The relationship between the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee and its most decorated Olympian Michael Phelps has been rocky for years.
The more Phelps won and ever won and won 28 Olympic medals in five games, the more he became the organisation’s figurehead worthy of any special treatment. Or from Phelps’ point of view, it was the latest and greatest asset that Olympic organizers were only interested in as a medal swimming machine.
Phelps distilled this momentum toward the end of “The Weight of Gold,” the HBO Sports documentary that he tells about depression and other mental illnesses that Olympians struggle with. Phelps is also the executive producer of the film, which should premiere on Wednesday evening.
“I can honestly say that looking back on my career, I’m not really interested in helping us,” he says, staring blankly at an offscreen interviewer. “I don’t think anyone jumped in to ask us if we were okay. As long as we performed, I think nothing else was really important. “
In the past few weeks, as they have been preparing to release the film and criticize a system that has long sought to win everything else, past and present Olympic officials have taken full advantage of the Phelps has received throughout his career, including top training and coaching, cutting-edge technology, and a two-bedroom suite at the Colorado Springs Olympic Training Center that only he and the occasional visiting doctor used when he wasn’t there. All others slept in single or double rooms.
But this uneven treatment and response to the film, Phelps said in an interview earlier this week, shows how Olympic officials and coaches view athletes as a valuable asset during their short windows of Olympic glory, but they are largely alone in the years between games to let . And when your career is interrupted or ended, the system moves on to the next star.
“I feel like they don’t care what I’m doing,” said the 35-year-old Phelps of the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee.
Over the past few months, the committee, which says it has always welcomed and wanted Phelps’ contributions, has formed a mental health task force to help change and expand a system that its managing director Sarah Hirshland has clarified that it needs to be updated. The organization hosts around 1,000 athletes for the Winter and Summer Olympics in each four-year cycle, but employs only three people for mental health.
“We can grow and improve,” said Bahati VanPelt, who became head of USOPC athlete services last year. “I firmly believe in a framework that is holistic and available across the entire life cycle of an athlete’s career.”
The essence of the problem, says Phelps and other athletes, is that Olympic officials and elite athletes have had two very different definitions of athlete support for several years.
For the Olympic Committee, the support of athletes meant, above all, the provision of services – state-of-the-art training facilities, top coaches and sports scientists, access to sports psychologists and a lot of Team USA prey – which apparently led directly to bringing medals home.
For athletes, support should have evolved into something more holistic, which included caring for their mental health beyond sports psychologists who focused on preparing their minds for competition.
“We have to teach people that mental health is not a weakness,” said Katie Uhlaender, a four-time skeleton Olympic champion who is one of the athletes featured in the film. Others are Steven Holcomb, a gold medalist in bob who died in 2017; Figure skaters Sasha Cohen and Gracie Gold, and Jeret Peterson, an aviation skier who killed himself in 2011. “It’s about people coming in from a performance versus healing perspective,” she said.
Uhlaender and others say there is an urgent need for athletes to have easier access to therapy that does not go through the coaches and high-performing staff – people who annually evaluate and punish their suitability for competitions and national team membership athletes they know need help dealing with mental illness.
The USOPC has tried to move in this direction. A growing number of athletes have access to unlimited telephone counseling and six personal therapy sessions with a licensed professional through ComPsych, the employee aid company. The advantage has been expanded this year to around 4,400 athletes, more than three times as many as before the coronavirus pandemic that caused the Tokyo Games to be postponed to 2021.
Critics say ComPsych is a human resource tool for companies rather than an institution for psychosocial services. VanPelt confirmed that the Olympic Committee is in talks with Talkspace, a telemedicine and digital therapy company for which Phelps is both an investor and a speaker.
The committee also compiles a register of mental health professionals that athletes can consult with the USOPC without anyone’s permission. However, those who qualify for this service and pay for it will still be worked out.
This year, Kelly Catlin, an Olympic cyclist, and Pavle Jovanovic, a former Olympic bobsledder, killed themselves.
“I can no longer see suicides,” said Phelps.
Phelps said he discovered the value of therapy in 2014 in the first few months of his comeback attempt before the 2016 Olympics when he was caught accelerating and driving in a Baltimore tunnel. He said he saw the incident and the suicidal thoughts he had afterwards as the culmination of years of “constipation” of his feelings of emptiness, vulnerability, and lack of confidence in anything other than winning races.
The opportunity to do “The Weight of Gold” came in 2017 when its director, Brett Rapkin, Peter Carlisle, Phelps’ agent, talked about the project as Phelps talked more and more about mental health. Rapkin had been working on a film about Holcomb, the bobsledder struggling with depression and speaking openly about his thoughts of suicide. Rapkin last interviewed Holcomb in spring 2017, just a few days before Holcomb died of an overdose of sleeping pills and alcohol alone at the Olympic training center in Lake Placid, NY.
“The metaphor that I like to use is when it comes to the spectrum of athletic performance. We think the top hits a grand slam to win the game and the bottom stands out, although the actual bottom actually doesn’t want to be alive, “Rapkin said.
The filmmakers turned to USOPC officials to participate in the film and provide footage. The organization announced that it would only do so at a cost of around $ 100,000 – a discount on the standard fee. The film was also intended to highlight the health services that Phelps and other topics in the film considered deficient.
It wasn’t the film Phelps, Carlisle and Rapkin wanted to make. The result is that only athletes talk about their struggles in front of the camera.
“I knew it would be emotional and raw,” said Phelps. “It’s the true feelings we’ve lived through throughout our careers.”
