Mind Matters Interview: 'How to perform under pressure': A chat with 3x Olympic gold medallist Drew Ginn

Justin Morris: Drew, I understand you grew up in Gippsland, Victoria and you’re obviously famed for your rowing. What else were you doing while you were a young kid running around?

Drew Ginn: I was born in Leongatha in Victoria. My first sports were surfing, BMX riding and bike riding. For me, bike riding was the way to get across the town, from the BMX track to the surf. I lived smack bang in the middle and my friends were at opposite sides of town. I’d be riding around with my surfboard under my arm, wearing my wetsuit in the middle of winter. 

You talk about putting in a bit of effort, you put the hard yards when you get up to surf when it’s bloody cold. The joy is when you catch the wave. That’s what I found with my bike riding too: the hard work was putting in the hours to learn the skills, but the joy came with those moments where you do something special – like catching a wave on the surfboard.

JM: The bike was an integral part of your youth, as was the surfboard. How did you end up in a boat, going up and down a river with a paddle?

DG: I was getting into a bit of trouble as a teenager. My mum passed away when I was 11: she died from cancer. My dad and mum had split up and I had been living in Queensland with her. He brought me back to Inverloch and I went off the rails, started getting into trouble with certain people around the town which was never going to end well. My dad recognised that and decided to send me to boarding school in Melbourne. I hated the idea of it, I didn’t want to be away from my friends, surfing or riding. 

On my first day at the boarding house, the boarding house master is sitting opposite me and he says: ‘You’re a young kid, you should give rowing a go.” 

I said: “No chance!” 

Two years went by where I did any sport I could – I just loved sport. I think I was into swimming, but I’d sort of given it away. A couple of afternoons after maths classes, one of my maths teachers said to me ‘why don’t you come down and give rowing a go’. We’ve all had these experiences, where a teacher has taken enough interest in you to see something in you that you don’t see in yourself. 

One afternoon he coerced me enough to walk down to the sheds. The rowing sheds were big, they were intimidating, it was something that was foreign to me. My first attempt at rowing was disastrous – my swimming came in handy actually because I couldn’t get in the boat, so I had to swim back to shore! I was stood on the shore in my shorts and t-shirts with all these kids are laughing at me. Something tweaked inside me: I had all these people laughing at me, I wanted to prove a point and show that I could do this.

The teacher cared enough to coach me through the initial couple of weeks, but the thing that really triggered it was that I was down at school in Melbourne. I hated being there, but the ability to get into the water was almost like being back at home. The freedom of being in the water, of being in a training environment on the Yarra River where you were away from school, away from 1,600 students, you were just in a boat by yourself or seven other people.

The initial months [at the school], all I wanted to do was go home. When we were driving into Melbourne for the first time, I was pretty pissed off in the car, and [my dad] said ‘just give it a go for a year’. 

I said ‘Is that the deal? I give it a go for a year and if I don’t like it I can come home?’ 

That first year, all I was thinking about was going home at the end of the year. Every break I went back home, it became more obvious that certain things were happening in the town that weren’t great. It was great to see my old school friends but they were struggling at school – a lot of my peer group around the age of 16 started disappearing. Basically, you’ve got social poverty, drugs happening to these kids when they’re growing up, abusive parents… one by one, they’d jump out of school and head to another state. I’d go back and there’d be fewer people that I really knew. 

JM: Do you think that time when you were in a bad crowd, did that serve as a motivator to do well in sport as an alternative route in life? 

DG: Two things stand out for me. You’ve got to have a bit of suffering – this is why you’ve got to have a hard time on the bike, it helps you appreciate when you’re getting to the end, right? 

Having had that experience of how bad things could be motivated me. Losing my mum was a big motivator. There was a constant reminder in my mind that I had to make the most of my opportunities. 

The other thing is connection. I was talking earlier about early mornings. I hate early mornings. But the idea of connecting with your friends, and the idea of knowing what will come at the other end of that work, that training, that’s what I really enjoy.

There’s an obsessiveness that you get as well – you enjoy suffering, you enjoy the moments where it’s not quite working quite well. 

JM: You went to the Atlanta Olympics when you were quite young – 20, 21? You won a gold medal with the Oarsome Foursome. Can you describe that feeling of winning a gold medal, especially for a young guy?

