“Everything
has been said before, but since nobody listens we have to keep going back and
beginning all over again.” Andre Gide.
https://www.brainyquote.com/authors/andre_gide
“Fiction is history that might
have happened. History is fiction that did happen.”André Gide. The Counterfeiters.
These two quotes of André
Gide are the backbones of the project. Working
around champions gives an idea of the requirements to create a champion. We have to assume that nobody listens and
begin all over again, this statement is not related to somebody in particular
but to athletes. At the same time, we have to create a
History that could help us to grow. It
was pointed out in our previous post.
People are willing
to believe in alternative facts because reality is overwhelming. We become delirious
believing in alternatives facts or psychotics when we see reality the way it
is; training to face reality and alternative facts is needed if we want to
achieve something with athletes.
As André Gide said: “Everything
has been said before, but since nobody listens we have to keep going back and
beginning all over again.” This is a touchy subject, repeating and insisting, starting all over again. We have to do it with every athlete if we
expect results. Mike Tyson said it
when he talks about Cus D’Amato. Here, we repeated the same thing again.
We started talking about
Postmodernism and alternative facts more than 30 years ago.The end of the Grand Narratives began and the
appearance of the Alternative Facts started. Donald Trump and Andrés Manuel López Obrador
come to my mind in today’s world.At one-point,
psychoanalysis was criticized by Jacques Derrida because of the alternative
facts.Triathlon represented by athletes,
coaches and Federations are full of alternative facts to keep their businesses going.People are willing to believe in
alternative facts because reality is overwhelming.We become delirious believing in alternatives
facts or psychotics when we see reality the way it is; training to face reality
and alternative facts is needed if we want to achieve something with athletes.
In the last World Series and
Mixed Relay, Hamburg, four times the Mexican team was lapped, just one ended in
40th place; four out of the five competitions.How can we face this overwhelming
reality!Alternative facts! We have
problems dealing with reality and alternative facts:
It’s because so much of what we know depends on the truthfulness of
others that the philosopher Immanuel Kant believed lying was always wrong. His
reasoning was that when we lie to another person, we fail to respect her
infinitely valuable capacity to encounter the world and think about the moral
choices she’ll make in it. By refusing to tell her the truth, we treat her not
as a person, but as an instrument — a tool to get something we want. We treat
her like a thing…When we routinely assume that our fellow citizens and
government officials are lying, it becomes impossible to work together to
determine how our neighborhoods, our cities, or our country should function.
When we abandon the effort to figure out what is true, we cede the field to
anti-democratic leaders who derive their “just powers” not “from the consent of the
governed” but from the acquiescence of the willingly deceived.
There is no point in showing
the comments related to this Mexican performance: hundreds of alternative facts
with one of two comments looking at the reality. Reality is difficult to see except for people like Mike Tyson.
Mike Tyson speaks clearly
about Constantine D’Amato.He believed
that Cus was crazy because he thought Mike was invincible in a fair fight.Mike believes Cus uses alternative facts when
he says such a thing, but the reality is that Cus had 50 years’ experience in
boxing and knew how to produce someone like it.Boxing children lived in his house.
“You do what I tell you to do and if it doesn’t work, then you can leave.”
“I’m not a creator. What I do is discover and uncover. See my job is to take the spark and fan it. When it starts to become a little flame I feed it, and I feed the fire until it becomes a roaring blaze, and then when it turns to a roaring blaze I pour used logs on it. Then you really got a fire going.”
“I don’t allow people to intimidate me, for no other reason than to set an example for my boxers.”
“Remember, it’s always good to throw the punch where you can hit him and he can’t hit you. That’s what the science of boxing is all about.”
“I feel that all boys growing up in the environment that he did would require help, patience and perhaps understanding cos’ I try to make them feel, and I hope I did, that I understand this kind of life. I grew up in a tough neighbourhood mysef.”
At the end, Mike ended up
with his beliefs without the overwhelming anger he developed growing up.
