"The child will have their own natural passion; you let them choose their goal, then you nurture them."
Nev Hackett realised there was something different about his son Grant when the boy was just six years old. Grant was playing in the local pool when Nev asked how many laps he could swim. Grant said 20. "I laughed, thinking that he was kidding himself as it was a 50-metre pool," Nev explains. "So I said, 'OK then, do 20.' And sure enough he did."
Even when Grant started winning races, Nev and Hackett's mum, Margaret, didn't think anything of it. "In all honesty we just thought that [he] must have been [in] a weak age group, because he was always so far in front, " Nev says.
The image of the maniacal, overbearing parent is a staple in elite sport, but the reality is different, according to Mark Dobson, author of Parenting Freak Ability, a new book that reveals the secrets of parents who raised some of Australia's leading athletes.
"The one clear lesson that came through is that it's the parents who support but don't force their kids into doing things [who] have the most success," says Dobson.
"The child will have their own natural passion; you let them choose their goal, then you nurture them."
Dobson, a long-time performance adviser to elite athletes and coaches, spent a year interviewing the parents of 14 top athletes, including Grant Hackett, basketballer Andrew Gaze, Test cricketer Peter Siddle and the World Cup-winning Wallaby Richard Harry.
His book is an insight into their often exhausting and exhilarating lives: Margaret Hackett describes how at dinner Grant would be so exhausted from training that he had to use two hands to lift his fork; Ken Sinclair, father of freestyle motocross rider Cameron Sinclair, tells of the night he thought he had watched his son die in a horrific accident. ("I was cold and then my muscles all locked up," Ken says. "I was screaming.")
Susan Davis, the mother of the extreme skier Anna Segal, explains how she made her daughter sleep on the bathroom floor at Mount Buller after she complained about her equipment. ''I said, 'OK, tonight you're going to discover what it's like to be really underprivileged,' " Davis says.
The book raises interesting questions about the nature of sporting excellence and what it takes to become the best. A natural affinity for their chosen field is important; Anna Segal once told her mum that "skiing feels more normal that walking".
But as Dobson is keen to point out, "you don't have to be a genetic freak - you just have to work hard. Too often families look for their child to be acknowledged but they don't want to do the hard yards to get there.
''Rocky Aloisi [soccer coach and father of John and Ross] tells how in all his days of coaching, parents would always ask, 'Do you think my child will get into the team?' Or 'Do you think my child can play for Australia?' But no parent ever asked him, 'What did you do to get your child into the Australian team?' People just forget about the work ethic."
But parental support is not the same as meddling. "Some parents get too involved," Phil Harry, father of Wallaby Richard Harry, says.
Often that support will be unthinking. Margaret Hackett tells how she and a 12-year-old Grant had just watched Kieren Perkins win the 1500 metres at the Atlanta Olympic Games. "Grant asked me, 'Mum, do you think I could do that?' And I said, 'Of course you can.' I was just being supportive. I wasn't connecting directly to the idea of him winning the 1500 metres. Grant has since said that because I said that, he knew he could do it. I had no idea it was such a defining moment or him," she says. "But it really was."
Source: SMH
