I'll give you two. I help officiate woman's alpine events for the Olympics. In the Vancouver Olympics the two stars in the woman's field were Lindsey Vonn and Maria Riesch. Lindsey is pure intensity. On the hill, she's is total focus. During inspection you can just "feel her presence". When she skis up to the gates for a close look at the line, everyone else moves back. One observation is that her coaches always make statements in the positive tense. Rather than saying, "don't get too low around this gate" they'd say "when you round this gate you're going to stay high". It was unique, all the other coaches from the other teams were using the caution side, whereas her coaches were always positive. Off the hill, Lindsey and her family are extremely nice. But on the hill, you don't even make eye contact. It's all business. No saying hello or good luck, just keep back.
Now, contrast that with Maria. The Alpine Combined is an event where they first do a downhill run and then a slalom run and the winner is the lowest time of both runs. I got into the gondola at Vancouver to bring some battery packs up to the top of the hill and Maria and her three coaches got into the same car as mine. Maria, if I remember right, was in third place after the downhill. I decided to play it professional, and just said "Congrats on your first run, best wishes on the slalom" and was going to keep quiet for the rest of the ride up the hill. Note that the gondola is going right over the slalom course that she's about to ski so she and her coaches have a birds-eye view. Maria chose to ignore the course and ignore her coaches. Instead, she just told me jokes the whole way up, and she was really funny. Had me really laughing. She went on to win the gold medal that day. Her approach to a big race was the complete opposite of Lindsey, her mind was a million miles away from the event.
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