LINCOLN Scott

General
OCCUPATION
He works three days a week as a bricklayer with his father's building company, 'Lincoln Builders'. "I'm a bricklayer by trade. I'm out on the tools mostly, but also I do a lot of the digger driving. I don't know any other top athletes that work, especially in a manual job so it is quite unusual. Obviously it's something to maybe look at and transition into full-time athletics if I can and see what we can achieve." (thenorthernecho.co.uk, 16 Jun 2021; yorkshirepost.co.uk, 27 Mar 2021)

RETIREMENT THOUGHTS
His long-time coach Paul Wilson persuaded him not to give up the sport in 2019 when he lost his motivation for training. Instead he switched from working full-time with his father's building company to three days a week. "I'd been at work all day, doing a really horrendous job in the middle of winter. I was in a muddy hole digging and digging and digging and I'd just got warm and dried off at home and then I had to go back out and drive 50 miles to training and it was still pouring down. So I got to training and wasn't in the best mindset to start with, and was halfway through the session when I said, 'Paul I'm done. What am I doing this for? I'm just not enjoying it'. He made me go and sit in the car and have a think about what I wanted to achieve and where I wanted to go with it if I did want to carry on. I think he sees my potential more than I do, and he pretty much just told me what I could achieve if I wanted to put my mind to it. A few things had to change. I was working five days a week at the time and that was horrendous. I was getting no recovery. He reminded me of where I'd come from. When the momentum's rolling, it's an easy ride but, when the momentum stops and you have a bit of a dip for a year or two or three, that's when you really find out who you are as a person, as an athlete, and that's when you find out how much you want it as well." (olympics.com, 15 Jul 2021)

PSYCHOLOGY INPUT
He added psychologist Chris Rowley to his coaching team in 2021. "Working with a psychologist is something that I've changed since lockdown because of my over thinking. It was just to try and find ways of becoming focused and gain the maximum out of the sessions in the time I had. It's where the saying, 'Every throw means something' came from. The first session we had he said to me, 'How many opportunities do you have to qualify for the Olympics?' I said, 'Maybe 10'. And he said, 'Well, how many throws do you get in each competition?' I said, 'Six'. 'So why do you have six opportunities, why is it only one in every competition?' I said, 'I've just never really looked at it like that' and, from that moment on, it was like, 'Instead of having 10 chances I had 60'." (olympics.com, 15 Jul 2021)