Battle of Olympic mind Games

With the Olympics set to be postponed, Australia’s top swimmers and cyclists have been warned the hardest times are still ahead.

Velodromes in Australia have been closed and one-on-one coaching has been suspended Picture: AAP

Still reeling from the shock that the Tokyo Olympics are set to be postponed for a year, Australia’s elite swimmers have been warned that the hardest times for them are still ahead, while our top cyclists have been given the unfamiliar advice to slow down.

Although no official decision will be made for another four weeks, Craig Reedie, a longtime member of the International Olympic Committee, said everyone could see where things were headed, with the coronavirus ­pandemic spreading and Olympic hopefuls around the world unable to train.

“In the balance of probabilities, the information known about conditions in Japan and the COVID-19’s effect on the rest of the world clearly indicate the likelihood of postponement,” Reedie said. “The length of postponement is the main challenge for the IOC.”

Australia’s swimmers got to sleep in this morning for the first time most can remember, because training has been cancelled.

Normally, they would be up ­before dawn and heading to the pool for a lung-bursting workout. But the high-performance centres have all been shut, so they have been ordered to stay home and keep safe. “It’s the right thing to do right now, but still it is a tough message,” Australia’s head swimming coach Jacco Verhaeren said.

Cycling’s high-performance boss Simon Jones said his first order to cyclists — some of whom had been selected for Tokyo 2020 last week — was to “take stock” and focus on their mental health.

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“People will go through all sorts of thoughts and feelings over the next day, week, month,” Jones said. “Some of them may have been thinking about retiring after the Games.”

For highly tuned swimmers, the problems they face during lockdown will be both physical and mental, but it’s the latter that worries Verhaeren the most. Used to training twice a day, every day, swimmers will quickly start to lose their feel for the water while their minds start to play tricks on them.

Creatures of habit who are used to clockwork planning and familiar routines to try to achieve the incredible goals they set, the prospect of swimmers being locked indoors for months on end has staff worried about their mental wellbeing.

“This is not going to be a quick fix, so we are going to focus on the preparation to repair the damage to our people but also to our industry, to reset their minds,” Verhaeren said. “We don’t know the goals at this point, and we don’t know when that goal is going to be set, which is obviously the Olympics. So, only after that can we make ­any decisions.

“We have to sit out this situation and do it a step at a time. But first and foremost now it’s really to keep the space and make sure that we provide them with the appropriate care.”

A 15-strong track cycling team, including six debutants, was named last week. But now Jones isn’t sure if a rescheduled Games will mean the team is re-selected. Funding beyond this year and the impact on staff are other unknowns, although Jones did confirm that the staffer who had contracted coronavirus was recovering well and that no other rider or staff member had tested positive since.

Velodromes in Australia have been closed and one-on-one coaching has been suspended, while riders have been ordered to avoid group road rides in accordance with social distancing measures. Riders based in Europe have been clocking up the kilometres on indoor simulators.

Australia failed to win a gold medal at the recent world championships, due to Jones’s focus on Tokyo. But he said the results were now “irrelevant” and the team had time to recalibrate for a likely 2021 Olympics campaign.

The Daily Telegraph/AAP