What Do You Do The Day After You Win? (ft. Yaya Touré, Ben Ainslie & Ian Thorpe)
The High Performance Podcast
High Performance
4.6 • 4.8K Ratings
🗓️ 13 May 2026
⏱️ 32 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Everyone talks about what it takes to win. Nobody talks about what comes the morning after. In this episode, Jake and Damian go deep into the HPP archive to explore one of the most uncomfortable truths in high performance: why the moment of victory so often leaves elite performers feeling empty, lost, and at a total loss for what comes next.
Featuring conversations with Yaya Touré on the strange emptiness of retirement, Ben Ainslie on the post-Olympic blues that hit 24 hours after winning gold, Ian Thorpe on walking away from a sport that stopped feeling like his own, Héctor Bellerín on why your value should burn like a candle - steady, never spiking - and Billy Monger on finding purpose after having it stripped away entirely.
Jake and Damian also get into the psychology of why we delay our happiness, what self-determination theory tells us about intrinsic motivation, and why the people who handle the end of peak achievement best are the ones who were never only defined by it.
The question isn't really 'what do you do the day after you win?' It's 'who are you when the goal is gone?'
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Listen to the full episodes:
Yaya Touré https://pod.fo/e/3f55a1
Ben Ainslie https://pod.fo/e/661e6
Ian Thorpe https://pod.fo/e/d9a3a
Héctor Bellerín https://pod.fo/e/d3369
Billy Monger https://pod.fo/e/a8d2c
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi there, you're listening to High Performance with myself Jay Cumpfrey and Damien Hughes. How are you? I'm good, mate. How are you? You're all right? Very well. Thank you very much. So today we're going to talk about what happens the day after you win. Because I actually think that so much of the conversation we have on this show is about equipping yourself to get the win. Yeah. All too often, people don't talk about the day after the win, but there's actually a really |
| 0:22.9 | uncomfortable truth here that I think we need to discuss. |
| 0:25.3 | And this isn't just about gold medal winners or people on the top of podiums or people |
| 0:29.2 | exiting businesses. |
| 0:30.2 | This is an everyday conversation for average people like you and I that are just getting |
| 0:36.4 | on with our lives, |
| 0:42.1 | assuming that we're either going to be really happy when a certain thing happens or even worse, telling ourselves we can't be happy until that amazing thing happens in our lives. |
| 0:48.7 | Because so often people have told us on this show that when they do achieve incredible things, |
| 0:52.7 | there just isn't that moment of joy, that day after tends to be lower rather than higher. And I still, you know what, I still can't really work out what's going on here after seven years of having these conversations. Well, like, do you remember when we both came off of the call when we spoke with Carl Frampton, the boxer. |
| 1:11.0 | Yes, and you immediately said there's problems there. |
| 1:13.5 | Yeah, and I'm glad that he seems to have navigated his way through it. |
| 1:17.7 | But he was talking about I need to win a third world title and then my career will be complete. |
| 1:22.1 | Then I can walk away happy. |
| 1:23.7 | Then I'll know that I've fulfilled my mission. |
| 1:26.2 | And we were like, you've already won two world titles. |
| 1:28.8 | You've inspired a generation of young fighters. |
| 1:31.8 | You've achieved everything. |
| 1:33.1 | You don't need this to get there. |
| 1:35.4 | You know, like we've seen it so often, aren't we? |
| 1:37.0 | I remember when I did the interview with Alistair Brownlee. |
| 1:40.3 | And I've quoted this so often to people when he went, |
| 1:43.7 | I have stood on the top step of the Olympic podium twice with the gold medal around my neck. |
... |
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