The Darkness Elite Sport Keeps at Bay

Sport held something back for me every day for fourteen years. Nobody asked what it was holding.

I have sat with this question for a while now. What was I actually doing in that pool?

I was an uncoordinated child, terrible in the classroom, with nothing much going for me. To top it off, I grew up in a country town where the only acceptable pastime was sport. It was how we measured each other, and I was found wanting in nearly everything. I was not even an acceptable nerd. So I found the one thing I could do without falling over: swimming. It helped that I grew up on a lake and was in the water almost every day. There was no pool nearby, and nobody telling me that my favourite pastime was actually a sport. Then one afternoon in 1990, sitting in front of our small CRT television, I watched Hayley Lewis capture the heart of a nation at the Auckland Commonwealth Games. I wanted that. The swimming, the achievement, and something else I did not have words for yet.

So I nagged Mum for over a year. Dad, a former swimmer and sailboard coach, gave me training sessions in the lake, half hoping it would talk me out of it. I complained, as all kids do. I also loved it. That was the beginning of a fourteen-year relationship with a sport that carried me through the darkest stretches of my life and handed me some genuine highlights along the way.

But the real answer to what sport was to me sits underneath the medal count. It was a way of hiding myself inside something other people could point to and understand. It was a way of regulating a very neurodivergent brain. It was a place where I could drown out the pain of simply existing, day after day. And it was an identity I could use to hide all of that from the world: a healthy alternative, for an undiagnosed AuDHD trans woman who could not yet come out, to the other options on the table. Self-harm. Drugs and alcohol. Adrenaline-seeking behaviour that would have taken me somewhere much worse, much faster.

The mask I built in the water

My swimming was a very good mask.

People who were not swimmers thought I was odd, and wrote it off as the professional swimming thing. The other elite swimmers just saw my results and never wondered about the rest. Coaches saw someone who pushed themselves to the edge every single day, and they read that as dedication, because that is what it looks like from the outside. Nobody was equipped to ask what a fourteen-year-old was running from in the water, because every visible signal told them the answer was ambition.

This is not just my own story, tidied up in hindsight. Sport psychologists have a name for the shape of it. Athletic identity foreclosure, first described by Britton Brewer and colleagues in the early nineties, is what happens when a person commits so completely and so early to being an athlete that they never get the chance to explore who else they might be. The athletic identity ends up carrying weight it was never built to hold. Brewer's original paper asked whether a strong athletic identity was Hercules' muscles or an Achilles heel, and the honest answer turned out to be both, depending entirely on what else the person had underneath it. Later work on college athletes found that the more foreclosed an athlete's identity became, the less developed their maturity was in every other area of life, because no other area of life was being developed at all.

Nobody sets out to build a mask that complete. It accretes. Session by session, medal by medal, because the mask keeps working, and because everyone around you is applauding the thing that is doing the hiding.

The same wiring as self-harm

Here is the part I find hardest to say plainly, so I am going to say it plainly.

I used to train until I vomited. Not occasionally, and not because a coach demanded it. I did it because the pain worked. On the other side of that particular kind of suffering, something in me went quiet that was screaming everywhere else. I did not understand the mechanism at the time. I just knew where the relief lived and how much it cost to get there, and I paid it, most days, for years.

There is a well-established neurobiological explanation for this, and it is not really about swimming at all. It is about pain.

Researchers studying non-suicidal self-injury have proposed a fairly precise model of why hurting yourself produces relief. People who self-harm tend to have lower baseline levels of the body's own opioids, the endogenous chemicals that regulate both physical pain and emotional distress. The act of injury releases a flood of those chemicals, and that flood is the relief. Physical pain and emotional pain are processed through overlapping regions of the brain, which is precisely why one can stand in for the other. Kimberly Bresin and Kathryn Gordon set that model out in a 2013 review, and the same literature notes something else worth sitting with: a case study by Wallenstein and Nock has suggested regular exercise might function as a treatment for self-injury, for the straightforward reason that it raises the same chemicals through a legitimate channel.

Read that in the other direction and you have my entire adolescence.

