Get the autograph signing right and the rest will follow - by Harry Pearson

The Guardian Unlimited Jan 26, 2007.

In order to become a world-class athlete you must first master the no-look autograph and be able to touch your toes.

When I was at primary school I regularly played football with a boy who went on to sign professional terms with the local First Division club. The thing that sticks in my mind about him was not his pace, ball control or apparently inexhaustible reservoir of spit, but the fact that when he punted the ball down field he spun nonchalantly away without looking to see where it had gone.

When I or any of his other contemporaries gave a football the full welly we stood transfixed, eyes trained on the disappearing pill until we were certain it would not smash a sitting room window, or snap the radio aerial off Mr Garbutt the chemist's brand new Austin Princess. By contrast, the future pro displayed an absolute confidence in the destination of his hoofs and, on the odd occasion that they did veer off course and knock the postmistress off her bike, the fact that he was looking in the opposite direction shifted all suspicion away from him.

Thomas Hardy wrote that "Aspects are within us; who seems most kingly is the king" and when it comes to sport it is hard to disagree. It is not the obvious things - power, speed, balance - that mark the star athlete out from the rest of us but the little, self-possessed actions: waving without checking to see if anyone is waving back, blowing your nose with your hand and not making a mess of your shirt, or bouncing up and down on the balls of your feet while simultaneously shaking your hands and revolving your head (I just tried this while waiting for the coffee machine to boil and knocked over a fruit basket and trod in the dog's water bowl. Sadly, it seems my Olympic dream is over).

Watch a top sportsman or woman signing autographs, for instance. They do not look at the person they are signing the autograph for, or even at the object they are signing. No, they simply stare into the distance as if gazing from the high battlements of their heavily fortified egos. I have spent practically every day for the past 20 years scribbling in notebooks, but if I tried to pull off the sort of insouciant look-no-eyes penmanship displayed by Shane Warne, Maria Sharapova and co I would end up scrawling my name all over the face of the person proffering their programme.

The phrase "painstaking attention to detail" is, in my experience, generally shorthand for "I haven't actually done anything yet, I'm still looking at the catalogues". But when it comes to sport, the minutiae are what really count. I was naturally delighted this week, therefore, to read Colin Jackson decrying the fact that many top British athletes do not even know how to touch their toes properly. A personal view is that if God had meant us to touch our toes he would have put them nearer to our knees and moved our stomachs off to the side, but Jackson knows more about these matters than me and if he sees top-quality toe-touching as a key area of track and field then I am backing him.

Clearly Britain's athletics future is not entirely predicated on being able to lace your shoes without putting your foot on the table, though. Other areas of fringe prowess will have to be targeted. Running vest adjustment, for example. Most of us can wear a vest without too much rigmarole, but a true athlete fiddles with their vest every few seconds to ensure that the shoulder position of the straps is just right.

This also applies to tennis, where a constant attempt to locate the exact correct position for the seam of your shirtsleeve takes up more of the players' time than actually hitting the ball. The head of British tennis, Roger Draper, acknowledges that fact and has vowed to get 200,000 British children nervously attempting to locate the prime collarbone-blouse interface by 2010, while Brad Gilbert, Andy Murray's coach, has already identified the young Scot's lack of a really top-class short-sleeve fidget technique, along with a rather non-aggressive serve-receiving shoe shuffle, as one of the aspects of his game he needs to work on if he is to be the first British player since Fred Perry to become a globally recognised logo.

Two other aspects of British athletes' techniques we really need to work seriously on are lap of honour lope and podium wobble-jaw. Using the former, an oddly stiff-legged, loose-footed jog, a normally extremely fast runner is able to make incredibly slow progress round the track much to the delight of the crowd and his sponsor. In the latter timing is crucial, with true greatness reserved for those who can remain smiling proudly until the precise moment when the band rev up for the "Send her victorious" bit and then suddenly begin to tremble and fight back tears in a manner that has the entire country reaching for the tissues and murmuring "Ah, bless".

Given what Colin Jackson had to say about the state of British athletics it may seem that we are getting ahead of ourselves here, but confidence breeds success and there is nothing more likely to stop our men and women winning gold than the fact that they do not carry themselves with the self-belief of those who have mastered these two non-essential essentials.