In Search of Olympic Gold? Seek a Therapist
By Alexander Eule
March 8, 2006

Immediately after Sasha Cohen’s first fall in her long-program at the Torino Olympics last month, NBC commentator Scott Hamilton shrieked, “That’s a fall,” without additional insight. Commentators displayed even greater befuddlement three days earlier when four pairs of ice dancers fell, unexpectedly, in their final competition.

More than any other theme, falls dominated story lines in Torino, from Cohen’s mistakes to U.S. skier Lindsey Kildow’s spectacular crash and surprising comeback two days after she was rescued from the mountain by a medevac helicopter. The falls were replayed repeatedly, but the commentators were often left searching for answers. While there was no easy explanation, Yogi Berra, in his own way, might have said it best years ago: “Baseball is 90% mental, the other half is physical.” Athletes who reach an Olympic stage are unquestionably gifted physically, but when it comes time for the final competition, experts say psychology plays an enormous role.

Sports psychologists say Berra’s quote applies to any sport, particularly on an elite stage like the Olympics, where medals are usually won by tenths of a second or a single point. Today, in search of any possible edge, athletes are increasingly adding sports psychologists to their training team. As endorsement opportunities and media attention swell with each new set of Games, psychologists and coaches say the increased pressures are likely to make psychological services even more important.

According to sports psychologist Jack Lesyk, the psychological aspect of competing “is tremendous in terms of results.” Lesyk, director of the Ohio Sports Center for Sports Psychology and adjunct professor at Cleveland State University, says Yogi Berra’s 90 percent mental figure might be high, “If it were that much, I would be able to do it,” he says of sports like figure skating.  Nonetheless, even a small percentage can have a major impact, Lesyk adds.

“The higher level you go in every sport, the more everything else is evened out,” says Lesyk, who is on the board of the Association for the Advancement of Applied Sport Psychology, a 1200-member national organization. “They have the same bodies, same conditioning. So the big question is how mentally prepared you are.”

Evelyn Kramer, a long-time figure skating coach who has worked extensively with Michelle Kwan, values mental preparation even more. “I think it’s 80 percent,” she says, “once they’ve reached the elite level.” As a result, Kramer has been using psychology in her coaching since she began in the 1970s, attending therapy sessions with athletes and leading mental exercises on the ice minutes before competition. Kramer, who has a masters degree in psychology and counseling, believes the figure skating community has long been out of touch with the mental side of sports. “I think a lot of people including coaches are now starting to look at that aspect,” she says. “But when I was in the midst of my career, I was the odd-ball. I was the maverick.”

The U.S. Olympic Committee has had sports psychologists on its staff since 1983, according to Lesyk. In seeking ways to defeat the then-dominant Eastern bloc nations, Lesyk says the United States began investing in psychologists. (“When the wall came down, we found that it was drugs not mental,” he notes of the Russian and East German’s prowess.)

Still, Kramer says there is not enough understanding inside the sport. “I would guarantee you that there are very few coaches even to this day that have gone to therapy with their skater,” she says. Kramer on the other hand, regularly uses psychological techniques, both during practice and competition. The coach recalls one particular example before the 1999 British Nationals where she was working with skater Tamsin Sear. Kramer says she had attended therapy with Sear and then brought the lessons onto the ice. “It was right before she’s getting on,” Kramer says of Sear’s 1999 skate, when she employed the Imago therapy technique of mirroring dialogue to ease the skater’s mind. “And then she went out, and she won the championship.”

Despite such widespread agreement about the importance of mental strength, the topic was rarely analyzed by NBC’s figure-skating announcers, Hamilton, Dick Button, and Sandra Bezic.  “Because I don’t think they understand it either,” Kramer contends. “It’s not measurable.” Psychologists themselves are reluctant to discuss individual performances, but past research could offer clues to Cohen’s mistakes.

David Conroy, a professor of Kinesiology at Penn State University, has spent much of his career analyzing psychodynamic forces in athletic competition and says a fear of failure or success can be very damaging to individual performance.  For athletes suffering from such a complex, Conroy says, “Failure captures their attention. We don’t know whether it’s because they’re hyper vigilant and detect cues sooner or because they have increased dwell time, meaning they don’t let go.”

Conroy adds, “For whatever reason, they do spend more time thinking about failure cues when they’re presented with them.” While Conroy would not extend the theory directly to Cohen, the skater did fall several times during the warm-up preceding her performance. “Falling in warm-ups,” he says understatedly, is “the type of cue that could be a little disconcerting.”
 
Kramer herself offered a more specific psychological perspective on Cohen’s falls. “She can’t concentrate for very long periods of time, and I feel that’s her issue.” Kramer says a tendency to overthink can be devastating to any skater. “I always think the best athletes are a little bit dumb.”

That opinion has grounding in scientific research. “Most of the time in sports, you don’t really have a lot of time to be thinking during the competition,” says Steven Petruzzello, a professor in the Department of Kinesiology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. “A lot of times when you do that’s when bad things happen.” Petruzzello pointed to recent work in the sports psychology lab at the University of Maryland, where studies have indicated that the performance of skilled marksmen usually suffers when the left hemisphere of the brain is more active relative to the right. Conventional wisdom has long suggested that the left side of the brain controls analytical thinking, while the right side is more spatially oriented.  

“When you start to have a lot of self-talk and mental processing going on during the performance,” Petruzzello says, “you take it out of the automatic and make it more effortful.” Such an insight has application even to novices. “Next time someone’s kicking your butt during tennis, just ask them if they breathe in or breathe out when they hit the ball.” Petruzzello says such a question is sure to knock opponents off their stride.

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