DG: I think I’d turned 21. I’d aspired to be part of this team: I was just a kid from the country who’d put my hand up. Rowing was the type of sport – cycling is too – where if you just do the work, put your head down and pay your dues, you can get a good result. 

The transition that happened to me was quite quick because, not only was I willing to put my head down, I was around the right people. The Oarsome Foursome, three of them came from the Mercantile Rowing Club. I came out of school and said: ‘I want to row at the Mercantile Rowing Club.’ I built some real connections there. I’m rowing within 20 metres of the Oarsome Foursome on the Yarra. The coach of the Oarsome Foursome was the club coach there.

Quite quickly, as a 17/18-year-old out of school, you’ve met all these athletes, you’re doing the training everyone at the top of the sport is doing. You’re not as good as them but because you’re measuring yourself against them every single day, you’re always getting a bit closer, keeping up on the ergo. We’d do bike rides, runs, you’d keep challenging yourself to keep up and try and get ahead. 

While going to the Games might have been a bit of a surprise to people outside – ‘Who’s this young kid and how does he go in the Oarsome Foursome?’ – on the inside I was like: ‘I’ve done so much work to get here’. There was a piece of me that wasn’t going to waste the opportunity but there was a massive amount of pressure. You think about that crew, that’s already had success, now you’re coming in. If we succeed we’re a great team. If we fail, it’s the young kid’s fault. These things get said: they’re off-the-cuff comments, but they things got embedded in me and spurred me on. 

The ‘96 Games was special. We were sitting on the start line. It was hot, humid. Thirty-six degrees, the humidity was through the roof. We had ice around our necks, drinking ice cold drinks to reduce our core temperatures. This is in ‘96, so there was a crude understanding of what kept your core temperature cool. By the time we got to ‘04 and ‘08 there was a lot more science around it. 

I was sitting in the bow of the boat with the oar handle in front of me – you become intimately connected to the oar because you spend so much time on it, it’s like when you’ve spent hours and hours on your bike, you know everything about the bar, everything about the bike. I remember sitting there and going ‘holy heck, I’m at the Olympic Games’. It hits you. It’s full bore. It’s the reason you’ve done all the work, and you realise you’ve finally got to do it. 

What was really cool was having James in front of me to turn round and say ‘relax, it’ll be fine, it’ll be good.’ That reassurance from people who’d been there before was really good. Nick Green had an affinity with me, we rowed on the same side of the boat. Mike was this really driven athlete, I was quite similar to him, whereas Nick and James were more laidback. 

I was sitting there, I was shitting myself, I’d been told the race plan. I was doing all these things as part of my pre-race routine: as much as they’re a routine to do things right, it’s also there to distract you and give you something to focus on. I’ve tightened the top knot up, made sure the seat’s fixed, made sure my shoes are tight, made sure the rig is fine. You’ve got all this nervousness, all of a sudden you have this moment where you realise you don’t have anything to do. 

What I love is that feeling when you’ve done the work, you have that sense of confidence [in the race]. The race unfolded as we planned, but the amazing thing is that, with about 250m to go, I’m yelling and screaming, going ‘let’s go up, up, up!’ and James is going ‘don’t change!’ It was good to have a wise person on board!

After the finish, I’m sitting there, waving my hands and screaming. Then I heard my dad calling out. You’ve all got childhood nicknames, I’m sure. There’s 5,000 people there and I can hear this one voice in centre of the grandstand yelling out my nickname, embarrassing me at the Olympic Games. But that was a special moment.

JM: You were obviously put in a high-pressure situation. You focused your mental energy on the few little things to distract yourself from the pressure or to make it more manageable?

DG: I think both. I’m a suspicious person but I’m a big believer in routines. If you can have a routine, you can use it like a recipe to get yourself mentally ready, to get yourself in the zone. People talk about the ‘zone’ as the Holy Grail: it’s not hard. It’s simply focusing on the things that centre you. 

You sit in the boat, you do a simple exercise: you put your hand in the water. You put your hand in the water and you feel it. There’s a temperature to it, a viscosity to it. You wriggle your toes in your shoes. You smell the environment. You smell the water, the smells coming from your shoes, the bodies and sweat – you go through these things, you’re right there. 