Cus D’Amato is not here anymore, but we know that there are people like him, we continue preparing ourselves to
look at reality without fear and with the will to face it. Alternative Facts are not an option for us.
What to teach is something
we take seriously, but how to create the environment to help athletes to learn
is more important. It is what every
country wants or what they say they want; to improve education and wellbeing
for the citizens. The infrastructure,
meaning the environment needed, should to be accepted by members: triathletes,
coaches, federations and nations.
Selling the idea is not an easy task; and selling the idea when other personal
needs are stronger is even more difficult.
In the case of Mexico, we try to convince people that there is a problem
in education, but our President says that he has a different data, contrary to
the OCDE. Let’s be serious and take the case of France:
Reconciling educational
excellence and success for all is not just the best way to tackle social
inequalities at the root, but also to obtain good results.
Results from around the
globe illustrate various best practices applied to improve the equity and
performance of the education system. Portugal’s TEIP programme for example
(Priority Intervention Education Territories) targets investment in
geographical regions where the population is socially disadvantaged and where
school drop-out rates are higher than the national average. Singapore, first in the PISA
science rankings, has a comprehensive teacher evaluation system that includes
in particular the contribution to students’ personal and academic development,
as well as the quality of parent-teacher relations.
In short, the capacity of
a system to help students in difficulty and those from disadvantaged
backgrounds to improve raises the general quality of the system and thus its
overall performance.
In France however, investments in education do not always reach
these groups. I had some personal experience of this malfunctioning when I
arrived in France and asked people to recommend primary schools for my own children.
The answer was: “Don’t
pick a school, pick a neighbourhood”.
How can we ensure that success at school isn’t the result of a
postcode lottery? France has already implemented reforms going in the right
direction.
Creating the environment in countries
like Mexico is possible, but it is micro environment within the country. Educating the huge bureaucratic apparatus is impossible,
and even more when the head of the system, CONADE, barely finished High School (certificate
equivalent to a GED). We gave up trying
educating the bureaucracy and limited ourselves to educate six to eight parents. Our micro-system produced a world champion
but so far we cannot influence a bigger population. Perhaps this is our fate, but we continue
trying to teach with the example.
We have touched this subject
several times.Nations want athletes to perform
well and they put money into it.Now a day’s
performance in a test as well as in a race have to do with environmental factors
which produce or not a competitive culture.This is something well study to the point of creating an “adversity score”
when taking a test as the SAT.From the
point of view of Human Rights, it is a big step, but let see how the involved parties play out; sometimes the pendulum swings to the other side and catastrophe
appears also.This is something we live
in Mexico with the new government and happened after the Mexican Revolution. The
rate exchange for the Mexican peso was one peso for two dollars before the
Mexican Revolution (1910). The production decreased to almost nothing except
for oil and raw materials after the Mexican Revolution; we still depend on these two. The worst part is that
Mexicans live in the same conditions more than a 100 years later.I grew up in one of the poorest states in
Mexico and did my medical residency in New York, when these factors were not
taken into account!It took more than 30
years to challenge the “white privilege.”The point is not to lower standards but to know that other factors are
playing a role and we should improve conditions to make the floor even, or at
least to know that somebody is competing with a handicap and have a competitive
level.We have paratriathlon for the physical
conditions, but the social ones are handicaps of the same degree. I started
with an average percentile my medical residency and finished residency at the 87th percentile (standardized test).
The Environmental
Context Dashboard includes information about students' high schools, including
the rate of teens who receive free or reduced lunch, and their home life and
neighborhoods, such as average family income, educational attainment, housing
stability and crime.
The
dashboard "shines a light on students who have demonstrated remarkable
resourcefulness to overcome challenges and achieve more with less," said
David Coleman, chief executive of the College Board, which administers the SAT.
"It enables colleges to witness the strength of students in a huge swath
of America who would otherwise be overlooked."
The scores
won't be revealed to SAT test-takers, but schools will see the numbers when
reviewing college applications.
