‘We’re all scared’: Inside the brutal mental grind of the Winter Olympics

Livigno: The halfpipe is the dancefloor of the Winter Olympics. As snowboarders try to dazzle the audience with their best, most daring tricks, there is a DJ providing a high-energy soundtrack, and a pair of announcers – a Kiwi and an Italian – who provide real-time commentary in two languages, explaining the moves and laying out the stakes with an infusion of expertise and irreverent humour.

Until someone gets hurt. Then the music stops.

During women’s qualifying last week, Chinese rider Liu Jiayu caught an edge at the bottom of the pipe, snapping her head to the ground and her legs and back over her shoulders. That kind of brutal fall is called a “scorpion”, and it brought proceedings at the Livigno Snow Park to a shuddering halt, with a once-pumping party falling into a stunned silence.

Fortunately, she suffered no major spinal damage. But as she was receiving initial treatment for about five minutes, nobody in the crowd knew that – and nor did her fellow competitors, including Australia’s Emily Arthur, who was one of the next to drop in.

Truthfully, part of her didn’t want to.

“It’s kind of a lot because I’m so scared. We’re all so scared,” Arthur said.

“Sometimes as spectators, we all perform pretty well, but when we’re training, we see people get hurt a lot, and so it’s kind of scary. But I don’t know, I knew what I was trying was going to be safe. I knew it was going to be fine.”

It’s not the first time this has happened to Arthur, and it won’t be the last.

Injuries are part and parcel of the Winter Olympics, and the Milano Cortina edition is no exception: from the high-profile example of Lindsey Vonn’s decision to push ahead on a torn ACL, to the concussion suffered by a Canadian veteran that suddenly opened the door for Valentino Guseli in the big air competition on the night before the opening ceremony, to the spate of falls, knocks and twists that wiped out several members of the Australian team, including Daisy Thomas, Laura Peel, Cameron Bolton and Misaki Vaughan.

The physical toll of competing in a winter sport is obvious, and known to all involved. But what is often overlooked is the mental strength required to know the stakes, to see teammates, friends and rivals gamble with their bodies and lose – and to then have to muster up the courage to follow them in.

“We’re not dealing with stress injuries here. We’re dealing with hitting walls, hitting fences, landing from 60 feet down onto the flat. Small injuries don’t happen,” said Australian snowboarder Jarryd Hughes.

“There’s no amount of prep we can do to think that it’s going to be OK. We’re dealing with life and death.”

So how do you walk back to the start gate, knowing that? How do you convince your mind to throw your body into danger when it has just seen the potential negative consequences unfold, right in front of your eyes?

Those who have done it repeatedly, and continue to do it, describe it as a never-ending battle with the dissenting voices inside their heads.

“You’re always aware of the fact that you can get hurt,” said Lydia Lassila, the two-time Olympic freeski medallist and Nine commentator.

There’s no amount of prep we can do to think that it’s going to be OK. We’re dealing with life and death.

Australian snowboarder Jarryd Hughes

“Especially if you’re coming off an injury yourself, you’re pretty sensitive to it. That takes a lot of mental work to just go, ‘All right, that was me then a year ago, or four years ago, but it’s not me now. I’ve done all this work to get myself here, and I feel strong.’ It’s always convincing [yourself] that your past isn’t going to equal your future.

“And then it’s the same thing if you see someone crash. It’s like, ‘That could happen to me.’ Then you’re worried for that person … and then you’ve got a delay, and you don’t know how long it’s going to be.”

Fortunately, Australian athletes do not go into that battle unequipped.

What Arthur went through at the halfpipe, and the experiences Lassila is talking about, are not novel: this is terrain they are deliberately exposed to, long before they arrive at an Olympic Games.

It is impossible to eliminate fear – but it is possible to shorten the amount of time it takes to regain focus once fear arrives.

They complete thousands of repetitions onto water or airbags, a safer environment to refine the technical aspects of their sport to the tiniest degree – so that when the moment comes to perform those same actions on top of a more unforgiving surface, like snow or ice, they feel confident enough in their fundamentals to do it.

Even the simple act of waiting is something they rehearse, so that when the unexpected occurs, they are ready for it.

For instance, what encompasses “scenario planning”, as described by Australian aerials coach Rene McEnduff, sounds like borderline psychological hazing, of the kind that you might imagine happens in the military every day: to prepare themselves for in-competition surprises, athletes might be told they are to participate in a mock event at a certain time, only for it to be delayed for no reason at all, other than to mess with their heads.

That held them in good stead for a day like Tuesday, when heavy snowfall saw aerials and slopestyle events in Livigno repeatedly delayed, then postponed altogether.

“The athletes think we’re a little nuts sometimes, but that’s exactly what we do,” McEnduff said.

“We’ll cancel the competition or have a wind hold for 20 minutes, and the athletes will have to sit and re-warm up. [We’re] kind of throwing whatever we can at them because we don’t know what’s going to be thrown at us when we get out here, so just trying to set them up for anything that might happen.”

It is no coincidence that many Australia medallists at these Games, including Cooper Woods and Josie Baff, have credited small mental techniques and the advice of sports psychologists as big reasons why they were able to land themselves on the podium.

“Every athlete has to go through a number of challenges, failures, setbacks, disappointments, heartbreak to learn how to really achieve that type of mental focus that they need when it counts,” said Stacy Gnacinski, a high-performance psychologist who has been working with Australia’s Olympic Winter Institute for the past six years.

“The whole package is really to minimise risk as much as humanly possible, develop confidence and replicability in their skill sets, so that once they achieve a level of proficiency … if we have difficult conditions to deal with, and it is a bit scary, that their fundamentals are what enable them to really maximise their performance on the day, stay safe, stay available and have another go.”

The Winter Olympic Games is broadcast on the 9Network, 9Now and Stan Sport.

News, results and expert analysis from the weekend of sport sent every Monday. Sign up for our Sport newsletter.