Post-Olympic Blues: The Blind Spots of Athletic Performance
Competing at the Olympics can produce a high matched only by the crash that follows. As researchers pay increasing attention to depression and other mental health struggles after major competitions, far less attention is paid to the difficult return home—or to the people who helped athletes get there in the first place. This is a story about what happens when the Olympic high wears off.
Two years after Paris 2024, the Olympic machine is already spinning again. Federations are building their teams for Los Angeles. Early favorites are reemerging, others have quietly faded from view, and attention is already turning toward the next athletes who might end up with medals around their necks. The reality is hard to ignore: the Olympic Games have become the pinnacle of international sport and, as geographer Pascal Gillon wrote in 2024, a platform for geopolitical communication.
Athletes are cast as heroes, symbols of constant progress who capture the world’s imagination every four years. But the athletes representing their countries—and the coaches and support staff behind them—are not machines. While institutions are already looking ahead, many of those people are still dealing with the psychological fallout from the previous Games. For some, the question is no longer how to get back to the highest level. It is how to recover from the last Olympic cycle.
“Sometimes your head is underwater and you’re trying to come up for air. Then you go under again, hit a rock, and keep going.”
Victoire Andrier, former member of the French speed climbing team.
Climbing, meanwhile, will be an Olympic sport for the third time. And for the third time, the format will change. At Los Angeles 2028, each discipline will award its own medals: speed, lead, and bouldering. If that format finally looks built to last, the way people come out the other side of an Olympic cycle remains far less stable.
In a month—and sometimes in only a few weeks—athletes compress four years of preparation, sacrifice, and obsession into a handful of performances. Overnight, the thing they have organized their lives around can end in triumph or crushing disappointment. We know the stories of the winners, and sometimes the losers. What we rarely see is the post-Olympic transition itself.
Thousands of athletes return to relative anonymity, disappearing back into the four-year stretch between opening ceremonies. The people who coached and supported them may never have received any media attention at all. Those untold stories say a great deal about how athletic performance gets produced—and how easily we forget the vulnerability of the people producing it.
When It All Stops
For four years, an Olympic climber’s life is organized around one goal: training, sacrifice, preparation, selection, competition. The Games are the endpoint of an all-consuming structure. Then the closing ceremony arrives, and suddenly it is over. In a long interview, former elite speed climber Victoire Andrier described what it was like to prepare for Paris 2024, only to watch her Olympic selection dream disappear after an intense qualification season. “Throughout the whole preparation and selection process, I felt like I was caught in a river that just kept getting faster,” she says. “Sometimes your head is underwater and you’re trying to come up for air. Then you go under again, hit a rock, and keep going.”
Coming back from the Games means entering a major transition in an elite athlete’s career. Researchers now recognize that period as one of heightened psychological vulnerability. The scientific literature often refers to the phenomenon as the “post-Olympic blues,” a range of emotional, cognitive, and behavioral reactions that can appear in the days, weeks, or months after the Games. In their literature review The Olympic Games Transition, Roy David Samuel and Itay Basevitch emphasize an important distinction: post-Olympic blues are not a psychiatric diagnosis. They are an adaptive response to an unusually demanding transition.
“I would wake up crying because I didn’t want to wake up to this new reality: an unfinished dream, and the sudden end of everything that had come with it.”
Victoire Andrier, former member of the French speed climbing team.
The two sport psychology researchers argue that it makes more sense to see this period as a dynamic transition process than as a psychological disorder. In other words, negative emotions after the Olympics do not necessarily mean something is wrong or needs to be fixed. They can be a normal response. And importantly, this experience is not limited to athletes whose Olympic dreams fall short. It can affect medalists, too, as well as athletes who never make it to the Games at all. The final result matters less than the experience surrounding it.
Alone in a Crowd
Elite climbing now relies on substantial resources, from strength and conditioning to biomechanical analysis, nutrition, and performance psychology. Each area has its own specialists. Together, that expertise reflects how sophisticated high-performance systems have become. But the moment when athletes may be most psychologically vulnerable often begins just as that system starts to pull away. The resources surrounding them drop sharply at the same time their need for support may increase.
Through what they call the “Olympic Games Transition Model,” Samuel and Basevitch argue that the post-Olympic period should not be understood as one isolated event. It is the product of a series of transitions that begin well before the competition itself. From that perspective, post-Olympic blues result from accumulated change rather than a simple emotional crash. Other researchers, including Kristoffer Henriksen, Robert Schinke, and their colleagues, take a similarly contextual approach. They emphasize that athletes’ psychological health depends not only on individual characteristics, but also on the quality of the sporting environment around them.
