SLAVEN DIZDAREVIC - Slovakia's first-ever Olympic Decathlete

Exploring the Paradox of Elite Sport, Love, Struggle, and Creativity

BN: Bete Noir, the hypothesis that it seeks to explore - is that of the pursuit of elite sport as the best and the worst thing to happen to someone.

This brand exists to explore the paradox between these contrasting forces of love and hate through sport.

Sport, is the the most powerful thing, that you can see, that you can do, or that you can witness, because it's so innate. It's like being fully connected with your animal instinct.

When you're doing sport, your heart rate rises, you're getting hot, it’s like you're approaching death, when you’re doing sport, everything rises, that's what makes it so magical, right?

I think often about what makes sport so addictive. What it is we're feeling. This heightened state of existence, this accelerated state… this feeling that takes you out of your normal state, so dramatically and so drastically.

And then if you can connect with someone next to you in the same suffering state... 

It's like human connection on a different level.

So that's when I started to feel something was missing when I was competing as an athlete. I simply started to think, and I started to explore my creativity, and then I noticed my environment and even my coaches were telling me ‘Hey, don't think too much.’

 

SD: I can relate because I come from a post-communist country, like Russia, so all those coaches raised in that period were of that type…

 

MD: You were born in Sarajevo, Bosnia?

SD: Yugoslavia yes. Where great athletes come from. There is something about team sports there. A small nation but they were able to do something in basketball, in soccer, water polo, in handball, in all the team sports. 

They are the only ones from the area that could create players that reached the NBA. This is where I grew up until the age of 10, then I got disconnected because of the war.

We ran because of the war. We took the last plane, the president of Czechoslovakia sent to pick everyone up, because they were bombing everything, we hid in the cellar, so we had to run from the war.

My parents just took two suitcases and they thought, ‘Oh, we are going for two weeks’.

Yeah, sure... eight years now. We had to start from zero, we lost everything.

We flew to Prague. It was Czechoslovakia. And six months after Czechoslovakia split in Czech and Slovakia. We stayed in Slovakia. This is where I got more into sports.

Czechoslovakia was a communist country before. There was a lot of Russian style training.

You would ask 'how much are we training today?' 'How many reps do we have to run, 10?'

If you asked the coach, it was ‘As much as you can, plus two.’

That was the style.

I was lucky. I had a coach who was from there, but already started taking the way from West, from the US. He was softer. He saw me at age 10, as a talent. He never pushed me too much. But then later, at 25 years old, I'd beat everyone in strength, lifting, snatch, clean, nobody could lift as much as I could... explosive power, nobody, even I beat the personal best of a world record holder in javelin.

MD: What made you a better athlete?

SD: It's mix of everything. It's a mix of your upbringing, of your life journey, struggles, temperamentally, mentality, everyone has something inside.

MD: Then you became the first decathlete ever for Slovakia at the Olympic Games?

SD: It’s a crazy story.

Basically, I was an average athlete. I was a national champion at age 15 in high jump, then national champion in high jump at the age of 18. But then I studied, I went to university. I went to the United States to work every summer, so I missed the season of competing.

You know, I would make money, learn English. I go next year, learn English, make money, then two years continuing sport, because you don't know what to do in between schools.

So you do sport, you compete, you start getting better. Then you finish school, OK, I'm going to Ireland, to Dublin, to work. I studied engineering and economics. Found a job in Pfizer. Started working as an account analyst in Pfizer, and always going home, taking half hour nap and then to training. Because in my head, I have a plan. I want to compete during the indoor season, but I have a full time job, so I combine everything. I win national champions indoors, I come back, I work. And then there was a point where I was like, OK, Olympics is year and a half away. My personal best is 7100 (points), what is the standard for the Olympics? 7700, it was quite low the B standard. In Russia, everyone goes for A standard, but if you come from a small country, you can do B.

MD: Through all your early years, was the Olympics never on your radar?

SD: I think it was. First of all, I was born in Sarajevo, which is an Olympic city, I went to the Sarajevo 1984 Olympics, my father was carrying me on his shoulders during the Olympic Ceremony. And after that, my family got an apartment in the Olympic Village. I grew up in the Olympic Village for seven years, on Olympic street number 15. The street was called Olympic Street, and it was number 15 on the sixth floor. And the whole suburb was full of young people, so suddenly, you’re living in the Olympic Village. It's crazy, did I suck some spirit, and then get into the Olympics?

MD: Seems like a fantasy. Seems like it was written.

SD: I only starting tapping into this spirituality once I got into the Olympics, and then I got to Lausanne to study art, the Olympic capital. It was following me. I would like to write a book one day, like the luckiest Olympian who ever lived, because the way I qualified was a joke.

I qualified at the last moment possible with the minimum points. It had this touch of magic that anything is possible.

MD: Sport is reflective of that, right? It shows you what’s possible.

SD: Just to connect back to that moment in Ireland when I decided to go for the Olympics.

I was sitting in front of the computer, calculating, I need to improve my score by 600 points. I have a year and a half. I have this amount of money in my account, I want to go to the Olympics.

You know what motivated me? I was looking out the window projecting myself as a 35 year old, sitting there, drinking a beer, and watching the Opening Ceremony of the Olympics, regretting that I hadn't done it, because I was like, Oh, I'm sure I would have been there, just that image was enough.

10 days later, I left. I go to Slovakia. Then I moved to Prague. I start getting coached with a guy, we go to South Africa. And all in total, I end up one year from the office chair to South Africa, where the world record holder and Olympic champion in decathlon and his coach comes to me and says ‘You want to come train with us?’

