I'm Matt Dixon and welcome to the Purple Patch podcast.

The mission of Purple Patch is to empower and educate every human being to reach their athletic potential.

Through the lens of athletic potential you reach your human potential.

The purpose of this podcast is to help time-starved people everywhere in a great sport into life.

And welcome to the Purple Patch podcast, as ever, your host Matt Dixon. And I had just returned from a trip of a lifetime.

Yes, I was at Paris for the Olympics.

It was my very first Olympic Games experience as a spectator.

Now, I dedicated years of my life.

I'm aiming to make the Olympic Games as an athlete,

and I missed it twice, Barcelona in 1992, Atlanta in

1996. So I never got to go as an athlete. And until this year, I'd never spectated. I'd just

watched it in television. Obviously, in my formative years, it was massively impactful. Now, as a coach,

I helped some Olympic athletes on their journey,

although most of my elite coaching was focused on long-course triathlon, aka the Ironman,

which of course is not an Olympic event. And so the reason that I went to the Olympic Games in

Paris just a couple of weeks ago was that it was all around fun, a spectator with my family. And it was terrific. But of course,

while I'm there, I couldn't help watching it also through the lens of a coach. And over all of the

events that we saw, including the final of the women's team gymnastics, the triathlon events,

multiple nights of swimming finals, track and field.

I saw all consistent trends starting to emerge amongst the participating athletes.

Much of the behaviour, the body language, the actions of competing in Olympians reminded me of my work with world-class athletes.

And I realised that over the week of spectating, there were

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