How Olympians think about success and failure and what we can learn from them

Sport

How Olympians think about success and failure and what we can learn from them

2026-01-12 08:39 Last Updated At：22:58

If winning gold medals were the only standard, almost all Olympic athletes would be considered failures.

A clinical psychologist with the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee, Emily Clark's job when the Winter Games open in Italy on Feb. 6 is to help athletes interpret what it means to be successful.

Should gold medals be the only measure?

Part of a 15-member staff providing psychological services, Clark nurtures athletes accustomed to triumph but who invariably risk failure.

The staff deals with matters termed “mental health and mental performance." They include topics such as motivation, anger management, anxiety, eating disorders, family issues, trauma, depression, sleep, handling pressure, travel and so forth.

Clark's area includes stress management, the importance of sleep and getting high achievers to perform at their best and avoid the temptation of looking only at results.

“A lot of athletes these days are aware of the mental health component of, not just sport, but of life,” Clark said in an interview with The Associated Press. “This is an area where athletes can develop skills that can extend a career, or make it more enjoyable.”

The United States is expected to take about 235 athletes to the Winter Olympics, and about 70 more to the Paralympics. But here's the truth.

“Most of the athletes who come through Team USA will not win a gold medal," Clark said. "That’s the reality of elite sport."

Here are the numbers. The United States won gold medals in nine events in the last Winter Games in Beijing in 2022. According to Dr. Bill Mallon, an esteemed shoulder surgeon and Olympic historian, 70.8% of Winter and Summer Olympic athletes go to only one Olympics.

Few are famous and successful like swimmer Michael Phelps, or skiers Mikaela Shiffrin or Lindsey Vonn.

Clark said she often delivers the following message to Olympians and Paralympians: This is a once-in-a-lifetime chance. Focus on the process. Savor the moment.

“Your job is not to win a gold medal, your job is to do the thing and the gold medal is what happens when you do your job,” she said.

“Some of this might be realigning what success looks like," she added. “And some of this is developing resilience in the face of setbacks and failure.”

Clark preaches staying on task under pressure and improving through defeat.

“We get stronger by pushing ourselves to a limit where we're at our maximum capacity — and then recovering," she said. “When we get stressed, it impacts our attention. Staying on task or staying in line with what’s important is what we try to train for.”

Kendall Gretsch has won four gold medals at the Summer and Winter Paralympics. She credits some of her success to the USOPC’s mental health services, and she described the value this way.

“We have a sports psychologist who travels with us for most our season,” she said. “Just being able to touch base with them ... and getting that reminder of why are you here. What is that experience you’re looking for?”

American figure skater Alysa Liu is the 2025 world champion and was sixth in the 2022 Olympics. She’s a big believer in sports psychology and should be among the favorites in Italy.

“I work with a sport psychologist,” she said without giving a name. “She’s incredible — like the MVP.”

Of course, MVP stands — not for Most Valuable Person or Most Valuable Player — for “Most Valuable Psychologist.”

“I mean, she’s very helpful,” Liu added.

American downhill skier Vonn will race in Italy in her sixth Olympics. At 41, she's coming off nearly six years in retirement and will be racing on a knee made of titanium.

Two-time Olympic champion Michaela Dorfmeister has suggested in jest that Vonn “should see a psychologist” for attempting such a thing in a very dangerous sport where downhill skiers reach speeds of 80 mph (130 kph).

Vonn shrugged off the comments and joked a few months ago that she didn’t grow up using a sport psychologist. She said her counseling came from taping messages on the tips of her skis that read: “stay forward or hands up.”

“I just did it myself,” she said. “I do a lot of self-talk in the starting gate.”

“Sleep is an area where athletes tend to struggle for a number of reasons,” Clark said, listing issues such as travel schedules, late practices, injuries and life-related stress.

“We have a lot of athletes who are parents, and lot of sleep is going to be disrupted in the early stages of parenting,” she said. “We approach sleep as a real part of performance. But it can be something that gets de-prioritized when days get busy.”

Clark suggests the following for her athletes — and the rest of us: no caffeine after 3 p.m., mitigate stress before bedtime, schedule sleep at about the same time daily, sleep in a dark room and get 7-9 hours.

Dani Aravich is a two-time Paralympian — she’s been in both the Summer and Winter Games — will be skiing in the upcoming Paralympics. She said in a recent interview that she avails herself of many psychological services provided by the USOPC.

