Forget Adam Peaty, the athlete who was most on my mind following the Olympic swimming was Max Litchfield, the person The Sun and BBC have described as the unluckiest swimmer ever, writes Simon Burch.
Fourth in the 400m individual medley in Rio. Fourth in Tokyo and now fourth in Paris, by just 0.19 of a second – Max is the epitome of always the bridesmaid, never the bride.
That’s sport, he sorrowfully concluded during his interview when he was pressed on how he was feeling, having trained for a total of 12 years without ever setting foot on an Olympic podium which, for swimmers, despite their world championships, is the pinnacle of their career.
Sport is certainly cruel, and what made me feel sorry for Max is that, unless he can triumph at a future games (he’s 29), he’ll go down in history undeservedly as a victim of bad luck.
But perhaps that’s not as bad as the fate that befalls other fourth-placers who are simply forgotten, even though they’re as deserving of admiration as everybody else and often lose their chance of immortality through fate and the narrowest of margins.
During this year’s Olympics I’ve watched so many events where I’m left thinking about the athletes at the back, or the athletes who fall off their bikes, or slip off a piece of gym equipment, or who are only-ever an also-ran (or swam, or jumped, and so on).
Who are they? What are their backgrounds? How hard have they had to work to get their chance to represent their country on the biggest sporting stage of all?
In the vast majority of cases, we never get to know.
The issue with the Olympics is that it’s a two-week tsunami of sporting action featuring hundreds of competitors who most people have never heard of doing sports we only ever watch once every four years.
And so, to make sense of it, we look for things we can relate to: an athlete from Great Britain, or our local town, whose familiarity means we feel we have something in common with because, in some way, through our nationality, we share the same story.
Some athletes we may have seen before, others, like Adam Peaty and Tom Daley, have stories that transcend their sports. Others will create their stories by winning something as we watch, writing their narrative by demonstrating their super-human prowess.
But woe betide those who don’t win. While winning means your story gets told, losing means it doesn’t, unless you do it in a dramatic fashion. And, the more you win, the more your story grows, alongside the sponsorship and the fame, which, due to money, will help you win more.
How like the world of business this is, where the vast majority of companies ply their trade in the shadows, unknown by the wider world, while the lion’s share of the attention and coverage is taken by a relatively small number of companies and personalities.
The reason for this is the same as in the Olympics: they have a story. Maybe their story emerged because they have been successful and win a load of awards, or maybe their success came because they had a story, which attracted the attention they need to sell their products.
Since storytelling is at the heart of PR, this is where PR is different to advertising. Advertising tells you what the company does and what its products are about: it’s the equivalent of telling us what is the athlete’s personal best, what their favourite event is and what we might expect of them on the field of play.
PR is their backstory: the stuff against which we measure their worth as an athlete and round out their brand. Who inspires them? What challenges have they overcome? What emotions are they feeling? What made them want to become a champion?
It doesn’t add anything to our understanding of what they can do as an athlete, but it makes us care. It invests us in their performance and makes us cheer at their triumphs, commiserate with their defeats and makes us look for their name on the start line the next time.
So this is why PR – the award wins, new clients, expansion and appointments, founder’s stories, entrepreneurs profiles and opinion pieces are so important in the Olympic-sized task of building your brand.
Having and building a story gives you the edge, it makes you different to a line-up of similar companies offering similar services and gets people engaged which you.
Like Max Litchfield, nothing can ever be taken for granted in your chosen occupation and not everyone can hit the heights, but if you have a story – and know how to tell it and use it to your advantage – then it helps to make your customers care.
And it helps you to be talked about which, as Oscar Wilde said and hundreds of Olympic athletes are finding out right now, is better than not being talked about at all.
