For many Americans, the defining image of the 2024 Olympics will be Simone Biles’ beaming smile, a mix of pride, relief, triumph and a touch of “I told you so.” She wore that smile when her team reclaimed the gold medal, when she claimed her second all-around title and when she triumphed on vault, the event that had plagued her at the 2021 Tokyo Olympics.
Biles said she suffered from what gymnasts call twisties in Tokyo and was able to bounce back with therapy and other mental health care. She is not the only one to reveal such struggles. Conversations about mental health and the price of success have become commonplace in sports, both during and after competitive careers. From Naomi Osaka’s boundary-breaking decision not to attend press conferences at the French Open in the wake of actions by some of the world’s most successful athletes, to Michael Phelps’ NBA player Kevin Love has been an outspoken mental health advocate after struggling with depression and suicidal thoughts. Open Letter About battling panic attacks and anxiety.
Although these athletes each have their own struggles, the idea that achieving the highest sporting accolades does not ease the pressures of elite athletic life is well established. For example, studies have shown that silver medalists are more likely than bronze medal winners to focus on what they could have gained by trying a little harder — on what they missed rather than what they achieved. Depression related to the pressures of competition can shape the careers and post-competitive lives of athletes, even gold medalists and the greatest competitors of all time. Depression is so widespread that athletes seeking to raise awareness refer to it as “depression.” Contagious diseases Among Olympians.
The lives of elite athletes are inevitably dominated by training and an almost obsessive desire to achieve more and be better than any other competitor. They must spend much of their mind analyzing their performance, visualizing improvements, and forcing themselves through training to get there. But some experts are finding that relaxing this dogged commitment may help athletes more easily adjust to life after their highs and may even make them better athletes.
David Lavallee, a professor of health and sport at Abertay University in the UK, said the stronger an athlete’s identity is — the more deeply they are tied to their role and persona as an athlete — the more likely they are to suffer mentally when adversity strikes, especially when they step away from sport. Self-identity is highly malleable, but “when there’s pressure to always be focused on one thing, it’s very difficult to strike that balance,” he said. For some athletes, as the study of silver medalists suggests, the pressure to win is so great that anything less is an indictment on their sense of self.
Allison Schmidt is a 10-time Olympic medalist.One of the most successful One former U.S. swimmer experienced these kinds of challenges firsthand. She described herself to me as “quirky,” fun-loving and generally cheerful. After winning her first individual silver medal at the 2012 London Games, she remembered thinking, “I’m not good enough.” I should be happy. This should be great. “I had just won a silver medal at the Olympics and I was smiling,” she told me, “but I still felt like I’d pretty much failed.”
Phelps, her best friend and training partner, helped her revise her approach at that moment: “Michael hit me in the leg and said, ‘You’re a good kid.’ You have the strongest legs in the competition!“I thought to myself, Oh, do you believe me? Does anyone else believe in me? “That was a big turning point.” She went on to win three gold medals at that Olympics. But after her peak in London, a decline combined with the pressure to continue performing at that level began to take its toll. She missed out on making the 2013 world championships team, was subsequently diagnosed with depression and has since spent her career advocating for athletes’ mental health, in and out of the pool.
The traditional view of sports sees a sole focus on athletic performance as essentially the price of admission, but there are benefits to having more leeway in other areas of life. A piece of paperpublished in Psychology of Sport and ExerciseIt was found that Olympic athletes who juggled two careers while competing reported feeling less constrained when they retired. They also felt more in control of their life decisions, which the researchers found to be a big factor in their success outside of athletics. This kind of multitasking doesn’t necessarily mean less athletic ability. A few years ago, Lavallee was asked by the Australian National Rugby League to analyze the correlation between rugby players’ performance and their involvement in activities that prepare them for life after athletics, such as school and work. The results surprised even Lavallee. The most single-minded players performed worse than those with outside interests over the three years of the study. Attention to other goals seems to act as a kind of buffer against the stresses of elite sport, Lavallee said.
Success in elite sport has always Several Mental health requires an extraordinary degree of focus and discipline. And adding another set of obligations to a demanding schedule doesn’t magically give you mental health. For example, tennis star Serena Williams and track and field athlete Allyson Felix, who have won more championships and Olympic medals than any runner in history, have spoken at length about balancing motherhood with the demands of elite sports. But both are keen to stress that athletes shouldn’t be limited to just the work on the field. Many of the world’s most high-profile athletes have started foundations, earned advanced degrees or started families midway through their competitive careers. Biles’ success this week comes after a hiatus from sports during which she married NFL player Jonathan Owens and focused on life outside the gym. If she decides to retire now for good, the attention she has given to other parts of her life could be the foundation for something much bigger.
For Schmidt, taking time off from competition also helped her get back in the game. After the 2016 Olympics, she retired from swimming to begin her master’s degree and an internship. By 2018, unfinished business was on her mind and she returned to competitive swimming. Even after taking a break from her studies to train for the 2020 Olympics, she told me she felt like a more complete person than she had before her break from swimming, and was able to see sport as a part of her long life ahead. Though she didn’t reach the same heights as she did in London, she did win one more silver and one more bronze medal before stepping away from competitive swimming again.
This mindset helps you get through moments you can’t control during a competition. Sometimes, your best performance to deserve a gold medal just isn’t enough. Or you make an unexpected mistake, or another athlete is just better. Stephanie Reid, 37, competed in the long jump at the 2021 Tokyo Paralympics and, in her words, delivered the best performance of her life. But she finished in fourth place, just three centimeters away from the bronze medal. “It was so hard to end like that. There was so much joy and sorrow. Couldn’t we have just buckled up a little more and sailed a little further?“It was an amazing jump,” she told me. But after her devastating injury in 2019, just making it to the Olympics felt like a miracle in itself, and jumping her farthest ever at a Paralympics felt just as satisfying as winning silver in the same event in 2012.
Céline Koscielnik, a sport and performance psychologist and researcher at the University of Lausanne, calls Reid’s approach “self-compassion.” “In the sports world, we talk a lot about mental toughness and strength and how you always have to surpass yourself, and I agree. It’s a world of performance, but you also need to learn to give yourself kindness and support when you need it,” Koscielnik told me.
Schmidt has a strategy for this, too: Every time she walks through a door, she says a positive thing about herself. “One thing is, you don’t realize how many doors you walk through every day,” she says, laughing. “Sometimes I’ll stop at the bottom of a door and think, ‘I wonder what I’m doing?’ What positive things can you say about yourself? It helps you reframe your mindset and think of yourself more positively.”
Koscielnik said this mindset can give athletes a competitive advantage. Even the best athletes can’t win every time. Biles finished fifth and third in the final two events of the Games, balance beam and floor exercise, respectively. Without self-compassion, athletes can fall into a vicious cycle. They may not get enough sleep or refuel properly. Their mental health may suffer, which can affect their performance during training and in their next competition. The International Olympic Committee has released a framework to help athletes prepare for life after competition, but everyone I spoke to for this article called for more mental health support for athletes, whether it’s provided by teams, federations, or independent organizations. Until such support is available, talking about these issues is the best athlete can do.
