Thanks Coach! Craig Mottram to Nic Bideau
Issue: Volume 29 Number 1
An hour before distance runner Craig Mottram lined up for the start of the 5000m event at last year’s World Championships in Helsinki, his enigmatic coach Nic Bideau asked Mottram if he was ready for the ‘school sports’.
It wasn’t, Mottram says, that Bideau was trying to lighten the mood with a bad joke; rather it was Bideau was telling him to treat it simply as another race.
Mottram went on to claim a bronze medal, the first non-African to claim a medal in that distance in 18 years.
Bideau was there in the stadium, calling the race for SBS TV — at least he called the first nine-and-a-half laps, breaking off to watch the last three intently.
After the race he simply told Mottram he could ‘tick off that bronze medal now. There’s only silver and gold to go’.
Mottram and Bideau have known one another for almost eight years. The 25-year-old counts Bideau as ‘a mate, a friend and a business adviser’, but is quick to point out that while he enjoys hanging out with the much older Bideau, ‘he’s not my drinking buddy. I do have my own set of friends’.
Bideau ‘shares my vision’ Mottram says. It’s a vision that sees Mottram becoming the world’s fastest middle-distance runner.
The two live 100m apart in suburban Melbourne and less than one km apart when they’re based in London. They speak every day, but Mottram says Bideau is ‘not easy to get to know’.
‘He gives his time sparingly, but when he works with you, he’s there 100 per cent,’ Mottram says. ‘He’s an absolute professional.’
Most in athletics circles seem to either love or hate Bideau. There appears little room for grey. He had a much publicised break up with Cathy Freeman in which he was labelled the scoundrel. He has variously been described as ‘straight talking’, ‘charismatic’, ‘shrewd’ and even ‘controlling’.
Mottram adds an even more colourful description: ‘He’s a prick, he’s reliable and he’s simplistic, and he’ll probably hate me describing him that way’.
He says that Bideau has a way of getting ‘under your skin’. ‘I might go around to his and Sonia’s (Bideau’s partner and distance runner Sonia O’Sullivan) for a barbecue and after that I’ll have a biscuit and Nic will say something like “that’ll hurt you on your 70 minute training run tomorrow”.’
He says Bideau likes to break down races to their most simple elements. ‘Nic says that you get out of it only what you put in and that everyone else out on the track is desperate. To win, you have to be just as or more desperate than them.’
Mottram says that one of Bideau’s less endearing habits is that he mumbles when he’s under pressure. ‘When he’s stressed he talks fast and this disintegrates into mumbles and then finally grunts,’ Mottram laughs, but then backs that up by saying that he is constantly amazed by his coach’s instincts about his charges’ stress levels.
‘When I was in Helsinki for the World Champisonships we were staying in the same hotel. I went out for a run and he was sitting in the lobby … just sitting there, doing nothing. When I came back he was gone and I went up to my room to watch some TV. I was getting more and more stressed the closer it got to race time and suddenly there was a knock on the door. It was Nic. He came in and just spent the next 45 minutes talking about everything other than running. It was exactly what I needed, but it was as if he knew.’
The two have come a long way since first meeting in 1998 at a school sports carnival at Melbourne’s Olympic Park.
On that less-than-auspicious occasion, Bideau, who was then Cathy Freeman’s manager, introduced himself to the 17-year-old Mottram. ‘I’m Nic Bideau. … Cathy’s manager’, Mottram recalls Bideau saying. ‘Who’s Cathy?’ Mottram replied. ‘I didn’t even know that athletes had managers,’ Mottram says, laughing at the memory.
Over the following years, their paths often crossed. When Mottram ran in the World Junior Cross-Country Championships in Ireland in 2001, Bideau was there to watch and offer advice. Bideau became more and more involved with the youngster, gaining Mottram access to various athletics meetings around the world.
Bideau became his full-time coach in late 2002. Bruce Scriven had previously trained Mottram since he was a schoolboy. ‘Nic and Bruce didn’t really see eye to eye,’ Mottram says. ‘It got to a point where our arrangement was no longer working and I had to make a decision [about leaving Scriven]. It came down to purely being a business decision but it’s the hardest decision I’ve made in my career so far.’
He says people form very strong views on Bideau’s coaching style. ‘They can be very judgemental, but they don’t know Nic. It’s like the tall poppy problem. They just want to cut him down. They say he wants things all his own way.
‘But Nic’s not isolating. He’s perfectly happy for anyone to come along to training. People don’t look at the big picture. They don’t realise what he’s done for athletics as a sport in Australia. He’s opened up all these doors and created opportunities for athletes like me to keep running and training domestically and our profile means that [international] athletes come out and we’ve got good competition.
‘People who don’t like his “way” of coaching need to open their eyes. He’s not arrogant … well, even if he is, his way works. What more can you say?’
As for Mottram, barring injury he has at least another 10 years in the sport, but he’s not tempted to take up coaching himself at any point. ‘I don’t think I’d be a good coach. I think people who are naturally talented find it difficult to see why others can’t pick things up quickly. I used to teach kids to swim because I was a good swimmer myself [Ed’s note: Mottram was a triathlete before turning his attention to running] and I couldn’t understand how some kids could be afraid of the water.’
That said Mottram is, however, taking on one small coaching job in coming months — training his brother to run in the London marathon. ‘He and his mate were in a pub and they had a bet. I don’t think his mate knew about our family’s sporting genes,’ Mottram says, referring also to his brother Neil, an Australian basketball player.
The change of pace will likely come as a breath of fresh air after Mottram’s disappointing Commonwealth Games in March. He had happily deferred to Bideau’s coaching experience for his own assault on the 5000m and 1500m at the Melbourne Games, but despite going into the races in ‘the best form of my life’, fate stepped in to hinder Mottram in both races. In the 5000m it came in the form of 19-year-old Kenyan Augustine Choge whose previous best was a world junior cross country championship win. Despite Mottram and Bideau’s plan to take the pace higher over the last kilometre and test the Kenyans’ sprinting abilities, Choge was able to draw away from Mottram with 250m to go and take the gold medal in a new Commonwealth record, relegating Mottram to silver.
In the 1500 metres, having worked his way into third position, Mottram was accidentally tripped at the 800-metre mark when an English athlete fell behind him, clipping his heel. He lost too much ground on the field and finished ninth. Despite having walked away from media immediately after the race, Mottram a day or so later heard to comment: ‘I’ve been watching the cars (Adelaide 500) all day and they’ve been crashing everywhere, so you’ve got to keep with the trend I suppose.’
