It's all downhill after the Olympics: Elite
athletes rapidly lose their fitness and conditioning after they stop
competing, AlisonKorn
reports.
The Ottawa Citizen
Fri 14 Jun
2002
Page: A15
Section: News
Byline: Alison Korn
Source: The Ottawa Citizen
If you've ever admired the sleek, muscular bodies of
Olympic athletes and felt a touch of envy, consider this: The fitter they are,
the further they fall.
The athlete's physical perfection is a fleeting, temporary state. Body
changes happen to everyone -- they're part of the aging process.
But for athletes who retire from sport, the changes can be dramatic. They
can occur much more quickly than for the average person. And they can be
devastating.
Lubomir Kisiov, who rowed on the Bulgarian national team in the 1980s, went
back to Sofia in 1999 for the world junior championships as a coach of the
Canadian junior national rowing team.
He had a great time at the regatta, reconnecting with old friends and
teammates. But one encounter was not as pleasant as the rest. A woman walked
up to him, smiling as if she knew him, but Mr. Kisiov couldn't figure out who
she was.
"I looked at this woman, and I thought 'I know this woman,' but I could not
picture the body I was seeing at that moment to the body I knew from the
past," Mr. Kisiov says.
"She was probably around 100 kilograms. She looked at me smiling, and she
said: 'Look what happened to me. I stopped training and, you see, you will
never recognize me.' So you see, this is one of the worst parts in our lives
when we stop training very hard."
Mr. Kisiov is right. By the time athletes retire, they have spent years,
maybe decades, devoting themselves to training up to eight hours a day.
While some of them keep exercising after they retire, others have simply
had enough exertion and stop all activity altogether -- with unwelcome
results.
"I guess I rebelled against working out," says Sandy Goss, who won Olympic
silver for Canada with the swim team in 1984 and 1988. "I did absolutely no
physical activity. I said I've run my last mile and I've swum my last lap."
That was 10 years ago. Today, the only evidence that Mr. Goss used to swim
100 kilometres a week is in the photos hanging on the wall of his office as a
stockbroker in Toronto.
Now 35 years old, he's gained 40 pounds since he last raced for Canada.
"It's kind of depressing, when you think about it," Mr. Goss says. "You've
reached your peak of absolute physical fitness at 22 and you're never, ever
going to attain that again."
He laughs. "That's the reality of it."
And the worst part is that the changes seem to happen almost overnight.
Rower Anna van der Kamp won a silver medal in 1996 with the Canadian
women's eight. For the first six months after the Games, she says she retained
a "wonderfully sculpted" body. Then the changes started to come quickly -- in
her hips, thighs and breasts.
"I was starting to get bulges where most normal people have bulges, but
where I didn't have bulges for the last five years," she says.
"And that was a little disconcerting."
A few years later, Ms. Van der Kamp's body adjusted itself again. But this
time it was the reverse. She lost 20 pounds and her body now looks vaguely
like it did before she ever picked up an oar.
Now, instead of complimenting her on her tall, powerful physique, people
tell her she's too skinny to be a rower.
"They know you're an Olympian, 'but you sure don't look like it.' You get
that comment quite often," she says.
Such dramatic body changes, coupled with the pressure to get a life and
move on to a job or education, can be difficult to accept.
Mr. Goss's wife, Dr. Judy Goss, is a sport psychologist who helps athletes
make the transition.
"Everyone has to go through a period of loss of what they've been doing,"
she says. "And, of course, that takes physical and mental energy."
Dr. Goss says becoming suddenly sedentary is hard on former athletes'
bodies and minds.
She suggests athletes in transition try a new activity.
"Sometimes it's better to change, to try something that you've never done
before because you have no preconceived notions of how good a certain level
is," she says.
"Because you're never going to meet the levels that you were at in your
particular sport."
Even so, elite athletes may find that, after all those years of training,
they have no idea how to exercise as a normal person. They may be convinced
that only workouts of a certain length and intensity are acceptable, and they
may lack motivation if they're no longer adhering to a goal-oriented training
plan.
And exercising merely for the good of one's health is a "very intangible
thing," says sport scientist Ed McNeely.
"The difficulty is that a lot of people that are in sport are not doing
sport for their health," Mr. McNeely says.
"They're doing it for the sport and, if they don't see a competition on the
horizon, they're sort of saying to themselves, well why would I do the
training?"
Mr. McNeely suggests newly retired athletes continue to schedule their
exercise, just as they did while competing. It's important they learn how to
fit exercise into their day, just like anybody else.
"Instead of designing a training program, it becomes a life program," Mr.
McNeely says. "It takes time for them to learn how to adjust to a normal
lifestyle as far as activity goes. And they need to be able to cut back on
their food intake."
Ms. van der Kamp feels fortunate. Now working as an environmental
consultant, she's active on a recreational level with yoga, jogging or
cross-country skiing three or four times a week.
"I'm very happy with how things have ended up, and quite lucky, probably,"
she says. "It definitely did affect my mentality for a while."
On the other hand, Mr. Goss -- who says he his not image conscious --
acknowledges he will soon have to start exercises that are more aerobic than
the golfing he enjoys now.
"It's not a healthy lifestyle," Mr. Goss says.
"You do want to have the ability to play with your kids and do things much
later in life and you can see if things don't change -- it's going to become
important over the next couple of years."
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