'It's important to be more than an athlete. It can just feel like that's all you do.'
"Emotionally Exhausting": Regan Smith and Abbey Weitzeil on the Mental Toll of an Olympic Swim MeetAt the 2021 Olympics, the swimming events ended with a showdown. The women's 4x100m medley relay, the last women's event on the schedule, matched up two powerhouses of the sport: the US, which had just set a world record in the event in 2019, and Australia, whose women swimmers were in the middle of a Games to remember.
"I was completely watching Australia the entire race," Weitzeil, 24, told POPSUGAR. As the butterfly swimmers plunged into the wall, Weitzeil saw McKeon neck-and-neck with Huske and thought,"All right, I'm diving in with Cate [Campbell]. I am going in with her." It was Weitzeil's first time anchoring a relay final for Team USA, and like Smith, she tried to focus on her own race, not the Australian opponent hovering in her peripheral vision. Weitzeil hung tough, but Campbell out-touched her at the wall. As the Australian women capped a terrific Olympics with one last hard-fought gold, Weitzeil couldn't hold back her tears.It wasn't just that they'd lost the race by a hair, she said.
Then there's the pressure of being an Olympian on Team USA. Both swimmers are grateful to be swimming for the US, but the"expectation of greatness," as Weitzeil put it, is a difficult burden to carry."There are legacies that you have to uphold," she said. The pandemic-induced fifth year between Rio and Tokyo made it even tougher, from a mental health perspective."It was just a completely different animal," Smith said."It was really hard." Weitzeil remembered crying after bad practices,"so stressed out that you're not going to do well . . . then you get back up and you do it every day, twice a day." The Olympics, the focus, the pressure, the fifth year:"It's emotionally exhausting.
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