How is Sport Dealing with the Post-Pandemic Mental Health Crisis?

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THE mental health in sports It has ceased to be a peripheral issue and has moved to the center of discussions about performance, career longevity, and the well-being of professional and amateur athletes worldwide.

The COVID-19 pandemic acted as a brutal accelerator of a crisis that already existed behind the scenes of high-performance sports: isolation, the cancellation of competitions, the disruption of routines, and uncertainty about careers left psychological scars that athletes, clubs, and federations are still processing and addressing years later.

Data collected by the Brazilian Olympic Committee indicates that approximately 35% of elite athletes have mental health problems — a number that challenges the image built over decades that professional athletes are, by definition, physically and psychologically invincible.

Simone Biles' decision to withdraw from the Tokyo 2021 Olympic finals to prioritize her mental health was the moment that definitively brought the topic into the global public debate—and her return in Paris 2024 as champion reinforced the narrative that taking care of mental health is not a weakness, but an integral part of serious preparation.

Michael Phelps, the most decorated Olympian in history, revealed that he lived for years with depression and suicidal thoughts in silence, fearing that this could be interpreted as vulnerability by his opponents — a pattern that the new generation of athletes is slowly but consistently breaking.

What professional sports are learning, years behind medicine and clinical psychology, is that ignoring mental health doesn't eliminate it—it only transforms it into unexplained injuries, decreased performance, premature career abandonment, and tragedies that could have been avoided.

The Impact of the Pandemic on High-Performance Athletes

The period between 2020 and 2022 represented an unprecedented experience in the history of professional sports: athletes who had dedicated their entire lives to a structured routine of training, competition, and clear goals suddenly found themselves deprived of all of that, with no return date and without the social support that sports life normally offers.

The Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games, held in 2021 without spectators and in the context of an ongoing pandemic, brutally exposed what happens when athletes are placed under maximum competitive pressure without the emotional and social support that the Olympic environment normally provides.

Isolation particularly affected athletes in team sports, who lost not only the competition but also the social dimension of the sport — the locker room, group training, and the relationship with teammates that often serves as the main emotional support network during periods of intense pressure.

The uncertainty surrounding careers — athletes nearing retirement who saw their last Olympic Games postponed, young people whose developmental years were interrupted, professionals whose contracts were suspended — created a specific type of anxiety that has no clear sports treatment and that clinical psychologists have had to learn how to address in the context of high performance.

The pandemic also revealed the fragility of psychological support systems in Brazilian clubs and federations: many teams did not have sports psychologists on staff or had them only on paper, without real integration with the coaching staff and without a clear protocol to identify and treat mental health crises.

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The Role of Athletes Who Spoke Openly

The most significant change in the sports environment regarding mental health did not come from federations or clubs—it came from athletes who decided to make their own vulnerability public, breaking decades of institutional silence on the subject.

Simone Biles was the most impactful case, but she's not alone: Michael Phelps used his post-retirement platform to advocate for greater attention to mental health in sports, Naomi Osaka withdrew from the 2021 French Open citing depression, and Kevin Love became one of the most consistent voices on anxiety in professional basketball.

In Brazil, Rebeca Andrade and Rayssa Leal represent a generation of athletes who have normalized psychological support as part of their preparation—not as crisis treatment, but as a permanent component of athletic development, equivalent in importance to physical and technical training.

Iga Swiatek, the world's number one female tennis player, began working with psychologist Daria Abramowicz in 2019 and has made this partnership a public part of her professional identity — a sign that, for the new generation of elite athletes, psychological support is no longer a secret to be hidden but a competitive advantage to be declared.

Athlete	Condition revealed	Impact on sport
Simone Biles	Twisties and burnout	Global debate on well-being vs. performance
Michael Phelps	Depression and suicidal thoughts	Advocacy for mental health in sports
Naomi Osaka	Depression and anxiety	Discussion about media obligations
Rebeca Andrade	Regular use of psychology	Normalization of psychological support
Kevin Love	Panic attacks	Breaking the taboo in men's basketball

What Clubs and Federations Are Changing

The institutional response to the mental health crisis in sports has been slower than the individual response from athletes, but there are structural changes happening in major sports organizations that indicate a genuine, albeit incomplete, transformation.

The Brazilian Olympic Committee implemented a mental health monitoring and intervention program for athletes during the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, with a dedicated multidisciplinary team and specific protocols to identify and respond to crisis situations — a significant improvement over previous editions, when psychological support was basically optional and poorly structured.

