Day 12 – "Pain is Temporary, Glory is Forever": The Sinkovic Brothers' Gold Medal Mindset | The Game Inside The Games

Michael Gervais (0:00)

Day 12 in Paris. Your tank is empty. You've fallen way behind the leader. How do you summon the internal resources to come back and win gold? We have a couple of incredible Olympians who are going to help us answer that question. Welcome back, or welcome to The Game Inside The Games on Finding Mastery. I'm Dr. Michael Gervais, by trade and training, a high-performance psychologist.

Nastia Liukin (0:25)

And I'm Nastia Lukin, Olympic gold medalist. And we are here in Paris. And in this special series, we unlock the psychology of pivotal, often unseen moments that can make or break an athlete's dream. What's it like to focus a lifetime of experience into one performance, a single moment?

Michael Gervais (0:42)

What goes on inside the minds of the brightest stars while the whole world is watching? Welcome back to Paris and let's dive into The Game Inside The Games.

Nastia Liukin (0:52)

Welcome back to Paris and The Game Inside The Games, presented by Microsoft Copilot. Today, we're sitting down with two rowing legends and brothers, Martin and Valent Sinkovic, who won their third gold medal here in Paris, defeating Great Britain with an incredible surge late in the race.

Michael Gervais (1:07)

Rowing is a sport that brings the mind into play like no other. The physical demands, the relationship with pain, down two and a half seconds to the Great Britain team with little left in the tank. How does one summon the internal resources to come back and win gold? We're about to find out.

Nastia Liukin (1:27)

First of all, welcome. Congratulations.

Valent Sinkovic (1:29)

Really nice intro. I kept the same.

Martin Sinkovic (1:31)

Yeah, well done.

Valent Sinkovic (1:33)

Yeah, very good.

Nastia Liukin (1:34)

So take us back to those final moments of the race when you're about to win the gold medal. Can you recall those feelings, the emotions, what was going on in your mind?

Martin Sinkovic (1:45)

Yeah, I think the final moments are the easiest one. You know, the last 300 meters, you can't feel anything anymore. You know, you are that tired. So I can honestly say that is the easiest part of the race. But I think the hardest for us was on 1000 meters. So in the middle of the race, we were already really tired. And we think we wouldn't even get the medal. You know, we thought, OK, we will fight for the medal. We'll give our best, hope we will get the bronze.

But then, you know, we start to push hard. We start to suppress the Swiss and the Romanian guys. And we see the Britons are really close to us. And then we start all in. And I even, I looked at the race today. I saw that like for the last 350 meters, we had like 44 strokes, 44 strokes per minute, which is really, really high.

Nastia Liukin (2:43)

What is the normal? Approximately?

Martin Sinkovic (2:45)

38, 39

Nastia Liukin (2:45)

Okay, wow.

Michael Gervais (2:46)

Oh, so you were moving. So did both of you have that same feeling at about, let's say a thousand meters, where it was like, oh no, uh oh, this is, it's slipping away. Did both of you have the same type of experience?

Valent Sinkovic (2:59)

Yeah, yeah, for sure. We talked about it after the race. because in the rolling race, you can't talk to each other because it's too, too painful and you don't have a brain, you know.

We just hear some, a few commands when we are getting up with a stroke rate and I'm on the stroke and a brother follows me and then I just say go a little bit higher. Not like that. We have just some one word, one word.

Michael Gervais (3:27)

You grunt.

Valent Sinkovic (3:29)

Like go. And then we go together. But yeah, like Martin said, on the middle of the race, when we pushed, I said I'd set him go and we pushed for the next 200 meters and nothing happened, you know. And even three screw were more in front of us than before, you know.

Michael Gervais (3:49)

Oh, that's interesting. So you realize you're behind. You said, uh-oh, in your mind, it's slipping away.

Valent Sinkovic (3:55)

It weren't the tactics.

Michael Gervais (3:56)

It was, say it again.

Valent Sinkovic (3:58)

It weren't the tactics, the tactics, you know. The tactics was different, you know. But everything, everything was outside of what we hoped to do, you know.

Michael Gervais (4:07)

And so you've got enough in you to say, let's push. So you go. And then when you're still behind, what happened? What was the psychology at that point?