These are the Olympics of emotions and not those of mental coaches. Even if it may seem exactly the opposite given that the media and social media used by the athletes themselves broadcast every blink of their eyes on a daily basis. This form of communication also comes from having said for years that to avoid the onset of psychological problems, if not psychopathologies, athletes should share their discomforts, to avoid worse trouble. Of course we were referring to sharing with people who are important to them and not public. However, for everyone comes the day when they touch their limits, not only physical but also psychological, and so many top athletes prove to be more fragile in the most important event for them, the Olympics.
This is not a new story, it can already be found described in an issue of the International Journal of Sport Psychology in 1972 with the contribution of 9 psychologists who participated in the Munich Olympics. Fifty years later, the role of the sports psychologist, now called mental coach, has exploded during these Olympic Games. Unmanaged stress and depression have affected super-winners, such as Djokovic, Osaka, Biley, but also younger athletes at their first Olympic experience, who then won a medal. Athletes perceive with more awareness the expectations of results that the world imposes, they must excel otherwise they are worth zero. For many of them there is no alternative to victory, think of Djokovic who after 22 consecutive victories lost a match that he was dominating and also his self-control. These are stories that become tragic also for the inability of the athletes to live differently.
I remember a comment by Julio Velasco when he observed that he saw in television images that Simon Biley is always attached to his cell phone, a source of stress. I am reminded of an opposite situation, when Rudic at the World Swimming Championships in Rome many years ago, had his cell phones handed to him by water polo players because he did not want them to be distracted. Obviously, everyone is free to choose what they want to do, but the great public exposure of today’s athletes and the awareness that success is really a way to radically change their economic future are very destabilizing factors that have so far been little addressed.
Hence the explosion of the figure of the mental coach or the role of past champions such as Vialli with the national soccer team or Phelps who, on the basis of a critical reflection on their own experiences as a top-level athletes, can play a positive role in the mental education of other young people.
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