22 July 2008

Rio de Janeiro (BRA)


Playing bad never helps.

The clichés always sound trite and dull but they always hide a deeper meaning.

During the 2008, we often heard the men and women teams’ coaches saying that the schedule planning was primarily aimed to the Beijing Olympic Games. Having to deal with a very tight schedule, they were looking eagerly for the necessary time to rest, to work out, to improve and so on.
Actually, it wasn’t easy at all, but repeating to many times these concept risks to be tricky.

In a overloaded season, the athletes (and the coaches too) have to work hard to keep high the enthusiasm as long as they could. Being under pressure due to the big number of commitments, they might misunderstand the real meaning of the statement: “our biggest aim is the Olympic Games”. The risk is thinking that everything that comes before the Beijing’s tournament is secondary.

Here, we can discover the true meaning of “Playing bad never helps”.
Even when we are not in the best condition, tired from long travels and drained off energies, we have to strive for best. Obviously, the performances cannot be as good as we would have liked, but the secret is the effort we do to play our best.

The intensity of that effort turns a good player into a champion.

We could see our physical energies as a bin that gradually empties. Saving energies and refilling the bin with specific work out is an ordinary part of athletes’ life. But we cannot manage our mind power in the same way. Our mind energies are managed by a kind of switcher, which can be on or off: we haven’t a modulator. If we stop striving for the best, our mind could turn off and we don’t know how and when it will turn on again.

Thus, if we do our best, a poor performance could be acceptable and even useful, but if we give up to fight hard in each rally, we risk to turn off our mental switcher and then, who knows what could happen.

The best way to prepare for the Olympic Games is play as hard as possible this wonderful 2008 World League Final Six.

Brazilian team has an amazing skill to maintain for longest period the switcher on and in the next five days we will see if Bernardinho's players are still by far the best (it seems very likely).

Bye bye andrea zorzi