Fifty
colleges and universities, including Yale, Florida State University and Trinity
University, took part in a pilot program last year to test what some observers
are calling an "adversity score."
We were asked in an
interview why the central Americans and south Americans have not successful triathletes
and apparently everything is in place for athletes; meaning Federations,
tournaments, high performance centers, etc.Obviously, the interviewers did not have knowledge that performance depends on the
family and environment as it is vision in the “adversity score.”Garry Kasparov, the one that lasted 20 years
as a Chess World Champion, says that intuition is the big player in performance, and intuition is learned by experience in the environment. Perhaps, fear of snakes is innate, but the rest we have to learn experiencing.
We have the subject of "adversity score" as a lecture in our
team:
To even the floor, we started forming a subculture 20 years ago to overcome the problems mentioned
above.We want to develop and teach a better
intuition to be competitive at the highest standards.
“We educate triathletes; we
do not train triathletes.”This concept
is very difficult to understand, but let see what happens in Medicine to
explain our approach to triathletes.The
following is from Medscape:
James
F. Sweeney
May 07, 2019
The
True Cost of Nonadherence
Hippocrates
warned about nonadherence. "Keep watch also on the fault of patients which
makes them lie about taking of things prescribed," he is alleged to have
said.
Much
has changed in the 2500 years since Hippocrates laid the foundation of modern
medicine, but his caution about nonadherence still holds true.
A
review in the Annals of Internal
Medicine[1] estimated that medication nonadherence
causes 125,000 deaths in this country, placing it between stroke and Alzheimer disease as the sixth most
common cause of mortality. It's also responsible for 10% of hospitalizations
and costs the healthcare system as much as $289 billion a year. About one
quarter of new prescriptions are never filled, and patients do not take their
medication about half the time.
With
the greater emphasis on value-based care and population health, more attention
than ever is being paid to the problem of nonadherence, but there is no single
proven way to correct it. And it's clear that current efforts are falling
short.
Well, Medicine started to see why we have a high failure rate
when treating patients.The reason is
simple:
Treating a nonadherent patient is frustrating for a
physician and can feel pointless. In addition, nonadherent patients can hurt a
practice's bottom line, as
medicine shifts to outcome-based reimbursement.
We do not have the problem
of reimbursement when coaching but we should.Many countries and Federations have a huge budget without results.Reimbursement based on outcome should be the
way to go to be effective and professional in what we do.This is something touched a bit in a previous
post.
The bottom line is that
coaches have not idea of what makes an athlete succeed just as doctor have
limited knowledge of why patients do not follow instructions.If the coach is correct and there is a plan
to follow we should look at the problem of nonadherence.We have been looking at it for a long long
time and have tried hard to overcome it but my guess is that we are 50/50
regarding achieving adherence.This is
without touching the point of how many points (subjects) of adherence we want
to achieve.Adherence to paying
attention is our main adherence; adherence of nutrition and recovery are easier
to achieve.
We try using electronics:
How effective tech
has been is the subject of debate and conflicting studies. What's clear,
however, is that tech will continue to be a part of comprehensive adherence
programs.
Jason Rose, MHSA, CEO of AdhereHealth, said the most
effective technology will rely on data, but add a personal touch. For example,
AdhereHealth (formerly PharmMD) scrapes data from pharmacies, physicians,
insurers, healthcare systems, and elsewhere to identify instances in which
patients are not filling prescriptions, not taking medication, or otherwise not
adhering to treatment plans.
We have known Dorian Connix
since he finished 10th in the Junior World Championship held in New
Zealand.Our competitor was 9th
then.Connix continue learning because
he had multiple point of adherence to his life plan.Nonadherence is the main cause of failure;
even if the plan is not so good, it works if there are many adherence points
from the part of the athlete.“It is
better a bad plan than no plan.”
