Elite Athletes Could Be Less Single-Minded
7 min read
For many Americans, the defining image of the 2024 Olympic Games will have been Simone Biles’s broad smile, suffused with pride, relief, the joy of success, and a touch of I-told-you-so. She flashed that smile as her team reclaimed gold, as she earned the title of two-time Olympic all-around women’s champion, and as she bested the vault, the event that troubled her in 2021’s Tokyo Games.
Biles struggled in Tokyo with what gymnasts call the twisties, and she has credited therapy and other mental-health care with helping her return to form. She’s not alone in opening up about such struggles. Discussions about mental health and the cost of success, both during competitive life and after, have become routine in sports, following the actions of some of the world’s most successful athletes: Naomi Osaka’s boundary-enforcing refusal to attend press conferences at the French Open, Michael Phelps’s outspoken mental-health advocacy after he suffered from depression and suicidal ideation, the NBA player Kevin Love’s open letter about his struggle with panic attacks and anxiety.
Each of these athletes has their particular struggle, but the idea that achieving the highest sporting honors cannot salve the pressures of elite athletic life is well established. Studies have shown, for instance, that silver medalists focus more than athletes awarded the bronze medal on what pushing just a little harder might have yielded—what they missed out on rather than what they achieved. Depression associated with the pressure of competition can shape an athlete’s career and their life after sports, even for gold medalists and the all-time-greatest competitors; it has become widespread enough that athletes trying to raise awareness have called depression an epidemic among Olympians.
An elite athlete’s life is necessarily dominated by training and an almost delusional fixation on doing more, being more, than any other competitor. Much of their mind must be given over to analyzing their performance, visualizing improvement, and steeling themselves through the work to get there. But some experts are finding that loosening this unwavering commitment may actually help athletes ease into life beyond those highs—and perhaps even become better athletes.
David Lavallee, a professor who studies well-being and sports at Abertay University, in the U.K., told me that the greater a person’s “athlete identity”—that is, the more their persona is enmeshed with their role as an athlete—the higher the chance that their mental health could deteriorate in times of adversity, not to mention when they transition out of sports. Self-identity can be quite malleable, but “when that constant pressure to be one thing is there, it’s very hard to find balance,” he told me. As the research on silver medalists hints, for some athletes, the pressure to win is so great that anything less can be an indictment on their sense of self.
The 10-time Olympic medalist Allison Schmitt—one of the most successful U.S. swimmers of all time—experienced this type of challenge firsthand. She described herself to me as “a quirky type of person” who is fun-loving and generally upbeat. She remembers thinking, after winning silver in her first individual event at the 2012 London Games: I’m supposed to be happy. This is supposed to be great. “I had a smile on my face—I just got silver at the Olympics,” she told me. “But it was still almost like a failure.”
Phelps, a close friend and a training mate, helped her reframe her approach in the moment. “Michael hit me in the legs and was like, You have the strongest legs in the competition!” she recalled. “I was like, Oh, I do? Someone else believes in me? That was a huge turning point.” She went on to win three gold medals at that Olympics. But after the highs of London, the comedown, mixed with the pressure to continue performing at that level, began to consume her. She failed to make the team for the 2013 World Championships; later, she was diagnosed with depression, and has since spent her career in and out of the pool advocating for athlete mental health.
The traditional outlook on sports holds that a narrow focus on athletic achievement is essentially the price of admission. But leaving more room for other parts of life has advantages. One paper, published in Psychology of Sport and Exercise, found that Olympic athletes who juggled dual careers while competing reported feeling less limited when they retired. They also felt more in control of their life decisions—which researchers found to be a major factor in success beyond the field of play. This kind of multitasking doesn’t necessarily mean compromising athletic performance. A few years ago, Lavallee was asked by the National Rugby League, in Australia, to analyze the correlation between rugby players’ performance and their engagement in activities that would prep them for life after the sport, such as school and work. The results surprised even Lavallee: The most single-minded players performed less well over the three-year course of the study than the players with outside interests. Attention on other goals seemed to act as a sort of buffer against the stress of elite sport, Lavallee said.
Athletic success at the elite level will always demand some degree of extraordinary focus and discipline. And adding another set of commitments to a demanding schedule doesn’t magically equal mental health. For instance, the tennis star Serena Williams and the track athlete Allyson Felix—who has won more championship and Olympics medals than any other runner in history—have shared at length about balancing motherhood with the demands of elite sport. But both are keen to emphasize that an athlete shouldn’t be limited to their work in the arena. Many of the world’s highest-profile athletes start foundations, complete an advanced degree, or start a family during their competitive career; Biles’s success this week follows a break from her sport, during which she married the NFL player Jonathan Owens and focused on life outside the gym. If she decides now to retire permanently, the attention she gave to those other pieces of her life will be the basis of something more.
For Schmitt, too, stepping away helped her return to her sport: Following the 2016 Olympics, she retired from swimming and started a master’s degree and an internship. By 2018, a nagging sense of unfinished business prompted her to start competing again. Even after she put her studies on pause to train for the 2020 Games, she felt more like a whole person than she did before her break from swimming, she told me, and was able to see sports as just one part of a long life stretching out before her. She didn’t quite attain the same heights she had in London, but she won another silver and another bronze before stepping back again from competitive life.
This type of thinking can help athletes move past moments in competition that they can’t control. Sometimes your very best, usually worthy of gold, isn’t enough—or there’s an unexpected slip, or someone else just does better. When, at 37, Stefanie Reid competed in the long-jump event at the 2021 Tokyo Paralympics, she achieved, in her words, the best performance of her life. Yet she came in fourth, three centimeters away from a bronze medal. “It was so hard finishing like that: so much joy and so much Could you not have just squeezed your glutes together just a little bit longer and sailed a bit farther?” she told me. But after a disastrous injury in 2019, just being at the Games seemed like a miracle, and to jump the farthest she ever had at a Paralympic Games gave her as much satisfaction as when she’d won the silver in the same event in 2012.
Céline Kosirnik, a sport-and-performance psychologist and researcher at the University of Lausanne, would call Reid’s outlook self-compassion. “We talk a lot in the sport world about mental toughness, and how you need to be strong, and you need to always surpass yourself, et cetera, and I agree: It is a world of performance. But we also need to learn to give ourselves kindness and support when we need it,” she told me.
Schmitt, too, has a tactic for this: Every time she walks through a doorway, she says a positive affirmation about herself. “One: You don’t realize how many doors you go through every day,” she told me, laughing. “Sometimes you stop under the door, and you’re like: What can I say that’s positive about myself? It just helps you reframe that thinking and think of yourself more in a positive light.”
This type of thinking, Kosirnik said, can give athletes a competitive advantage. Not even the best of the best win every time: In her final two events of this Olympics, balance beam and floor, Biles came in fifth and third, respectively. Without self-compassion, athletes can spiral. They might lose sleep, or fail to properly fuel themselves. Their mental health deteriorates, and in training or at the next competition, their performance is negatively affected. The International Olympic Committee has unveiled a framework to help athletes prepare for life after competition; still, every person I spoke with for this story brought up the need for more mental-health support for athletes, whether it’s offered by teams, sports federations, or independent organizations. Until such support manifests, talking about these problems is the best tool that athletes have.
