For Olympic athletes, the hurdles aren’t only literal, there are mental obstacles as well. One of the most compelling storylines of the Paris Olympics is the return of gymnast Simone Biles, who withdrew from the Games three years ago because of psychological issues that affected her performance.
When Biles qualified for this year’s competition, she was quick to tell spectators that regular therapy sessions were crucial in helping her comeback – the idea of a world-class athlete admitting publicly that they were less than a perfect 10 registered with Alice Merryweather.
“I think that should be celebrated and amplified a hundred times over,” Merryweather said during a recent appearance on Colorado Matters. “I think hopefully by having more conversations like this, spreading more awareness, it can break through the entire Olympic community hopefully and get resources to athletes who need it anywhere in the world.”
Merryweather was one of those athletes. An alpine skier, she was a member of the 2018 U.S. Olympic team and competed in South Korea. Three years later, following ongoing battles with body imagery, Merryweather found herself in Colorado, being treated for anorexia.
Growing up in New England, Merryweather had become familiar with the term “Alpine Girl,” a physical description for the skiers who competed in the region.
“I grew up in this culture of eating a ton of food and talking about our powerful thighs, bulking up, all those sorts of things. And for a long time in my life that was very empowering and a very positive influence,” she said. “But when my mental health started to go and I became very self-critical, that narrative of body talk and of size started to really compete with the idea that I was getting from society of what a perfect body looks like.
“The alpine skiing body norms that I had been raised with through my ski career didn't match those societal norms at all. And it became a very confusing place to navigate, and I wanted to be strong and powerful, but I got scared that I was getting too big or became afraid of being too far outside of the societal norm.”
In the process of trying to co-exist in both worlds, Merryweather faltered. The competitor in her looked at scaling back her eating while staying on top of her sport as a contest to be won, but in reality, her competitive times – and more importantly, her health – suffered.
“The way my brain had shifted during the earlier phases of my eating disorder, I was cutting out food groups and telling myself that this was healthier and it was going to be better for my stomach. I was going to be leaner,” Merryweather said. “The word healthy can mean so many different things, and so I kind of told myself, ‘Oh, I'm doing this to be more healthy, to be more lean and more efficient,’ and yet what I was doing was not actually working towards any of those things.”
Ironically, the same discipline that helps elite athletes become great at their sports can also exacerbate issues like eating disorders. Kate Daley is a therapist at Athlete Edge at ED Care. Based in Denver, it’s just one of two facilities dedicated to treating elite athletes with eating disorders.
“When you're competing at such a high level, it can be really enticing to do anything and everything to be the best that you can be, and so thinking about the qualities that make someone a very good athlete can also make them really successful in their eating disorder unfortunately,” Daley said. “Just because it's an Olympian doesn't mean they're immune to mental health concerns or issues – maybe there's pressure from a coach to be a certain weight or pressure from sports that there's a certain body type that maybe needs to be achieved; there might just be high intrinsic pressure from perfectionism and just wanting to really do everything to be the best they can be.”
Although they’re often regarded as the epitome of physicality, Merryweather added that she and other athletes can also be influenced by the words and opinions of others who could never approach the heights reached on playing fields or the ski slopes.
“Especially when I was struggling, if someone were to tell me or if I were to hear that someone had been talking about me and said like, ‘Oh man, her legs are so strong, part of my brain would've been really happy about that, and then part of my brain would've thought, ‘Oh my God, does that mean my legs are too big?’” she said. “I think oftentimes those compliments and celebrations, you don't think through the way that those might be interpreted by someone who's maybe dealing with a lot mentally at the time.
“And then on top of that, as spectators watching the games, if you're a young athlete and you hear a commentator really focusing on an athlete's body, commenting on the shape of their muscles or comparing them to their other competitors, (and) you don't look like that athlete that you look up to, then you might think less of yourself because like, ‘Oh my God, I could never look like that. I'm never going to be good at that sport.’ Or you might think that if they're saying that the athlete's big and you're bigger, that could also cause a lot of harmful thoughts. So I think a way to kind of move away from this is to focus really on the accomplishments of these athletes and the incredible things they're doing.”
After recently announcing her retirement from competitive skiing, Merryweather likely won’t have to deal with outside opinions. However, there are still internal challenges, like making the conscious choice to take it easy.
“What I've been focusing on is really just trying to give myself time and space to feel the emotions as they come and to allow myself to move a little bit slower and to not have to do a workout every day. Things like that, that feel very un-intuitive to me, where I wake up and I feel like, ‘Okay, what is my workout today? What physical thing am I going to do?’ And to realize like, ‘Oh my God, I don't have to do something today.’
“It's been kind of a daily battle to allow myself the space to say, ‘Okay, you really don't have to work out today, you can just relax and do something else that brings you joy.’ It’s trying to lift that athlete pressure that I've been putting on myself for the last eight years as a professional skier. It's definitely a daily battle, and I know it's going to take a long time, so I'm not trying to rush through it, just leaning into it as it comes.”
Editor’s note: If you are looking to speak to someone about eating disorder concerns for yourself or a loved one, please contact the National Alliance for Eating Disorders Helpline at 1-(866)-662-1235 Mon. - Fri., 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. ET or by going to their website. For a fuller list of resources, go to the National Eating Disorders Association website here.
