Caroline Brown is back, but in a good way. The Spanish badminton player, who last summer could not revalidate in Tokio 2020 the Olympic gold medal he won in January 2016 due to the rupture of the anterior cruciate ligament and the two menisci of his left knee that occurred during training on May 28 of last year, he has returned to competition winning his sixth European consecutively and with the mind and eyes fixed on the Olympic Games in Paris 2024.
The Andalusian is one of the four athletes who are part of the Toyota teama team of ambassadors that is made up of Niko Shera, Eva Moral y Martin de la Puenteall examples of perseverance, effort, perseverance and overcoming, and with which the Asian car company has just renewed the commitment it signed three years ago until 2024. And in that perseverance, effort, perseverance and overcoming mental health plays a role just as important as physical health, as recognized by Caroline Brown in the act in which the agreement between Toyota Espaa and the four elite athletes.
“Life has given me a second chance after the two injuries I’ve had”, underlined Carolina Marn, whose motto is I can because I think I can and who has between her eyebrows the Olympic event in Paris in two years: “Paris is a goal that I set for myself at the time I got injured and couldn’t be in Tokyo. It’s a goal that I still have every day and when sometimes I’m so tired that I can’t even get out of bed, there’s this Paris is on my mind every day, even on bad days or on days that I can’t stand myself, and I face them all with enthusiasm, enthusiasm and motivation”
“In my team I have a psychologist. In fact, I have to say that I have been working with psychologists since I was 15 years old and today I work with a psychologist who for me is a fundamental support in my team due to the injuries I have had and of the family loss that I had two years ago”, admitted the woman from Huelva. “I am not an alien or a superhero, I am a human being. I have my emotions, my feelings, and working on the mental part and talking about my emotions and expressing my feelings helps me a lot because I am very emotional,” Carolina Marn continued.
“For me, having a psychologist to talk to about all this is a great help. Today people go to a psychologist because they want to be better than they are and I have always had that help. In fact, a few years ago, I had two psychologists, one for my personal life and the other for my professional life as an elite athlete, because I wanted to know myself much better and although I felt fine, I always wanted to be better than I was and for that I needed that external help “, continued the three-time world champion and six-time European badminton champion.
“I’m not the same, I’m different. It’s true that I’m not one hundred percent yet, but it’s not something that overwhelms me or scares me because my rehab isn’t over yet. Just as I know I’m not one hundred percent, I know I have a lot of room for improvement”, Carolina Marn pointed out about her physical condition after recovering from the rupture of the anterior cruciate ligament and the two menisci of her left knee that she suffered a year ago.
