Food for thought in preparing the recipe for success at LA Olympics

A FORMER journalist shared with me recently a little nugget of wisdom – on how the first Malaysian sports psychologist attached to the Malaysian contingent at the Olympic Games convinced a high-profile American leader to sample a taste of the spicy chicken satay.

Tom Bradley, the first African American mayor of Los Angeles who served the city an unprecedented five terms, was coaxed to try the famous Malaysian dish at the historic Mayfair Hotel during the Los Angeles Olympic Games in 1984.

Seated at the same table with Bradley, the late Sultan Haji Ahmad Shah and top businessman Datuk Tamby Chik Hassan, Rosmanizam Abdullah, who covered the Games for Berita Harian, did not indulge himself due to the spicy peanut sauce but somehow the American politician did.

“I saw how Dr Ahmad Lisut convinced Bradley to have some of the satay served on the table. Whether it was due to Dr Ahmad’s power of persuasion or Bradley’s show of respect and courtesy to his guests, it did not matter,” said Rosmanizam, a journalist-cum-sports administrator who served in cycling and later cricket.

When Dr Ahmad was engaged by the Olympic Council of Malaysia (OCM) to put the Malaysian athletes in the right frame of mind ahead of the Games, it was described by the media as a first.

Dr Ahmad was a lecturer at the Vancouver University and had been residing in Canada for the past 20 years.

He offered his services for free to accompany the contingent throughout the Games, which was granted following the Malaysian Hockey Federation’s wish to have a psychologist to psyche the team up.

The contingent were made up of a small number of elite athletes, including track cyclist Rosman Alwi, swimmer Helen Chow, shooter Sabiamad Abdul Ahad (later Datuk), and runners Nordin Mohd Jadi and B. Rajkumar, while the men’s hockey team were led by skipper and policeman Ow Soon Kooi (later Datuk). The frontline was spearheaded by Kevin Nunis.

“Dr Ahmad’s technique was to wake up the sleeping giant in you. He preferred provocation, in contrast to Lawrence Chan’s soft and tender approach in handling the senior hockey team in the World Cup in 1975 and the 1979 Junior World Cup team,” recalled Kevin.

Despite Dr Ahmad’s presence, the Malaysian contingent, headed by Tunku Adnan Tunku Besar Burhanuddin, on his third stint as the chef de mission after the Teheran Asian Games in 1974 and the Christchurch Commonwealth Games the same year, returned from Los Angeles empty-handed.

Well, that was four decades ago. One would have imagined Malaysia has a huge pool of psychological experts to call upon by now.

But slightly more than two weeks ago, a post-mortem was held to evaluate the performance of the Malaysian contingent to both the Olympic and Paralympic Games in Paris.

Youth and Sports Minister Hannah Yeoh concluded the number of in-house sports psychologists at the National Sports Institute (NSI) was insufficient to provide mental support to the nation’s elite athletes.

“For every 10 athletes, there should be two sports psychologists. Right now, we have just seven for both the Podium and back-up programmes,” she was quoted as saying at the press conference following the post-mortem session.

In the past, the NSI had engaged with a number of sports psychologists, including Frederick Tan, who continues to work with the badminton team after a successful stint with Datuk Lee Chong Wei, in-house expert Datuk Zaiton Othman, long-serving Michel Gagne who was instrumental in preparing the contingent mentally for the 1989 SEA Games, Master V. Sivalingam who worked with Dhaarmaraj Abdullah’s junior hockey team, Hasmah Yusof, Dr Jolly Joy, Dr Rebecca Wong and Dr Balbir Singh.

Although there seems to be a growing perception that today’s generation of athletes are mentally weak, as the nation’s chief purveyors of instant joy and happiness, our elite athletes must be assisted on all fronts so that they enter the battlefield in the right frame of mind.

The NSI will need to continue to pursue innovative and creative measures to elevate Malaysian sport to a higher plane.

To help athletes reach an ideal psychological state sometimes referred to as the zone, the psychologist has a role to play behind the scenes.

Who knows, the elusive gold could well be delivered in Los Angeles, 44 years after a Malaysian psychologist cajoled the mayor of the city to consume the quintessential street food.