#PhelpsFace and the dramatic history of Olympic sports psychology
Don’t f*ck with my flow.
Michael Phelps was just trying to find his flow.
Before the 200-meter butterfly semifinals on Monday, the Olympic swimmer sat with his hoodie and headphones on. Looking straight ahead at the pool, he was mentally preparing for the event.
But the competition wasn’t having it. Vibrating and gyrating his body right in front of Phelps, rival Chad Le Clos of South Africa was sending a message: I want to f*ck with your zen.
Phelps initiated a series of eye rolls, upper lip twitches, and frowns that became a trending hashtag: #PhelpsFace.
Then Phelps came in second place, ahead of Le Clos. The finals are Tuesday.
Mind games are fair play in sports. It may be dirty, but players are constantly trying to get in each other’s heads and disrupt or prevent flow.
The idea of flow, nirvana, ecstasy, peak experience, losing oneself “in the zone” is not new. Achieved by complete immersion in one activity or state of mind, flow is characterized as the point where time is transcended, motions are effortless, virtually no thought exists. When athletes reach flow, it looks like Michael Jordan’s seven three-pointers in a row during the 1992 NBA championships against the Portland Trailblazers. After his shots, Jordan threw his hands in the air, unable to explain his astounding play.
Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi coined and researched the concept of flow around 1975 and in his subsequent book, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Csikszentmihalyi originally studied artists who would get so lost in their work they would forget to eat or sleep. Even distractions would cease to interrupt their consciousness.
It’s clear that Le Clos was able to distract Phelps. When NBC asked Phelps after the heat how he felt about his opponent’s actions, the swimmer replied, “He does his thing. I do mine.”
Though Phelps wasn’t flowing at the time, he was likely preparing to achieve flow on some level, in the water. He’s no stranger to the interplay of sport and psyche.
In the early 1920s, Dr. Carl Diem founded the first sports psychology laboratory in Berlin. Five years later, Russia began its own research into the intricate relationships between psychological factors and physical performance. “The physical education of the rising generation is one of the necessary elements of the system of communist education of youth,” said Vladimir Lenin in 1920.
It wasn’t until the Cold War that the US began to seriously invest in sports psychology research, in order to inform competition with Russia in — surprise, surprise — the Olympics. During those years, Russia excelled at athletics — in particular more “militaristic,” individual sports like skiing, swimming, and wrestling — which the US in particular perceived as a symbolic win for Communism.
The Russian-American ideological and political standoff manifested at the 1952 Helsinki Games, dubbed by the media “The Battle of the Giants.” American decathlete Bob Mathias described the US team’s attitude toward the Russians, “They were in a sense the real enemy. You just had to beat ‘em…This feeling was strong down through the entire team.”
After the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, the US team hired its first dedicated sports psychologist. By 1996, it employed over 20.
The practice is intended to inform athletes and teams of the psychological implications of their activity, to optimize performance and enjoyment of the game. Techniques vary from cognitive-behavioral to goal-setting to kinesthetic imagery.
“We simulate the pressure,” sports psychologist Matthew Cunliffe told Quartz, by making athletes compete, face cheers and boos, and literally reach exhaustion before a huge event like the Olympics. Besides physical practice, many athletes simply sit with themselves and focus their thoughts before competing. Phelps has his music on and “just blocks everyone out,” said Cunliffe.
But the flip side to finding flow has proved treacherous for Phelps. After the 2012 Olympics, in which he became the most decorated athlete in Olympic history with 19 gold medals, Phelps found himself nearing the end of an already isolated career. He’d spent so long training to be a swimmer that he struggled to define his own identity when he stopped. It’s the one muscle he’d forgotten to exercise.
“He had no idea what to do with the rest of his life,” Phelps’ coach Bob Bowman told The New York Times. Some sports psychologists call this the “post-Olympic low.”
After two DUI arrests, Phelps spent time at an inpatient addiction-treatment facility before getting back in the pool with a new goal: Be a swimmer and be a vulnerable human at the same time. That’s sports psychology.
At 6’4”, with a wingspan of 6’7”, size 14 feet, a lung capacity twice that of the average man, double-jointed limbs, and a proven resistance to fatigue, Michael Phelps may seem superhuman but his chances in the pool mean far less without a healthy, focused mind. Unfortunately, athletes like Le Clos are prepared to exploit that. But now more than ever, so can Phelps.
