Real-life resilience - Winter Olympics version

Sport is the great giver of surprise.

We anticipate an outcome, but then we’re shocked when life has other plans. It happens in the biggest games on the world stage, but it also happens in the school gyms when the buzzer beater breaks hearts and creates locker room legends.

The Olympics sits at the pinnacle of sporting moments. Athletes do the miraculous and surprise us all, which is entirely evident after another Olympics wraps up today in Italy. Talk about constantly being reminded that ANYTHING can happen. And underneath all the spectacle, there are plenty of honest lessons in resilience to be found. Here are just a few that are worth pausing to note.

The comeback - Alysa Liu

Four years ago, Liu was a teenage prodigy of figure skating. However, after Beijing 2022, she stepped away, retired at 16 years old! It was a rare decision in elite sport, made often under extreme circumstances. She left to become a ‘normal young adult’ for a minute, and renew her passion for the sport.

And then she came back.

She returned to the figure skating spotlight with a newfound energy that can only be described as joy. Her mindset adjusted to focus less on surviving expectations and simply enjoying the moment.

This is the twist that we so often miss about resilience. Sometimes resilience is grinding, but sometimes it’s walking away long enough to remember who you are without the pressure, and then returning on your own terms. I often talk about bouncing forward when we need to, but sometimes we have to bounce OUT first to get ourselves right.

The moment before she took the podium summed up her mindset. It was human and carefree: a young woman not worried about expectations. While the camera tracked her, she remembered her lip oil. She quickly retrieved it, applied it while on camera and then joined the medal ceremony like a boss.

In our next high-stakes moment, we should reflect on why this matters. Are we trying to prove something or are we trying to perform? Often when we simply show up to do our best, the pressure releases and we tend to find the important flow to perform.

The consistent - Antoinette Rijpma-de Jong

Rijpma-de Jong is a Dutch speed skater. She has competed at a total of four Olympic Games, but the Gold had always eluded her. Until now.

In the 1500m race, she crossed the line and won by six one-hundredths of a second (that’s less than a blink of an eye!).

Sometimes, resilience is the consistency of showing up time and time again, year after year, four Olympics deep, when the gold keeps arriving for others. That patience and willingness to keep caring, despite mounting near-misses, is genuinely hard.

When a long-sought outcome keeps evading us, focusing on the outcome can become paralyzing. When that happens, sports psychologists recommend shifting to process goals: these are the specific, controllable behaviours rather than results. It helps us zoom out with a breath. What’s the next important thing to do today that move us toward our goal?

The hungry - Alex Ferreira

Ferreira is a US Free skier who won silver in the halfpipe in 2018, bronze in 2022, and finally gold just a few days ago. He’s 31, with perhaps the best performance of his life coming on his third run, under the lights, when it mattered.

What I found interesting was that he later reflected: "If they gave it to me in 2018, who knows if I would be here tonight. The universe has a weird way of working itself out." 

It’s inspiring that sometimes the near miss is the thing that keeps us going. It keeps us hungry and we learn ways to tweak accordingly, whereas quick success can lead to complacency.

The tool here is to see failure as data and to look for just one small improvement today. What’s the next 1% improvement we can make in any aspect of what we do? It doesn’t have to be a total renovation; we just need to focus on one micro-edge that we could make fractionally better today.

The grateful - Mark McMorris

Days before the Games officially began, Canadian snowboarder Mark McMorris crashed hard on a big air training drill and was knocked unconscious for approximately two minutes. He was stretchered off and taken to hospital with a concussion, bone bruising, and a lot of pain.

He withdrew from the big air competition but still chose to compete in the slopestyle event (an event where snowboarders ride a course packed with features). To compete required passing a bunch of concussion and medical tests, but he did it. He showed up, and finished 8th. Whilst he didn’t medal he said he was proud to make it to a fourth Olympics, and that he was "having more fun than ever."

The version of courage this story offers is an underrated one: the restraint to not compete when our body tells us not to, and then return only when medically cleared. We don’t have to push through everything all the time. We have to respect the process and appreciate the opportunity, even if things don’t always work out. That’s just one more example of gratitude building resilience, even without the medal success.

The sick - Finland Women’s Hockey

Before the Games began, the Finnish team had 13 players affected by a norovirus outbreak. Their opening game against Canada was postponed.

The coach said at one point during the outbreak that if he had five players and one goalie, they were going to show up and play regardless. The team captain told reporters that all they can do is to focus on one day at a time.

Individual resilience is one thing, but collective resilience (when the disruption hits the whole group at once) is something harder and less discussed. How do we hold a team's culture together when most of the team is physically incapacitated? All we can do is focus on the next window, the next 10 minutes, or the next practice with however many people are standing.

Life is rarely smooth but focusing on What’s Important Now (WIN) is one powerful way forward. It's how we maintain agency in genuinely chaotic situations, where the impulse is often to freeze or to try to solve everything all at once.

Despite all of the above, perhaps the most chaotic story of the Games belonged to Nazgul, a wolfdog who escaped two locked doors and ran an Olympic course uninvited. The perfect reminder that we can never really plan for everything! The question is always how we respond.

Resilience is messy, chaotic, and unexpected. What’s consistent with all of these stories is that the goal is to find a way to stay in the game long enough to give ourselves a chance.

Until next time friends, stay resilient.

Carre at Resilient Minds

PS - I could have done a whole newsletter on any one of these stories, but chose to focus on keeping them brief and covering more. Sorry if I missed one of your fave moments from these Games.