A few weeks ago, as we sat around talking to boxer Aidan Walsh, a personal question was put to him. He was asked if the high-performance environment in sport was a healthy one to be in. Walsh, a bronze medal winner from Tokyo, has qualified for Paris and will travel to his second Olympic Games later this month.
It might sound like an odd kind of question to ask, but it came after the 27-year-old had been speaking about his struggle to stay in boxing and get to Paris.
Perceptions of high performance are generally associated with being at the peak of fitness and health. The assumption is that it requires a lifestyle that is wholesome and satisfying, whether it is playing for Ireland on a soccer or rugby team or boxing in the Olympic Games.
The rewards seem to always outweigh the effort. The sense of achievement of wearing an Irish crest and the accomplishment of playing in global sporting events reach far and wide, beyond the sphere of the athlete’s chosen sport.
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People outside of elite sport have positive impressions of the dedication and self-sacrifice required to live in that environment, especially that of an Olympic Games. Stepping into the Olympic medal zone, which Walsh has done, is in another stratosphere entirely.
It conveys a world-class ability, a confident, high-achieving mindset that is geared for success. It marks out the individual as someone who consumes pressure better than most and can compete against the top 1 per cent in the sport. It suggests, above all, strength of mind and purpose.
The question came after Walsh candidly began to talk about his mental health, how he had crashed and burned, then pulled through. He explained how he had given up boxing, and how taking his dog for a walk had become the limit of his physical activity.
The light-middleweight was not a one-off medal winner at the Tokyo Olympics but had a history of success. He won a gold medal at the 2022 Commonwealth Games along with his sister Michaela, who will also travel to Paris. The health problems emerged before those Commonwealth Games.
“I had a breakdown here,” he said of the Sport Ireland campus in Dublin. “I went into the performance director. It was in the office and I fell to the ground. I was just done. I was so happy when I was away. I was so, so happy, and I enjoyed every single minute of it.
“There’s a lot of things that I need to keep doing right and I know if I don’t, I’ll not be able to hold it [together]. I’m an obsessive person. That was partly the reason for my breakdown, to be honest, trying to reach a certain goal.
“I know if I had that obsession, it’s very easy to go back into that. I just can’t do it because I know the consequences. It’s not good. I just said to myself that no amount of sporting success is worth it.”
Walsh is not the only athlete who has felt that pressure bear down and had to fight against it. In 2021 Naomi Osaka withdrew from the French Open and stunned tennis, explaining she had faced “long bouts of depression” since she won the US Open in 2018.
Michael Phelps, a winner of 28 Olympic swimming medals, told a mental health conference in Chicago in 2018: “You do contemplate suicide.” The hardest part, said a CNN report on the conference, was after the 2012 Olympics in London.
“I didn’t want to be in the sport any more ... I didn’t want to be alive any more.” He explained the “all-time low” was sitting alone for “three to five days” in his bedroom, not eating and “just not wanting to be alive”.
High performance is a kind of dreamland, where almost nothing else in the world but outcome matters and where athletes often hold neither the power nor the authority.
Dreamland in sport is an unnatural place to be. Where recreational athletes see competition as fun or a way of being part of an enjoyable social group, elite athletes come under direct pressure to perform. Bursaries are at stake. Qualification for World Championships and Olympic Games become constant stressors.
Success is expected to validate the coaching, the hours put in, the energy and costs of building the team or individual into something formidable. Coaches and teams are only as good as the success of their athletes.
Athletes are defined by their sport. Their sense of self-worth is entwined in succeeding and that leaves them vulnerable to all sorts of things, some of them severe.
On the issue of high performance, Walsh was able to answer the question directly.
“For me, I don’t think chasing something obsessively for numerous amounts of years is healthy,” he said in whispered words. “There is a lot of consequences, especially with my type of personality.
“A lot of things I need to keep doing right. I know if I don’t, I’ll not be able to hold it. That was partly the reason for my breakdown, that obsession trying to reach a certain goal. I know if I have that obsession, it is very easy to go back into that. I can’t do it. I just know the consequences.”
Dreamland is not all smart team tracksuits and warm-weather training camps. It’s beating what’s in front of you on a day-to-day basis.
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