Mental health is the spotlight at the 2022 Beijing Olympics

The Winter Olympics are under way in Beijing and athletes are under some new restrictions, mainly due to Covid. In this year of the pandemic, the Olympic games are not allowing families to travel with competitors, they’ve reduced the number of fans in the stadiums, and athletes are less able to go out and to explore their host country. Carter Hyde has the story.

Olympic Athletes have always faced enormous pressure at the games, and COVID has only added new pressures. The famed “Olympic Village” is a more isolated place this year. The US athletes are far from home, maybe without support systems they might have had access to in the past. And yet.

The good thing for the athletes that are in the Winter Olympics is they’ve had a lesson from the summer athletes and coaches, right?

Megan Buning teaches at Florida State University and is a mental performance consultant for athletes.

So the summer Olympians went through this just last summer and hopefully they were taking the winter. Olympians were taking notes about kind of what they were going to be allowed to do. Preparing mentally in general without the stress of having an Olympic event coming up is quite a lot. And then you add the Olympics on top of that and then now you have COVID restrictions and a pandemic. So I would say that preparedness is important in terms of what you do.

Buning says she sees progress in mental health acceptance and the acknowledgment that talking to someone doesn’t show weakness.

And I think that in terms of successes, I’m seeing more athletes and coaches being more comfortable expressing when they need help. And then also I’m seeing athletes and coaches being more willing to accept help because for a long time, people thought that mental training that there was something wrong with you. And I think we’re starting to see that people are changing the narrative with the work.

But more importantly, I think that mental health and mental prep is getting the attention that it needs.

Christopher Ryan Hill teaches psychology at Cal State Santa Barbara.. He works with athletes on mental preparation. Hill says that in addition to the new pressures from Covid this year’s winter Olympians in Beijing could also face internal pressure about what they should and shouldn’t say, which might be different than how they are used to acting at home, says Professor Hill.

I think athletes now have the ability to freely express themselves, at least in the United States and in most areas of the world on social media.

They’re able to say what they want whenever they want. They can be critical of our government or other governments around the world. But you can’t do those same things typically in China. And I imagine that that presence of an authoritarian government, plus the kind of fear that might come with that might be a little unnerving to some athletes and might be in the back of their minds as they enter their preparations for their sports.

The pressures of Covid and possible restrictions on speech, might even affect the athletes’ performances. Hill says.

The normal routines, the normal flow of people, sports was totally disrupted, and that disruption caused a lot of tough times for athletes. It causes you to lose focus that causes you to lose concentration with losing focus and concentration. It’s quite likely that you’re going to have decreases in performance.

The 2022 Beijing Olympics continue through February 20. When Team USA returns they’ll be asked about how they coped and how they held up, in these most unusual Olympic Games.

For Annenberg Media. I’m Carter Hyde.