The relationship between the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee and its most decorated Olympian, Michael Phelps, has been a difficult one for years.
The more Phelps won, and ever won, racking up 28 Olympic medals in five Games, the more he became the boy of the organization, worthy of any special treatment he could provide. Or, from Phelps’ perspective, it was the latest and greatest product that Olympic Games promoters cared about only as a medal-producing swimming machine.
Phelps distills that dynamic near the end of “The Weight of Gold,” the HBO Sports documentary that tells about depression and other mental illnesses the Olympians struggle with. Phelps is also an executive producer on the film, which will be released Wednesday night.
“I can honestly say, looking back on my career, I don’t think anyone really cared about helping us,” he says, staring blankly at an off-screen interviewer. “I don’t think anyone has jumped up to ask us if we were okay. As long as we were acting, I don’t think anything else really mattered. “
In recent weeks, as they geared up for the movie’s release and criticism that levels it out in a system that has long prioritized victory over everything else, past and present Olympic officials have noticed all the advantages that He received Phelps during his career, including superior training and coaching, access to state-of-the-art technology, and a two-room suite at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs that only he and the occasional visiting physician used if he was not there. All the others slept in single or double rooms.
But that uneven treatment and response to the film, Phelps said in an interview this week, illustrates how Olympic officials and coaches see athletes as valuable assets during their brief windows of Olympic glory, but then leave them alone for the years between the games. . And when their careers are interrupted or ended, the system goes to the next star.
“I feel like they don’t care about what I’m doing now,” Phelps, 35, said of the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee.
In recent months, the committee, which it says has always welcomed and wanted Phelps’ contribution, has formed a mental health task force to help change and expand a system that its executive director, Sarah Hirshland, has left behind. clearly it needs updating. The organization brings approximately 1,000 athletes combined to the Winter and Summer Olympics during each four-year cycle, but it only has three mental health officers on staff.
“There is room for us to grow and improve,” said Bahati VanPelt, who became chief of athlete services for the USOPC last year. “I strongly believe in a holistic and available framework throughout an athlete’s career life cycle.”
The crux of the problem, Phelps and other athletes say, is that for several years Olympic officials and elite athletes have had two very different definitions of support for athletes.
For the Olympic committee, the support of athletes has gone a long way toward providing services: state-of-the-art training facilities, top-notch coaches and sports scientists, access to sports psychologists, plus huge loot from the US team. USA, which apparently led directly to bringing medals home.
For athletes, support should have so far evolved into something more holistic that includes caring for their mental health in ways beyond sports psychologists who focused on preparing their minds for competition.
“We have to educate people so that mental health is not a weakness,” said Katie Uhlaender, a four-time skeleton Olympian who is among the athletes featured in the film. Others include Steven Holcomb, a sled gold medalist who died in 2017; figure skaters Sasha Cohen and Gracie Gold, and Jeret Peterson, an air skier who committed suicide in 2011. “It’s about getting people to come to this from the perspective of acting against healing,” he said.
Uhlaender and others say there is a great need for athletes to have easier access to therapy that does not involve going through high-performance coaches and staff, people who assess their fitness for competition and membership in the sport each year. national team and they could penalize a The athlete they know needs help dealing with mental illness.
The USOPC has attempted to move in this direction. An increasing number of athletes have access to unlimited telephone counseling and six in-person therapy sessions with a licensed professional through the employee assistance company ComPsych. The benefit was extended this year to some 4,400 athletes, more than three times the number that had access to it before the coronavirus pandemic caused the postponement of the Tokyo Games until 2021.
Critics say ComPsych is really a corporate human resources tool rather than a mental health services entity. VanPelt confirmed that the Olympic committee is in talks with Talkspace, a telehealth and digital therapy company for which Phelps is both an investor and a spokesperson.
The committee is also creating a registry of mental health professionals that athletes will be able to consult without the approval of anyone at the USOPC, although work is still in progress on who qualifies and pays for that benefit.
Already this year, Kelly Catlin, an Olympic rider, and Pavle Jovanovic, a former Olympic bobsledder, have committed suicide.
“I can’t see any more suicides,” said Phelps.
Phelps said he discovered the value of therapy in 2014, during the first months of his comeback attempt before the 2016 Olympics, when he was caught speeding up and driving while intoxicated in a tunnel in Baltimore. He said he sees the incident and the suicidal thoughts he had afterward, such as the culmination of years of “suffocating” his feelings of emptiness, vulnerability and lack of confidence about anything other than winning races.
The opportunity to do “The Weight of Gold” came in 2017 when its director, Brett Rapkin, approached Peter Carlisle, Phelps’ agent, about the project as Phelps was becoming more vocal about mental health. Rapkin had been working on a movie about Holcomb, the sled that fought depression and spoke openly about his suicidal thoughts. Rapkin last interviewed Holcomb in the spring of 2017, just days before Holcomb died alone at the Olympic Training Center in Lake Placid, New York, from an overdose of sleeping pills and alcohol.
“The metaphor I like to use is when it comes to the spectrum of sports performance, we believe that the top is hitting a Grand Slam to win the game and the bottom is hitting, when in fact the real bottom doesn’t want to be alive.” Rapkin said.
The filmmakers reached out to USOPC officials to participate in the film and provide images. The organization said it would only do so at a cost of about $ 100,000, a discount from its standard license fee. He also wanted the film to highlight the health services it provides, services that Phelps and other themes in the film deemed lacking.
That was not the movie that Phelps, Carlisle and Rapkin wanted to make. The result only has athletes in front of the camera talking about their struggles.
“I knew it was going to be emotional and raw,” said Phelps. “They are the true emotions we live with throughout our career.”
