For even the most successful Olympians, life after the Games can be like ‘going down that cliff’
It is these emotions that define the Olympics, these moments of release after so many years of control and sacrifice. But soon when the athletes return home, all these emotions, these immense highs of competing at the Games or winning a medal can fade away into what has been dubbed “the post-Olympic blues” – a still relatively under-researched phenomenon that has been highlighted by the athletes themselves.
“It has similarities to anyone that has been doing something for a very long time,” the USA’s most decorated winter Olympian Apolo Ohno told CNN Sport. “They ... felt like this is what they were made to do, they were good at it. And then at a snap of a finger, it’s no longer available and now they have to go and do something else.”
What’s next is the question often asked of athletes in press conferences after their races.What do you do after achieving your life’s work? What happens when you go home after suddenly becoming a household name? Where do you go after starring in the biggest show on earth? What do you do if you have to wait four more years to achieve your goals?
Even as athletes bask in the glory of their achievements, returning to and readjusting to a different, normal life after an Olympic Games can be difficult. And as each returns to their own specific set of pressures, for some those “blues” can linger, take root and turn into periods of depression, even for those athletes who have won gold medals.
“You’re on a high and you don’t really have a chance to understand what you did, for one.And you don’t really have a chance to come down and relax. It’s like you’re on this high and all of a sudden you go down that cliff,” Allison Schmitt, the American swimmer who won 10 Olympic medals – four of them gold – and has completed a masters degree in social work, told CNN Sport.
“We may be looked at as superhuman on TV and we might feel superhuman when we’re winning gold medal after gold medal, but at some point, every high has a low and it’s okay to have that low but it’s not okay to isolate like I did.”
‘When the rollercoaster hit’
Schmitt radiated energy in the moments before the race that would change her life, biting her lip and bouncing up and down on the poolside, preparing herself for the minutes ahead. Already at that Olympics in London, she had won a bronze medal in the 4x100m freestyle relay and a silver in the 400m freestyle, matching her tally of medals from Beijing.
To her left was Camille Muffat, the recently crowned 400m freestyle Olympic champion; to her right was Federica Pellegrini, the defending Olympic champion and world record holder. In less than two minutes – one minute and 53 seconds to be precise – Schmitt would beat them both, become an Olympic champion, set an Olympic record and achieve the goal for which she, as well as her family and friends, had sacrificed so much.
She had dedicated her whole life to this goal, missed high school prom and graduation, put parts of her life “on hold,” redshirted and left her college in her senior year to move to a city where she knew no-one to “solely train.”
In the end, she produced a flawless performance, finishing the race with enough time to grab the lane divider and raise her hand to the sky in triumph before her competitors had even touched the wall.
“I remember one of the coaches saying to me after the 200 free ... ‘You’re on cloud nine, do I need to pinch you?’ And I’m like, ‘No, let me live in this moment. Let me relish this feeling,’” Schmitt recalls.
The rest of the London Games passed in a golden blur for her as she picked up two more Olympic titles in the 4x200m freestyle relay and the 4x100m medley relay.
“During that Olympics, I was on a complete high and it was coming back from it, that’s when the rollercoaster hit,” she says.
She returned home to the USA as a recognizable face, someone whose exploits who had been beamed into millions of homes worldwide.
“I left as Allison Schmitt and I came back as Allison Schmitt, the gold medalist, and there are people that just look at you not as a human and are kind of like, ‘Oh there’s a gold medalist, there’s that swimmer girl.’ It’s like, I can hear you, I’m still a human being and I can still hear you whispering about me. I can see your jaw drop and just stare at me,” she said.
“You’re told so often when you come back from the Olympics how people wish they were you, how you’re so lucky ... how they would do anything for these gold medals,” she adds. “And I don’t think they realize what it took to get those gold medals, all the sacrifices, all the hard work, all the taxing physically, mentally, emotionally you have on your body.”
Still being “grateful” and understanding the sacrifices that everyone around her had made proved to be a “huge hurdle” for Schmitt when asking for help. “I didn’t want it to seem like I was complaining because, ultimately, I was very grateful for this ... but it was definitely a time where you don’t feel human because so many people are looking at you as an object,” she says.
Struggling to cope and feeling like she wasn’t her usual “happy-go-lucky, optimistic” self, Schmitt began to isolate herself as her mental health deteriorated and attempted to go to therapy but didn’t click with her first therapist and “not really understanding therapy” at that time didn’t try to find another one.
“I continued to isolate, it was like I’m just going to sleep because at least when I’m sleeping, I can’t feel this. And so I cried myself to sleep. It took until January 2015 when I was at my absolute lowest point when someone said to me, ‘Let’s get some help.’ I was like, ‘I guess I’m at a point where I want to end my life, I want to do all these things, I don’t know what else to do.’”
She found another therapist who she clicked with and credits showing up for her teammates as well as swimming itself for saving her life. Then, her 17-year-old cousin took her own life in May 2015, prompting Schmitt to speak about her experiences in therapy when it was still stigmatized in the hope that it would help others.
Eventually, she returned to the Olympics and won yet another gold medal at the 2016 Rio Games in the 4x200m freestyle relay and a silver in the 4x100m freestyle before continuing on to the Tokyo Games where she won a silver and bronze medal in those same events, respectively.
