Tag Archive for 'sci'

Mikaela Shriffin and the stress management at the Olympics

A few days ago, an article came out in the New York Times by Sian Beilock, one of the leading researchers on how stress affects human performance, even that of very experienced people like those who participate in the Olympics. The beginning of her article should make us think once again about the strength/fragility of champions.

“Watching a two-time Olympian and three-time Olympic medalist skier stumble — not once, not twice, but three times — at the Beijing Olympics was both extraordinary and painfully ordinary. No matter how well we prepare ourselves, how focused we are, what mental exercises we do to get ready, the reality is: These things happen.

Mikaela Shiffrin herself seemed baffled as she talked to reporters after tripping on a gate and failing to finish the women’s Alpine combined race on Thursday, her third disastrous mishap at the Games.

“I didn’t feel pressure there,” she told them. “I mean, there’s always pressure, but I didn’t feel — I just felt loose and relaxed, like I knew my plan: focused, good skiing, and I was doing it.”

In fact, it can happen in the heads of athletes that unnecessary and harmful thoughts pop up that prevent what has been repeated thousands and thousands of times from being played out without the interference of consciousness. The example that I always give to athletes of the damage caused by being voluntarily focused on the task concerns running down the stairs. It is an absolutely automated activity that if it is done with the thought of doing it right or thinking about the movements to be performed will be done awkwardly and less fluidly. So stress can not only promote negative performance by increasing or excessively reducing the levels of physical and mental activation, but it can also compromise performance by making the athlete focus analytically on parts of his performance.
Thus, we can be our own worst enemy even if we are prepared and this happens much more often than we think.

For these reasons, I hope that the two Italian winter sports federations whose Italian athletes will participate in four years at the next Olympics in Milan-Cortina have the intention of immediately activating psychological counseling services for their teams to help them prepare mentally and build a positive team climate for the competitions.

 

Learning from the biggest mistakes

Psychological themes of this week:

The Juventus case - two goals conceded as soon as the game started, and especially at the beginning of each half. Why weren’t they ready? How could Bentancur have been so distracted? What is the mental approach to important games? You can make a mistake at the beginning of the first half, but how can you also make a mistake at the beginning of the second half?

Italian women’s skiing disaster at the World Championships - Too much nervousness from the athletes? How did the coaching staff prepared to handle these legitimate expectations of victory? There is a syndrome created by Sofia Goggia injury? How do you make a mistake on the third stick: too much impulsiveness at the start?

These are cases to be studied in depth, certainly not to find fault but to identify through the knowledge of the reasons that created these problems, how to avoid them in the future.

What is the Italian female skiers lacking?

What is the Italian female skiers lacking?  Probably the total involvement with their performance while instead dominating a mental condition of anxiety and excessive worry.

Peak performance is provided by the athlete whose mental condition is called the “flow state” or “ideal performance state” and in this condition the person is totally absorbed by the task relevant components. It was a matter of asking athletes to develop knowledge around a relatively simple idea: “If you are physically present in a given situation, why aren’t you fully present? What does it take for your mind to also be fully engaged in this competition?

Already in the 1980s, Orlick and Partington interviewing world-class Canadian athletes found that for them it was of fundamental importance to be, before the start of the competition, in a condition of global involvement, a state of mental readiness that almost resembled a form of dream come true. The same regards the top professional golfers. The dominant image in these golfers, an expression of total absorption in the task was as follows: to be focused only on the shot that is about to be executed and on nothing else inside or outside.

People then develop a strategy that allows them to be totally absorbed in the task, which starts with the use of methods that encourage learning and refining a particular task. The pianist, Alicia del la Rocha to optimize the execution of difficult passages of a score uses a strategy based on playing them in a slower, almost whispered way. Time management is also essential in this path of concentration, not everyone should use the approach of the German writer Goethe who claimed that the “early hours of the morning have gold in their mouth”. While there are differences in the conception of what the best hours to work are, it has nonetheless been shown that those who structure their writing time prove effective, just as those who devote more time to their activity are more likely to achieve the desired results. Thus, in any activity, expertise is fostered by the quantity and quality of time spent combined with its temporal organization.

A practical application of this approach can be found in the description that Alessandro Del Piero gives about wanting to learn a certain way to kick a free kick: “At the World Cup in Italy ’90 I was very impressed by Schillaci’s goal against Uruguay … I remember that after every training session at the Comunale, I stopped to try free kicks, especially that famous shot by Schillaci. The coach would sometimes ask me what I was still doing on the field, and he would ask me to stop so that I wouldn’t get too tired. I went on anyway, on my own. I would fix the ball, making a kind of small hole with my shoe, and I worked a lot on the support foot. In short, I wanted to recreate the conditions that had produced that famous shot, and in the end I succeeded: it was a Bologna-Juventus match, we won 3-1 and I finally scored that blessed ball in that blessed way”.

The boldness

Sci, La "follia" di Kristian Ghedina: la spaccata sulla Streif a 137 km/h -  Sci Alpino video - Eurosport

Sofia Goggia at 9 years old wrote: “I want to win the gold in downhill”

It’s never too early to dream. When Sofia Goggia was 9 years old, she wrote: “I want to win the gold in downhill.”

She did it filling the questionnaire on Goal Setting from my book “Mental training.”

She wanted to be mentally ready and at long term very ready. She asked her coach to work at maximum with her.

Over 80, wood cross country ski: Marcialonga vintage

Over 80, wood cross country ski, Marcialonga vintage

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Sky arathon on the frozen lake

Cross-country skiers begin the Engadin Ski Marathon on the frozen Lake Sils.

More than 12,000 skiers participated in the 42.2 km race from Maloja to S-chanf near St. Moritz.

And They're Off

Lindsey Vonn and the depression of the stars

The last athlete that we have come to know that she suffered from depression is the champion of skiing LindseyVonn (see interview on http://www.people.com/people/article/0,, 20,655,760.00. Html) after Buffon, Thorpe and many others. We are a long way from the 80s when psychologists wrote that sports champions show complex and well balanced personality . It was not true! For a long time it was thought that successful people  and not just athletes but also coaches, great leaders, managers, the winners compared to losers showed common personality traits  and therefore their identification in young people, it would be allowed to select potential champions from the others. No research has ever been able to prove. On the other hand, just think at the stars we all know to understand the great differences in personality: Tomba and Thoeni, Maradona and Platini, Rivera and Meroni, Messi and Balotelli, to name just a few. It happens to be successful and depressed, even being constantly under the eye of the public rather than the duty/want to keep winning create additional psychological pressures, increasing the conflict between that part of herself that is suffering from the pain of living and the other one who needs to do the best.