Anxiety, frustration and pressure, the B side of the top of the sport

Delfina Pignatiello – with tears in her eyes – celebrated having won the silver medal at the Youth Olympic Games, in 2018, and he dedicated it to his grandmother, died a week earlier. Everything was glory and excitement. But two years later, the tears were for something else.

At just 22 years old, the swimmer announced her retirement. Her mind and the haters on the networks, to put it briefly, prompted her to step aside.. “I am very hurt and I need to prioritize my mental health… I am very self-demanding with a lot of things, but the competition was against me, the most difficult of all because I always wanted to be on top, very high, go up and up, break the ceiling , an increasingly higher ceiling,” he explained.

Delfina’s case It is a clear example of the B side of what athletes suffer when they reach the top. Anguish, fear, bullying, depression, self-demand, frustration.

“Athletes have to learn to manage emotions. They suffer a lot of pressure and fear. The first fear is of not performing according to the expectations created. And there is also the fear of injuries because they leave you out,” Pablo Pécora begins by explaining, a psychologist specialized in high-performance sports, author of the book The pressure, winning in sport and current therapist of tennis player Jaime Etchevery, among other athletes.

Former soccer player Daniel Osvaldo also dared to share his pain: “I have been dealing with a very big depression for a long time. That depression makes me fall into some addictions: alcohol and drugs. “I’m at a point where my life is getting out of hand.” Her words, in an Instagram post, set off alarms. Fernando Signorini, Diego Maradona’s former physical trainer, reacted quickly.

“As soon as I finished listening to him, I left him a message to sympathize with him. He told him to count on me for anything, as I usually do with all players who are bad. You know why? Because There is a very perverse treatment with the soccer player and a very great degree of insensitivity as well. Not only in relation to the human. Depression is a disease that is not taken into account. They do not care. In many cases they are told: ‘It’s going to pass, go back to training.’ There is a brutal insensitivity.”

Adds Signorini: “On the other hand, you cannot treat an athlete for losing a competition or a footballer for losing a match in the brutal way that the media treats. State mechanisms would have to intervene. There should be content control, without this meaning a brake on freedom of expression”.

Tennis player Nadia Podoroska also confessed her anguish after suffering bone injuries as a teenager and frustration at not being able to play or losing. “She needed to work emotionally. Master my emotions, observe myself and not just reproach myself.”

In 2018 he began working with Pedro Merani, an expert in Zen meditation, who gave him breathing and meditation techniques to improve his anxiety during matches. Francisco Cerúndolo, who is ranked 21st in the world tennis ranking, He confessed some time ago that he started therapy to improve his character.

Pécora says: “Nowadays, going to the psychologist is established, it is no longer frowned upon in the world of sports. The athlete, when he goes to therapy, looks for a plus for his mental strength. And with the development of neuroscience, you can improve a lot of things, from your agility to vision and decision making.”

“In the case of tennis,” he points out, “a lot of work is done prior to the matches. There are routines and rituals, where through breathing and meditation you begin to calm your mind. You learn to get rid of negative thoughts, those that interfere with your peace of mind. Positive visualizations, good feelings, reviewing good plays. All of this is a way to prepare well and then get into the action, which is the game. Suddenly, we are in the players’ room, where there may be two hundred tennis players, perhaps, if it is a Grand Slam tournament, and I have them meditating. In football it is being incorporated little by little, but it is a different type of group.”

Pécora highlights that there are several important clubs, such as River and Boca, that have long incorporated psychologists into their technical teams. “Likewise, many times it is more of a social worker coverage, like going to see where the kids in the lower divisions live. And unfortunately in many cases, these kids cannot talk to a psychologist: they lack the culture of talking to a therapist, they even have very crude stories to tell. But they need it. Because the first pressures they feel are external ones, like the expectations of their own family.”

Pécora adds that in that environment that sometimes suffocates there are also managers (“who put in money for the boy to do well”), coaches and even friends.

