When Richard Dunwoody used to sit at home rewinding his races that he’d recorded on his VCR, he wasn’t looking at his triumphs. The races he rewound “20, 30, 50 times” were the defeats. He was trying to eradicate mistakes and if he felt there was an error, he would keep going back over the tapes, looking at those mistakes, trying to find an edge while he was haunted by the losses. Few sportspeople embodied the idea that “the agony of the devoured animal is always far greater than the pleasure of the devourer” more perfectly than Dunwoody during his…

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