“I’ve started tracking my sleep,” she said, naming Clark as a counselor. “Especially being an athlete who has multiple jobs, sleep is going to be your No. 1 savior at all times. It’s the thing that — you know — helps mental clarity.”

Ditto Clark.

“Sleep is the cornerstone of healthy performance,” she added.

Follow AP’s Be Well coverage, focusing on all aspects of wellness, at https://apnews.com/hub/be-well

Artemis II astronauts rocket toward the moon after spending a day around Earth

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — NASA’s Artemis II astronauts fired their engines and blazed toward the moon Thursday night, breaking free of the chains that have trapped humanity in shallow laps around Earth in the decades since Apollo.

The so-called translunar ignition came 25 hours after liftoff, putting the three Americans and a Canadian on course for a lunar fly-around early next week. Their Orion capsule bolted out of orbit around Earth right on cue and chased after the moon to nearly 250,000 miles (400,000 kilometers) away.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I am so, so excited to be able to tell you that for the first time since 1972 during Apollo 17, human beings have left Earth orbit,” NASA’s Lori Glaze announced at a news conference.

The engine firing was flawless, she noted.

Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen said he and his crewmates were glued to the capsule's windows as they left Earth in the rearview mirror, taking in the “phenomenal” views. Their faces were pressed so tightly against the windows that they had to wipe them clean.

“Humanity has once again shown what we are capable of, and it’s your hopes for the future that carry us now on this journey around the moon,” Hansen said.

NASA had the Artemis II crew stick close to home for a day to test their capsule’s life-support systems before clearing them for lunar departure.

Now committed to the moon, the Artemis II test flight is the opening act for NASA’s grand plans for a moon base and sustained lunar living.

Commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Hansen will dash past the moon then hang a U-turn and zip straight home without stopping on land. In the process, they will become the farthest humans have ever traveled from Earth, breaking the Apollo 13 distance record set in 1970. They also may become the fastest during their reentry at flight’s end on April 10.

Glover, Koch and Hansen already have made history as the first Black, the first woman and the first non-U.S. citizen to launch to the moon. Apollo’s 24 lunar travelers were all white men.

To set the mood for the day’s main event, Mission Control woke up the crew with John Legend’s “Green Light” featuring Andre 3000 and a medley of NASA teams cheering them. “We are ready to go,” Glover said.

Mission Control gave the final go-ahead minutes before the critical engine firing, telling the astronauts that they were embarking on “humanity’s lunar homecoming arc” to bring them back to Earth. The capsule is relying on the gravity of Earth and the moon — termed a free-return lunar trajectory — to complete the round-trip figure-eight loop. The engine accelerated their capsule to more than 24,000 mph (38,000 kph) to shove them out of Earth's orbit.

“With this burn to the moon, we do not leave Earth. We choose it,” Koch said.

Flight director Judd Frieling said he and his team were all business while on duty but will likely reflect on the momentousness of it all once they go home. “I suspect everybody understands that this is a once-in-a-lifetime moment," he told reporters.

The next major milestone will be Monday’s lunar flyby.

Orion will zoom 4,000 miles (6,400 kilometers) beyond the moon before turning back, providing unprecedented and illuminated views of the lunar far side, at least for human eyes. The cosmos will even treat the Artemis II astronauts to a total solar eclipse as the moon temporarily blocks the sun from their perspective.

While awaiting their orbital departure earlier Thursday, the astronauts savored the views of Earth from tens of thousands of miles high. Koch told Mission Control that they can make out the entire coastlines of continents and even the South Pole, her old stomping ground.

NASA is counting on the test flight to kickstart the entire Artemis program and lead to a moon landing by two astronauts in 2028.

The so-called lunar loo may need some design tweaks, however.

Orion's toilet malfunctioned as soon as the Artemis crew reached orbit Wednesday evening. Mission Control guided astronaut Koch through some plumbing tricks and she finally got it going, but not before having to resort to using contingency urine storage bags.

The urine pouches are serving double duty. Mission Control ordered the crew to fill a bunch of the empty bags with water from the capsule’s dispenser on Thursday. A valve issue arose with the dispenser following liftoff, and NASA wanted plenty of drinking water on hand for the crew in case the problem recurred. The astronauts used straws and syringes to fill the pouches with more than 2 gallons (7 liters) worth before pivoting to the moon.

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