Katerina Stefanidi has cleared heights most people can’t even see from the ground. She is a 2016 Olympic gold medalist, a 2017 world champion and one of the most decorated female athletes in Greek history. But when she stood in Bashor Lounge at USC’s Heritage Hall on Tuesday, she said the hardest thing she has ever done was bigger than a gold medal. .
“Creating a life-work balance was the hardest thing in my career,” Stefanidi told an audience gathered for “Olympic Athletes and Health: Excellence, Ethics and Performance in the Modern Games,” part of the Olympic Ideals Series co-hosted by the USC Center on Public Diplomacy and the Consulate General of Greece in Los Angeles.
The April 21 symposium brought together Stefanidi and three USC researchers – sports pharmacist Dr. Alexis Brown, data scientist Dr. Lorena Martin and pharmaceutical sciences dean Dr. Vassilios Papadopoulos – for a wide-ranging conversation about what it actually costs to compete at the elite level and what the sports world owes athletes in return. With the LA28 Games fewer than two years away, the stakes of the discussion felt immediate.
A struggle that started at 16
Stefanidi was candid about a private chapter of her career. At 16, she was told she had gained four pounds. As a track and field athlete, weight gain could be weaponized against her. Her coaches’ observation sent her into what she described as nearly a decade of struggle; It was a period that included bulimic episodes, a referral to a psychiatrist and dietitians and an eight-month break from competition.
“I was told for years that there was only one way to success, but it wasn’t for me, I needed to find my own path,” Stefanidi said.
That path eventually led her to Stanford University, where a coaching change to Toby Stevenson reignited her love for the sport. She later moved to Arizona and found further inspiration under current Texas jumps coach Edrick Floreal. The journey, she said, required luck as well as persistence – and a willingness to reject the idea that suffering is the price of excellence.
“Performance is not just what happens in competition,” she said. “It’s what happens around you.”
More than an outcome
Throughout the symposium, Stefanidi kept returning to a question that elite sports rarely makes easy: how do you separate what you do from who you are?
“I don’t want to be defined by outcomes,” she said. “It took a long time to learn how to separate what I do from who I am, that was very difficult.”
It is a tension she has not fully resolved but has learned to manage. Now a mother – she noted, with a laugh, that she has stopped mid-practice to breastfeed – she describes herself as more attuned to her body, more patient and more clear-eyed about what actually matters. Her husband, Mitchell, is also her coach and a former pole vaulter himself. The two met in 2013 and tied the knot in 2015.
As a new mother, Stefanidi is eyeing a return to high-level competition with the European Championships in August. Her life outside the sport – mountain biking, skiing, reading and board games – is not a distraction from that goal, she said. It is what makes her career sustainable.
“I needed to create a life outside of sport to truly protect myself,” she said. “Now I know I can’t lose myself.”
The science behind the athlete
The panel around Stefanidi expanded on the less visible aspects of elite performance.
Dr. Alexis Brown, the embedded sports pharmacist with USC Athletics, described a role most fans don’t know exists: working directly with athletes to review medication and provide guidance so they can make informed decisions about their health. She raised concerns about the prevalence of substances like pseudoephedrine (Sudafed) – common but prohibited – and the dangers of performance culture that normalize pushing every limit.
“We want to help athletes make healthy choices for themselves,” Brown said, emphasizing the importance of being non-judgmental and advocating for a shared health tracking system that would follow athletes through gaps in care, including emergencies and transitions between programs.
Dr. Lorena Martin, who works primarily with men’s sports and studies how performance data shapes athletic decisions, described a landscape of thousands of data points and not enough ethical guardrails. Recovery data has become central and increasingly non-invasive, she said, but the integration of AI into that analysis is still maturing.
“The meaningful data question is the real challenge,” she said, noting that the ethical dimensions of data collection, who owns it, who sees it, and how it is used, are as important as the numbers actually say.
Dr. Papadopoulos addressed the frontier of performance-enhancing substances, with particular focus on peptides such as BPC-157 that are seeing explosive amateur use despite significant unknowns. He described an ethical structure in which responsibility does not fall primarily on the athlete.
“The ethical dilemma is not solely up to the athlete to know,” he said. “It’s up to the person delivering the substance.”
He was blunt about the long-term costs of doping in professional sport, citing elevated rates of early cardiac death among players who used steroids, as well as emerging neurological consequences.
“New technology and innovation arrive every year,” he said. “But you cannot beat physiology.”
What sports owe athletes
One of the panel’s closing questions cut into the heart of the event’s purpose: what does sport owe to athletes?
The panelists agreed the conversation about mental health in athletics, while important, has to go further. A truly athlete-centered approach, they said, means building structures that support whole lives – before, during, and after competition.
Stefanidi put it plainly: “Everyone is so different. The things that make you happy – that matters. You need people who can point you in the right direction and who see your talent.”
The event, moderated by Dr. Kari L. Franson of the USC Mann School of Pharmacy, was held in anticipation of the LA28 Olympic and Paralympic Games. For panelists, the two years remaining before Los Angeles welcomes the world is not just a logistical countdown, but an opportunity to do something the Games have not always managed: put the athlete, in their full humanity, at the center.