After the Olympics, athletes face a further tough challenge: the comedown

After the Olympics, every athlete has a different landing. For years they knew where they were going. And now? Maybe not. They had a vision of how this dream would be fulfilled, or how it would make them feel, or how it would change their lives. And maybe they were wrong about everything.
By now, you have looked away. For two weeks you thought the Olympics was a banquet for national morale, but in sport’s great sushi bar, the carousel keeps turning and there is another plate under your eyes. You’ve forgotten many of their names. For you, it was a giddy, summer fling.
For the athletes, there is no easy break-up. They couldn’t have reached the Olympics without an unconditional investment of their whole selves. As you have heard in a million ads for financial institutions, the value of your investment can go up as well as down. At the Olympics, the most common outcome is failure. It is the only way for glory to exist.
Every Olympian needs an exit strategy. Or access to mediation. They have life choices to make. Can they countenance another four years? Can they sustain it? Justify it? Did the Olympics just spit them out? Between winning and losing lies a spectrum of complex experiences. Each one requires attention.
In 2003, shortly after he joined Irish boxing’s high-performance programme, Billy Walsh shared his Olympics experience with a group whose sights were trained on Athens. Walsh had been sorely overlooked for the LA Games in 1984, so he kept going for the next Olympic cycle. In Seoul, though, he lost his first bout, beaten by a Korean who he had knocked out six months earlier.
The nuts and bolts of the narrative were that he was cut twice in the fight, but that was why he lost rather than why he didn’t perform. He couldn’t explain it, and for a long time he couldn’t leave it behind.
“I was devastated,” Walsh said, years later. “I let everyone down: my town, my county, my country. It was a nightmare. What did I feel? Anger. Frustration. Probably a lot of feeling sorry for myself as well. Putting all your lifetime’s ambition into this and then you get your shot and you don’t do it. Which was probably one of the reasons why you didn’t do it – because of the pressure you put on yourself.
“Talking to the boxers that day I just broke down with the emotion of it. It was still there with me, it still resided with me. It took me the best part of 17 years to come to terms with it. It’s only when I started the job [in the high-performance unit] and started talking to the boxers about it that I started to get over it.”
Dr Karen Howells, an academic and sports psychologist, told the New York Times recently that she had “not yet met an Olympian who hasn’t experienced” what is often called the post-Olympic blues. Dr Cody Commander, the Team USA mental health officer for the Tokyo Games, describes it “as a crash of emotions”.
“Elite athletes are used to having each minute planned every day for years,” he said. “When there’s no plan, it’s the feeling of ‘I’m lost’.”
After the Tokyo Games a study of 49 Danish Olympians and Paralympians showed that 27 per cent of them reported “below-average wellbeing or moderate to severe depression”. In what seemed like a counter-intuitive finding, though, 40 per cent of athletes who had achieved their goals still reported “below-average wellbeing” when the Games were over.
Winners are not exempt. The Olympics levies such a tax on the emotions of athletes that winning is not guaranteed to square the books. In an interview with NBC earlier this year Michael Phelps, one of the greatest Olympians of all-time, spoke about his feelings after two astonishing performances at the games.
In Athens, when he was just 19, he won six gold medals and two bronze; in Beijing he swept the boards with eight gold medals, breaking Mark Spitz’s record of seven from Munich.
“I would say 2004 was my first taste of post-Olympic depression,” said Phelps. “It was basically, you get to the edge of a cliff and, like, ‘Cool. Now what?’ 2008 was my second taste because you were coming off that high of doing something that you set out to do your whole entire life.
“I think I saw it as a sign of weakness and if I shared anything about it then it would give my competitors an edge. I’m trying to be better than anybody has ever been. I looked at it as a weakness. I had to learn vulnerability is a good thing and it was scary at first.”
For the London games the Irish Institute of Sport started putting supports in place, under the leadership of Gary Keegan at the time. For every subsequent Olympics, the processes have been enhanced significantly.
Eoin Rheinisch is head of performance life skills at the Institute now, having competed in canoe slalom at three Olympics. After his first games, in Athens, nothing was in place to break the fall. “I just remember,” he says now, “having a really tough year coming to terms with a bad performance.” He can’t have been alone in those feelings, but there was no place to share them or untangle them.
For Paris, interventions with the athletes started before the games. A “scaffolding”, as Rheinisch describes it, was erected. In parallel with the life skills team is the work of a transition psychologist and others in that space. As soon as the games were over all the athletes had contact from the transition psychologist for an initial debrief.
The next meeting, says Rheinisch, is called “unpacking the bags” – a deep dive into what happened, how they’re feeling, what might happen next and what help is available. Over the last couple of months there has been a series of targeted workshops on all kinds of everything. Early next month there will be a gathering of 40 “athlete-friendly employers”, designed for networking and exploring opportunities. The support is practical and empathetic and comprehensive and vital.
Not everyone will stay in the bubble. Not everyone has reached a decision yet. Not everyone is coping. The Olympics flashed across our sky, like a comet.
Then we moved on.