"Being a professional athlete is more difficult because of social networks"

A while after being eliminated in the second round of the WTA Bogotá by the Russian Anastasia Tikhonova (1-6, 6-4 and 3-6), the tennis player Marina Bassols logged into her social networks. While she was still processing the defeat, the Blanes-born player, 26 years old, read a handful of messages with death threats. "Get yourself good life insurance and a lawyer because I will kill you when you get back home", "I've paid a cartel to kill you", "I will assassinate you, I know where you live" or "You are officially dead".The situation that Bassols, who is ranked 203 in the WTA rankings, experienced is not an isolated case. Elite athletes have had to get used to living with fierce criticism, derogatory messages, and death threats. Some of the messages come from fans unhappy with their performance, but others come from people who have lost money on a sports bet.“Being a professional athlete is now more difficult because of social media. When we talk about managing pressure, they now have a component that didn't exist when I was an elite athlete, which is what others think of them. This is clearly summarized on social media, which has become a stressful factor at levels we can't even imagine. This often causes them to get confused, and it's much more difficult for them to manage this part”, analyzes Mar Rovira, a sports psychologist who years ago made a living as a professional basketball player. Her advice to elite athletes is not to look at their mobile phones after a bad performance.Rovira, who was key in Ricky Rubio's mental recovery, heads up the mental performance department at Espanyol, an initiative named El Niu. “I work in a very transversal way because I really like amateur sports, which keep me very connected to the essence, but I also manage professional sports, which accounts for almost 80% of what I do. I move through stages because I've done a lot of basketball, motorsports, swimming, and tennis. I also handle refereeing, which is very interesting, and now I'm very focused on football,” she says. “I don’t understand performance sport as a discipline that can be separated into boxes. The mental, physical, technical, and tactical parts are linked. When you work with an athlete to reach the elite, you have to integrate all the factors that are important. It is not a question of percentages but rather that everything is integrated and everything is important”, recalls Rovira. Before, athletes had the feeling that resorting to a psychology specialist was admitting a weakness, but this has changed a lot in recent years. “In my early years, I had to do preliminary work to convince athletes. This has changed, but I still notice differences between disciplines. In football, it's still a bit difficult and there are many who keep it hidden because they don't want people to see them as vulnerable. In fact, there aren't many sports psychologists integrated into coaching staff. I'm very lucky because Espanyol does have this figure within the first team's coaching staff, but it's not the norm. A lot of work still needs to be done because players have to understand that just as there is a technical or physical coach, there is a mental coach. All we want is for both the player and the team to perform,” he summarizes.Success does not exempt from discomfort

There are players who have sporting success, but who have stopped their sporting career or have sought help because they were having a bad time. In fact, 49% of Olympic athletes have sleep problems and 33.6% of elite athletes suffer from anxiety and depression. “Clubs should try to introduce a mental health team, a series of resources that any player can have within their club when they see that something at a mental level is not working. For this, there must be a great deal of confidentiality, reference professionals and a lot of education. We must explain to athletes when they should realize that something is not going well and even do preventive work”, he recommends.“Having money does not exempt you at all from having mental problems. What does one have to do with the other? Earning a lot of money is a circumstantial thing, a consequence. The anxiety or depression problems that an elite athlete suffers are the same as those suffered by any person on the street. The only thing that changes are the circumstances that produce them. Athletes ask me why this is happening to them if they have everything. They live it with a great sense of guilt,” recalls Rovira.