A lot of this is close to home

The Herald reports


IT was the moment that the talent coach realised he could not spot talent.


It was not his surroundings that made Usain Bolt a sporting superstar
Rasmus Ankersen and seven other coaches at Danish club FC Midtjylland were asked to write down the names of five players out of 16 candidates who would go on to be professional footballers. The results were placed in a sealed envelope.

Five years later, in 2009, Simon Kjaer, a product of the academy, was sold for £3.3m to Palermo, before joining Wolfsburg for £9m, then subsequently signing for Roma for the same fee. The envelope was then opened. Not one coach had identified Kjaer as a potential top-class centre-back. "It was my moment of truth," Ankersen says. "We were highly skilled coaches, with UEFA A licences, and we did not identify him. Other coaches did the same. He was only at our academy because other clubs rejected him and because his dad was our kit man."

This epiphany launched Ankersen on a journey around the world. He quit his job and spent all his savings on plane fares. "I became obsessed with talent and how it is spotted and nurtured," he says. "I went to the spots where talent was concentrated."

These trips to Ethiopia, Russia, Kenya, South Korea and Jamaica produced The Gold Mine Effect, a fascinating book that explains how talent must be spotted and nurtured and why rich seams of great performers are found in unlikely surroundings.

Ankersen's itinerary included Bekoji in Ethiopia, a village of 17,000 souls that has produced 10 Olympic gold medallists and 32 world champions. He also arrived in a taxi on a parched piece of grass in Kingston, momentarily incredulous that this could be the launching pad of a Jamaican sprint gold run. He then headed to a programme based outside Seoul that produces 35% of the world's top women golfers.

So how and why does this happen? Why do great athletes seem to congregate? Ankersen believes that too much emphasis is placed on genetic factors. He describes the attribution of success to genes as the propagation of a myth. One might assume Kenyan runners, for example, have an in-built advantage by training at altitude but Ankersen stresses a different environment as crucial to development.

He points out there is no better motivation than to train beside the best and be routinely beaten as he was when running with 14-year-old Kenyans. He states, too, that "what you see is not what you get" because potential can become overlooked when the level of performance is be assessed as everything. "There is a talent that whispers and talent that shouts," Ankersen says. "The talent of Usain Bolt shouts but Asafa Powell if a different case."

Stephen Francis, the coach who assembled a very speedy conveyor belt of Jamaican sprinters, saw Powell training alone without a structured programme and knew he could improve him. He did. Francis, the best sprint coach in the world, is a statistician.

Ankersen learned that the best coaches did not have to practise the discipline or even to have a personal knowledge of it. They had to create conditions for talent to grow. "We overrate facilities and underrate character," says Ankersen, whose immersion as a coach followed a cruciate injury that ended his career as a footballer at 19 years of age. "Stephen Francis trains the best on a patch of scarred grass and in a basic gym. He says his facilities are not designed for comfort but for hard work."

Ankersen also believes that innate ability is never all. "Talent is just the beginning of the journey and the danger is that young boys and girls with it say to themselves: 'I have the talent so why should I work hard'."

He pointed out the most productive period for any sportsman or women is when they say to themselves: "I don't want to look good any more, I want to get better."

He has distilled the lessons of the gold mines to eight concepts which are brilliantly detailed in his book. However, one of the main strands is self-motivation and that this can be inculcated by parents. One of his mantras is that not pushing your children is irresponsible. He accepts that this principle can be misinterpreted and he is not an advocate of bullying or of making unrealistic demands. But he says: "The parent factor is important. They can show their children the value of hard work and of preparing properly. The real lesson is that gold mines must be created not discovered."

This is an apposite lesson as Ankersen was at Hampden yesterday to speak to parents of the children in the Scottish Football Association's high performance programme.

This brings us back to Kjaer who was "lazy and arrogant" and who is now a top-level performer at 24 in Serie A. The defender gained motivation, improved his discipline and became the best product of the academy. This was achieved with the help of skilful coaching and with an astute psychologist. But the change had to occur within Kjaer, who is happy to have his case discussed by his former mentor.

So what advice has Ankersen for a Scottish nation mired in failure at the international level of football? "First, you have to realise this is not a talent problem. You have the talent. You just have not identified it or learned how to bring it through," he says.

But what would be the first thing he would do if placed in charge of Scottish sport? "Start the children earlier," he says immediately. "I would give children gymnastic lessons at two so they had a foundation in movement. That is a big window of opportunity. I would have fun programmes so that if they did not want to play football they can use these skills in another way. "

Ankersen's message is captivating, provocative and persuasive. His talk to the parents was applauded loudly. More pertinently, he sold out a bagful of books to his audience. A clap of hands can be unconvincing but there is an impressive sincerity in a group of Scots queueing to part with a tenner.

* The Gold Mine Effect is published by Icon Books

This article was posted on 4-Apr-2013, 07:30 by Hugh Barrow.