‘The weight of expectation was crippling’: How to avoid choking at the Olympics

At the start line in Rio de Janeiro in 2016, rower Kim Brennan was so calm that she was conscious of the sound of the bubbles under her boat and the touch of her fingertips as she held the oars.

She had trained her mind to believe that nerves were merely a physiological response to a moment, one more input to be dealt with as she readied herself to row in an Olympic single sculls final. In lead-up regattas, she’d even tried to simulate nervousness, as far as that is possible.

Youth on the grand stage: Leisel Jones at the Sydney Olympics.Credit: Craig Golding

“That’s not to say I was calm three hours before the race, but by the start line I was very calm,” Brennan said. “I knew what was going to happen. I didn’t know whether I was going to win the race or not, but that wasn’t the ask. The ask was to perform the best I can.”

Brennan won gold, crowning silver and bronze medals four years previously in London, all now stashed away in a sock drawer. Motherhood and her work for Ernst and Young as a consultant to defence and national security on complex data and technology programs don’t leave much time for or inclination to basking.

‘I didn’t cope very well’

It’s not like that for every Olympian, nor every time. Breaststroker Leisel Jones was 15 when she made her debut at the Sydney 2000 Olympics and became a darling to her country with a surprise silver medal, but was drowning as much as waving. “I didn’t work with a sports psychologist, which I think was a big mistake. I really needed one,” she said. “That was probably when I needed it the most. I was just overwhelmed. Pressure, expectation, all eyes on me. I didn’t cope very well.”

Conventional wisdom was different then. “My coach at the time (Ken Wood) said that only weak people needed sports psychologists,” Jones said.

Famous sisters Cate and Bronte Campbell.Credit: AP

Swimmers make a splash and feel one. Just before she took to the blocks for the 100m final in Rio, Cate Campbell got a text from a friend to say that she had booked out her company boardroom so that they could all watch.

Suddenly, she felt a continent-sized millstone on her shoulders. “I remember thinking this was bigger than just me,” she told the Daily Telegraph in 2017. “I was responsible for other people. I had to do this for other people as well as me.”

Australian rower Kim Brennan.Credit: Nic Walker

She and sister Bronte, the then world record-holder and reigning world champion respectively, both bombed. That’s Cate’s summation, not ours. “Possibly the greatest choke in Olympic history,” she said some years later.

But not even those who conquer their Mt Olympus float off around on a gold-lined cloud. Ariarne Titmus produced one of the great swims in Australian history to win 400m freestyle gold at Tokyo 2021. When her meet finished, she collapsed. “You look forward to an Olympic Games your entire life and you train your whole life for it, and then when you’re in it, you just want it to be over,” she told Code Sports En Route to Paris podcast. She’s going back, of course.

For Jamie Dwyer, the nerves crept up. Leading into Athens 2004, Australia’s men’s hockey team had never won Olympic gold. It was surely a monkey, but in Dwyer’s eyes not his monkey; this was his first Games.

But as the final against the Dutch tipped into extra time, Dwyer was on edge. “I really didn’t want it to go to (penalty) strokes,” he said. “I was the fifth taker for Australia. I found that out two minutes before the game.” His sudden death goal settled everything. It remains the most famous in Kookaburras history.

For three reasons, the Olympic Games put more pressure on athletes than any other event. One is that they come around only every four years, and for most competitors, once in a lifetime. Only 30 per cent of Olympians make it to more than one Games, and only 10 per cent at any edition win medals (this is particularly true of Australia, which sends very big per capita teams). There is no Olympic season; it’s today or never.

Sheer relief: Cathy Freeman in 2000.Credit: Craig Golding

Former Olympic hockey player and coach Ric Charlesworth once framed it this way: golf and tennis are immensely competitive, but with four majors a year each, a good player will get 40 cracks in a career. An Olympian might get one.

Secondly, there is the glare of the spotlight, which is infinitely more intense for Olympic athletes because so many toil away in obscurity for most of their careers. Thirdly, and this is also especially true of Australia, Olympians become avatars of their nation. No single athlete has more embodied this unholy trinity of unfathomable stress than Cathy Freeman in Sydney in 2000. None, arguably, has handled it better.

‘An emotional threat’

Carolyn Anderson was a newly graduated psychologist when she competed in taekwondo in Athens in 2004 and admits she was completely unprepared for the maelstrom. Twenty years later, she is going to the Olympics again, this time as the Australian team psychologist. In the interim, the science has changed in a quantum way.

“The approach then was, you should feel confident, you should be calm and relaxed,” she said. “And I didn’t feel any of those things. I didn’t know then about imposter syndrome. I had moments walking through the Olympic village thinking, wow, what am I doing here?” She thought she had somehow to banish these sentiments. Now she counsels athletes to make room for them.

“Our approach now is, these things are not bad,” she said. “We’re human. These things are going to happen. It’s how we work them that’s important. The answer is not to replace negative thoughts with positive thoughts. That’s not how it works. It’s about how we relate and respond to our thoughts.

“I spend a lot of time talking to athletes about understanding their fight-or-flight response. Fight-or-flight obviously comes up in a life or death situation. Exactly the same response shows up at an Olympic Games. No one’s going to die, but that limbic system, the primitive part of the brain, doesn’t know the difference. It’s an emotional threat, not a physical threat.”

