Article

Comment

Sport

12 July 2023

3 min read

Winning the emotional whole in elite sport

As the pressure builds at Wimbledon, Jonny Reid and Graham Daniels reflect on the psychology vulnerabilities sports stars face.

Jonny Reid and Graham Daniels

Johnny and Graham work for Christians in Sport. Graham, is the General Director, while Jonny is the Resources and Communications Team Leader.

A tennis player stands ready to return a shot, while a phalanx of photographers crowd round a court-side opening to take a picture of him.

Photo by Howard Bouchevereau on Unsplash.

“It’s tough to be happy in tennis because every single week, everyone loses apart from one person.”
Taylor Fritz – American World Number 9 tennis player

Wimbledon is one of the pinnacles of the tennis season as players long to win the prestigious tournament. Yet only a handful will experience success. The vast majority will fail in their goal and return to the treadmill of elite touring sport.

These players were once the best in their town, state or country, yet now they face the relentless pressure of competing against hundreds of others who were ‘best-in-class.’

Former US Open champion Bianca Andreescu struggled to come to terms with this reality when she turned professional. Speaking in the Netflix documentary series Break Point, she said:

“When I started losing, I didn’t know what was happening in a way. I didn’t know how to deal with it. I was shocked, which was really weird because people are losing every single week in tennis.”

The shame of losing

Andre Agassi has written one of the most illuminating autobiographies of any sportsperson, where he recounts how by the age of seven, he associated winning tournaments with safety from the potential rage and disappointment of his highly driven father.

However, having won Wimbledon at the age of 22, he discovered that even winning one of the biggest tournaments in his sport could not heal his wounds and the need to find satisfaction and worth in his performance. He said after his victory:

“winning changes nothing. Now that I’ve won a slam, I know something that very few people on earth are permitted to know. A win doesn’t feel as good as a loss feels bad, and the good feeling doesn’t last as long as the bad. Not even close.”

Like all humans, elite athletes need to know they have value and significance not based on what they have done or will do in the future but on who they are.

More recently Emma Raducanu, the British 2021 US Open Champion reflected on how she had become trapped in a similar view of her tennis.

"I very much attach my self-worth to my achievements,"

she said.

"If I lost a match I would be really down, I would have a day of mourning, literally staring at the wall. I feel things so passionately and intensely."

Ashley Null is an experienced sports chaplain who has worked with Olympians and high-level sportspeople for many years. In reflecting on the story of Agassi, he notes:

“The first task of any chaplain to elite athletes is to help them learn to separate their personal identity from their athletic performance. Only love has the power to make human beings feel truly significant, not achievement. Only knowing that they are loved regardless of their current performance can make Olympians feel emotionally whole.”

How to feel emotionally whole in elite sport

Current professional player Shelby Rogers has noted that in elite tennis:

“Week to week, you’re walking around with your ranking plastered on your face.”

They cannot seem to escape their performances.

Like all humans, elite athletes need to know they have value and significance not based on what they have done or will do in the future but on who they are. Most of us do not have our work watched by millions and instantly ranked and analysed. But for elite athletes, these pressures mean they are especially vulnerable to insecurity and are much more likely to conflate identity with performance. Thus, a stable and secure identity is critical for the sportsperson.

Sports psychology has begun to understand this need and now encourages athletes to think more broadly about how they find their worth and value. Rebecca Levett has worked in a number of high-performance environments and acknowledges that:

“It is absolutely vital that we, as support staff and coaches encourage our athletes to consider who they are as a person as well as an athlete.”

For most of us our ‘private identity,’ as Levett calls it, could be derived from our family and friends and how they see us. Several athletes reference their role as husband or wife or mother and father as key in their success. Meanwhile, others, recognising that not even family relationships are permanent or always fulfilling, have turned to Christian faith for this stability.

Shelby Rogers recently spoke on a podcast about the difference understanding this has had on her tennis career.

“As much as you try not to read the media, you still have that constant comparison, and so it is understanding within yourself that you do not have to prove yourself to God…that you do not have to perform for him…you just have to go out and enjoy yourself and use these gifts he’s given you.”

The Christian message is that a secure identity can be found in God's assured, steadfast love, as a Father has for his children.

Sport is a beautiful gift, but it is not stable enough to define us.

Article

Comment

Politics

25 September 2024

5 min read

Exploring Labour’s parameters of hope

At the party’s conference, meeting mayors and old friends rekindle a restless hope.

David Barclay

David is a partner with the Good Faith Partnership, collaborating on solutions to social problems.

A group of four people stand in front of an even banner, smiling

Labour mayors smiling, despite the weather.

