The pressure at the Olympic Games is brutal, suffocating. The athletes say so. And their statements can be a reflection of their mental state. The climber Alberto Ginés declaring that he doesn’t even want to look at the bouldering, which is similar to imagining a footballer saying that he’s not going to defend again. Or the water polo legend Felipe Perrone pointing out that it’s not fair to compete feeling almost obliged to obtain a medal, as if it were that simple. It is also a pressure that seems increasingly severe, although already at the Barcelona 92 Games several Spanish athletes recalled that the oppressive atmosphere barely left them room to compete naturally: the cyclist Álvaro González de Galdeano burst into uncontrolled tears just after finishing the 100-kilometre team time trial. He wasn’t crying because he had finished so close to the bronze, but as a way of getting rid of the pressure that was distressing him.
In the era of the obsessive search for marginal gains to improve sports performance, of scientific studies to create or incorporate materials that work the miracle of pushing athletes or cyclists, sailors or surfers a little further, psychology, the cornerstone of excellence, remains hidden in a dark room. And we continue to hear statements from elite athletes explaining their displeasure or their Olympic diploma (in the Paris Games, Spain has collected 17 fourth places) with purposes that drive sports psychologists crazy. “We have been waiting 30 years for the psychologist to become a natural part of an athlete’s team… and we are far from achieving it,” analyses Josep Font, a psychologist at the CAR in Sant Cugat, who recalls an anecdote: “At the beginning of the 90s, the Italian psychologist Bruno DeMichelis asked a group of athletes in Barcelona if they wanted to be better. Obviously, they all answered yes, and he replied that, then, they needed to have a psychologist on their work team.”
Psychology applied to high-performance sports remains a delicate issue, especially for many coaches who do not consider the benefits inherent in working with the mind, and this despite the fact that most sports federations as well as high-performance centres offer their athletes psychology services. It is not a problem of resources, but of the use of said resources. All the elite athletes of the CAR of Sant Cugat have free and unlimited access to the psychologist, but “only 20% or 25% of them come to our office,” explains Font. The same occurs with the 80 who benefit from the Basque Government grants managed by the BAT Basque Team programme, which offers similar data: only 27% work with the psychologist; the rest do not, unless they do so with one integrated into their respective federations or go to a private one.
Everyone who comes to Josean Arruzea’s office at the BAT works continuously because “there is no other way to do it,” explains the expert. “It is a long-term job in which I try to build appropriate mental processes, a way of thinking at each moment based on what benefits the athlete to optimize their capabilities. I work a lot hand in hand with the coaches in their training and competition space, always if the coaches want, of course. I have a very close relationship with some and I barely have contact with others.” And he adds: “Many coaches do not know what content we handle. They do not know, for example, that we work to contain impatience, which leads to haste, something that is an emotional and rational psychological aspect that must be worked on. Or the management of pressure, or confidence, or mental strength… It is a kind of construction of thought that takes time. Mental functioning is built for one’s own benefit, just like technique or physical strength.”
There is a paradox in sports psychology: there is hardly any coach or athlete who does not recognise the importance of the mental factor: “They think that psychology is important, but the psychologist is not,” explains Josep Font and adds. “We are in this situation because coaches do not know how to work with a multidisciplinary 360-degree vision. Coaches work with doctors, dieticians, biomechanics, physiologists or psychologists, but they do not place themselves at the centre of a work team, but rather they use what a specialist in a field they do not master can offer. And when they think they do not need it, they stop using it. The ideal of many coaches is: if my pupil does not have to go to see a psychologist, it is because he does not have any problem. That is the root of the problem. Performance is 100% psychological and also physical. If you do not have a physical level or the technique incorporated, you will not perform. Psychology conditions performance 100%: it consists of doing what you are capable of doing in the right measure at the right time. If you don’t get mentally ready, you won’t be able to perform,” Font says.
Josean Arruzea was a judo coach in the 1980s and attended the Games as such. “I know the role of the coach and the psychologist, and the doctor and the dietician well, and they all have to work in the same direction for things to flow,” he says. It is common for athletes to go to a sports psychologist when they are feeling bad, when they think they need it, and to abandon the process when they consider it is no longer necessary. In general, they do not perceive the psychologist as an advisor who helps them to better face the competition, to understand why they perform or not or to carry out an examination of their own performance. “For example, I am not in charge of the national artistic swimming team of the CAR of Sant Cugat, but I know that the assigned psychologist only works with one girl on the team. And the team? The coach does not work with the psychologist. At the Games, they made a disastrous debut in the technical routine. What was the reason? Lack of training? “I don’t think so. I think it was more because they didn’t get into the situation despite having a lot of experience in major competitions. They improved afterwards and won bronze and the bottom line is that their role has been a success that makes up for the lack of work with a psychologist,” Font says.
Even today, the work of a sports psychologist is seen as that of a firefighter who puts out specific fires. “A coach will never admit it,” Font says, “but for many, the ideal would be for psychology to not exist, for everything to be reduced to a purely mechanical matter. There are coaches who see the athlete as if he were a bottle full of physical, technical and tactical abilities and consider it a shame that, because of psychology, the contents of that bottle cannot come out. In other words, they see psychology as a cork that prevents the potential contained in the bottle from coming out. So, when the cork does not move, they call the psychologist to uncork the bottle.”
Paradoxically, there are athletes who, once they discover the benefits of psychological work, incorporate it into their routine for years. This was the case of the multiple Paris-Dakar winner Marc Coma, who worked for more than a decade with Font. Or that of Miriam Blasco, Olympic gold medallist in judo in Barcelona 92, who continued working with Josean Arruzea even after leaving competition: “If the athlete evolves mentally and builds a way of thinking that helps them, they can transfer it to their daily life.”
How can we change the mentality to permanently incorporate psychology into the work routine of elite athletes? Font is pessimistic: “It is a cultural issue, of Western culture, of problem solving, and changing this is complicated. I do not work as a therapist, I am not an external support to solve a problem. I help improve sports performance.” Arruzea believes that the ultimate responsibility lies with the athlete, who must seek the tools for improvement: “In high competition there is no justice, there is only doing things well when it is necessary.”
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