"The brain is a muscle, it must be treated"

Japanese tennis player Naomi Osaka, after being eliminated by Russian Vondrousova.Seth Wenig / AP

The world watches in amazement at the sudden interruption of the flight of Simone Biles, the 24-year-old gymnast who was predestined to become the queen of the Games.

He is in no condition to compete, to do what he has done so wonderfully most of his life, since the day he went hiking at the age of six and ended up at the Bannon Gymnastix in Spring, Texas.

He will not be in the team final for the moment due to a "mental health" problem that has spread like an oil slick through elite sport in recent times.

Or it is simply that now it emerges and is made public.

The stars, especially in the United States, divulge their doubts, their fears, their paralysis in the face of competition and life.

It doesn't matter how much they earn, or how much experience they have.

They come to the court, to the pool, to the gym and the world falls on them.

More information

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• No sprain, no fracture, it's a panic attack

Something similar to whatever may be happening to Biles has happened to other elite athletes.

Several have explained their state of mind in detail.

One of the first and most eloquent was Kevin Love, a 32-year-old player who has been in the NBA for 13 years and has accumulated earnings of about 150 million euros.

"Being depressed is exhausting," begins in the last of his collaborations in

The Players Tribune.

“That is one of the cruelest ironies about mental health. When you are in a dark place, everyone around you, all your friends and family, just wants to see you doing what you love again, being happy, being 'the old you'. Sometimes it feels like the world is looking at you saying things like, 'Come on, man, get over it. Do not think that way. Just keep going. ' But what outsiders don't always understand is that it takes all your willpower just to keep going. Fighting depression, fighting anxiety, fighting any mental health disorder ... it's all incredibly exhausting. " Love was admitted to a hospital for a time because of his anxiety attacks. Another of the NBA figures, DeMar DeRozan, 31-year-old forward for the Spurs, has also spoken about his depressive reality.

Liz Cambage, the 29-year-old Australian center and one of the best basketball players in the world, decided, just a week before the opening, that she was not going to compete in Tokyo.

"I'm very far from where I want and need to be," justified the Australian player.

“It is no secret that in the past I have struggled with my mental health and recently I have been very worried about having to prepare for the Olympic Games in a bubble regime.

No family, no friends, no fans, no support system outside of my team.

It's really scary for me.

Last month I had panic attacks, I did not sleep or eat ”.

The danger of fame, fame, and your dream job

Gianluigi Buffon, a world football legend, world champion in 2006, today in Parma at the age of 43, explained that he suffered a depression when he was 26. “If you live nihilistically, looking only at football, your soul will begin to change. . In the end you will be so depressed that you will no longer feel like getting out of bed, ”he wrote in a hypothetically addressed letter to himself when he was 17 years old and made his debut for Parma. “In just a few days, you will receive three things that are very, very intoxicating, but also very, very dangerous: money, fame, and your dream job. Now, surely you are thinking: 'What could be dangerous about all this?' Well, it's a paradox ”, writes the goalkeeper. “One morning when you get out of bed to go to training, your legs will start to shake uncontrollably. You will be so weak that you will not be able to drive a car.At first, you will think that it is just fatigue or a virus. But then it will get worse. All you want to do is sleep. In training, each stop will feel like a titanic effort. For seven months, you will have a hard time finding joy in life. Your routine can become a prison. You are going to train. You come home and you watch TV. You go to sleep. You do the same the next day. You win. You lose. It repeats and repeats ”.You win. You lose. It repeats and repeats ”.You win. You lose. It repeats and repeats ”.

Michael Phelps, the 23rd gold medalist in the history of the Olympic Games, retired after Rio 2016. At 36, the Baltimore Shark has traveled to Tokyo to fulfill various commitments and has explained that the pandemic exacerbated his depression problems.

In August 2018, on the 10th anniversary of his feat at the Beijing Games in which he won eight golds and beat Mark Sptiz's legendary record in Munich 72, he revealed his problems.

He explained that he went through the worst phase after the 2012 Games: “I didn't want anything more, I didn't even want to live longer.

Then we think of suicide.

I've never been so bad.

I have been locked up for three or five days without eating, hardly sleeping, without wanting to live ”.

"I didn't want to get out of bed"

Álex Abrines, the 27-year-old Mallorcan forward who competes with the Spanish team in Tokyo, has told in detail how the depression he suffered affected him and led him to leave professional basketball when he played with Oklahoma City in the NBA, at the beginning of 2019 "I was sick, vomiting. I thought I had a virus. Then I felt something physical, like a headache. It happened to me a couple of times. He had no fever. But I realized that something was happening to me ”, he related in a podcast of the Association of Players of the Euroleague. “I did not have the passion that I had before in training and in games. He didn't want to get out of bed. I spoke with professionals. They helped me, but it wasn't enough. I was in the same routine, training and playing all the time, and it got worse every day.After that I knew that I couldn't improve if I didn't leave the team to work on my mental health and get out of that situation ”. Iniesta and Paula Badosa are some of the other Spanish athletes who have also reported that they have suffered periods of depression.

Naomi Osaka, the 23-year-old tennis player, the athlete with the highest income in the world - 34.2 million euros per year, according to

Forbes

- and who had the privilege of being chosen to light the cauldron of the Tokyo Games, announced publicly suffering from episodes of depression since 2018 and social anxiety. His statement came shortly after leaving Roland Garros in May. "The truth is that I have suffered long problems of depression since the US Open 2018 and I am having a hard time dealing with it," said the tennis player. "Everyone who knows me knows that I am an introvert and everyone who sees me at tournaments will have noticed that I always wear headphones, because it helps me deal with my social anxiety."

Abrines advises: “It is important to share.

I know it is difficult, but you need to open up ”.

And he advocates for a greater presence of psychologists and mental health specialists on sports teams.

“If you break your leg or suffer a ligament injury, whatever it is, it's physical.

The brain is a muscle and when it is sick it must be treated ”.

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