With life choices to make following the games, every Olympian needs a strategy for moving forward
US gymnast Simone Biles, who has won 11 Olympic medals, at the Bercy Arena during the Paris 2024 games. Photograph: Markus Gilliar/GES Sportfoto/Getty Images, every athlete has a different landing. For years they knew where they were going. And now? Maybe not. They had a vision of how this dream would be fulfilled, or how it would make them feel, or how it would change their lives. And maybe they were wrong about everything.
In 2003, shortly after he joined Irish boxing’s high-performance programme, Billy Walsh shared his Olympics experience with a group whose sights were trained on Athens. Walsh had been sorely overlooked for the LA Games in 1984, so he kept going for the next Olympic cycle. In Seoul, though, he lost his first bout, beaten by a Korean who he had knocked out six months earlier.
Dr Karen Howells, an academic and sports psychologist, told the New York Times recently that she had “not yet met an Olympian who hasn’t experienced” what is often called the post-Olympic blues. Dr Cody Commander, the Team USA mental health officer for the Tokyo Games, describes it “as a crash of emotions”.
In Athens, when he was just 19, he won six gold medals and two bronze; in Beijing he swept the boards with eight gold medals, breaking Mark Spitz’s record of seven from Munich. For the London games the Irish Institute of Sport started putting supports in place, under the leadership of Gary Keegan at the time. For every subsequent Olympics, the processes have been enhanced significantly.