‘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.
