Media, sponsors, expectations: the pressures athletes don’t talk about

The cameras are waiting for her at the airport. A reporter holds a microphone up to her face and asks whether she will bring a medal home. She smiles and says what one says: “I’ll give it everything I’ve got.” On the plane she spends three hours staring out of the window and does not sleep. She is not thinking about the race. She is thinking about what she will say if there is no medal. And to whom.

When we talk about pressure on athletes, we mostly mean the competition itself: the start line, the final throw, the penalty kick. Yet people who live from sport often say that what wears them down most is not the competition but everything that surrounds it. A public that has opinions. Contracts with results written into them. Scrutiny that knows no day off. And the sense that you are not competing only for yourself, but for your town, your club, your family and your country. These pressures are hardly ever mentioned in interviews. So I will write about them here.

I am writing from the perspective of psychotherapy, not sport psychology. This is not a piece about how to improve results, but about what happens to a person in the middle of all this — and to the people around them.

Pressure without a face

The pressure of a competition has a shape: it starts at a set time, it has rules and it ends. The pressure of the surroundings has neither a beginning nor an end. It lives in the messages on the phone, in the headline the athlete should not have read but did anyway, in the look of the sponsor’s representative at a reception, in the neighbour’s question at the shop. It cannot be grasped anywhere, which is exactly why it is so hard to fend off.

That elite sport offers no protection from psychological distress is no longer a secret. A review of studies published in 2019 by a group led by Vincent Gouttebarge found that symptoms of anxiety or depression were reported by roughly a third of active elite athletes (34 per cent) and a quarter of former ones. These are not diagnoses but symptoms people described themselves in questionnaires. Still, the figure is high enough to overturn the image of the athlete as someone whose physical fitness protects them from everything.

In the same year the International Olympic Committee issued an expert consensus statement on the mental health of elite athletes, in which it treats mental health as an integral part of caring for an athlete and lists, alongside injury and the end of a career, the strains that are specific to elite sport. Many of them are the kind you cannot see at training.

Four sources that add up

When you talk to athletes about what weighs on them, the stories differ but the sources repeat themselves. Roughly, I would divide them into four.

Each of these sources has its own logic and its own justification. The media are doing their job, sponsors pay for something they expect, anti-doping scrutiny is fair to clean athletes, and the pride of fans is often sincere and warm. None of it is malicious. The problem arises because all four flow into the same person, who has one body, one night’s sleep and one life outside sport.

The public: when a result becomes your personality

A reporter’s question — “what went wrong?” — after a bad race is entirely understandable. For the athlete, though, it often means having to explain publicly, within two minutes, sweaty and disappointed, something they have not yet understood themselves. Whatever they say then lives on — in headlines, clips and comments.

The public tends to read a result as character. A win means someone is “a fighter”, a defeat that they “couldn’t handle the pressure”. An athlete who listens to this long enough starts to think the same way: I am only as good as my last performance. This is very close to what in psychotherapy we describe as perfectionism — worth that is conditional on achievement and can be lost at any moment.

Social media is a chapter of its own, where criticism does not stop at the result but often reaches the body, the family and a person’s origins. I have written more about this in Online attacks: athletes and social media, so here I will stop at just one point: praise is pressure too. When a thousand people call you a hero, you know that the same thousand people will be very loud when you are a hero no longer.

Contracts and sponsors: when the body becomes an investment

Professional sport is also a business, and there is nothing wrong with that. But when a bonus for a placing is written into a contract, when a sponsor expects a certain number of posts, or when the renewal of a contract depends on the season, something shifts in the athlete’s mind. A run is no longer just a run. It is also a loan repayment, the coach’s salary, a commitment to someone who has invested in you.

Psychologists of motivation have spent decades studying what happens when an activity a person does out of inner enjoyment starts to bring external rewards. A 1999 meta-analysis by Edward Deci, Richard Koestner and Richard Ryan showed that rewards which depend on performance and are experienced as control can noticeably undermine intrinsic motivation. Not always and not for everyone, but often enough that it is worth knowing: when a game becomes a contract, the joy of the game can quietly step aside.

Sponsorship brings one more thing that is rarely talked about: an obligation to an image. An athlete who represents a brand has to be smiling, well groomed, “positive”. They have a bad day, a bereavement in the family, anxiety — and they still film content for a post. The gap between what you feel and what you have to show is one of the most reliable roads to exhaustion.

Scrutiny: life under a magnifying glass

An elite athlete lives under a kind of scrutiny most people never experience. Their weight is measured, their heart rate, sleep, food intake, number of steps. If they are in an international testing pool, they have to tell the anti-doping organisation in advance where they will be and name one hour every day when they are available for testing — on holiday too, at a family lunch too.

These rules have a good purpose and most athletes support them. But the nervous system is not good at telling scrutiny that is fair from scrutiny that is threatening. When someone is measuring you all the time, you learn to measure yourself as well. Many describe how, even after their career has ended, they cannot stop weighing, counting and checking.

This inner observer has a name in psychotherapy — the inner critic. In athletes it is often built from the voices of coaches, parents, judges and commentators, folded into a single voice that sounds like their own.

National pride: when you carry the flag

In a small country such as Slovenia, an athlete’s success is quickly felt as a shared success. A welcome at the airport, a flag over the shoulders, the mayor’s congratulations, a sign at the entrance to the hometown. It is lovely, and it gives many athletes a sense of belonging to something larger. At the same time it brings a burden that is hard to put down: you are no longer competing only for yourself.

