Jessica Bartley was aware that mental health problems were having a significant impact on the athletes in Tokyo even before Simone Biles turned the Olympics on its head. The U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee's director of mental health services, Bartley, a psychologist, claims her staff received roughly 10 requests per day to assist athletes with their mental health concerns throughout the Games. The majority of calls came from "tips from someone surrounding the athlete, who alerted us to a concern," rather than from players themselves, she claims. These concerns ranged from difficulties encountered while under quarantine owing to COVID-19 rules, to hearing unexpected news from home, to not performing as expected during the Games.
A few of the requests that Bartley's mental health team received hinted at potentially more serious problems, so Bartley or a member of her team immediately called the athlete and asked about their mental health to see if they required additional mental health support and to make sure they were in contact with their regular support team from home, if they had one. Bartley offered to put them in touch with helpful resources if they didn't have one. “The Games are really an incredible opportunity to start to have those conversations,” says Bartley. There were always going to be extra difficulties for the athletes at the Tokyo Olympics because of the epidemic that is currently affecting everyone's mental health.
However, the problem became a defining feature of the Games once Biles withdrew from the women's gymnastics team competition to concentrate on her physical and mental wellbeing. She made a gutsy choice, and the attention the Games received throughout the world made it a unique opportunity to shift the conversation from raising awareness to taking constructive action. “The Games are really an incredible opportunity to start to have those conversations,” says Bartley, whose group is the first to travel with Team USA specifically to support the mental well-being of athletes. The other Olympians in Tokyo understood the seriousness of the situation. When Allyson Felix won her 11th career medal in Tokyo, she became the most decorated track and field Olympian in American history.
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Biles is by no means the first athlete to open up about mental health difficulties or to suffer the crushing pressure that comes with being an Olympic favorite. The most decorated Olympian in history, Michael Phelps, has been open about his depressive battles. Similar to Biles, Phelps carried the burden of a nation as the face of the entire Olympics—unique challenges he described in a 2020 documentary titled The Weight of Gold. In addition, tennis pro Naomi Osaka withdrew from the French Open and skipped Wimbledon in the run-up to the Olympics as a means of mental and physical safety. The weight of expectation can be especially crippling for Olympians. Their performance is the result of four years of preparation, sacrifice, and mental and physical adversity, and the stakes for them personally are multiplied by the fact that their achievement is seen as a representation of the hopes and expectations of the entire country.
Simone Biles struck a chord with people who were not only athletes, letting loose an apparently bottled-up reservoir in popular culture. Compared to Osaka's withdrawal from the French Open or Meghan Markle and Prince Harry's chat with Oprah Winfrey, Biles' decision to withdraw from the Olympics created more social engagements, according to data from NewsWhip, a data analytics company that assesses the impact of media reports. On the day Biles withdrew, Google searches pertaining to mental health reached their highest point in two months.