We are looking at a huge
problem in Medicine: The number of patients needed to treat in order to have
the expected response:
Number Needed to Treat: A
Double-Edged Sword
This concept can best be
understood using the number needed to treat (NNT).1 If
a novel drug has an NNT of ten—a fairly robust effect by most standards—we are
implying that we would need to treat ten patients to prevent one from
experiencing the outcome of interest. In other words, 90% of individuals who
received this highly efficacious drug would actually derive no benefit. Are we
meeting our ethical obligation to this 90%? Do physicians owe our patients an
explanation of this phenomenon when we prescribe a medication? Should we say
that “this medication probably won’t make a difference in your life, but there
is a chance that it may. I suggest you take it.”?
During decades we ignored
the above concept due to excess of optimism from colleagues. Money is getting shorter and patients do not
want to be subjected to side effects without knowing their chances of getting
better.This is not different from “talent
identification” in triathlon.So far we
know that at the Mexican National Center for Sports (CNAR) the cost per athlete
is too elevated and we have not triathletes capable of winning a World Cup;
they hardly obtained a podium at Continental Cups.They take athletes into their program based
on their ability to swim and run short distances.It is obvious that swimming and running is
needed to win in triathlon, but there are more important variables to take into
consideration if we want to develop viable triathletes.
In the case of the Mexican
National Center, they have the numbers to start looking at this problem
differently, none of the triathletes is viable.The problem is that people at the Center are so ignorant that they do
not know what is needed to have viable triathletes.Looking and studying Mario Mola or Javier
Gomez could give us information about what is lacking in our athletes, but we run into another
problem.In order to see the
differences, we have to know what we are looking for and to be knowledgeable about the subjects;
the value of perseverance, passion, and simple professionalism (something that
lacks in the Center) need to be studied and pursue by mentors/coaches.
As a team, we have the
translational model that allows to target the athletes that could benefit with
triathlon training to the point of being at least the National Champions.Jack Daniels puts it simple and explains the reason why the Center fails producing viable athletes:
Perseverance is a key
element to accomplish something.Einstein would say: “It’s not that
I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.” At the same time, he said: “The difference between genius
and stupidity is that genius has its limits.”How long should
we perseverate trying to solve a problem?That depends on the culture and experience.I remembered a friend doing a fellowship at
Harvard who found out that a patient forged a signature to obtain more psychotropics, the pharmacy called him up to inform him.He
wanted to speak to the patient regarding the matter, but the “boss” just told
him to call the police because he could end up in jail without a license.The boss knew by experience that the best
solution was to call the police.My
friend wanted to perseverate with the patient to learn more about her.
We have a case of perseverance in triathlon that
has cost a lot of dollars to Mexico without expected results.Any other nation would stop trying the same
format except that money for the Federation/organizer in Mexico would stop
flowing.The economic reasons for perseverating won even when “fake news” were needed to support the program.At the end, the purpose of keeping the
program even when using “fake news” was not sport related.It is just like my friend who wanted to call
the patient to know more about the situation and the patient, losing the
purpose of helping the patient to overcome addictions (sometimes the police can
help to put limits to the situation).Remember what Einstein said: “The
difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits.”
The Mexican State has supported Crisanto Grajales
since he started practicing triathlon because he has been the Mexican Champion, he
even won the National Amateur Sportsmanship in 2016.Camps around the world for him and his crew
were paid by the state; budget is justified by winning events like the Central
American Events:
- 16th place at the 2017 ITU World Triathlon Leeds;
- 13th place at the 2017 ITU World Triathlon Gold Coast;
- 19th place at the 2017 ITU World Triathlon Yokohama;
- 24th place at the 2017 New Plymouth ITU Triathlon World Cup;
- 21st place at the 2017 ITU World Triathlon Abu Dhabi;
- 7th place at the 2016 ITU World Triathlon Grand Final Cozumel; and
- 12th place at the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympic Games.
Resources are limited as well as time. Ignorance allows "fake news" to be part of our History and our governing bodies believe in these news; people called it marketing effect. The format we have used as a nation to create triathletes have failed long time ago and we continued using it because of economic reasons.
