‘High risk’ time for NZ athletes
setbacks such as disappointment, frustration, injury and financial struggles.
‘‘Some of them don’t know where the next dollar is coming from. But when you get a big disruption like this, it is particularly tough because sport at an elite level isn’t just a job, it’s a lifestyle. Their identity is very much tied up it in all, so anything that takes a crack at that, can make them vulnerable,’’ Nimmo says. The
IOC’s announcement on Wednesday, after months of playing down the severity of the global pandemic, went some way in providing clarity for New Zealand’s Olympic hopefuls. While there was widespread relief among the New Zealand athletes community at the decision, Nimmo says it is still a challenging time for them as they will be forced to reconfigure their plans for the next year.
New Zealand canoe slalom star Luuka Jones, who was among just a handful of Kiwi athletes to have had their selections confirmed for the Tokyo Games before the postponement, says she is mindful of the impact a long break from competition could have on her mental health.
‘‘It’s going to be a really strange year because there’s no real pinnacle event, and probably likely to be no racing. So it’s something I am going to have to work on from a psychological point of view, because you do tend to get absorbed in this one thing,’’ the Olympic silver medallist says.
For the past few months Jones has had to ignore the niggling doubts in the back of her mind and prepare as if the Games were going ahead. She says while she is pleased the event has been postponed, the sudden shift in gear will be a tough adjustment.
‘‘We were keeping on training on the off-chance that the Olympics would go ahead, so now it has been officially postponed I’m relieved from a health perspective, because I just didn’t think it was a good idea, but also we have all had to change our training quite dramatically because of the disruptions.
‘‘Now we’re going to have to make even more changes. We go from kind of ramping up into more intense training and building into the Games, to going right back down again to off-season training. It’s a pretty big adjustment, it’s not like a quick fix.’’
Olympic boxer and double Commonwealth Games medallist Alexis Pritchard, who now works as a mindset and performance coach, says her advice to athletes during this time is to focus on the things they can control.
‘‘There is going to be a lot of frustration and grief out there right now, but athletes are used to coping with this sort of thing. It’s now a case of refocus, readjust, and make a plan,’’ she says.
‘‘We were keeping on training on the offchance that the Olympics would go ahead, so now it has been officially postponed I’m relieved from a health perspective, because I just didn’t think it was a good idea, but also we have all had to change our training quite dramatically because of the disruptions.’’ Luuka Jones, left
wifter, higher, stronger’’ proclaims the famous Olympic motto. So where’s the thinking in that? Where’s the brain gone? It’s all very well bouncing about like Tigger when the world is a beautiful place, but in these troubled times Tiggers need to get smart. They need to think of others. They need to stop bouncing Covid-19 across the universe.
So the new challenge to Olympic athletes is to be swifter, higher, stronger, smarter, because in all this brouhaha about the postponement of the Olympic Games, I’m not hearing enough young people taking responsibility. There are reams of lovely sentiments out there, and thank you for all of those, but first and foremost you youngsters need to get a grip.
A few weeks ago I read a New Zealand sportsperson bleating about the IOC’s failure to cancel or defer the Olympics. And I thought, hang on, how about taking a little personal responsibility here. No-one is forcing you to go. How wonderful it would have been if athletes like Valerie Adams and Mahe Drysdale and Nick Willis, who have quite a bit of brain between them, had said: ‘‘Stuff the IOC, we ain’t going.’’
How wonderful it would have been if a group of elite athletes around the world had joined forces and decided to boycott the Games. How powerful a message that would have sent, not just to the amoral old lawyers and bank clerks who run the IOC, but to all the youth around the world. It would have said: ‘‘The health of the world is on us too, however invulnerable we may feel.’’
Instead, everyone kept just hoping that the IOC would eventually put this thing off. And I think we should worry when our young people are looking to the likes of Teuton Tommy Bach to determine their future. What happened to the revolution?
What happened to young people thinking and talking for themselves?
When the decision to postpone was finally taken Christian Taylor, the American double Olympic triple jump champion, spoke of his relief because, ‘‘The concern of safety was always on my mind. It wasn’t actually about my personal safety. It was really the safety of my friends and family who would have come to visit me.
‘‘I was getting calls from my friends and family saying: ‘Chris, if you’re going to risk it, we’re going to be there with you.’ And that actually scared me. So I really had a sigh of relief knowing that they were going to be safe.’’
This sentiment has been repeated time and time and again by athletes around the world in recent days. And although you can cherish the love behind it, you also want to shout, grow up. Many of you supreme athletes are loving, thoughtful, caring people, but, please, please, please, start thinking for yourselves. Taylor could have kept his family safe, or at least safer, by declaring weeks ago that he would not be going to a Tokyo Olympics in July 2020.
This lack of personal responsibility is a problem being echoed around the planet. One of the glorious things about being young is that golden selfishness which consumes the world in a positive energy. The front of the brain still hasn’t fully grown up and so anything is possible.
Maybe that is why so many heroic young men, many of them still teenagers, rushed to be fighter pilots in World War II. ‘‘Live fast, die young’’, although that bravado is seasoned with a sense of invincibility.
And our Olympic athletes often have rushes of that same immortality. And we celebrate that. It is one of the glories of being human. Sometimes it can come at a terrible cost, but how diminished life would be without the sheer reckless thrill of being young.
But in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, being young comes with a sense of awesome responsibility. I’m not asking all young people to act like Greta Thunberg and save the world. Actually, Thunberg is literally a bad example.
The sermonising 17-year-old Swede was in Davos in January, she was leading 15,000 Brits on a Bristol protest in late February rain, and she was telling off European leaders in Brussels in March. That’s a lot of travel and a lot of contact.
Thunberg says now that it is likely that she and her father have Covid-19. She added: ‘‘We who do not belong to a risk group have an