There is a further layer underneath it. Kazuo Nakamoto and Shogo Tokuyama's 2023 review of the endogenous opioid system found that early life stress, including abuse and neglect, measurably alters how that system functions, changing both a person's sensitivity to pain and their vulnerability to depression and anxiety later on. The system I was flooding in the pool was not a neutral one. It was already shaped by everything that had happened before I got there.

I want to be careful about the limits of this comparison rather than overstate it. Nobody has run a study that puts elite athletes who train to failure alongside people who self-injure and measures them on the same instrument. That specific research does not exist. But the mechanism described in the self-harm literature and the thing I did to myself in a pool for fourteen years line up closely enough that the absence feels less like a hole in my argument and more like the argument itself. We have spent decades studying self-harm, and almost no time asking whether sanctioned, celebrated, medal-winning forms of extreme physical exertion draw on the same regulatory system. We did not look, because it never occurred to anyone that we needed to. The trophies got in the way.

And what that mechanism gave me was real. It was a chemical support structure built without a single drug, holding up a coping pattern that was simultaneously destructive and genuinely, measurably working. That contradiction is the whole of this essay in miniature. The behaviour that should have been a warning was instead the thing everyone around me was proudest of.

When the water was gone

My career never amounted to much more than a few international medals and a handful of world top-ten rankings. Then it ended, suddenly, and the income ended with it.

I started a job I hated. I set myself a new goal, transition, and that turned out to be a fourteen-year battle in its own right. Meanwhile I was lost in every other area of my life at once. The depression came on hard, and I turned to risky behaviour and to recreational drugs and alcohol. I drifted through eight jobs with no real sense of direction, and the depression usually destroyed each one before I got the chance to decide I did not like it. There were three suicide attempts in there. I eventually transitioned, kicked the drugs and the drinking, and later received a dyslexia and ADHD diagnosis, along with confirmation that I am very likely autistic, a formal diagnosis I have chosen not to pursue for reasons of my own.

None of that was bad luck. It has a documented shape.

Former elite athletes carry worse mental health outcomes than the general population, and the gap is not small. A 2019 systematic review and meta-analysis led by Vincent Gouttebarge found that around twenty-six per cent of former elite athletes reported symptoms of anxiety or depression, against general Australian population figures in the range of thirteen to nineteen per cent. A larger 2024 meta-analysis by Adam Runacres and Zoe Marshall, drawing on thirty-seven studies and nearly twenty-five thousand former athletes, concluded that the point prevalence of anxiety and depression among them could be more than double that of the general population.

The identity research supplies the mechanism underneath those numbers. When the identity that organised your entire life disappears overnight, and no other identity was ever permitted to develop alongside it, there is nothing standing in the gap.

I went from high-performance athlete to a woman using drugs and alcohol to chase the same chemical relief the pool had been providing for free. The channel changed. The need underneath it never did. That is not a story about retirement. It is a story about a wound that was never treated, briefly and brilliantly managed by a sport, and then left exposed the moment the sport stopped.

What we could have seen, without naming the ending

I want to be precise about what I am arguing for, because it would be easy to read this as a call for more retirement planning, and it is not.

Telling a sixteen-year-old to start preparing for the end of their career is one of the fastest ways to take the belief out of them. Athletes need to be entirely inside the world they are training for. That belief is not a delusion to be corrected, it is the engine, and I am not asking anyone to reach in and switch it off in the name of welfare.

What I am asking for is earlier identification of the athletes using their sport the way I used mine. As a disguise, and as a regulator for something that was never actually about the sport. That requires nobody to mention retirement at all. It requires attention to a pattern the current system is not built to notice, because from the outside the pattern is indistinguishable from everything we have taught ourselves to admire.

There is real evidence this is achievable. A structured mental health literacy intervention delivered inside organised community sport, evaluated by Stewart Vella and colleagues in 2021, produced measurable gains in participants' understanding of mental health conditions, their confidence in supporting a struggling teammate, and their attitudes toward people living with mental illness. That is the model. Education and identification skills built into the environment athletes already trust, delivered by people already inside their world, without ever touching the question of what happens after the sport ends.

I will not oversell it. A systematic review by Samantha Diamond and colleagues, looking specifically at mental health literacy programs for youth elite athletes, found genuine promise in the approach and also found the evidence base still too thin and too methodologically inconsistent to say with confidence how much difference these programs make over time. The direction is right. The proof of long-term protective effect is still being built. I would rather say that than pretend otherwise.

