After a few weeks training with Barça, recovering that smile that he lost one day and that made him walk away from basketball, Ricky Rubio decided to speak. He wanted to show who he was, what was wrong with him, after pre-retire because his “mind went to a dark place,” to the point that he abandoned a camp with Spain and refused to continue in the NBA. “I’m building myself, but now I pamper myself more and I’m not so self-demanding. The player ate the person. There are many grays in life and I am learning to draw in gray”, he resolved without hesitation to explain his fears; “I have developed chronic stress, although I never put a label of depression or anxiety disorder on it.” His words were as sincere as they were measured, so they brought with them an echo of respect from the press and society. “That was the intention, to understand what was happening to him, making it natural,” explains Mar Rovira, his psychologist, speaker on mental health at the III EPIC International Congress, organized by the Euroleague Players Union ELPA and which will be held in Mataró on May 10. She explained that he had mental health symptoms, not a specific disorder. Since he came, we have not worked with any label because if you put it on, the patient, from that moment on, begins to behave that way. The important thing is that he understands why he has reached that point, what resources he has and how to get out of it.” His process is going from strength to strength, Barça player until the course ends, now enjoyment on the parquet He and other famous athletes –Simon Biles, Michael Phelps, Naomi Osaka…– who also raised their voices, are the best speaker to explain that athletes are, simply, human.
Opening to sports psychology. According to data from the International Olympic Committee Action Plan, 33.6% of elite athletes suffer from anxiety and depression (one in three), and 26.4% maintain mental health problems once the point has been made. end to the sports career (one in four). “They are data on symptoms of mental health problems,” Rovira deciphers. Figures that show a problem and that refer to the sports psychologist. “There has been a radical change and now it has become very normalized and we are already respected, but before you had to do a marketing exercise and convince that our help was valuable. Luckily, now they are coming to look for you,” agrees Rovira, who highlights that there are sports more inclined to rely on a psychologist than others, especially individual sports, although he points out that in basketball they are very well accepted; not so much in football, no matter how much “he is jumping on the bandwagon.” But what is sports psychology for? “What it mainly does is help stabilize or improve the athlete’s performance. You work to make it better than it is,” he defines. It happens, in any case, that there are two groups of athletes knocking on the door: those who want to improve – “we’re doing well,” he jokes –; and those who are already bad. “With those, our obligation is to know the case very well, to make a first intervention to see small alarms and, from a professional perspective, see if you can handle it or if they are no longer symptoms but disorders, so we must refer them to a clinical psychologist. or a psychiatrist.”
The fall. How is it possible that a person who has everything, including a lot of money, is wrong? That is a repeated question in society, which observes athletes at the top of the pedestal. “It’s funny to see how many people associate having a lot of money with being well. Yes, it relieves pressure from the environment, but it is not going to make the internal or external sources of stress, typical of competition, less,” Rovira responds pedagogically; “Each person is different and having more or less zeros in your account is irrelevant. There may even be athletes for whom this high amount of money is a stress factor because they are about to retire, because it will not be renewed if they do not do well and they will not continue to earn the same… That phrase, the one about They have everything, it is general and unfair. Many times they think that they are supermen, that they cannot fail. And they are people like the rest.”
In elite sports, depression, anxiety, disorders and, lately, cases of sleep disorders are repeated. “We must point out,” says Rovira; “symptoms of mental health problems are not the same as the disorder.” And it focuses on the reasons: “This is so multifactorial… Each person is different, but the map of the external stressors associated with performance is significant: the demands of the competition, the number of games they play, travel. , the change of coach or teammates, the end of the contract, the rival team. There are thousands of stressors and they can impact each athlete in one way or another.” And he adds: “There are, in addition, some factors of our own, the biological ones, that come as standard and nothing can be done other than giving tools to make one calmer. There are internal stressors, which is the way they interpret what is in front of them. They are given resources and that is a large area where we can impact.” Resources that are strategies to deal with stress correctly and not that emotional regulation that some do incorrectly, bad management habits such as drinking or going out to play. “If that causes you to have problems with alcoholism, gambling…, we’re in trouble,” she says.
Ricky’s Bounce. Rovira would like the sports psychologist to be more of a guide than a rescue. “By doing good preventive work, the decline will be smaller and, most importantly, the rebound upwards will be faster.” And he clarifies: “Mental health is the ability to adapt to the environment. That’s why I give weight to the environment because not everything depends on you. You have to be as adaptive and flexible as possible to what you encounter in your daily life, knowing how to surf the wave. Knowing that sometimes the sea will be flat, other times it will have five-meter waves, there will be short or long ones… You have to be right or wrong when it’s time, because if not, something goes wrong. “You have to go through all the emotional stages and live with hope and optimism.”
In this is Ricky Rubio, who left basketball for a time. He didn’t want anything to do with the orange ball. “It came to me at a low moment and his process continues. This is not now I start playing and it’s over. “He owns his process and it is under construction,” Rovira agrees. A construction that did not necessarily have to go through playing basketball again. “I think it will be established that doctors prescribe sport as a medicine because physical activity is the best possible medicine. But for elite athletes, their sport, their work, can be a source of stress in itself. And if it is unpleasant for him or for anyone, there is no need to continue with that relationship.” For the Barça point guard, in any case, playing was good for him, in the same way as playing in the derby too. “It was going for it and trying to win it. It is the wonderful loop that we are looking for and we have to know how to focus it in the best possible way.” This time he did it, 11 points and a big smile, more and better reconstruction.
From basket to all sports
He tries to do that with whoever he works with, because in addition to Ricky he also had Alex Abrines as a patient, as well as several MotoGP riders, swimmers, tennis players, paddle tennis players and now he is at Espanyol. “I’m restless,” he explains; “It is exciting to enter a new sport that you don’t know.” But there are common points: “In collective the social component is very important, it is a team, a group of people who seek a common goal where each one has their own goals. In individual sport you are more alone and these are issues related to the level of activation, management, pressure… That is why they are invited to have the maximum possible environment that facilitates their performance.”
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