Coaching
I’ve never coached at the Olympic level. But I’ve had a couple of “national” quality athletes, and lots of “state” athletes, and that gave me an understanding of what goes into making decisions in an athletic season. Certainly it starts with talent. At the highest level, everyone is talented; there is nothing that can make up for a lack of that. Add to that fierce dedication to “the goal”. Without that dedication, talent is wasted. Every coach had that the “most talented” who couldn’t didn’t have the fortitude to excel. It’s a “lead the horse to water” thing.
But when an athlete has the combination of talent and dedication, as the coach, you “get the shot”. You get the opportunity to use all of your knowledge, skills, and experience to hone that athlete to an elite level.
The next factor is structural. Does the athlete have the physical structure to handle the extreme stresses of training that are required? Where is the “breaking point”, and how far can you go before it’s “too late”? There’s a reason athletes can go through an entire season, and then, at the crucial moment, pull a muscle. They have reached the limit, of speed, of stress, and of training – the edge between the success and disaster. And they go too far.
Luck Factor
And then there’s the luck factor. As athletes train, it stresses not just muscle and tendon, bone and ligaments. It stresses their entire bodies, from the brain to the immune system. There are points where they are most vulnerable to sickness, where the impact of hard training drops their defenses. While coaching teams, I could tell to the week when some would get sick. It was around the week of highest intensity.
It’s one of the tough decisions I’ve made as a coach. I took a group of athletes to the National High School Championships in New York City. One had “his shot”, the chance to win. But that morning of the race, he came down to breakfast looking awful. He was coughing, struggling to breath, and running a fever. There wasn’t really a choice, but telling him that he wasn’t going to run when he was so close, the number literally already on his jersey: that was hard.
The Vaccine
So what’s this essay all about? The Olympics haven’t even started yet, and athletes are falling by the wayside to COVID. How could they not have been vaccinated? Common sense – well common sense would seem to say they could have easily protected themselves from this threat.
And that’s true, they could have. But let’s look at the timing. And because I was a track coach, let’s look at it through the lens of a track athlete, one likely to have spent a lifetime, and particularly the last five years (one more than expected) to make the Olympic Team and compete in the Games.
An Olympian
There are two parts to making it to the Olympics in track and field. The first is making the “standard”. That’s a mark or ranking established by the International Track Federation (IAAF) that says you’re good enough to compete in the games. And the second part is you have to actually “make the team”. In the United States, that means finish in the top three at the Olympic Trials.
So as an athlete, you have three goals:
– run (or jump or throw) well enough to qualify for the Games
– finish in the top three in the Trials to actually make the national team
– run (or jump or throw) at the Olympic Games themselves (medal?).
Achieving the standard can occur as much as a year before the games. But the other two come in quick succession. The Olympic Trials were in June, track and field starts in Tokyo next week. Track athletes are on carefully designed training programs, schedules set up to allow for two “maximal performances”, one at the Trials and one at the Games. That is, unless they are still in college, then there’s one more maximal performance, at the NCAA Championships.
These athletes did everything they could to protect themselves from COVID. They had little contact with others, wore protective gear, and literally went to practice and went home – that was it. When they became eligible to get the vaccine, in mid-April, many of them were right at that moment when there training was at the highest intensity – and knew they were most vulnerable to sickness.
Weigh the Risk
Their “teams”, coaches, trainers, and the athlete; weighed the risk. If they got sick from the vaccine, there’s lost training time at a critical point. If training is disrupted then maybe there isn’t the “maximal” performance – no Olympics. But, of course, if the athlete gets COVID – well that’s much worse.
And if they didn’t get the vaccine in April, then surely not in May – nor June before the trials. And while maybe right after the trials would be the “shot to get the shot”, that would still disrupt a training cycle designed for Olympic medals.
Their COVID protections were working – they dodged the virus for over a year. I’m sure when it was all added up, some athletes took the chance and got the vaccine. And some, took the chance and didn’t.
It was one more gamble, one more risk to take in the quest to achieve their goal.
