Juan González-Hernández, ‘Mental health after the Olympics: why so many athletes struggle to adapt to normal life after big competitions’, https://theconversation.com/mental-health-after-the-olympics-why-so-many-athletes-struggle-to-adapt-to-normal-life-after-big-competitions-236718, The Conversation Media Group Ltd (August 14, 2024)
According to data published by the International Olympic Committee in 2023, 33.6% of elite athletes suffer from anxiety and depression, and when their career ends, 26.4% experience severe mental health problems. (…) When the competitions end, or when athletes retire, they often feel lost: their day to day mental functioning is no longer governed or guided by immediate, ambitious challenges. (…) For sports professionals, retirement can be a great opportunity to explore different ways of seeing sport outside of top-level competition: to understand how children play, to observe how hard amateur athletes work, or how people recover use it to from illness or injury.