“A youth athlete is not prepared for those external pressures. The boy has to play and enjoy. Because if not, he ends up demanding too much of himself. That’s when you get frustrated or depressed if things go wrong. And there she faces his own doubts, his own uncertainty, his own fears, her places of darkness. Places where she cannot move forward,” adds Pécora.

Signorini agrees with Pécora on the importance of the therapist and makes a request: “More psychologists should go to the slums because many players end up being professionals. And, beyond training them, we must educate them. Create heads with strengths.”

“You take your son to a club and the first thing you have to know is who are going to be in charge. Let them not be those guys who play along with the miserable people in the media who say that you have to win in any way, that second does not exist, because horrible things can happen later. Furthermore, I think what often fails is communication. Because you have to listen to the kids first. They are not vessels that must be filled with words. “They are torches to light,” she defines.

Mirko Saric was one of the promises of San Lorenzo football. In 2000, at the age of 21, he hanged himself with a sheet. The Uruguayan Santiago Morro García, Godoy Cruz’s great scorer, committed suicide in February 2021 at the age of 31. Much has been written about this: that the drama of suicides in football is aggravated by the difficulty of players in externalizing their problems. who suffer on and off the field.

The depression that arises from retirement, from being released from a club or from not being able to overcome an injury seem to be some triggers for the cases that have shocked the world of sports.

Saying goodbye to the activity that marked the athlete’s life is a crucial moment. Ezequiel Lavezzi, former player of the Argentine National Team, made headlines earlier this year. It was said that he was admitted to two psychiatric centers. He did not make any statements, but he was recently seen smiling, holding hands with his girlfriend on the beaches of Uruguay.

But why, in sport, is there not more investment in mental health? Mónica Santino, former soccer player and coach, also founder of the feminist club La Nuestros in Villa 31, responds: “There is no investment in these issues because it is almost taboo. Men are part of a mechanism, of a work industry and a commercial industry, where the human aspect is totally left aside. Nobody observes what is happening to a kid when he starts in the lower ranks. And even if you are lucky enough to reach First Division, a percentage is tiny. Professional sport is a very ruthless, very cruel world, where mental health has no place.r”.

“In addition,” he adds, “ It is a sexist construction, where if you cry you are a whore, nothing should ever hurt you and you cannot have any sign of what is considered weakness.. It seems to me that machismo starts there, where men are victims.”

Now, do women have more tools in this field? Says Santino, who manages a group of more than 200 soccer players in her foundation: “I think we are more resistant. As culturally we tend to network and take care of each other”.

Their claim goes beyond the gender issue: “The area of ​​mental health in clubs is an urgent need. But we still continue with the prejudice of ruling it out because the psychologist, they say, ‘is the technician.’ The technician is in charge. The clubs in Argentina are more than 100 years old and there is still a lot to improve. But the reality is that little or nothing is said about this problem.”

Pécora explains why the coach is essential. “Because It depends on him how much pressure is put or how much pressure is taken off so that the athlete can play freely.“, without looking at the result but focused on the processes they trained before entering the court, being as similar as possible to what they worked on during the week.”

But many times, explains Pécora, it is usually an ideal that does not adjust to the demands of high competition. “The pressure comes from all sides. From both journalism and the club, whether they are called leaders or fans, a noise is generated from the outside that is also inevitable. And it is good to teach the player to be isolated from that context. Because it ends up harming his performance. The noise will be and will continue to be, But we must teach him, for example, how journalism works and that criticism is not necessarily an attack against him.”

Pécora has been working as a psychologist at a professional level for twenty years. He was with Gastón Gaudio in 2004 when he won Roland Garros, with Agustín Calleri when he reached 15th place in the world ranking and with David Nalbandian, when the Cordoba native became a finalist at Wimbledon when he was barely 20 years old.

“I believe that attention to these types of problems will continue to improve because it is linked to performance. And when you talk about performance, you talk about money. But it will continue to improve not because society has understood it but because it privileges the result. If you manage your emotional world well and know how to deal well with pressure, you will earn more. The truth is that the only difference, the only talent, ends up being the mind.