From the perspective of family therapy, what is interesting here is how national expectations often become intertwined with family ones. The family has invested years of driving, sacrifice and money. The town is proud. The country is watching. When all of this merges, the athlete can start to feel that a defeat is not only theirs — that they have let all these people down. And that is no longer the pressure of a result, but Shame: the emotion that whispers “There is something wrong with me”.

Why they keep quiet

An Australian study in which Amelia Gulliver, Kathleen Griffiths and Helen Christensen asked young elite athletes what stood in the way of seeking help for mental health difficulties identified stigma as the most common barrier. The athletes were afraid of looking weak, of it affecting team selection, of the coach or teammates seeing them differently. Often they also simply believed they ought to sort it out on their own.

In sport, “mental toughness” is a virtue everyone praises. The problem is that we often understand it as the ability not to feel — rather than the ability to feel and keep working anyway. Contracts add a very practical fear: what if the sponsor finds out? What if the club does not renew?

And so it happens that an athlete talks about everything except this. The conversation many describe goes roughly like this:

(composite, not a real person)
“How are you when there are no competitions?”
“Fine. Training, sleep, training.”
“And when you read what they write about you?”
“I don’t read it.”
“Never?”
“… At night. When I can’t sleep.”

That “at night” says more than a whole interview. The pressure of the surroundings rarely surfaces as a complaint. It surfaces as poor sleep, irritability, withdrawal from loved ones, lost enjoyment of training.

How pressure writes itself into the body and relationships

As early as 1984 Roy Baumeister described a paradox athletes know from experience: when the importance of a performance is very high, a person starts to observe themselves consciously, and this very attention to one’s own movements can break down a performance that is otherwise automatic. So pressure affects not only how you feel but also the very thing it arose around — the result. What happens in the body at such moments I have described in What happens in the brain during anxiety.

External pressure, however, does not stay on the pitch. It comes home. A partner gets a tired, absent person who does not want to talk after a competition, or one who needs the whole world at home to revolve around them. Parents who have lived with the athlete’s career for years sometimes unknowingly become one more source of expectation. Children pick up the tension before an important competition without anyone saying a word.

In relational family therapy, in which I am training, we always ask with stories like these whose expectations the athlete is carrying. Christian Gostečnik describes how emotional patterns from the family of origin are carried into new relationships — including the relationship with a coach, a club and the public. Someone who felt as a child that their parents noticed them mainly when they succeeded will experience public praise and public criticism more deeply than someone who received love regardless of the result.

Exercise: whose expectation is this?

This is a simple exercise you can do today, with paper and a pencil. It takes about fifteen minutes. If you prefer, you can use the Expectations table template from the knowledge base.

1. Write down every “I have to”. In five minutes, list everything you feel you have to achieve this season. Do not censor — “I mustn’t embarrass my father” belongs on the list too.
2. Write a name next to each one. Who expects this? The coach, a sponsor, the media, your parents, your partner, the country, you yourself. Some will have several names.
3. Check whether it was said. Mark the expectations someone has actually voiced or written down (in a contract, for instance) and those you are only assuming.
4. Pick one assumption. For one of the assumed expectations, write down what would happen if you did not meet it. Then write down what that person would probably say about it if you asked them.
5. Cross out what is not yours. What remains uncrossed is your real frame. It is often noticeably smaller than the one you woke up with.

The exercise does not remove the pressure. But it helps take it apart into pieces you can work with — and it shows how much of the load you carry on behalf of people who may not expect it of you at all.

When this is not a matter for psychotherapy

I would like to be clear about the limits of this piece and of my work.

Pressure is part of the profession. Not every pressure is a problem that needs treating. Many athletes flourish under expectation and experience it as recognition. If the pressure is great but you still have your sleep, your relationships and your love of the sport, you may need nothing more than a good team around you.

For performance, the right person is a sport psychologist. If you want to work on concentration, pre-competition routines, visualisation or how to get back into the game quickly after a mistake, that is the field of sport psychology. I am not a sport psychologist. Psychotherapy comes in when the distress spills over into life outside sport — into relationships, self-image, the family. I have written about where the line lies in Psychotherapy for athletes: when a coach and a sport psychologist are not enough.

For the body, the right person is a doctor. If you have been sleeping badly for weeks, have no appetite, are losing weight, or feel that nothing makes sense any more, turn first to your GP or club doctor, who can refer you to a psychiatrist if needed. These are not signs of weakness but signs to be taken seriously. If thoughts appear that it would be better if you were not here, call the crisis line Klic v duševni stiski on 01 520 99 00 in Slovenia (every day from 7 pm to 7 am) or the Samaritans line Zaupni telefon Samarijan on 116 123 in Slovenia (24 hours), and in an emergency 112.

For contracts, the right person is a lawyer or agent. If the problem lies in a contract that imposes unreasonable obligations on you, therapy can help you understand why you do not dare to reopen it — but it will not change the contract itself.

If you notice that your inner critic is getting louder and louder, it is also worth knowing how this connects to what I describe in Perfectionism and overthinking: two sides of the same fear.

I also work with English-speaking clients, in person in Ljubljana, if you would like to talk about what sport has asked of you.

What to remember

• Athletes are often worn down less by the competition itself than by the pressures around it: the public, contracts, scrutiny and national pride.
• Each of these pressures is understandable; the trouble is that they add up in one person.
• Over time an external expectation becomes an inner voice that sounds like your own.
• Silence is not a sign that all is well — distress often shows up as poor sleep, withdrawal or lost enjoyment.
• For performance the right person is a sport psychologist, for the body a doctor, while psychotherapy helps when pressure spills over into life and relationships.