Elana Meyers Taylor was supposed to carry the US flag at the opening ceremony of the Beijing Winter Olympics but the bobsleigh athlete was instead forced to isolate in her hotel after testing positive for coronavirus.
Taylor, who was separated from her infant son as part of the process, eventually earned a silver medal this week in the monobob, a bobsleigh event with a single driver.
“Every medal is very difficult to achieve, and is not without its struggles,” she said after the result. “But this one was especially difficult.”
Athletes already grappling with the nerves of elite level competition have also had to contend with an array of unusual pressures at China’s first Winter Olympics. The event has become a test case for a strict nationwide response to the coronavirus pandemic that has recently included citywide lockdowns.
The Games have taken place within a closed-loop system that separates athletes and other participants from the wider population to a greater extent than during the Summer Olympics in Tokyo last year. Athletes in Beijing have been placed in isolation and missed their events if a daily test, or those of close contacts, is positive.
The challenges associated with Covid prevention measures have coincided with a greater focus on mental health across elite sport. Simone Biles, the American gymnast, said at the Summer Olympics last year that “we have to protect our mind and our body” after pulling out of the team event while tennis player Naomi Osaka spoke out about her “long bouts of depression”.
National Olympic committees have introduced “welfare officers” for athletes representing their countries, and the IOC has said that there are 65 staff designed to offer support in the Olympic Village.
In his speech at the opening ceremony, Thomas Bach, the International Olympic Committee president, said “our heart goes out to all the athletes who because of the pandemic cannot make their Olympic dream come true”. So far, 183 athletes and team officials have tested positive, with nearly two-thirds of the cases identified at the airport.
The pandemic has also weighed on athletes in the build-up to the event, given the need to be coronavirus-free before boarding the plane to China. After testing positive for the coronavirus before leaving Canada, figure skater Keegan Messing faced a battle to get to Beijing in time for his competition last week, where he eventually finished ninth.
“To see my teammates boarding a plane that I am supposed to be on and keeping [a] positive mindset was probably the hardest thing I had to do,” he said. “Keeping the mental health side of things strong was very, very difficult.”
Fellow figure skater Nathan Chen, who won a gold medal for the US last week after crumbling in the 2018 Winter Olympics, told the Financial Times that he had hired a sports psychologist for the event.
“Heading into this season I was like, you know I’ve never really tried [a sports psychologist] and I don’t really want to leave a stone unturned,” he said. The decision was related to the pressure of the Games, but Chen also told reporters he had been cautious because of the virus. His teammate Vincent Zhou tested positive in Beijing and missed the event.
Sarah Cecil, a psychologist in China with Team GB, said the emphasis on mental health reflected “a big shift around elite sport”. She added that the British team had to prepare its members for the possibility of isolation ahead of travelling to the games. “That’s like any Games, but the context of this Games is different,” she said.
At one ice hockey match between Canada and the Russian Olympic Committee, players wore masks to reduce the risk of transmission. Natalie Spooner, a Canadian ice hockey player, told reporters that the Canadian team had been training in masks in Toronto.
“Everyone was out and about at Christmas, seeing family and friends . . . It just felt safer for us [at] such a critical time leading up to the Olympics,” she said.
Conditions in quarantine attracted complaints early on in the event, with the German delegation citing issues over cleanliness, food and training equipment and the IOC commenting on the need to avoid being “complacent” when implementing the measures.
But by the second weekend, cases among athletes had slowed to a trickle. On Sunday, there were zero locally-transmitted cases of the coronavirus for the first time since the Olympics began.
Some athletes said they were unaffected by the experience of isolation. Johannes Thingnes Boe, who has won three golds and one bronze for Norway in biathlon events that combine shooting and cross-country skiing was isolated for days following a close contact. “It did not affect anything,” he said. “I trained normally.”
Team GB’s Cecil said the conditions were “really your chance to create your own performance bubble” because “a lot of the normal distractions have disappeared”.
“It’s going to be an amazing story to tell when you’re 60,” she added. “That’s a useful psychological technique.”
