How GB Rowing plans to sleep way to gold
Research shows that getting the right rest will help athletes adjust in a different time zone and peak for early race starts
When Moe Sbihi arrived in Tokyo ahead of the rowing programme, he already knew his priority: to get his sleep pattern back in shape. The veteran rower had been given specific advice on how to overcome the issues of jet lag and potential earlymorning competitive starts. The last thing GB Rowing wanted was for its athletes in contention for a gold medal to give an impression of Bill Murray in the movie Lost In Translation, blinking in sleep-deprived confusion.
“They’ve been monitoring how we sleep for some time,” explains Sbihi, who will row in the four seat of the men’s eight. “All through lockdown, when we were training from home, they checked us through our devices, to make sure we were sleeping right. Though during lockdown, there wasn’t really that much chance of us suffering from a shortage of sleep.”
Given the emphasis on the need for a good night’s rest, the rescheduling of the men’s eights heats to the small hours of this morning was probably not ideal for Sbihi – who was flying the flag for Britain at the Opening Ceremony last night – or his crewmates.
How athletes sleep has become as significant a part of their preparation as what they eat. At GB Rowing’s Caversham performance centre they have installed a sleep sanctuary, where rowers can catch up with their kip. The rowing team’s sports scientists and data analysts have resolved that proper sleep is as essential a part of the recovery process as taking a dip in an ice bath.
They are not unusual. Sleep has become a significant branch of the study of sport. When she was taking her degree in sports science, Olympic high jumper Morgan Lake wrote her dissertation on athletes’ napping habits.
“It was weird, because it was all about the importance of sleep and I was there, at 3am, writing about it.
It was so contradictory,” she says. “My research was mostly questionnaires, so I got insight into athletes and how long they sleep for, when they usually nap around training and competition. It was interesting data.” In Tokyo, Lake will not be short of people to talk to about her research. Team GB take the approach of rest sufficiently seriously that they have taken a sleep specialist to Japan to help athletes acclimatise quickly to a different time zone. Dr Luke Gupta, of the English Institute of Sport, will be on hand to offer individual advice.
“We know that if athletes don’t sleep well, then it does have a profound impact on their performance,” he says. The question that has been concerning sports scientists, however, is what exactly does a good sleeping habit entail? Roger Federer, for instance, talks about sleeping 12 hours a day, while Cristiano Ronaldo insists on taking five half-hour naps. But Gupta is sceptical about the benefits of attempting to generalise.
“You do get some athletes that may think, I need to sleep for 12 hours a night. It can make someone lose confidence quite quickly because they realise their sleep isn’t elite sleep like Roger Federer’s, and they brand themselves as imperfect. But they’re not.”
Because sleep is a very individual issue, Gupta says. “Sleep is being treated like every other entity in sport. Athletes are expected to have the perfect diet, the perfect training regime, but now also to have the perfect sleep. But we don’t really know what that looks like.”
Sbihi, for instance, had his sleep patterns checked alongside his training performance, to come up with a pattern appropriate to his biorhythms. Each rower was advised differently and only after analysis. This, Gupta says, is critical.
“It’s almost been out there a bit too much,” he says of the growing one-upmanship among leading sports people about how long they keep their eyes shut. “It’s like a performance enhancer, which basically means that if an athlete doesn’t get 10 hours of unbroken sleep every single night, they’re not going to win a gold medal. Which is obviously ridiculous.”
Adrenalin can cause as much disruption as jet lag. And, for any of the British team still buzzing after a performance, help will be at hand.
“The likelihood is after late-night events an athlete’s not going to sleep very well,” Gupta says. “But sleep is a form of recovery, you need to sleep well to recover from the heats in order to be ready for the final. So you have to set the athletes’ expectations that their sleep won’t be great that night. But the next night is their target. And the night before competition everyone wants to sleep really well. But that’s the most likely time your sleep’s going to get disturbed.
“So we try to make athletes focus on the few nights leading up to the big events. It’s a case of setting appropriate expectations.”
After all, however much research is done into the issue, this fundamental truth remains the same: the most important thing about sleep is to be wide awake on the start line.
‘Roger Federer sleeps for 12 hours a day – while Cristiano Ronaldo takes five half-hour naps’