There is one more finding worth sitting with, and it is the one that convinces me the timing matters more than the service. A study of one hundred and ninety-one elite Canadian athletes, published in the Canadian Journal of Career Development, found that although planning for life after sport was clearly associated with better emotional outcomes in retirement, only a small proportion of athletes actually used the support available to them. The barriers were lack of time, not knowing what existed, and fear of the stigma attached to using it.

Support offered only at the end, once the identity has already collapsed, is fighting uphill against the precise isolation it exists to treat. Which is the strongest argument I know for doing the work early, quietly, and without ever announcing itself as being about the ending.

What I would want someone to notice

I think about my coaches sometimes. Not with anger, because they were doing exactly what the system had trained them to do. They saw an athlete pushing herself to the edge every day, and they were right to be proud of the results, because the results were real.

What none of us had language for, back then, was the difference between an athlete driving herself toward something and an athlete using the pain to get away from something. From the pool deck those two things look identical. They produce the same split times. They win the same medals. Only one of them leaves a person with somewhere to stand when the water is gone.

I am not sure anyone could have named it in me at fourteen. But the tools to start noticing exist now, and I know precisely what it costs when nobody is looking for them, because I spent the better part of two decades paying it.

I made it through. That is worth saying, because too many stories like this one do not get to end that way. But the fourteen years, the eight jobs, the three attempts and everything in between were not the price of retiring from swimming. They were the price of nobody asking, at any point in fourteen years of daily contact with concerned and well-meaning adults, what the pain was for.

Somebody should have asked. Somebody still can, for the kid who is in the water right now.

If anything in this piece has raised difficult feelings for you, support is available. Lifeline offers 24-hour crisis support on 13 11 14, by text on 0477 13 11 14, or via online chat. The Suicide Call Back Service is available 24/7 on 1300 659 467. Beyond Blue provides free counselling any time on 1300 22 4636. QLife offers peer support and referral for LGBTIQ+ people and their loved ones on 1800 184 527, every day between 3pm and 9pm. 13YARN provides crisis support for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people on 13 92 76. In an emergency, call 000.

Sources: Brewer, B. W., Van Raalte, J. L., & Linder, D. E. (1993), 'Athletic identity: Hercules' muscles or Achilles heel?', International Journal of Sport Psychology, 24, 237–254; Brewer, B. W., & Petitpas, A. J. (2017), 'Athletic identity foreclosure', Current Opinion in Psychology, 16, 118–122; Murphy, G. M., Petitpas, A. J., & Brewer, B. W. (1996), 'Identity foreclosure, athletic identity, and career maturity in intercollegiate athletes', The Sport Psychologist, 10(3), 239–246; Bresin, K., & Gordon, K. H. (2013), 'Endogenous opioids and nonsuicidal self-injury: A mechanism of affect regulation', Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 37(3), 374–383; Nakamoto, K., & Tokuyama, S. (2023), 'Stress-induced changes in the endogenous opioid system cause dysfunction of pain and emotion regulation', International Journal of Molecular Sciences, 24(14), 11713; Gouttebarge, V., Castaldelli-Maia, J. M., Gorczynski, P., et al. (2019), 'Occurrence of mental health symptoms and disorders in current and former elite athletes: a systematic review and meta-analysis', British Journal of Sports Medicine, 53(11), 700–706; Runacres, A., & Marshall, Z. A. (2024), 'Prevalence of anxiety and depression in former elite athletes: a systematic review and meta-analysis', BMJ Open Sport & Exercise Medicine, 10(4), e001867; Vella, S. A., Swann, C., Batterham, M., et al. (2021), 'An intervention for mental health literacy and resilience in organized sports', Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, 53(1), 139–149; Diamond, S., Wallace, L., English, M., & Caperchione, C. M. (2022), 'The impact of mental health literacy initiatives on youth elite athletes: A systematic review', Performance Enhancement & Health, 10(3), 100226; 'Planning life outside of sport: elite athletes' help-seeking behaviours toward career support resources' (2023), Canadian Journal of Career Development