Boldon's Ten Track Commandments

by Mike
(Jamaica)

While speaking at the Business of Sports seminar last week at the Jamaica Pegasus Hotel in Kingston, former 200m world champion Oto Boldon’s left ten commandments with the athetes...

1. Save your money like your life depends on it — it does. Make your money earn more while you are earning a lot of it and yes get a pro to do this. Your cousin who is good with money does not count.

2. Europe can be wild and crazy and fun and it can also shorten your career drastically if you are incapable of not acting a damn fool there. European wine and men/women have prematurely ended many a promising careers.

3. Your career is infinitely more fun with a good training group. Choose your training group wisely. Chances are if you hate your career after, it’s because you either hated your training partners, bounced around several camps or had no training partners.

4. Make use of the best things about being a track athlete — the travel. Years in exotic locales and all you know are hotels and McDonalds. That is pointless! Get outside. Take pictures. Learn something. Experience other lands.

5. One day you’ll wake up and you won’t be fast anymore. Does a career define your whole life or existence? It shouldn’t. Have a life so you don’t have to go get one after.

6. Figure out what job you will do next in early or mid-career not post-career. Few get to decide when they retire. Most get forced out.

7. The competitors you think you hate will be your friends when you are retired. Don’t take it that seriously. Compete without hate.

8. No one from that shoe company you love so much loves you. The romance with no finance is a nuisance. The more you love them and the more in love you are, the less you make.

9. No one ever remembers the pain but medals are forever. Push. No pro-track athlete has ever died from a workout. Post-career regret sucks.

10. Save some of all that free gear that you constantly give away — it will end.