‘My biggest issue is that I don’t feel like I’m in my body,” Naomi Osaka wrote this week on Instagram. A year after her daughter was born, the Grand Slam champion, who returned to the competitive circuit in January, is struggling to find her form. “I try and tell myself ‘it’s fine you’re doing great’ ... Internally I hear myself screaming ‘what the hell is happening?!?!’”
That is awful, but how fantastic that she is talking about how she feels. Traditionally, vulnerability is not welcome in elite sport, an environment of “stigma surrounding mental health issues, a high threshold for help-seeking behavior, and a low sense of psychological safety”, as one study described it last year. Yet so much of elite athletes’ success is in their heads; of course they falter, habitually exposed to pressure that would crush us normal people (unsurprisingly, research suggests they may be at higher risk of deleterious mental health symptoms.
Osaka helped to change this. Her high-profile withdrawal from the French Open in 2021, citing anxiety compounded by press obligations she felt unable to meet, amplified a vital conversation others have continued: Adam Peaty; the diver Noah Williams, who this week discussed his depression; and two athletes we are used to casually calling superhuman, Michael Phelps and Simone Biles.
Because they are humans, as well as superhumans. Their vulnerability makes them more, not less, impressive. Recent research confirmed my gut feeling: the public are supportive of athletes who are experiencing mental health challenges.
What strikes me is that Osaka is describing a feeling that most people who have given birth – not just elite athletes – would recognise. “Not in my body” hits the nail on the head in relating the alienation from your previous self you can feel in the postpartum months and even years. The body I live in now was reshaped by “easy” pregnancies and “good” childbirth in my supposedly resilient and bounce-back 20s: by the undiagnosed hernia I had for three years; by the abdominals no amount of pilates wholly fixed; by the dodgy perineum (sorry, but we have to talk about this stuff).
And I got off lightly. Research this year found that labour is a traumatic experience for one in three women. (I often find myself thinking about PMSL, Luce Brett’s brilliantly funny, angry and sad memoir, which explores how “an hour of pushing” left her with a legacy of incontinence, incidentally uncovering an unspoken world of birth injuries around her.) You are no longer in your body when you grow, then expel, another body from it – and that must be far stranger to navigate when that body is your work tool and your livelihood.
A new, optimistic narrative around elite athletes returning from pregnancy and childbirth has emerged in recent years. It started to crystallise when Jessica Ennis-Hill won the world championships 13 months after giving birth and an Olympic silver shortly thereafter.
Laura Kenny, who won two Olympic medals after having her first child, has written about how this attitude shift benefited British sport. There were nine mothers in Team GB at this Olympics; they won seven medals.
That is – they are – amazing. Normalising mothers’ success is a powerful corrective to the entrenched prejudice that motherhood weakens women. “It was one or the other – you were either a current Olympian or a mother,” Kenny wrote in the Guardian of the mindset she had internalised. It should also mean women get more, and better, help when returning to elite sport postpartum (Denise Lewis described trying to return to the heptathlon without support after the birth of her daughter in 2002 as a “very lonely experience”).
It’s not grim or alarmist to say you might not be the same. That doesn’t necessarily mean worse: you might be stronger, better, more resilient. Physiologically and psychologically, though, things are different. As Brett put it: “What was left of me in this ‘new mother’ body?” That is more of a struggle for some than others, whether they are elite athletes or have never attempted a parkrun. It helps to hear women say it’s hard and add some nuance to the “you got this, mama” narrative.
Osaka says she is giving herself “grace”; she is giving everyone who has felt that struggle grace, too. That is what makes her post – and her – so brilliant.
• Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist
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