For me feeling the texture of things is important – feeling the oar handle. Touching the carbon fibre. The routine for me is about touching things, feeling things and reminding yourself about the here and now. As an athlete, any time I would get stressed was because I was thinking about things, thinking about the enormity of what I was doing, or getting worried about what I’d done in the days before. ‘Was that good enough? Have I done enough?’ 

It’s a distraction technique, but also a form of mindfulness. The ‘here and now’ allows you to do what you’ve got to do to fix your tent. One oar stroke at a time, one pedal at a time. You’re going to climb Mt Wellington tomorrow – it’s the greatest climb I’ve ever climbed in my life – but you’ll get half way up and if you’re thinking about the top or worrying about coming back down to the bottom, you won’t be riding anywhere near as well as you possibly can. 

But if every single pedal stroke is just automatic riding, every breath you take is automatic, it’s still tiring but there’s a pleasure in that tiredness that allows you to keep going. As soon as you start stressing about it being steep or your legs hurting, that sort of stuff isn’t going to help you. The rowing experience was very much like that. 

JM: That’s awesome, because there are training sessions I write for these guys that are all about focusing on pedal strokes! 

The ‘96 Olympics saw you as a young bloke, rising to the pressure: the next Olympics were in your home country. You’re getting a bit older, obviously excited about it and then you started dealing with injury. Tell me what happened before the Sydney Olympics and how you managed to come back from that.

DG: That was my first major injury. It was a ruptured disc with a perforation. I didn’t know at the time because back surgeries were really crude at the time. They took me to a back surgeon who said he didn’t want to operate in case it got worse. Then came the rehab process, and the best thing about a rehab process is that you learn heaps about yourself: you learn to be consistent, slow yourself down, remain calm, all these other things to get yourself right. 

Finally I was feeling comfortable when we were racing in Vienna at the World Cup. James and I won that, everyone was saying ‘you’re back!’. I was starting to feel confident again. Then the typical thing: I started switching off, not doing my rehab, not doing all the things I was supposed to do at that stage. We went to Lucerne and I was a bit achey.

I’d been pushing myself in the gym: the night before a training session, I pulled up really sore, went to see the doctor, took some pain medication, had a horrible night’s sleep. We got out in the water for a pre-race row, James says ‘let’s just warm ourselves up’. We row for 10 minutes and I go for the first ten-stroke effort. I can’t even hold onto the handle coming through. James asks if I’m alright, I say: ‘Yeah, my back’s not great’ and he says: ‘it’ll loosen up’. We do another ten strokes, same thing, I go: ‘mate, I can’t do this’. I feel the emotion and the tears welling up. It was hard was because it had been seven months of work.

I was sitting at the Sydney Olympic Games watching the race – the race I’d trained for four years for with James. He and Matthew Long were awesome – they rowed from fourth place to take the bronze. I ran along the bank with an Australian flag from 500 metres out. I’m running along, at one stage there’s a white chain with two security guards to stop us getting in the VIP area – security in those days wasn’t too significant – and I come running along, launch over this chain with both arms out to stop them grabbing us. Afterwards I sat there and went: ‘that’s the most painful thing I’ve done in weeks’.

I had surgery three weeks after that: it was hard to watch the Games at home, it was hard to wake up in the morning knowing it was me causing that issue – not listening to my body, not looking after myself. It was the most difficult time. But in retrospect, I needed to have that experience as an athlete to wake up and learn to do things differently. It was difficult to miss the Games but I don’t regret that, funnily enough. I learnt from what happened, and it’s still teaching me today.

JM: Did that disappointment help contribute to your success later on in Athens, Beijing and London?

DG: Everything that happens contributes to who you are and where you get to. 

For me as an athlete getting to the first Games, I didn’t really appreciate the success, because I was just throwing myself back into training activities without a lot of thought.

After Sydney, I started thinking about it. If I’d had all that success and then gone to Sydney and had any sort of success, I might have retired from the sport then. Or gone on and got progressively worse. My initial motivation was external, but my motivation then switched into going ‘well, I’ve got to do this in a different way’. 