@UKHospKate.

If weather can set the tone for events then the meteorological omens for the Labour Party Conference this year were hardly promising. By the time I’d made it to Liverpool Dockside from the train station I was already soaked and cold, and wondering if anything our new Government was going to say would cut through the gloom and kindle some much-needed hope and optimism.

The downbeat mood of bedraggled conference-goers searching for umbrellas felt like a pretty fair reflection of the wider public as a whole. A recent piece of research found that ‘broken’ was the most common word used to describe the state of the country, and if Keir Starmer had a honeymoon period as Prime Minister it has clearly already long passed. We have become used to politics as a force of chaos and division, and as the events of this summer revealed all too starkly, this state of our public life has left our communities highly vulnerable to the forces of hate and violence that lie closer to the surface than most of us like to admit to ourselves.

Yet my experience over 48 hours in Liverpool did give me cause for optimism, even if that came from some slightly unexpected places.

Mayors are uniquely unburdened by the departmental silos of Westminster and Whitehall, as well as having a direct mandate from the people and communities they are serving.

One of those was the energy of new MPs. Amongst the large intake of Labour MPs there are some seriously impressive people with a vitality and creativity that has been sorely missing from British politics in recent years. I got the chance to speak to Josh MacAlister, the new MP for Whitehaven and Workington, who is a case in point. Josh set up Frontline, a graduate social worker training programme modelled on Teach First which has had huge success in boosting recruitment into a vital part of our public life. He was then asked by the last Government to lead a landmark review into Children’s Social Care, which is without doubt one of the most broken aspects of British politics with private companies making obscene profits from providing terrible care to vulnerable children, leaving a trail of human misery and financial ruin for local Government in its wake. Now he is looking to put the review’s recommendations into practice with a Government that seems far more likely to spark radical change in this area than it’s predecessor. As a foster carer myself who has seen the human cost of the current system up close and personal, meeting Josh gave me real hope that we can do better for the most vulnerable children in our country.

The other politicians who seemed very much in the limelight in Liverpool were Mayors, who now cover more and more of our English cities and regions and are taking an increasingly significant role in our public conversations. I’ve had the opportunity to work closely with the former Mayor of Bristol Marvin Rees, and saw first-hand the incredible impact that place-based political leaders can create by convening different leaders and organisations from across the public sector, business and charities around common goals.

Mayors are uniquely unburdened by the departmental silos of Westminster and Whitehall, as well as having a direct mandate from the people and communities they are serving. So seeing increasing amounts of resource and powers flow to Mayors is undoubtedly another cause for hope.

One of my areas of passion is refugee and asylum inclusion, and I was part of several conversations over the Conference on how Mayors and other regional actors could play a bigger role in this policy area. As Marvin Rees used to say as Mayor of Bristol, city leaders see the issue of migration and human mobility in a fundamentally different way to national leaders, because nation-states are defined by borders and therefore constantly obsessed with controlling them, whereas cities by definition exist due to the movement of people, good and ideas, and are therefore much more interested in how policy can lead to greater welcome and connection in order to harness the strengths of having a diverse population. It is this kind of mindset and perspective shift that having stronger Mayors could bring into British politics, and to me at least it feels like a breath of fresh air.

History teaches us that really significant change happens rarely from the top down but rather through constellations of leaders and organisations with similar worldviews but distinct resources and perspectives.

My final source of optimism for change came not for politicians at all but from the friends and colleagues I was able to catch up with or bump into. Having been around the world of politics for nearly two decades, things like Party Conferences are a lovely opportunity to touch base with people I might not otherwise get to see.

Over lunch with an old friend from the Bristol Mayor’s Office, we were reflecting on how being part of a wider political movement can create opportunities for collaboration and mutual support over the years and in different professional and personal contexts. As someone whose ancestors were actively involved in the Abolition Movement and the Clapham Sect, I often find myself thinking about the social dynamics of change and how movements and coalitions grow and evolve. History teaches us that really significant change happens rarely from the top down but rather through constellations of leaders and organisations with similar worldviews but distinct resources and perspectives. At a time when it often feels like party politics lacks the imagination and courage to really answer the demands of the time, I find real hope in this idea that we can all organise ourselves and our institutions for change, and we all have a responsibility to build a stronger web of relationships to make that happen.

So, if like me you are longing for some positive change in this country, I think the Labour Party Conference did have some real signs of hope. But it’s not a passive hope that somehow having ‘the grownups in charge’ will by itself guarantee real progress. Instead, it’s a restless, active hope that says nothing will happen without us making it happen, and particularly joining the dots between people of goodwill to build something better than our status quo.