The world of elite sport is a completely separate universe, sometimes even hostile to human nature with its fixation on performance. But this is no reason not to seek the mental well-being of athletes. On the contrary. It is even a condition of their success during and after their career.
The start of women’s artistic gymnastics at the Paris Olympics on Sunday marked the arrival of American superstar Simone Biles. The 27-year-old multiple Olympic medalist shocked the world by withdrawing from several events at the Tokyo Games three years ago due to mental health concerns.
The tremendous pressure elite athletes are under, especially at the Olympics, cannot be overstated, says Alexis Gagnon-Dolbec, a sports psychologist at the Institut national du sport du Québec (INS). “The Games are like a circus on the moon. It’s something completely unique, completely crazy. Even if you have experience on the international stage, or have competed in the biggest competitions in your sport, the Games have an aura that is impossible to have anywhere else.”
It’s also an extremely hostile environment for athletes. “We’re putting these people, who are often very young, in a situation [en matière de pression et d’exposition médiatique] that any normal human would refuse. And then they are asked to deliver the best performance of their lives.” The pressure is all the greater because, for them, it is often the culmination of their entire athletic career and the chance to realize their wildest dreams.
In this context, the psychologist explains, we must help them “to bring it back to the very essence of their sport. To try to treat it like any other competition, knowing full well that it is not true.”
Sustainable development of athletes
Like society in general, the world of elite sport is becoming increasingly open and sensitive to mental health issues, explains the director of sports sciences at the INS, François Bieuzen. “I would call it more of an evolution than a rupture. Everyone has become more vigilant when it comes to mental health. Not just that of athletes, but also that of everyone around them.”
To do this, we no longer simply detect problems as soon as they arise, he continues. We also seek to act upstream, by setting up healthier support for the athlete “before, during and after” his life in the upper echelons of competition.
Because a happy athlete performs better, says Alexis Gagnon-Dolbec. “If you burn an athlete out mentally after only one Olympic cycle, you won’t be any further ahead. To stay in the sport, he has to have a great experience.”
But it goes beyond sporting performance, continues François Bieuzen. “We are now aiming for the sustainable development of the athlete. We want them to see their sporting career as a great step in their life and then be able to continue their path in a normal way, by continuing their studies, by finding a job.”
The head doctor of the Canadian team in Paris, Suzanne Leclerc, says the same thing, but differently. “We want high-performing athletes, but we also want healthy athletes. And there is nothing contradictory in wanting to develop champions while being committed to delivering individuals who will still have all their heads and all their pieces in the right place after their career.”
In this quest for healthier athletic performance, athletes are both allies and problems, she observes. Problems because they are the first to want to surpass themselves and conquer summits. Allies, because they are the ones who “have started to name their mental health problems, whether it is stress or anxiety disorders, and who talk about the importance of overall health.”
Learning from the population
This realization convinced Quebec kayaker Pierre-Luc Poulin to start a career as a sailor at the same time as he qualified for the Paris Games. “Finding balance in the sports world is difficult because athletes are very performance-oriented people. It’s natural to think that if you want to succeed, you have to train more. But sometimes, it’s just a matter of taking a step back to figure out what you’re missing to be well and happy,” he said recently in The duty.
As for the stress of Olympic competition and the heartbreak of defeat, athletes need to be helped to remember why they do sports, says Alexis Gagnon-Dolbec. “One of the reasons they will give you is the emotions their sport gives them. In this case, whether it is the intense joy of victory or the bitter sadness of defeat, we can find a way to be grateful for having been able to find ourselves in a situation where we felt alive.”
Will all these recent lessons learned about mental health in elite sport lead to advances in the general population? “I think it should be the opposite. High-performance sport has a lot more to learn from the general population than the other way around,” says the psychologist who worked for three years in a psychiatric hospital. “The ability to face one’s fears, to try to understand oneself and to evolve as a human in the general population, and particularly in the psychiatric population, is much more impressive than what I see in athletes.”
This report was financed with the support of the Transat International Journalism Fund-The duty.