The abrupt end of a cycle—or the sudden loss of constant stimulation—can affect athletes in everyday life. Psychologically, that may mean negative emotions, lower motivation, or even depressive episodes. Physically, it can mean persistent fatigue, sleep problems, and poorer recovery. Andrier remembers the mornings after the final Paris qualification event: “I would wake up crying because I didn’t want to wake up to this new reality: an unfinished dream, and the sudden end of everything that had come with it. Finding another big dream takes time. You have to process the last one and understand what you did and didn’t accomplish.”
Preventing these problems cannot be the responsibility of climbers alone. Federations, coaches, and the entire high-performance system have a role to play. Post-Olympic blues should not be reduced to a few individuals struggling to manage their emotions. They also reveal a blind spot in the system itself.
The Blues Hit Everyone
For years, research focused almost exclusively on athletes, especially those who failed to achieve their Olympic goals—as though post-Olympic blues were something that happened only to people who had not been “strong enough.” But athletic results are only one factor. Any climber can be affected. In the 2022 paper Beware of the Blues: Wellbeing of Coaches and Support Staff Throughout the Olympic Games, Christopher E. J. DeWolfe and Lori Dithurbide showed that coaches and support staff can experience the same period of vulnerability.
The authors describe something similar to athletes’ post-Olympic blues, although shaped by the demands of each professional role: intense social and emotional involvement, constant responsibility, the sudden disappearance of the group, and a frequent lack of institutional or media recognition. All of those factors can have professional and personal consequences.
And the mechanism described in this research is not unique to the Olympics.
Someone who spends years working toward sending their first 5.11d, the US equivalent of roughly French 7a; preparing for a Himalayan expedition; climbing an iconic multipitch route; or training for a season of amateur competition can also organize a large part of life around one major goal. Once that goal is reached—or abandoned—a similar emptiness can appear. When it follows success, researchers sometimes call it post-achievement depression.
In that sense, post-Olympic blues are the most visible version of something many people experience, often without recognizing it. They reveal how deeply our societies are shaped by a culture of personal achievement and micro-celebrity.
“When the whole thing ends, support from the federation or public institutions doesn’t kick in right away. I asked for help and was proactive, so I was able to get support. But it isn’t systematic. It isn’t clearly identified or structured. To me, that’s a problem and a real gap. I think there should at least be end-of-career meetings where someone explains, at minimum, what happens next.”
Victoire Andrier, former member of the French speed climbing team.
We are expected to achieve our dreams, tell the story, keep succeeding, and move on to the next thing. But we are rarely given the tools to handle the transitions that follow.
Andrier did not know what to do with the difficulties that emerged after her own Olympic pursuit ended. “The emptiness came afterward,” she says. “And it was really hard because I didn’t know that kind of emptiness. It wasn’t the quiet of rest or the feeling of peace. It was my body still waiting for a signal that wasn’t coming anymore.”
Psychological transitions take time. Trying to move on too quickly can prevent someone from fully processing what happened and simply postpone a come-down that was always going to happen.
Coming Back Down
If we want to think about performance as a complete process, we have to account for what happens afterward. Any serious summit plan includes the descent. For climbers’ well-being and mental health, that means paying attention to several factors. The first is maintaining an identity with more than one dimension: having a life beyond climbing and cultivating other interests. For Andrier, that balance can become a paradox. “There are these two things,” she explains. “The more you project yourself into that athletic identity, the more you embody it, imagine it, reinforce it—the stronger you become, because that mindset helps you in competition. But at the same time, when everything stops, the stronger that identity is, the harder it becomes. I don’t regret building it that deeply at all. But the grief afterward was very real.”
Another priority is creating and maintaining strong, unconditional social support. That includes teaching athletes, coaches, and staff coping strategies based on recognizing and accepting emotions, while preparing them for transitions before they happen through education and by normalizing their possible effects. Andrier says she did receive both personal and financial support when her career ended. But she regrets that athletes are expected to seek that help themselves instead of federations and public institutions providing it as a standard part of the process.
“When the whole thing ends, support from the federation or public institutions doesn’t kick in right away,” she says. “I asked for help and was proactive, so I was able to get support. But it isn’t systematic. It isn’t clearly identified or structured. To me, that’s a problem and a real gap. I think there should at least be end-of-career meetings where someone explains, at minimum, what happens next.” The post-Olympic blues point to something easy to forget: performance does not end when a goal is achieved. It ends when the person has had time to process the experience and start building whatever comes next. Planning for the descent does not mean lowering athletic ambition. It means recognizing that taking care of people is part of performance, too.
