The Leftbehinds: Why The Olympic Games Is A High Risk Time For Athletes On The Sideline

Wednesday, 24 July 2024, 6:17 pm
Article: RNZ

Dana Johannsen, Sports Correspondent

Two months ago, Shiray Kaka's knee and Olympic dreams came unstuck.

The Black Ferns Sevens star ruptured her anterior cruciate ligament during pool play of the Singapore round of the World Sevens circuit.

It seemed fairly innocuous at first. Kaka stepped off her right foot to get around her British opponent - a move Kaka reckons she must have made more than a thousand times in her career - when she felt her knee give way.

As she was carried off the field, she wasn't thinking about the pain. The 29-year-old was doing a mental calculation of the recovery time for the various gradings of knee injuries.

"I was thinking, 'It's okay, this could be an MCL [medial collateral ligament], a knee cap, maybe six weeks tops.' I was going through a timeline of how much time I had to make a comeback before the Olympic team was named," says Kaka, who won gold with her "sisters" at the Tokyo Games in 2021.

The team medical staff soon blew out those calculations. Under the stands of the Singapore National Stadium, the doctor performed the standard checks on Kaka's knee. A grimace formed on his face.

"He said, 'I'm sorry, I'm pretty sure this is an ACL'," Kaka recalls.

She still did not believe it until she could see it in black and white in a scan. The medical imaging confirmed the worst: the third ACL rupture of her career.

"I think this one stings the most," Kaka says. "There are still some days when I wake up and I just want to cry.

"I was in the best shape of my life. I was the fastest I've ever been. The fittest and strongest I've ever been.

"After my last ACL [in 2019], I had done so much work to be a better person - to not get to an Olympics and be guessing about whether I had done enough work. This time I knew I had done everything and I was going to do some damage to other teams. I was going to make my family and myself proud."

Kaka is one of hundreds of Olympic and Paralympic hopefuls who will not be at this year's Games.

For this Olympic cycle, the New Zealand Olympic Committee started out with a longlist of more than 700 athletes. The final team for Paris is 195 athletes, meaning more than 70 percent of aspiring Olympians did not achieve their goal.

For those left behind - the athletes that failed to qualify or meet the NZOC's additional 'top 16' selection criteria, the shock omissions, the injured, the athletes battling illness and even the newly retired - the Olympic Games period can be a "high risk" time, clinical psychologist Karen Nimmo says.

"For psychologists, there is always a red light flashing when athletes are not competing, because not only is sport their work, it is also their happy or their safe space and it is where they feel most valued," she says.

"But I think the Olympics, with all its fanfare, is next level, because it is often a childhood dream and people have worked for years and years to get to this place, so it can be an absolute gut-punch when you can't go."

Nimmo adds it can be especially tough for athletes that miss out for sudden or unexpected reasons - such as a shock injury or omission.

"It completely turns their world upside down."

'It's so confusing'

After one door closed abruptly in her face, Kaka has found new avenues to pursue.

The outgoing athlete, who is married to All Blacks Sevens legend Gilles Kaka, is exploring a career in the media, and has picked up work for The Crowd Goes Wild.

As part of her reporting duties, Kaka has been covering Olympic selection announcements in the lead-up to the Games. While she smiled for the cameras and celebrated with other athletes, internally she was struggling.

The Black Ferns Sevens team naming was particularly tough.

"I'm holding back tears at the moment because the Sevens team naming was probably one of the hardest things I've had to do in the past couple of months," she says.

"When I was there I was in full media mode, full support mode, and I didn't really have time to understand what was going on in my head. But the drive home afterwards was really, really hard," she says.

"My husband looked at me and he just said, 'Are you okay?' and that set me off. I think that's when it really sunk in that this is for real. I'm really not going to be playing at the Olympics."

Kaka jokes that at least she's developed her acting chops over this period.

"Shortland Street, if you need some actors, I'm here, I'm available. I think I'd be great."

As it turns out, Kaka is in Paris for the Games. She has picked up a gig reporting on the men's and women's Seven campaigns for NZ Rugby's new media channel, NZR+.

She says she has done a lot of work on developing coping strategies for when emotions inevitably surface during the tournament, which gets under way at Stade de France tonight with the men's pool play. Husband Gilles has joined her in Paris as her "emotional support animal".

"I know there will be some challenging moments," Kaka says. "The confusing thing is when I am sad, I'm still really hyped for my sisters. My emotions are all over the place at the moment, because I'm so proud of [the team] but selfishly, I wish it was me that was out there."

Nimmo says major disappointments can trigger intense emotional responses in athletes, including anger, grief, sadness, anxiety and depression.

"The big one, the one that nobody talks about, is envy. That green-eyed monster that comes out. Athletes are highly competitive, obviously, and they can find it really hard to be excited for others when they're stuck at home."