I’d put my experience of 2004 as much more rewarding than 1996. It’s still a gold medal but the internal experience and the feeling of rowing the boat, it was much better connected. Even the experience with James – we then had eight-plus years of rowing together. By that stage I’d married my wife and she was pregnant with my son, I had a four-year-old daughter. There were a whole lot of things happening. For me it was just more well-rounded as an athlete.  

Children change things. It’s very easy as an athlete to worry about your fatigue and training… are you sleeping enough, are you eating right. Your mental volume of focusing on that stuff goes down [when you have kids] because you’re up at three in the morning looking after a crying child and trying to get them back to sleep. 

The irony is, because you’re doing that, you’re better at using your time. We became more efficient because we weren’t wasting training hours. We’d often talk about duration, but changed to every single minute being really focused, really deliberate training. Every single minute would add up, whereas a year before we’d be doing a three-hour session where 45 minutes or an hour would be a waste of time. It kept us focused. 

JM: What kind of role does activity and exercise still play in your life?

DG: I’ve got to have a routine of exercise. The last three months have been pretty difficult at work my routine has recently been sitting in a hotel room doing jump squats and jacks at 9–10pm at night! 

Not having the expenditure of energy and the socialisation of being around other athletes, from a mental health side of things it’s not quite the same. 

I got into cycling seriously due to the Australian Institute of Sport. The rowing coaches, cycling coaches and running coaches were all talking together. John O’Gould, who was triathlon coach at the time and Dave Saunders, who was a cycling coach at AIS, got together with Chris O’Brien because they knew I loved cycling. 

I’d done a heap of riding when I was a rower. That was the antidote for the back injury, because I knew I could go out and do 5-6 hours on the bike and I wouldn’t have back issues, but I couldn’t sit in the boat and row. So I got my volume on the bike and did body weight exercises for the rowing-specific stuff. That was working for me. 

Wattbikes were coming in at the time as well so you’ve got all these rowers on Wattbikes –John would see my wattages and go: ‘So what do you reckon you could do for four minutes?’

We started doing some testing and they all started getting pretty excited about it. At that point the individual pursuit was still an Olympic sport, so we had a real good look at training for that. It was awesome. What was really nice was that John O’Gould had ridden professionally and was involved in triathlon, Dave Saunders has been around for years. To have a group of people like that interested in having a conversation not only about riding, but also understanding what you’d been through as an athlete as well. It was fascinating. 

I was in the lab with John one day, it was the final lab test before going to the track for testing. The idea was to see the absolute max power I could do for four minutes. 625w was the number I got for four minutes and they turned around and said ‘we have the power, we need the aero numbers’. The problem was I couldn’t get aero enough. I was getting close to it, but then the individual pursuit was removed from the Olympic program. The team pursuit wasn’t an option because the team was in Adelaide at the time and they weren’t seeing an option for anyone to come in because they’re so well-drilled to precision. Dropping in another athlete just doesn’t work. 

So we said ‘let’s do the road time trial’. All of a sudden I was going after an hour-long time trial. I was able to produce the wattage but whatever I did, screw myself into different positions, get as low as I could, shoulders hunched, all that sort of stuff, I couldn’t get my aero numbers good enough. 

I remember doing the 2010 national champs, I did 425w for that course and I came sixth. We worked out I needed to be doing 450–455w to be the best in Australia – but that’s not the best in the world. The best in Australia would be coming 15th, 20th, that sort of stuff and at that point I’d be coming 70th or 80th or 90th. So that became impossible, but it was an awesome time. I liked it because it was very scientific. Rowing had been scientific, but cycling really had that rigor.

JM: Have you encouraged your kids to get into rowing?

DG: My daughter tried rowing. She really enjoyed the first term, then the school made it too serious and so assessment-based. I listened to a bunch of girls who were fourteen, Year 8, I was picking them up from training and dropping them off at home – at the beginning, you could hear the joy in their conversations. By the end of the term they were already talking about quitting the sport. I started asking questions, the frustrating thing for me was the way they were running it. I said to the school: ‘let’s make it fun!’.

My son’s talking about trying it now, I’m nervous about that, because I don’t want him to feel like he has to do it because of me.