There was a moment in Simone Biles' only vault at the Tokyo Olympics where, she said, she lost her impact. She was going for Amanar, points 5.8, the third highest point vault for women. There are photos (see composite below) marking the moment where Biles exits her second turn at Amanar, extending her arms out instead of in.
From those images, we realize that in a heartbeat before throwing up his arms to slow the turn, Biles must have seen nothing but the roof of the stadium, before his torso begins to descend to the ground. head first. It is immediate that cognition overrides the muscle memory of the twist, warning him that right there he has lost orientation. His world is bent on its axis. For the outsider, this is a moment of pure terror. For Biles, arguably the greatest gymnast of all time, landing awkwardly on her feet and stumbling is not an unusual technical error. it's a relief. She said, "I took a step back, because I didn't want to do some silly thing there and get injured."
Biles' departure from team finals and all-round competition, where she was expected to dominate, presents sports fans with an uncomfortable truth. The first is that athletic expectation can undermine even the most skilled, successful, best trained and supported athlete. Second, our understanding of 'sport psychology' and the role of sports psychologists is skewed towards performance, not well-being.
The Internet is full of studies focusing on the importance of result-oriented mental/psychological training: visualization, team-building, mental conditioning, goal-setting. Very little is known about the internal stability required to get there. It is now increasingly accepted that, without a sense of well-being, elite athletes can run on unstable terrain. This isn't a thumb rule for all elite athletes, but it's not the rare exception either. A 2019 British Journal of Sports Medicine metastudy concluded that of the current elite athletes studied, mostly in Europe and North America, about 34% suffered from anxiety or depression.
Biles gave the sharpest warning about the mental health issues plaguing the elite athlete world. In an interaction earlier this week, badminton singles player HS Prannoy said that he sympathizes with athletes in precise sports, which are built around repetitive exercises in a limited amount of time. As in shooting, archery, weightlifting, gymnastics, even where the margins leapt wildly between glory or doom, years of work were left to nothing because of the deviation of the millimeter. Funnel those sports into events like the Olympics and the stakes and sense of urgency can only increase.
It is true whether you are successful like Biles or a failure, like the Indian shooting team in Tokyo on Thursday. Biles said she wanted to compete in Tokyo for herself, but "I came in and felt like I was still doing it for other people... Taken away... We should be here to have fun and sometimes it just doesn't happen."
In that context, how do Indian athletes view their Olympics? Is the game still fun for them? Or is it a duty? To please millions? With so few individual medals in our Olympic history, there is no measuring the psychological load carried by our athletes, especially the mentally most vulnerable. The complex economic and power dynamics in Indian sport mean that an Olympic medal is not just a sporting achievement.
For most of our athletes, it is the golden ticket to a life of financial security and personal freedom, for many masters. This is what SACOM Mirabai Chanu achieved with her silver medal. Most of our athletes compete with the fabric of their lives in the Olympics. How it plays out in their brains, if it has been studied, has not been shared.
Heena Sidhu, specialist pistol shooter from ESPN India's Talking Tokyo Show, said, "The more events matter to us, the more we want to do well in them and the Olympics is what matters the most to us." If India had won more Olympic medals in the past, would our athletes be safer and thus perform better? Biles has shown us that there are no guarantees.
Mental health issues don't even differentiate between subjects. Swimmer Michael Phelps, who has won as many Olympic medals as India (28), has been battling depression for years, yearning to make a mark for himself outside his sport. Individual sports vs. team sports, then? Professional team sports are not necessarily more prone to cases of mental illness among footballers and basketball players.
We must ask ourselves how many athletes, especially those who are neither as major or successful as Biles, have the option of pulling out of an Olympic event because they could not cope and therefore could not perform at their best? While there was criticism of Biles, it was far less in support of the maturity of his decision. Among Indian athletes, it would be fair to say that the prospect of dropping out would probably be considered a form of sedition.
In this last Olympic cycle, the International Olympic Committee's (IOC) Athletes Commission during its meetings on mental health issues gained greater traction among athletes around the world. In May this year the IOC released its first Mental Health in Elite Athlete Toolkit. It is a 100-page manual, directed at coaches, their partners, international federations, that explains best practices for handling issues of well-being of elite athletes.
The toolkit was the result of the work of the IOC's Commission of Scientific, Medical and Athletes with more than 20 mental health experts. It drew advice and information from more than 14,000 papers of scientific research around the recognition and evaluation of mental health issues. It takes steps to prevent the onset of a crisis, detect and intervene early, and seek specialist mental health care.
For the first time in the Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics, athletes have access to a helpline called Mentally Fit. It is available to athletes 24 hours a day by phone, email and on the web in 26 languages for Olympic athletes for three months following the Games. The helpline's counselors will advise athletes on a range of issues: coping with pressure, stress, burnout, depression, coping with sports-home life, bullying, eating disorders, injury, and parenting.
Sport should not have been considered part of this grim list at the center of human obscurity. After Tokyo, we will never forget that it is.