On meeting a Paralympic legend.

I recently had the privilege of meeting Chris Holmes. I have to say I didn't know who he was, but he turned out to be a brilliant and motivational speaker. As a boy he was keen on sport, including rugby and cricket, and he was a county standard swimmer. He had three ambitions: to get his A-Levels, to go to Cambridge, and to represent his country at sport. Then, when he was 14 years old, he woke up one morning to discover that he’s lost his sight. He had a genetic eye condition called exudative vitreoretinopathy (the retina is folded and doesn't grow properly, so it tears easily), but up until this point his eyesight hadn't been badly affected. But even now that his sight had been lost, he was still determined to achieve his three goals. Chris returned to the pool and committed to the same training regime as sighted swimmers aspiring for the Olympics. He got straight As at A-Level and read politics at Cambridge, but his first swimming championships wasn't such a success. This was the Junior European Championships in Moscow, just a year after he’d lost his sight. After his race, an official said to him “It’s a long way to come 28th out of 29”. Chris saw that in order to finish on the podium he’d have to improve his time by about six seconds – a massive time in a 100-metre swim. But then he did a really clever thing: he worked out the number of training sessions that he would do before the Barcelona Olympics in 1992, and calculated that he would only have to improve by one five-hundredths of a second per session. This seemed eminently possible. I was immediately reminded of Sir Clive Woodward’s famous quote “Winning the World Cup was not about doing one thing 100% better, but about doing 100 things 1% better”. I asked Chris if anyone had helped him come up with his idea, but it was entirely his own reasoning. The training regime he followed meant getting up at 4.40 in the morning, and swimming 7,000 metres in the morning, and another 7,000 metres in the evening. He did this, six days a week, for 17 years. He would go on to win six gold medals in Barcelona, and nine Olympic medals in a career in which he broke 35 World records. When talking about his achievements, Chris would often begin a sentence by saying “I was lucky enough to win…” Clearly, hard work counted considerably more than luck. But what struck me was the phenomenal mental strength he had at just 14 and 15 years old. I suppose you could argue that he was “lucky” to have that. Chris Holmes is the most remarkable person I've ever met. He’s almost certainly the most remarkable that I shall ever meet. David Donner

Olympic Countdown - Swimming

Synaesthesia is a condition in which there is cross-activation within the sensory areas of the brain, so that activity in one area (say vision), excites activity in another, such as smell. There are thought to be over a hundred different types, but in the most common form, letter, numbers of days/weeks/months of the year evoke the experience of colour. For some, swimming evokes colour. Danko Nikolic at the Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt has researched this phenomenon. In 2009, Hazem Toutounji, a national swimming champion for Syria, told Nikolic that each swimming style was bathed in a distinct colour in his mind's eye. Uta Jurgens, a graduate student of Nikolic's, and a keen swimmer, admitted that her trips to the pool, too, were awash with colour. She sees red whenever she swims the breaststroke. Backstroke is lavender, butterfly sky-blue. Nikolic and colleagues showed Jurgens and Toutounji, plus a group of non-synaesthete volunteers, four black-and-white photographs of swimmers performing front crawl, backstroke, breaststroke or butterfly. Their task was to find the exact colour that the photos evoked in a book containing more than 5500 colours. A month later, Nikolic repeated the test. By assigning each colour in the book coordinates in a three-dimensional "colour space", he was able to calculate that the difference between the colours chosen on the two occasions was 8 times smaller for his synaesthetes than for non-synaesthetes. Nikolic then performed a second experiment, known as a Stroop Test. In the original Stroop Test, the names of colours were printed out but in the “wrong” colour. For instance, the word “red” might be printed in blue. It was found that it was much more difficult for participants to name the colour when it was printed in this way than when it was printed in red. In this test, the group were shown the same photographs with each photo printed in a different colour. The subjects were asked to name the colour of the photo as fast as possible. Both Toutounji and Jurgens took significantly longer to name the colour when it did not match the one evoked by their synaesthesia. These tests suggests that the concept of swimming can produce synaesthesia just as well as swimming itself, although there may be other forms, such as when touch produces certain emotions, where this is not the case. It seems that we may all have a bit of synaesthesia within us. In music, many of us associate low notes with dark colours and high notes with brighter ones. It’s thought that this crossover of senses may lay behind human creativity. Some scientists believe it may even have been how humans developed language, if sounds evoked the object that was being described. I don’t think I’m very creative: I wish I saw more colours when I swim – it would certainly make it more fun. David Donner