The Pandemic Tax: Our Country is Tired–And We're Seeing it in our Athletes First
We look to our Olympians not just for inspiration, but for confirmation. Olympic athletes tell us who we are in the world at that moment in time. Jesse Owens' superlative performances in Berlin in 1936 reset the national baseline for courage. Joan Benoit's gritty gold medal run in the marathon in 1984 announced the irreversible arrival of women on the sporting scene. Our country's best athletes remind us that we are strong, capable and determined. This year, though, the U.S. Olympic Team is telling us something else: we are tired.
Since the turn of the millennium, the U.S. has always sat comfortably atop the Olympic medal count: second in 2002 with 34 medals, behind Germany's 35; second in 2006; first in 2010; second in 2014 with 28 medals behind host country Russia's 30 (and given the subsequent revelations about the systemic state-sponsored doping orchestrated by the Russians in Sochi, one could argue that the U.S. won the medal count outright that year); and fourth in 2018.
Yet on the busiest day of Beijing's Olympic program, Feb. 8, with 30 total medals up for grabs across 12 different sports, the U.S. won just two: Ryan Cochran-Siegle's surprise silver in the men's super-G and Jessie Diggins' bronze in the women's nordic ski sprint free final. A few days into the Olympic program the U.S. was only 17th in the medal count. It took us five days to win our first gold. Bravura performances by Chloe Kim and Nathan Chen, among others, have since moved the U.S. higher, but storylines of unexpected defeats have been as common as tales of golden victories.
So who's stolen our shine?
The pandemic has taken its toll in countless and diverse ways, but it has levied a specific tax on athletes: it has robbed them of their recovery. The steady two-count of "work" and "rest" that is the drumbeat of every elite athlete's life has been disrupted.
With fears of COVID swirling for the better part of two years, athletes have maintained around-the-clock vigilance lest their Olympic dreams get extinguished by a close contact's virus-heavy exhale. It's not that athletes aren't racking up enough sleep hours; it's that their central governor isn't ever relinquishing control. They're "on" all the time. And if you're on all the time, your game-day performance is going to be, well, a bit off.
"Our nervous systems, when taxed, do not sustain forever their ability to be at a high level of stress," explains sports psychologist Emily Saul. "We get absolutely exhausted. And when you add the additional stress of the Olympics, your system just might not be able to rise to that level if it is fatigued.”
When the difference between first and 20th is 1.7 seconds (as it was in the men's downhill) or the difference between a medal and a DNF is a flare of the left foot at the fourth gate (as it was for Michaela Shiffrin in her best event, the slalom), the slimmest deficiencies are magnified and have outsized consequences.
What's unfolding in Beijing is a real-time MRI of our citizenry's energy supply. Of course elite athletes aren't the only ones who are exhausted, but by dint of their reliance on the exquisitely calibrated machines of their bodies, they're the first ones to be symptomatic.
Consider how our Olympic rivals perceive their governments' management of the pandemic: according to a Pew Research poll, 71% of Swedes, 74% of Italians and 87% of Dutch citizens believe their country has handled the pandemic well. A whopping 88% of Canadians believe that to be true. Even the Russians have a sunnier take with two-thirds of the population stating their country has handled COVID well. That same poll found only half that number of Americans — 36% — believed the same to be true of the U.S. government's management of the pandemic. Other polls have put that number slightly higher, but none shows a majority of Americans believing that our country has adeptly managed COVID. Simply put, the majority of people in the United States believe we've handled the pandemic badly.
Our country's elite athletes have, for two years, been operating in an environment in which their perception of their risk was higher than that of their international sport rivals. That fact puts them at a disadvantage before they even leave the starting gate.
"Everything I heard in the two weeks leading up to the Olympics was about the fear," says Saul, who routinely works with elite athletes. "There was no wiggle room with COVID. And there was just a sense of this abstract danger.”
The members of the 2022 U.S. Olympic Team are no less courageous for their limitations; if anything, they're more so. In many ways sport is easy when you believe yourself to be invincible. It's harder to fling yourself into competition when you're not sure you're at your best. Just ask Michaela Shiffrin. Or Simone Biles. And yet, still, they try. And that may be the greatest example of all: to model how to move forward with awareness of our imperfections. It is a lesson we, as a country, can take to heart.
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February 10, 2022