In demanding environments, sustainable performance depends as much on the ability to learn as it does on the ability to execute.
Sharing information, embracing feedback and helping others improve are also powerful ways to progress yourself.

In this interview with Mainpaces,I reflect on the lessons high-level sport has taught me about cooperation, knowledge sharing and sustainable collective performance.

Winning Culture, Stress Management, Failure, Rapid Multi-Factor Decision-Making…

How do you stay motivated day after day in an extremely demanding environment?

With 280 days spent sailing each year, an Olympic medal, and an exceptional track record, Jonathan Lobert shares the keys that led him to achieve extraordinary results.

Determination, humility, sensory awareness, sharing, and open-mindedness are all qualities that a long-lasting champion must develop.

Jonathan Lobert: The Making of a Champion

Hello Jonathan, you’ve had an exceptional career in Olympic sailing. Could you briefly tell us how it all began?

When I started sailing, I was seven years old on the Saône River in Mâcon. Proof that you don’t need to be Breton to become a great sailor :)…

I practiced many different sports, but none of them truly inspired me enough to fully commit. My parents enrolled me in a sailing club, I sailed my first tack, and I instantly loved it. Being alone on my boat, making it move, positioning myself against others. It all felt incredible.

It was a small club, which meant I was able to compete very quickly. The first time, I finished last, but I improved rapidly afterward. I loved spending entire weekends away with friends racing, being out on the water all day long. It felt amazing and did me a world of good.

Then, in 2000, completely by chance, I turned on the television one morning to watch the Olympic Games, and luckily sailing was on. It was the final Laser race of the week, a rematch of the Atlanta Games where Robert Scheidt (Brazil) had defeated Ben Ainslie (Great Britain). This time, Ben Ainslie prevailed over the Brazilian in a true match race.

I had just returned from the Optimist World Championships where I had finished 21st, and I remember thinking:

“One day, I want to go to the Olympics and win a medal too.”
Jonathan Lobert

What’s remarkable is that twelve years later, at the London Olympics, I found myself standing on the podium alongside Ben Ainslie, the sailor who had inspired me, with him winning gold and me taking bronze.

Training for Excellence

How did you train to reach that level?

Training is first and foremost technical. It relies heavily on repetition.

You repeat maneuvers until they become almost automatic, until you no longer have to think about the movement itself, constantly striving for the perfect gesture. There is also a tremendous amount of feedback work with the coach, confronting what he observes with what I personally feel on the boat.

The challenge in sailing is that every maneuver can be different depending on the wind, the waves, or the body of water. It is an extremely technical sport. Technical mastery frees up the ability to make extremely rapid decisions regarding opponents, wind shifts, and overall strategy.

When sailing, you are constantly collecting information: clouds, water texture, competitors… Sailing develops your ability to process information, recognize familiar patterns from previous experiences, react quickly, and position yourself rapidly.

As you progress through years of racing, you become increasingly expert and capable of positioning yourself optimally in any situation.

Feeling Your Environment and Trusting Your Senses

You mentioned perception, intuition, and sensations. How do you develop such heightened awareness?

Sensory awareness is essential for us because it allows us to finely perceive everything happening around us.

It starts with touch, feeling what the tiller and the mainsheet communicate through your hands.

It’s also about feeling everything directly connected to the boat: your feet, your body, your balance.

We also do many blindfolded exercises during training to sharpen our hearing, to better feel the wind on our face, indicators we often neglect.

From the outside, someone who doesn’t realize we are blindfolded would see no difference at all. Yet these sessions are mentally exhausting because they require extreme concentration and constant attention.

We often work by isolating one parameter. For example, while sailing downwind, we may lock the rudder and rely only on body balance and sail trim to move the boat forward.

The same logic applies to equipment development. One sailor keeps everything identical while others perform specific technical tests.

Are those highly developed senses still useful today, now that you’ve left elite competition?

Absolutely. My wife often tells me I notice the smallest details.

It gives me a way of reading people, their body language and reactions. It helps me enormously in business because it allows me to sense what’s happening beneath the surface and understand emotions that are not explicitly expressed.

