got a white ribbon. The guy on the next step up got a red ribbon, and the guy at the top got a blue ribbon.

      ‘I came back to my mom crying and gave her that purple ribbon. That was the first time I recognised that I would get a reward for doing something in a sport. I didn’t understand about why I got the reward, or even that someone had given me a time or had a stopwatch on me. The fact was that I didn’t like the purple ribbon because it was quite obvious that that guy on the staircase with the blue ribbon had been treated as more special than I had. I wanted to be on that top stair. How was I going to get there? I had no clue. But I know that to this day I don’t like purple.’

      Ironically, Ian Thorpe, who hopes to add to his five gold medals in the 2012 Olympics, also fell into swimming. ‘My sister swam. She only swam because she broke her wrist, so the doctor recommended she swim to strengthen her wrist, but she ended up being quite a swimmer. She made our national team. When I was young, I basically decided I’d take up swimming because I was really bored being dragged along to all these swimming carnivals by my parents to watch my sister.’

      Ian already played a few different sports at the age of eight, and it’s probably safe to say that he was better at most of those than he was at swimming. ‘When I was young I wasn’t that good a swimmer,’ he told me. ‘I was allergic to chlorine, as well, and was getting sick from being in the pool. But I enjoyed it. My mum had to take me to the doctor, and basically the doctor said, “Your son’s allergic to chlorine. It has to do with how the adenoids mature in your nose. When he hits puberty it’s not going to be a problem as much any more. If you think he’s going to be a champion swimmer, it’s probably advisable that you have them taken out.”

      ‘My mother didn’t think I’d be a champion swimmer, so we opted to do nothing and I continued to get sick from swimming from time to time. That took me out of the pool every once in a while. In the pool I had to wear a nose clip, which is probably the uncoolest thing you can wear when you train. But I was like the nerdy swimmer when I was little.

      ‘My parents wanted me to stop swimming, figuring it wasn’t good for me. But by the time I was ten or eleven I was pretty much winning everything in the pool in the age group competitions. By the time I was 14 I made the national team. I missed every development team on the way because I didn’t meet the criteria. I was usually too young. At 14 I went away on my first trip, which was the Pan Pacific Championships in Japan, and came second. Then, the following year, I was world champion. The year after that I set four world records in four days. Then, the following year, I was Olympic champion.

      ‘As a pre-teen, my goal was to become an Olympic athlete. I dreamed of winning Olympic gold. At that point, however, I thought maybe Athens would be the first