In Hard Times, Mind Coaches Get Busy

Good advice In lockdown mode with all competitions and training cancelled, some of India’s elite athletes are calling up their mental conditioning coaches to keep negative thoughts from creeping in

- Avishek Roy

NEW DELHI: The unprecedented decision to postpone the Tokyo Olympics by a year should’ve come as a relief to most of the professional athletes around the world. However, despite the end of the overwhelming uncertainty of whether the Games will be held in this calendar year or not, athletes around the globe— and in India—remain ridden with enough anxiety that some of them are now reaching out to mental trainers for professional help.

Like the rest of the country, athletes too are in lockdown mode—with camps and tune-up competitions having been cancelled a while ago. And because academies and training centres (second homes to these athletes) are also now out of their bounds, India’s Olympics aspirants are finding it difficult to spend the hours where they would ideally have been expending their energies; remaining idle at home, therefore, makes it easy for negative thoughts to creep in.

“Itis one of the many challenges the Olympic-bound athletes are facing in the current situation,” says Dr Swaroop Savanur, a mental conditioning and peak performance coach who works with the Pune-based sports NGO Lakshya Sports, which provides support to many elite Indian athletes.

“Athletes are used to a routine, training timing, rest, etc. Suddenly they have a lot of time in hand with nothing to do. And with the Olympics qualification on hold and time on hand, it is natural that the negative switch in their heads will be on.”

Savanur works with top boxers, wrestlers and table tennis players. Some of them have already made the cut for Tokyo. Others haven’t—and for them the stress is understandably more.

“This is something unprecedented. Ambiguity is more stressful,” says Savanur.