Anderson said the not uncommon reflex by which athletes feel nauseous to the point of vomiting before a competition was a natural corollary. “When we understand physiologically what’s happening, for most it’s actually really good for us,” she said. “It gives us more energy, makes us more accurate, shuts down the parts of the body that we don’t actually need, like the digestive system.

“When we understand that all these things are going to make us faster and stronger - and save energy, too - and start to interpret that as a helpful thing, that can have huge implications. The more we try to fight what’s actually happening, the bigger it gets, the more problematic it becomes.”

“I didn’t work with a sports psychologist, which I think was a big mistake. I really needed one ... That was probably when I needed it the most. I was just overwhelmed. Pressure, expectation, all eyes on me. I didn’t cope very well.”

Leisel Jones

In most sports, the competition at Olympic Games is less acute than at world championships because entry by any country in any one event is limited. Despite this, few world records fall and many stars underperform. Only one in four Olympic gold medals are won by the contemporary world champion or world record-holder. Brennan puts this into context of the “sensory overload” at the Games.

“No one ever watches rowing. All of a sudden, you’re rowing in front of a global audience,” she said. “There’s a whole lot of environmental changes that you don’t really get the chance to practise before you get there.

“People say it’s just another regatta, but it doesn’t feel like another regatta. You know this matters to you, this really matters. This is what you’ve been putting your life on hold for. You can’t trick yourself. This is the time the spotlight is actually looking deep into you and any lies you’ve been telling yourself about leaving no stone unturned, they all come back in that moment on the start line.”

Brennan’s deceptively simple answer was to make sure there was no lie to tell herself. That meant approaching every training session over four years as if it was her last before the Games. But she is one of few capable of such iron-clad mental discipline. “Sometimes in coach-driven sports, the coach takes away that accountability,” she said. “But it’s the athlete who has to sit on the start line.”

Psychological preparation is not one-size-fits-all, of course. One athlete’s arousal is another’s over stimulation. “What you learn is what is your best state for optimal performance,” Brennan said. “For me, it was being calm, being clear, being present, able to hear the bubbles under the boat, feel the pressure in my fingers, sense what was happening to the trim of the boat, hear what was going on with the other competitors. Knowing how I would respond to those inputs.”

‘The reality of sport’

For those fortunate enough to go to more than one Games, the mind games change shape but do not ease. Jones learned to concentrate on process, not outcome and it put her on a more even keel. Nonetheless, the gold that had seemed her destiny continued to elude her.

“The pressure I was under was mostly from myself, but it grew and grew and by the time I got to Beijing (in 2008), it was enormous,” she said. “The weight of expectation was crippling, really.”

At last, this most graceful of swimmers prevailed, winning 100m gold. “I’m glad I finally did it,” she said. “I think it would have been very difficult to live with, not having achieved what I knew I was fully capable of. I’d have loved to have won the 200 as well, but it just wasn’t my day. Time has given me space to be able to appreciate everything I’ve done.”

Dwyer’s second Olympic experience in Beijing in 2008 was as different as Greece and China are different. “My mindset was a bit different,” he said. “I’d been voted best player in the world a couple of times. I felt a bit more pressure from the media, from myself, too. I really wanted to win again. It was just a bit different.

“Looking back on my career, if I had the money, I’d probably have got a personal psych. I think I would have been much more prepared for the bigger tournaments. The older you get, the more you realise you don’t know.”

Meares celebrates her bronze medal at the Rio Olympics.Credit: Getty Images

Track cyclist Anna Meares won medals at four Olympics and was Australia’s captain and flag-bearer at the fourth, in Rio in 2016. What she learned along the way, she said recently on a Sport Integrity Australia podcast, was that there were no guarantees.

“There was a shift in psychological pressure from the rookie I was in Athens in 2004 to ultimately the matriarch in Rio in 2016,” she said. “I go from loving trying to win to in some ways fearing what happens when I don’t.” She said she was as proud of the keirin bronze she won in Rio in her last games as the gold she won the time trial in Athens in her first.

Meares is chef de mission of the Australian team in Paris. She said she would work to foster a more holistic understanding of success and failure. “I would be proud to help people to be able to see that behind the face of an athlete, of a leader, of a coach, there are people who experience the exact same emotions and stresses as everybody else,” she said, “and try to bring that level of pressure down a bit.”

To that end, she is glad Australia has abandoned its practice of publicly projecting a medal count. “It’s nice to feel like there’s not a competition within a competition,” she said. “I would have really enjoyed a reprieve from that.”

Most who go don’t win. Failure comes in a spectrum. An outsider’s near-miss has a different texture to a hot favourite’s. The Campbells were distraught that night in Rio, and I don’t think I’ve seen a more hollow look on an athlete’s face than on swimmer James Magnussen’s after he bombed out in the 4x100m relay in London four years previously.

But failure is not always or even mostly a matter of succumbing to pressure. Psychologist Anderson says she can easily rationalise it. “Failure is a part of it,” she said. “You can do everything right on the day, but someone else is better. That’s the reality of sport. That’s what makes it exciting. If it was predictable, it wouldn’t be very exciting. That’s the beauty of it. When we accept that failure is a part of sport, it doesn’t take away from the greatness.

Twenty-four years on from her Sydney debut and 16 since winning her precious gold medal, Leisel Jones long ago stopped trying to beat all the demons. Instead, she has joined them. Recently, she completed a psychology degree.

Jamie Dwyer will appear as a hockey expert on Stan Sport’s Olympics Daily and Paris Preview shows throughout the Paris 2024 Olympic Games.