In the NBA, the league implemented a rule in 2019—before the pandemic—requiring all teams to have at least one clinical psychologist available for players, and the pandemic accelerated the application and deepening of this protocol, with clubs investing more seriously in mental health teams integrated into the coaching staff.

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THE World Health Organization In 2022, it formally recognized the mental health of athletes as a specific area of attention, with recommendations for international federations to develop protocols for the early identification of mental disorders and to create sporting environments that reduce the most common risk factors.

The University of Football has documented that coaches trained to identify signs of emotional distress in athletes and create supportive environments produce teams that are not only psychologically healthier, but also perform better—practical evidence that is leading more clubs to invest in training their coaching staff in mental health.

Sports Psychology as a Competitive Advantage

The most profound transformation occurring in sports regarding mental health is not humanitarian in nature—although the humanitarian aspect is real and important—but rather a recognition that well-applied sports psychology produces more consistent, more resilient athletes with longer careers.

Iga Swiatek's model — which has included psychologist Daria Abramowicz as a permanent member of the technical team since 2019 — has demonstrated in practice that continuous psychological support, not just during times of crisis, produces measurable competitive advantages in terms of consistent performance and the ability to maintain a high level of performance under extreme pressure.

Brazilian football clubs like Flamengo, Palmeiras, and Cruzeiro have expanded their sports psychology teams in recent years, integrating psychologists into coaching staffs much more closely than in previous decades—a move that reflects both the pressure from athletes and the managerial recognition that mental health directly affects on-field performance.

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Positive psychology applied to sports — with techniques for strengthening optimism, cultivating gratitude, and setting clear goals — is being incorporated into coach training programs in Brazil, recognizing that the coach plays a central role in the emotional development of athletes and that this requires specific training, not just intuition or charisma.

Grassroots sports are where this transformation has the most lasting consequences: programs like "Sport is Life" in Salvador, which combines sports practice with psychological support for young people from the outskirts of the city, show that sport can function as a tool for community mental health when the support structure is in place.

Conclusion

Sports are dealing with the post-pandemic mental health crisis unevenly — better at the top of the sports pyramid, where resources and visibility create pressure for change, and more slowly in grassroots and amateur sports, where most people participate in sports and where psychological support is still a rare exception.

The most important structural change in recent years has been the normalization of the topic: elite athletes who speak openly about depression, anxiety, and burnout make it easier for other athletes—at all levels—to identify their own difficulties and seek help without fear of being seen as weak or less committed.

Sport inherently possesses something that clinical psychology recognizes as therapeutically valuable: routine, purpose, belonging to a group, progressive challenge, and the concrete experience of overcoming obstacles—and learning to use these qualities consciously, instead of allowing the sporting environment to transform them into sources of additional pressure, is the central challenge that sport faces in the second half of the 2020s.

The pandemic was traumatic for sport — but trauma, when processed with adequate support, can produce lasting learning, and there are clear signs that global sport is beginning to do this work more seriously than at any point in its history.

FAQ

1. Why did the pandemic affect the mental health of athletes so much? The pandemic disrupted structured routines, canceled competitions, isolated athletes from their social support systems, and created uncertainty about careers—a combination of factors that particularly affected professionals whose identity and well-being are deeply linked to regular sports practice.

2. What was the impact of Simone Biles' decision regarding Tokyo 2021? Biles' decision to withdraw from the Olympic finals to prioritize her mental health was a watershed moment that brought the issue into global public debate, breaking the taboo that elite athletes cannot admit to psychological difficulties without compromising their careers or reputations.

3. What are Brazilian clubs doing regarding the mental health of their athletes? Clubs like Flamengo, Palmeiras, and Cruzeiro have expanded their sports psychology teams and are integrating psychologists more closely into their coaching staff. The Brazilian Olympic Committee (COB) has implemented specific protocols for monitoring and intervening in mental health for the Paris 2024 Olympic Games.

4. Does sports psychology improve athletes' performance? Yes. The case of Iga Swiatek, the world's number one tennis player who has been working with a psychologist since 2019, demonstrates in practice that continuous psychological support produces greater consistency in performance and a better ability to maintain a high level under extreme pressure.

5. What percentage of elite athletes have mental health problems? Data presented by the Brazilian Olympic Committee indicates that approximately 35% of elite athletes exhibit symptoms or disorders of mental health — a number that reflects both the pressure inherent in high-performance sport and the increased willingness of athletes to identify and report their difficulties.