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CHENNAI: Paddy Upton and Mike Horn go back a long way. Upton, one of the foremost mental conditioning coaches in all of sport today, had seen how Horn had supplied fresh impetus to two of India's biggest sporting teams in 2010 and 2011.
In 2010, Upton had invited Horn, a South Africa-Swiss explorer, for a session with the Indian Test team. A year later, Horn got a similar invite, this time to have a session with the white-ball side before the home World Cup.
Sometime later, Upton and Horn had a few days with the South African Test team in Switzerland ahead of a crunch series against England. After those few days in the mountains, South Africa's red-ball side won that series.
So, in the months leading up to the Paris Olympics, Horn had received a call from his good friend. A similar trip to the Alps would have to be arranged. The visitors? The Indian men's hockey team. While Horn understood the assignment, the Indian players, then, didn't have any idea of what would await them once they reached the Alps?
In simplistic terms, the exercise was to give a new perspective on pressure in the world of hockey as compared to pressure in the real world. "In one or two situations," Upton tells this daily, "if they got something wrong, it could have resulted in, erm, death.
"In hockey, you aren't seriously faced with death. You are faced with losing or, may be, at worse, an injury. When you actually face death, you realise the pressure you face in hockey isn't that big. It's not that bad in the context of life. That's what I knew would be one of the biggest advantages of Switzerland. They got a different perspective."
That may sound like hyperbole in the extreme but the South African, who first joined hands with the men's team before the Asian Games in 2023, takes this daily through the exercise when the team, for want of a better phrase, knew one of their colleagues could get into grave danger.
"There's one particular exercise where we are walking along a narrow snow ridge," Upton, who experienced his first Olympics, explains. "If the players fell on one side, which had already happened, it was safe. We knew what needed to happen if you fall down on that side. How do you recover the fall and so on... we had already done that.
"But if one person slipped and fell on the other side... death. There was a plan, we were roped in. People were tied into groups of six, there was one stretch of rope and every two metres people were tied on. There were six people tied on to one length of rope and if one person slipped and fell down on the danger side, there was a clear plan what the other five people needed to do immediately to rescue the situation."
If you were to ask the need for such an exercise where one of the outcomes could be death, it kind of went back to one of the themes the management had prepared. "When sh*t happens," Upton says, almost matter-of-factly. In life as in business as in sport, sh*t is going to happen. That's a certainty. We had mentally prepared the guys that something somewhere was going to go wrong. Either 1-3 down with minutes left or a goalkeeper going down with an injury with no replacement or... losing a player to a red card in a big game."
As it happened, India lost Amit Rohidas for a deliberate raised stick against Great Britain in the quarterfinals. Playing with 10 men for 43 minutes and coming on the right side of a result is almost unheard of in modern hockey because the game moves so fast.
"We couldn't predict all the things that would go wrong but we could predict that, along our journey, stuff would go wrong. Then, it was all about rescuing that situation proactively rather than panic and back away. As many athletes do when things go against them, psychologically, there's a tendency to use that as an excuse. To be fair, getting a red card with 43 minutes to go is a good excuse. But we were prepared, we didn't want to use that as excuse."
It was, one can inarguably say, one of Upton's mandates when he accepted the responsibility of mentally conditioning the team in 2023. In Indian hockey's recent history — in this context, recent pretty much goes back a good 30-40 years — a backs-to-the-wall win like this in a high-stakes game has been few and far between.
Here's Upton. "That was part of my mandate when the coach and captain took me on board a year ago," he says. "It was identified that in big moments against some opposition, India tended to not win in those big moments.
"But again, even if I did a great job, if the team wasn't exceptionally fit, they would not have been able to hold on for 43 minutes against a team like GB. The coach had very clear plans. Mentally, physically, strategically, we were prepared for those moments. Switzerland did play a part because we put the players in really challenging situations."
One of the big non-negotiables within the squad is the physicality, there is now no room for flakiness. Even before the squad left for the Games, they knew that would either be the fittest squad or at least the joint-fittest. "That's a non-negotiable and all credit to Craig (coach Craig Fulton), Alan (trainer Alan Tan) and the players who grulled through training sessions to the point where we were comfortable that while we might not be fittest team in the world there's nobody fitter than us."
It showed. Upton, Fulton, the rest of the support staff and the players wanted to return with a shinier medal — a departure from 2021 when a bronze was considered the best-case scenario — but a medal continues the side's upward trajectory.
Four years down the line if and when the team qualifies for the Olympics, don't discount Upton giving Horn a call. For another death-defying assignment.