One of my former colleagues at Temasek Junior College, a sportsman and competitive swimmer in his school days, Alex Fun started a SportsExcel Programme which sought to provide mentorship and training as well as funding for promising school athletes. For three years, Alex wrote, designed and disseminated a journal which contained stories centred on resilience and self-motivation. Alex called his journal, Red Socks.

Alex had this to say:

“Ideas needed inspiration and inspiration, to me, was everywhere. Among some of the places I looked was an old copy of the Readers’ Digest which featured the late Sir Peter Blake, the legendary New Zealand ocean adventurer and leadership maestro. Sir Peter epitomised a down-to-earth and timeless kind of leadership that was sincere and built on values. I was never a fan of the Winter Olympics but one Herman Maier caught my attention.”

Hermann Maier is a law unto himself. Hermann the Herminator is coming back into the Winter Olympics because there is one gold medal he has not won – the downhill. At the Nagano Games in 1998, he sailed like a lunatic off the mountain. He had taken a bend too fast and catapulted into the air, somersaulted like a rag doll 5 times and landed on the ground with a terrifying thump. Yet, amazingly, he struggled to his feet. He was battered, bruised, and in pain from the shoulder, down the spine, through to his ankles.Two days later, The Herminator was back. Defying doctors, but unable to mask the pain through drugs because of doping controls, he won the super-G slalom and then the Giant Slalom events.

In August 2001, Maier’s Harley Davidson motorbike was hit by a Mercedes on a hairpin corner near his Austrian home. He was closer to death than to life. His limbs were shattered, and there were multiple internal injuries. Fortunately, his personal physician managed to save him. The Herminator was not told what the Austrian doctors believed – that he would not walk again, let alone ski.

Three months after the accident, he was back in the gym. He insisted he would make it to the 2002 Salt Lake City Games in an attempt to hang on to his sponsors. He did hold their faith but he lost his struggle for Salt Lake. He was on a Caribbean beach with a towel draped over the leg still held together by a titanium rod. A brace man, but a busted Olympian. Or so we thought.