The Paradox Psychology in the Process of Ski Racing

“Focus on yourself”. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? It seems like a sentence that everyone has been told at some point in their lives. But growing up in ski racing, this is a quote you’d imagine reading on top of the locker room door of a ski team (if these were a thing outside of collegiate skiing). I guess other sports have similar components. Cross country, for example, is essentially the same, I would argue, in the sprint qualifiers. After those, however, it’s a direct battle. Alpine skiing, on the other hand, is solely based on racing against the clock, where the performance is then compared to that of everyone else. This is the topic that I want to unwrap today and try to take a look at why skiing is a difficult sport, psychologically, and why it – once understood, fully – is a golden example of the art of hard work.

So, since I want to start with the topic of comparison, I want to make one thing perfectly clear: Usually, I don’t support this notion of the woke mind-virus that claims “No! You shouldn’t compare yourself to anyone! You are PERFECT, the way you are”. You aren’t. None of us are. That’s okay. Let’s not be delusional, here. A healthy amount of comparison is good/necessary. However, in this very specific topic (“Adolescents in individual sports”), I will entertain the idea of how this can have a negative effect on that very specific group (NOT in the sense, though, that there should be no grades in school, or that you can’t play hoops/football/etc. in the break/PT, and keep score?!).

 So, with that in mind, it should be worth considering what the research in this field has to say. Hoffmann et al. (2022) compiled data from over 11,000 children and adolescents and found that participation in individual sports had a broad specter of mental health difficulties compared to, actually, non-participation in any sport (so, doing nothing – sport wise – indicated to be healthier for your mind, than being in an individual sport; and that’s on four different levels: anxiety/depression scores, withdrawn/depressed scores, general social problems, attention problems). Results like that, initially, sound crazy. But, again, this is analyzed from data from over 11,000 kids.

Pluhar et al. (2019), additionally, showed that there is a 100% higher likelihood of an adolescent athlete in an individual sport struggling with anxiety or depression than an adolescent athlete in a team sport.

Now, yes, while all this might be true, this shouldn’t be taken as a call to pull your kids from individual sports. The real question behind this data is “Why is that?”, not whether or not it is the case; in my opinion. And to answer this question, I want to take ski racing as an example, because that’s the only one I feel entitled to philosophize about, at this point.

Ski racing as a sport is, anyways, influenced by a multitude of factors that, if not accounted for, can paint a picture that doesn’t actually fit with reality. In statistics, if one were to compare these fields, those would be called confounding variables – variables that affect the outcome. Now, in ski racing, confounds might be any of the following: did you prepare for the upcoming races on a surface that is similar to the race? And if you didn’t, did the other guy? And if you did, did the other guys have it even more similar (or even on that hill/surface)? And did those guys who prepped on that hill, even if you did too, have significantly more ski days on it, and learned the key spots a bit better? Do you have the better set-up for these specific conditions, and is it better than the other guys?

Another key factor worth mentioning, that was pointed out to me by a friend of mine is, aside from the being the only one carrying the pressure of one’s performance, in younger years, money is most certainly a pressure point for a lot of athletes. When you are a young skier, you’re not earning anything. You know that your parents are spending a lot of money. And it’s easy for that comparison to creep in (“Shit, my parents are spending so much money on this, and I’m not nearly as good as him”).

On top of that, the sport is centered around post-hoc comparison. You ski, you cross the finish line, and before you even have any chance of processing what has actually happened – “here’s your result; now go and figure out why it is what it is”.

I think my point is clear, at this point. And I also think that there are few sports that have that many confounding variables, like ski racing. If we look at the track and field sports, that have, sort of, the same structure (i.e., single performance attempt, that is compared post-performance; like discus throw, shot put, jumps), you – at least – can’t do much different in terms of preparation. Surface is the same, everywhere (more or less), and the movement is the same in every repetition, and there are multiple attempts.

