Mental-health issues challenge top athletes
MENTAL HEALTH A MAJOR CONCERN FOR CANADIAN ATHLETES AMID COVID-19
Melissa HumanaParedes finds comfort on the eight-by-eightmetre half of a beach volleyball court. Feeling the soft sand underfoot, the world champion begins to mentally decompress.
But since COVID-19 shuttered sports around the world, Canada’s elite athletes have lost access to courts, gyms, pools and tracks — the places they’d always been able to count on to find relief in tough times.
“The ability to just be able to go outside to a beach for a couple hours a day, that is my release. When I’m inside my court, inside my box, that’s my mental-health time, that’s my me time, that’s when I get to decompress from the rest of the world,” HumanaParedes said. “I don’t have that escape anymore.”
The 27-year-old from Toronto won gold with partner Sarah Pavan at last year’s world championships. The two would have been medal favourites at this summer’s Tokyo Olympics before the coronavirus brought global sport to its knees. Not only have the Games been postponed to the summer of 2021, but this season’s world beach volleyball tour has been scrapped.
In the aftermath of the Olympic postponement, retired American swimmer
Michael Phelps stressed the importance of mental health, telling NBC that “I really, really hope we don’t see an increase in athlete suicide rates because of this.”
The winner of 23 Olympic gold medals told The Associated Press: “As athletes, we’re so regimented. At this point, all the work is done. We’re just fine-tuning the small things to get to this point. Now it’s like, ‘Oh ... we’re not competing.’ All these emotions start flaring up.”
Several national sport organizations — both the Canadian Olympic (COC) and Paralympic Committees (CPC), Own the Podium, the Canadian Olympic and Paralympic Sport Institute Network, the Canadian
Centre for Mental Health in Sport, and Game Plan — have joined forces on a mentalhealth task force to help athletes emotionally navigate this uncharted territory.
The task force will develop consulting and counselling plans that will be offered across numerous platforms such as webinars to athletes, coaches and team staff.
Karen MacNeill, the COC’s lead mental performance consultant, said part of the mental-health issues around coronavirus stem from the fact it’s something athletes have never had to face.
“There’s no playbook for this, right?” she said.
The unpredictability and lack of an end date are troubling. At least with an injury or a maternity layoff, athletes have an approximate timeline for return.
“Whereas we don’t know what (a return) looks like, it’s a moving target, and it’s dependent on not only on what we do, but what our country does and what the world does,” MacNeill said. “So there’s a lot of variables that are out of our control.
“And so we have to really go back to focusing on what’s in our control.”
Humana-Paredes said the few days around last month’s Olympic postponement were the most difficult.
“I just got really anxious and I wasn’t pleasant to be around — you can ask my boyfriend (Canadian rugby sevens player Connor Braid),” she said. “I was just on an emotional roller-coaster. I’d be crying. I’d be upset. I would be frustrated. I would be lost.”
Humana-Paredes and Braid, who’ve both qualified for Tokyo, are living together in Victoria, which she said helps. The couple has set up a work-out area in the living room. But she misses the separation of roles and spaces.
“I know who I am on the court, I know who I am off the court, I know who I am in the gym, and I know what my purpose is, and I know what my goals are,” she said. “Just not having that distinction between that — because my living room is now my gym, and I don’t really have access to the beach — I don’t have those lines anymore to kind of help balance out my life and dictate what my day will look like.”
Two-time Olympic trampoline champion Rosie
MacLennan said an athlete’s loss of sports is similar to what the general population is feeling: it’s grieving the loss of what was normal, and stress-caused uncertainty.
“It’s almost like anticipated doom,” said MacLennan said. “And there’s no clarity on when there will be some aspect of normalcy again; or realistically, we will have to trudge a path towards a new normalcy or new normal.
“It’s really difficult to manage uncertainty, I don’t think humans are really hardwired to manage it well. And then compound that with any financial struggle, a lot of people are experiencing loss of income and jobs. And with that comes like a loss of identity, too.”
Alysha Newman, the Canadian record-holder in women’s pole vault, said athletes focus so completely for months on end for one or two shining moments — the Olympics or, in track and field, the Diamond League. Cancelling the entire season was a proverbial rug pulled out from under athletes, who were left to ask: What now? What’s the point?
“And then it’s like a full blown ‘Holy, this is way bigger than track and field,’ and in my world, track and field is everything,” Newman said. “And now, I think ‘All right, we have to have the (2021) Olympics because there’s no way that this is going to last forever. But we don’t know that.
“Every so often it will come up in my head, like, ‘What if this keeps going for more than a year?’ It’s hard, definitely really hard, but I try not to think about it. Because it’s so out of our control.”
Indeed, the severity of the pandemic and the rising death toll has raised questions around whether the Olympics will even be feasible 15 months from now.
The loss of structure is difficult for athletes, who are accustomed to having their days, weeks and even months carefully scheduled into training blocks.
Loss of income affects athletes. While many receive a monthly stipend through Sport Canada’s Athletes Assistance Program — a senior “card” is worth $1,765 per month — athletes also rely on appearance fees, prize money, and sponsorship dollars. Many athletes also need part-time jobs to pay the bills. Those jobs might no longer exist.