‘A trap that the mind can set’
When Ohno won his first Olympic gold medal at the 2002 Salt Lake City Games, he became the USA’s first male short track speed skating Olympic champion ever. He became the face of the sport in his home country for the next decade, winning eight Olympic medals – including two golds – before writing two books about his athletic career and his metamorphosis into an entrepreneur.
“My life changed quite literally within a span of 24 hours,” he said, remembering winning his first Olympic gold medal.
“I was no longer this kind of athlete who was relatively unknown... now, my name and my picture and my face was everywhere and I didn’t know how to respond to that. I didn’t know how to act. I don’t think there’s anything in the world that can prepare you for instant fame or instant recognizability.
“As I grow older, I realize now that most of this probably was not true, but you start to believe in something: this is how the world believes I should be, this is how the world believes that I should act and respond, this is who the world thinks I should be with and all these things. It takes time to live authentically to yourself and also to the values that you want to uphold.”
It is tempting to think that the stories that captivate the world during the Olympics end neatly sewn up when the Games conclude, that the athletes who accomplish superhuman feats ride off into the sunset.
“It’s certainly a trap the mind, and to a certain extent the media, can set that if you win this medal then you will be bliss for ever after,” sports psychologist Peter Haberl, who worked with the USOPC for 18 years until 2023 and now works with the Indian women’s hockey team, told CNN Sport.
“And that’s not how life works. If we prepare the athlete properly, then it’s not just about reaching that peak, it’s also what comes after it.”
More and more athletes, like Schmitt and Ohno, have spoken about the pressures of going for gold and the ways in which that pressure changes if they achieve that goal.
British swimmer Adam Peaty, who has won three Olympic gold and three silver medals, told the BBC in May 2023 that a “a gold medal is the coldest thing you will ever wear ... because you think it will fix all of your problems. It will not.”
He took a break from the sport before returning to win a silver medal in Paris and has spoken about suffering from depression and problems with alcohol. “I took a break because I was on this endless search of a gold medal or a world record and I looked into the future and I said ‘OK, if I do get that, is my life fixed or any better?’ No,” Peaty told the BBC.
In 2020, Michael Phelps produced and narrated an HBO documentary, “The Weight of Gold,” detailing these pressures and criticizing the lack of governing bodies’ support for them. “Really, after every Olympics, I think I fell into a major state of depression,” he said in 2018.
Then, Simone Biles withdrew from several events at the Tokyo Olympics suffering from the “twisties,” a mental block causing gymnasts to lose track of themselves in the air. On her return to the sport, she has both consolidated her status as the greatest gymnast of all time and changed conversations around mental health both inside and outside sport.
As athletes have advocated for themselves and detailed the pressures before, during and after an Olympic Games, there has been some response from the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and national federations.
“The athletes are people first and their whole holistic wellbeing should be taken care of,” Kirsty Burrows – the head of the safe sport unit at the IOC – tells CNN Sport. “In the run up to the Olympic Games, there’s clearly a huge focus on their athletic identity ... and it’s trying to balance this and make sure that after the Olympics, some athletes can struggle with ... this athletic and their non-athletic identity.”
There is a helpline for athletes, available in over 70 languages both during and after the Games, more than 165 athlete welfare officers trained in safeguarding or as mental health professionals and a “mind zone” above the gym in the Olympic Village for the first time ever, where athlete can complete mindfulness exercises, contribute to a positivity wall or spend time in a disconnection pod, Burrows said.
She adds that there are courses available that detail “psychologically recovering from big events” as well as a program that helps retiring athletes transition into a non-athletic career.
For Haberl as a sports psychologist, he said his role is to prepare “the athlete to lead a rich and meaningful life,” to encourage them to “separate and differentiate goals from values,” and help them see that the attention around the Games is an “illusion.”
‘Everything seems to matter’
For almost every sport included in the program, the Olympic Games represents the biggest prize available and their one shot at mainstream exposure, heightening the stakes around winning a medal, or competing there. The pressure to perform is different compared to other professional sports that have popular competitions annually.
“Most Olympic athletes are competing in arenas that are normally pretty empty,” Ohno says. “And there’s not a lot of prize money. There’s no salary, depending on which sport it is, obviously in skiing, swimming and in gymnastics, there’s some great sponsor dollars, but think about all the sports that are non-traditional. There’s just no real market for that.”
The pressure is almost unimaginable, the margins between victory and defeat wafer thin. Neither Noah Lyles nor Kishane Thompson knew who had won the men’s 100 meters final in Paris on Sunday until a photo finish showed Lyles’ torso millimeters ahead of Thompson on the line; just 12 tenths of a second separated the eight men in the final. In Ohno’s own sport of short track speed skating, anything can go wrong in the jostling for position and the tiny margins of victory.
“We know that when I go to the Olympic Games and I may miss the actual podium by two finger snaps just like that, all of a sudden the training today, four years away from the Games seems to really matter,” he says.
“That’s why we see this incredible obsessiveness around the training and the consistency in the pattern and routine from athletes ... because we know the margins are so slim ... and we feel like every single thing that goes into our training, our mental preparation, our recovery, our sleep, the food, the equipment, everything seems to matter.”
After the Olympics, the emotions and highs experienced by athletes can fade away, leading to what's known as "the post-Olympic blues." (from the second paragraph)
Athlete Apolo Ohno, who has been dubbed the USA's most decorated winter Olympian, explained that the post-Olympic blues can feel similar to anyone who has done something for a long time, especially when they have to move on to something new. (from Apolo Ohno's quote)