In skiing, those concerns of comparison that I have mentioned earlier can very much be justified. You might stand at the start, facing a surface that you haven’t skied on in months, on which you’re generally not feeling great, for which you don’t really know what to do with the set-up, on a hill that you don’t really like, and someone else might have everything dialed in that day. He skied on that slope 10 days more than you, on the exact surface that there is now, and that was very recently. And then you still need to give your best, like you fully believe you can win. In all of that, I can 100% understand, how a 16-21 year-old can forget about a fact like “Oh shit, I haven’t actually trained on this sort of ice, since I went to the indoor-hall, 4-5 months ago.” Now, is that a point from where – over time – these doubts and concerns can cause a lot of mental struggles that make it hard to see a clear path forward? Absolutely. However, it is still only a description of a possible “How?”, not the “Why?”.

For that reason, I would like to hypothesize, that the answer to the “Why?” is – because of the coaches, who let those young athletes beat themselves up, without educating them on how to look at the process. Whether it’s the coach who’s too comfortable to take the necessary, but unpleasant, conversation of letting the athlete know (gently) that his/her comparison to other athletes is nothing but unproductive; Or whether it’s the coach so lazy, that he thinks it’s better to “just let her/him be”; Or the coach, who thinks that kicking the athlete when they’re down will help them “face reality” (such as saying “rather quit, than keep embarrassing yourself” or “if you’re just gonna cry after bad performances, you can quit right away”). And while I, also, understand that quotes like these, very much, depend on context, to any coach who sees themselves in any of the above-mentioned examples, consider this a “You’re an adult. Do a better fucking job and help your athletes!” from me to you. And I don’t care whether it’s an athlete who could win the World Cup one day, or if it’s one that is bound to retire in 2 months, because he knows there’s no point to continue: either one of those deserves a conversation, and to be listened to. Yet, amid these challenges lies an opportunity: when coaches—and athletes themselves—embrace a deeper understanding of the sport, ski racing transforms from a source of mental strain into a masterclass in disciplined, resilient hard work.

With that in mind, I am currently writing this without access to internet, so I don’t know where I have it from, but I want to point out a quote that encapsulates the essence of how the appreciation for the hard work that goes into ski racing is built:

            “Once you understand the way broadly, you can see it clearly in all things”

As long as I was a ski racer, I never really thought about this quote much. Now, as I’ve been retired from being an active racer for a while, and working with athletes on a daily basis, I learn more and more about what weight that quote carries with it. As I’ve said, skiing has a lot of confounding variables that athletes can’t and won’t be able to control. However, once you’ve understood that, and have begun to accept it as part of reality, you begin to realize that those factors do not matter. Not in a way that “it doesn’t matter that you haven’t skied on salt for the past 8 months; you’re still expected to ski the way you know how to”. No. But, in a way that says “Yes. You haven’t skied on salt in 8 months. It’s not gonna feel natural. It’s probably not going to go super well. But that doesn’t mean that you cannot try your best.”
Even if “trying your best” one day is just trying to figure something out (and, maybe, failing at that, even). Trying, means failing. It is cool to try. It is cool to fail and learn. You learn to consider factors like fatigue, equipment, nutrition, routine, etc. and start seeing that there are still plenty of opportunities on the table for you to improve on. Nothing is given as an individual athlete. Expecting a good result, just because you had one last week, or some good runs in training, is a very slippery slope. Once this realization starts setting in, something very strange and interesting happens. The expectations diminish, the attention shifts from the emotional to the mechanical, and the beauty of the process starts revealing itself.

Embrace it. Try. Fail. Try again. Analyze. Reflect. Try again.
And see how much you care about comparing yourself to others, after a while.

References:

Hoffmann, M. D., Barnes, J. D., Tremblay, M. S., & Guerrero, M. D. (2022). Associations between organized sport participation and mental health difficulties: Data from over 11,000 US children and adolescents. PLoS one, 17(6), e0268583.

Pluhar, E., McCracken, C., Griffith, K. L., Christino, M. A., Sugimoto, D., & Meehan III, W. P. (2019). Team sport athletes may be less likely to suffer anxiety or depression than individual sport athletes. Journal of sports science & medicine, 18(3), 490.