“I am extremely attentive to my environment, and it also gives me a strong capacity for empathy.”
Jonathan Lobert

Humility and Preparation as Drivers of Success

You once told me that understanding another person’s emotional state is essential to performing at a high level, especially in the coach-athlete relationship. Could you explain why managing emotions together is so important, and why it can also be a key factor in business partnerships?

Very concretely, during the preparation for the 2012 Olympics, my coach François Le Castrec and I quickly decided to work deeply on our partnership and communication.

During races, François was in a coach boat while I was on the racecourse, so communication was impossible except between races, and even then, time was extremely limited.

It became essential to communicate efficiently between races, reinforcing what worked well or correcting what wasn’t working. The goal was to remove emotion from the equation and communicate clearly around objectives and strategy.

If I was frustrated after a poor race, I still needed to be able to listen to him. And he needed to be able to talk to me effectively.

We learned together how to manage each other’s stress because I could be stressed, but so could he.

On the final day of the Olympics, he was extremely stressed, but we had prepared for that moment. We had anticipated it. It was fine for me because we were able to talk about it openly, and I could head out on the water feeling calm and focused.

We had learned to truly understand each other in order to work better together, and above all, to accept that the other person might not always feel perfectly fine without allowing that to affect the quality of the work or the relationship.

You also spoke about humility. What does humility mean to you and why is it so important at the highest level?

In sailing, humility is something you learn the hard way.

You can start with the best settings, believing everything is perfect, but if you missed one element, all that preparation can instantly become irrelevant.

You can lose to someone who trained less, prepared less, but who simply seized a better opportunity.

“You learn that you cannot always win and that you cannot control what others do. So you focus on what you can control.”
Jonathan Lobert

That’s how you develop the ability, despite failures, to keep coming back, racing again, and trying once more, even when the exact same method may not work in every situation.

We evolve in an environment where nature is stronger than we are. When you wake up and the wind is too strong, reality reminds you immediately.

It is a living environment, constantly changing. Basic safety rules must always be respected.

For me, sailing is very similar to mountaineering. You don’t head into the mountains without preparation, and you must also know when to stop because conditions can suddenly become life-threatening.

Sharing to Improve

You often say: “Sharing is winning.” What does that truly mean?

I deeply believe that sharing accelerates progress.

When you master a technique that was difficult to develop, teaching it to someone else forces you to structure your thinking, identify areas for improvement, and answer questions you may never have asked yourself.

The person in front of you will never apply it exactly the way you do. They will add their own perspective, sometimes revealing highly valuable insights you hadn’t considered.

“Teaching allows people to nourish each other’s growth. Sharing is not something you lose. When you give, you become even more knowledgeable yourself.”
Jonathan Lobert

Many people hide things because they are afraid of losing what they have built.

But the moment someone starts using what you created, you instantly notice what they do differently, and if it’s valuable, you can integrate it into your own technique.

And you always maintain an advantage because you remain the person who understands the original concept best.

I learned this in a rather difficult way because at the beginning, I had trained alone for two and a half years. When I joined the Olympic preparation group, I suddenly had to share everything I had developed, despite how hard I had worked to build it.

Olympic preparation is done collectively. I had to explain everything to my training partner so we could improve together, even though at the end of the process only one of us would qualify for the Olympic Games.

It creates a very unusual tension because your partner is also your competitor.

“The moment you truly shift into a mindset of transmission and sharing, you only gain from it.”
Jonathan Lobert

You free yourself from psychological pressure and stress. That is how you gain a psychological advantage.

At the highest level, competition is not only physical or technical. It is also psychological.

Do you spend four years fearing your opponent? Or do you choose a posture where you continuously improve and create something meaningful?

Four years is a very long time, and some athletes collapse under the pressure of Olympic selection.

The same dynamic exists in business when it comes to competition.

Motivation and Failure

But that’s exactly the challenge: how do you maintain motivation?

It all comes back to the bigger objective, where you ultimately want to go.

Did you always keep the Olympic medal in mind?

Yes. The ambition of becoming the best possible version of myself in order to win an Olympic medal allowed me to remobilize countless times.

And what happens when you fail?

Failure is simply additional information that allows you to reach another level.

Behind every failure, there is something to validate, something that didn’t work and requires a different approach.