Going back to the way I qualified, basically there was a deadline.

After that deadline, all the National Sports Federations meet and they say, We have this athlete, we have this team etc. But my Federation looked at my first day of competition and didn't even mention my name. Second day starts well, and then I make a personal best in pole vault. Then comes the Javelin, I throw like six meters further. This was the last chance. The coach comes to me and says ‘if you want to qualify, if you want to make 7700 points, you have to run 4:40:95 in the 1500m, my PB was 4:49… I need to run 9 seconds faster than my PB… I’d never run that fast. You can’t believe the level of stress.

But anyway, I run and the whole stadium screams. They push you because they know you are fighting to qualify. I was moving to the max. Just 100m before finish line, I look at the time, it said 4:20. OK, I’ve got 18 seconds I said, you’re at the state where lactic acid is burning.

In my head I started repeating ‘Beijing, Beijing…’ At that moment, I saw I was sitting in a plane , putting my seatbelt on. As I child I always wanted to feel important as an athlete, as I was flying some where.

I crossed the finish line at 4:40:85. I needed to run 4:40:95.

I lost it, crying half an hour on the grass.

The craziest thing about this is how you learn everything is interconnected. The seemingly meaningless things in your life make you go where you need to go.

The month before the Olympics I had 25 euros in my pocket, nothing more.

MD: So you went to Beijing 2008 – how did it go?

SD: I felt like I was there alone. I felt like Alice in Wonderland. I was injured, I couldn’t even walk but I finished the decathlon. 

MD: Was there frustration there that you couldn’t perform to your full ability?

SD: Just being at the Olympics for me was such a shocking dream I just looked around… I was smiling. I was laughing.

At the finish line, at the end of the 1500m, you cannot believe it. You lay down on the track, you have goosebumps. It's 10:30 pm at night, you are looking at the Olympic fire, 100,000 people, and you're like, 'what the hell am I doing here, this is wild.' I made the decathlon, I crossed the finish line.

There was the guy who won it, I looked at him and I looked so much happier. 

There is a lot of pressure on the top guys to win the medal. I was the underdog, I lived my own story.

MD: I don’t know which story is more BN. The guys at the top struggling, they're unhappy and they're at the top, or you, this underdog that's injured, but with this strong sense of joy.

But that’s the BN message, the paradox of the torment but utter enjoyment at the same time.

For me, it's important to highlight both. I think for you, the enjoyment aspect is clear, but what I'd love to know is where this sense of deep pressure, suffering and pain is interjected. 

SD: In the same way I can speak about the positives, I can speak to you about the rest. For me, that’s just the balance of life. I always follow the positive messages, that’s how I grow.

Even when I looked what you are doing, I didn't go much into details.

I didn't even research you or anything. I don't like to know too much. I like when I'm meeting someone new for the first time, I want to stay free of knowing and free of prejudice. I just read what you were writing on athletes, and I was like ‘I like this, I like a bit of darkness’, even when I look at art. When the art is dark, I love it. When I see the darkness or the scariness it excites me.

When I was going through sports and experiencing homophobia... going through sports and realising I’m gay. The internal struggle is real.

I remember I was 24 years old, a defending champion in 110m hurdles, there was a race, I was going down into the blocks, in this stress I remember thinking, ‘you cannot be a good athlete because you are gay.’ You are at the starting blocks and you have this in your head, I remember the voice.

Later when I was 26 in South Africa, I was with a guy from Canada. He asked me if I had a girlfriend, he was a big womanizer! After getting to know me a little bit, he asked if I had a boyfriend, I said no, I lied. I was just discovering myself on this level.

I felt the atmosphere go down as I didn’t remain open with him. As time went on, I opened up and told him.

He thought it was great. Suddenly you have someone that is accepting you, telling you it’s great, that it’s OK.

Now the darker part, I trained like crazy after the Beijing 2008 Olympics. I was motivated, competing well, I was confident. I decided to do the last step, and tell my family I was gay. It was always a big elephant in the room. 

They did not accept it, it killed my career, a huge disconnection with the whole family happened. A very difficult thing internally, emotionally. After that my career went down. 

We eventually grew out of it without much talking… but I look back on that time and felt like it had an effect on the progression of my career.

I spiralled a little but what I learnt from sport is that it saved my life.

The whole spectrum of emotions that I learnt from sport… that gives me wisdom today.

In sport you learn to handle a lot physically and mentally.

You go and go, and you’re breaking borders and boundaries, you go to training and you want to run 45min more because it didn’t go well. You get angry, frustrated, all the emotions, you are angry at yourself, very hard self-talk. 

This mechanism connects you to similar type of narcissistic people… what you keep in your head is so important. Mindset. 

You need to believe you have something to offer.

You can have thoughts about yourself that are so deeply rooted that can destabilise your whole life.

Don’t look at mistakes inside yourself, go the opposite way.

I work every day on myself, there is always something to find, to correct, to work through, to grow.

The right thing because there is a lot of darkness in the world.

Darkness grows onto something. You feed it and it grows. Same for the light.

Everyone has both, the darkness and the light.

MD: What we believe about ourselves is the base. Even what you said about the rejection from your parents when you came out to them as gay and how that lead you down a hole, away from your sporting career.

I realised that when you attempt to liberate yourself, you liberate others.

That’s what I’m here to do.

As soon as you share your struggle and your stories, you liberate others, it’s not about you anymore.

 

The remainder of the conversation between Slaven and myself covered topics like meditation, psychedelics, mind expanding substances, the mind, hypnosis… how to work with your subconscious mind, how it all ties into relaxation, the interconnection with the body to provoke these states.

Love, BN x