Thanks for sharing that. It’s important to highlight the difference between sport psychology, which focuses a lot on performance, and the clinical side, which is about more general mental health. Some therapists do both, but there’s a distinction.
They do leak into each other a lot, and for athletes, it’s easy to think, “I’m taking care of everything I need to because I’m talking with my sport psych.” But for me, there’s been a lot of personal strife over the years, and things that surface that actually don’t relate to the sport at all. The sport, skiing, is where I feel the most at home. Figuring out how to feel more at home with myself outside of skiing has been a bigger issue for me.
There’s been such a shift in recent years, with more athletes talking about mental health. What has it been kind of like to be a part of that? And have you seen actual changes come about because of it?
Even when I first started racing in the World Cup, we weren’t talking about it. Over the last five or 10 years, we’ve been learning more about athletes and the different interests they have. It’s a fine line, because as an athlete, you want to have some level of private life, right? But at the same time, sharing a bit about life outside of the sport helps the rest of the world and fans of the sport understand you.
It’s such a cringe thing when I hear people say, “Athletes are humans.” I’m like, “Yeah, duh.” The fact is, when a lot of people envision an athlete, they think: wake up, train, maybe eat sometimes, sleep, maybe eat again, train, compete, go to sleep. But there are moments in between. We have personal relationships and family and trauma, loss and tragedy, finances and issues with bills and credit, all of the things that everybody has to deal with.
Then we have to perform on a world stage, knowing that most of the world feels like, “Well, this is what you do, and it should be easy and we expect it, and if you don’t do it, that’s going to be a problem.” Let’s just keep talking about the pressures and anxiety we feel, because I think people are starting to get it.
I love that you’re able to hold that hard stuff with the more lighthearted moments of enjoying the sport. For instance, being able to name a reindeer when you win a race in Levi, Finland! I know you added an eighth to your existing herd—Rori (short for “Aurora Borealis”)—when you claimed your 98th victory on November 16. Where are they, and do you visit them?
The reindeer stay in Finland, in Levi. My brother and his wife came to watch the race last year and they wanted to go see them. So we went to visit them for the first time!
You mentioned your dream early on, and you’ve written about it before—that from as young as nine years old, you wanted to be the best in the world. I’m curious if you feel like you’ve made that dream come true, and what you’d say to young Mikaela if you could go back and show her what the future would hold.