“Failure itself is not negative. It is information.”
Jonathan Lobert

You must develop the habit of seeing events positively rather than constantly complaining, otherwise you only drag yourself downward.

That mindset allows you to progress much faster instead of handicapping yourself emotionally.

Interestingly, something you succeed at imperfectly is often much harder to analyze than a true failure.

“Poor performances always gave me more determination.”
Jonathan Lobert

Confidence and Mental Strength

I still sense a very strong level of self-confidence in the way you speak.

That’s true. But fundamentally, I’ve always believed that we are all human beings. So there is no reason someone else should be able to achieve something that I cannot achieve as well.

“You should never place people on a pedestal while still fully respecting their level and accomplishments. They must never become a psychological limitation.”
Jonathan Lobert

That’s how I viewed my competitors.

Even someone like Ben Ainslie, many people considered him unbeatable. But why should that be true?

He may be a legend, but there is no reason he cannot be beaten.

In that mindset, every difficult achievement becomes an incredibly powerful source of motivation because it proves to you that more is possible.

That’s what I always tell my daughter: if you want to do something, you must try.

If it doesn’t work, learn from it. But whatever happens, at least try.

Curiosity and Open-Mindedness

In another interview, you once said: “Today, I don’t think it’s possible for an athlete, especially in a non-mainstream sport, to focus exclusively on their discipline.” Could you elaborate on why openness to the world is so important?

Exploration is absolutely fundamental.

It means discovering, remaining open to everything around you, constantly collecting information, analyzing it, and turning it into something useful.

On the water, we have no instruments, no data feeds. Our only sensors are our eyes and our feelings.

All our senses are constantly alert to remain connected to our environment.

Do you apply the same philosophy in daily life?

Absolutely. I am always exploring.

Even in cooking, I taste everything I can. I experiment constantly to discover what I like and dislike.

I always try to go further, not to settle for what I already know.

I want to learn, discover, and then integrate those discoveries into my own way of doing things.

Does that allow you to create unexpected connections?

Yes, I have a very concrete example.

During the Rio Olympics, I sometimes felt seasick on the water, even though I normally never suffer from seasickness.

My coach was interested in essential oils, and while smelling peppermint oil I suddenly felt an incredible sensation of freshness.

I immediately thought:

“When I feel sick, what I actually crave is freshness. Let’s try that.”
Jonathan Lobert

I put some under my nose, and it worked incredibly well. It completely eliminated the seasickness that day.

The reason it worked is also because I was highly aware of my own sensations and knew exactly what my body needed.

Understanding what makes us feel good is essential.

People often say: “Sport is about suffering.” I disagree.

“Performance requires putting yourself in the best possible conditions for you.”
Jonathan Lobert

That means listening carefully to your body and understanding what it needs.

Allowing yourself to be extremely attentive to yourself is important.

It is not selfishness. It is self-awareness.

Goals and New Challenges

We return once again to the subject of goals, which is closely linked to motivation. I think that’s one of the major differences with business: athletes often pursue extremely difficult goals, but those goals are very clearly defined.

Yes, having a very clear objective is essential.

It means knowing exactly what your goal is for the day, what needs to be done, and executing it properly.

Then you must condition yourself while adapting to everything happening around you.

You constantly adapt your level of ambition to the reality of the moment in order to execute correctly despite external factors.

The final purpose also plays a major emotional role.

I believe that in business, money is often positioned incorrectly in people’s minds.

You must clearly distinguish between the ultimate objective and the means used to achieve it.

Transmission seems deeply important to you. What message would you most like to share with people pursuing goals that may appear impossible?

The first message is to never listen to pessimists, the people who tell you something cannot be done.

Very often they are either jealous or simply incapable of contributing anything meaningful to the project.

At the same time, remain extremely objective about where you currently stand and what you are truly capable of doing.

“A major goal is nothing more than a succession of smaller achievable goals.”
Jonathan Lobert

“Vision is the engine. It is what puts fuel into the machine every single day.”
Jonathan Lobert

And what ultimately allows you to succeed are all the small daily victories you can build upon.

It is a constant back-and-forth process, like stacking one small stone after another in order to build a pyramid.

Interview conducted by Thérèse Lemarchand for Mainpaces