An Olympic skier stands at the top of a mountain, waiting to begin what everyone around him is calling his biggest race yet. He has won championships and trained for thousands of hours, and it has all led him to this point. If he skis well enough, it could mean a lot of money from endorsement deals, an Olympic gold medal and a place in history.

Keeping calm under that amount of pressure is tough.

Even if it’s not to this magnitude, athletes face pressures and distractions that can affect their ability to perform. It can break their concentration, hurt their confidence and even cause them to engage in negative self-talk.

Sport psychologists like Jon Hammermeister work with athletes on these issues and creates strategies to overcome them so the athletes can perform at their best. Hammermeister spoke to students, faculty and community members Tuesday Jan. 12 in Arntzen Hall about the “Principles of Olympic Excellence.”

At the Olympics, excellence is obvious: either an athlete is a champion or an athlete is not. But Hammermeister said in his mind, excellence means achieving your potential.

Of course, some things affecting potential are out of a person’s control.

“So many factors go into winning,” Hammermeister said. “Not least of which is how intelligently you selected your mother and father.”

Both environment and genetics play a role in a person’s development, but Hammermeister argues that people are born into different-sized genetic boxes that represent their potential.

Hammermeister said Olympians have “pretty dang big” genetic boxes. They work themselves to the outer limits of those boxes by training every day and using tools from sport psychology to get into what Hammermeister calls an “optimal mental climate” – more commonly known as the zone.

So how do they do it? What are these special tools that get athletes’ minds just as ready as their bodies to go for that gold medal?

Hammermeister said one of the most important tools is concentration. The pressure is high at the Olympics and it’s easy to get distracted by all the action. Athletes must also know how to set appropriate goals for themselves, use imagery, control their self-talk, relax or energize themselves on command and, of course, be self-confident.

“These skills are essential for peak performance and for good mental health,” Hammermeister said.

Another factor sport psychology helps athletes control is motivation. According to Hammermeister, a common misconception among sports viewers is that athletes who don’t win simply didn’t want it badly enough. With the Olympics, though, Hammermeister said most motivation problems stem from over-motivation. The athletes want to earn the gold medal so badly, he said, that “their fire is burning too hot.”

Hammermeister works with the Army Center for Enhanced Performance. He was a performance consultant to the U.S. Olympic Ski Team in the 2002 and 2006 Olympics and he will accompany them again to the 2010 Olympic Games in Vancouver, BC.

He has worked with the U.S. Ski Team since 1998, when he was teaching at Central Oregon Community College in Bend, Ore. The U.S. Ski Team trains at nearby Mount Bachelor, which is how Hammermeister got to know the coaches.

Before earning his doctorate, Hammermeister coached Division III college tennis for six years, which he said helped shape his outlook as a sport psychologist.

Another contributor to Hammermeister’s philosophy was Western physical education and sport psychology professor Ralph Vernacchia. The two friends have known each other for 10 years and share a mutual respect as colleagues.

Vernacchia said the lecture was an opportunity to learn from the best, and he hoped Hammermeister’s talk helped Western students gain insights not available to the average person who might see the Olympics on television.

Hammermeister shared stories about what it’s really like at the Olympics, showed pictures of the Olympic villages in Torino and Vancouver and discussed the various events in which the U.S. Ski Team will compete. He also explained how elite athletes apply sport psychology tools to help them do their best, using what he called “key mental tools."

These tools include goal-setting, imagery, self-talk, relaxation and "energization."

Hammermeister also focuses on key mental skills, which include confidence, concentration and control over emotions.

“[Olympic athletes] think about how they perform their job in different ways than the rest of us do,” Hammermeister said. “There is no better illustration of excellence than the athletes that participate in the Olympics.”

The average Western student probably isn’t aiming to be an Olympic champion, Hammermeister said, but they still want to succeed at what they do – and that’s a skill you can learn.

He said Western students can all benefit from learning sport psychology principles because they are not just sports skills but general performance skills.

“Being a student is just another performance venue. That’s the primary area where you perform right now,” Hammermeister said. “Some people are lucky enough to be born with a lot of self-confidence and the ability to control their emotions under fire. But not many of us are. The good news is that those sorts of things are trainable if you know some of the methods.”

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