When all you know is life in four-year blocks

Since she was a teenager, Dame Sophie Pascoe's life has revolved around the four-yearly sporting extravaganza.

The Christchurch swimmer was just 13 when she made her international debut, and 15 when she competed in her first Paralympic Games in Beijing.

It was at those 2008 Games that the talented teen was elevated to national treasure after winning three gold medals and one silver.

In each successive Games, the medals, records and accolades continued to pile up.

But this year, the face of New Zealand Paralympics will not be in Paris. Dame Sophie has a new title: mum.

She and husband Rob Samson welcomed a baby boy earlier this year, ruling Pascoe out of the Paralympics Games.

"It's quite an unusual feeling to be in a sidelined position," she says.

"This will be the first time in 16 years that I'm not going to a Paralympic Games. All I have ever really known is my life being broken down into four-year cycles and everything building to this one event.

"So while it's certainly for happy reasons that I'm not there, I think there's still a part of me that will feel a bit of FOMO [fear of missing out]."

Before giving birth, Pascoe had been weighing up a return to the pool ahead of this year's Paralympics. She ultimately decided that she did not want to "force my body back into training sooner than it needs to" and seven months was too short a runway to get back to the level she had been competing at.

It was an easy decision in the end, says Pascoe, who stresses she has not retired from top-level swimming. But to get to this point where she can let go has taken a long time and a lot of hard work.

Her struggles with her mental health after being sidelined during the Covid period have helped her understand the dangers of having her identity and self-worth tied up in being an athlete, she says.

"Tokyo was absolutely everything to me, and I went into 2020 thinking I was really unbreakable. But I did break. Covid broke me, and I realised there were so many areas of my life that I hadn't taken care of.

"I went through severe depression after Covid, because not being able to train, not being able to compete - I thought I had lost everything," Pascoe says.

"Since then I have worked with clinical psychologists and sports psychologists to be able to put myself in a really good place. I have no doubt I'm absolutely going to feel a lot of emotions when the Paralympics are on, but I have the tools now to recognise when I'm struggling and address it."

'I knew something was wrong'

Past struggles and setbacks have also helped Anton Cooper find perspective as he grapples with the disappointment of missing the Olympics.

Making the grade for this year's Games was always going to be a tough ask for the elite mountain biker.

The Tokyo Olympian has faced a series of injuries and health issues over the past three years, limiting his involvement on the World Cup circuit.

While Cooper has endured disruption after disruption, his Kiwi rival Sam Gaze has excelled, winning the 2023 UCI mountain bike world championships in the short track and marathon, and finishing runner-up in the Olympic distance.

But after a strong off-season, Cooper had hopes of re-joining the pro tour this year and amassing enough points to garner New Zealand a second spot in the men's cross country for Paris.

"I had expectations that I was going to [the first World Cup in] Brazil and finish on the podium. Then I got to the first race and I'm like 60th," says Cooper, who had finished sixth in Tokyo.

"I just had no chance. I was not even close to resembling myself - I was down 70 watts on the bike, and my heart rate was 10 beats lower than max heart rate. So I knew something was wrong, but I just kinda also expected that maybe it would fix itself fairly quickly - but it hasn't," he says.

Blood tests earlier this month revealed Cooper has toxoplasmosis - a parasitic infection.

The diagnosis provided some relief for the 29-year-old. While it came too late to revive his Olympic chances, it gave him an answer to his sudden drop-off in performance and allowed him to rationalise the disappointment of missing the Games.

He says it helps too that he has experienced this before, having missed out on the Rio Olympics after being diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome.

"While it was disappointing at the time, after that I really put my mind towards performing, and I had some of the best years of my career in the five years after those Games," says Cooper, who has already reset his sights on the next Olympics in LA.

"But yeah, it was tough. When Rio came around I couldn't bring myself to watch the race, put it that way. Sometimes you just have to distract yourself with other things."

Nimmo says avoidance is a sound strategy for any athlete that might be struggling to process the disappointment of missing out on the Games - although she admits that can be hard when the Olympics garners wall-to-wall coverage.

"It's important for athletes to let themselves be emotional, but keep some boundaries around it," she says. "Distract yourself with fun things, even if they don't feel particularly fun at the moment. Keep those healthy routines in place, but don't put too much pressure on yourself."

The focus for Cooper right now is his health. He's been off the bike for a couple of weeks while his doctors in Europe, where he rides for the Trek Factory Racing Team, have him on a medication plan.

He hopes to be back competing next month, in time to build again for the world championships in September. But if his experience over the last three years has taught him anything, it's to not pin his hopes on one event.

"I've come to realise through the years that sport is my life in a way, because it's my job. But life is also bigger than sport."

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