Those of us who watch the Olympics as bystanders tend to smugly judge athletes for succumbing to pressure without understanding what we even mean by the term. The first thing to know about pressure is that it has actual physical properties. Feeling it is not a sign of a too-thin veneer of character. Pressure might as well be a snakebite, given its very real qualities in the bloodstream and how it can paralyze even the strongest legs. The way to deal with pressure, and become an Olympic great, is to beat it down with a long-handled pole, like the American skier Mikaela Shiffrin did.
You think that you have total command of yourself, sitting there safely at your desk. But have you ever noticed that typing can seem harder on a tight deadline? That’s because it is harder. As physiology studies show, stress and anxiety cause increased muscle tension and redirection of blood flow away from your extremities—and with less blood in your fingers, you lose fine motor control. Now, imagine what happens to the nervous system of an Olympic skater or skier trying to land on the edge of a blade or stay upright on two thin planks, with one chance every four years to win gold medals, in front of more than 25 million sets of appraising eyes.
In 1921, the German physiologist Otto Loewi performed an unnerving experiment that would win him and a colleague the Nobel Prize for Medicine: He removed the heart from a live frog; placed it, still beating, into a beaker containing a nutrient solution to keep it alive; and poured juices extracted from another frog’s vagus nerve onto it. The heartbeat slowed, proving that the heart rate is chemically governed. The chemical in question was later found to be acetylcholine, a neurotransmitter also present in humans, which regulates our heart rate, muscle contractions, digestion, and attention. Disrupt it with, say, a cobra’s strike, and your diaphragm will stop working properly, as will your breath.
Something like that is what can happen to Olympic athletes on the ice or at the starting gate.
As the Milan Cortina Games draw to their close, the American figure-skating world champion Ilia Malinin is designing a new program, to the NF song “Fear.” He plans to perform it at the Olympic skating exhibition gala today, simply to prove that he can. The 21-year-old is still wrestling with why, at his first Olympics, he suddenly became so jelly-legged that he fell twice and scored about 60 points below his usual marks in the men’s free skate, placing eighth. “It’s a lot to handle,” he told a reporter after the event. “The pressure of the Olympics is—it’s really something different, and not a lot of people will understand that.” Malinin said that he was confident right up until he took to the ice for the free skate, when he was hit by a sudden sense of dread that was “overwhelming.” He was hardly the only favorite to get frost on his pants—five of the event’s final six skaters also fell. At the 2018 Games, in Pyeongchang, Nathan Chen was similarly undefeated going into his first Olympics, but he skidded all over the ice in a botched short program and finished fifth. In fact, just one American male skater has ever won a gold medal in his debut: Dick Button, in 1948.
At the opposite age-and-experience end of the Milan Games is the 30-year-old Shiffrin, an indisputable great with a record 108 Alpine-skiing World Cup victories and an aqueous style that makes snow seem like velvet. But she had not won an Olympic gold medal in eight years, continually struggling for composure. In the 2022 Winter Games, in Beijing, she went zero for six in races, crashing in three. At the starting gate of Wednesday’s slalom, her final race at these Games, she felt such a pounding in her chest, she later wrote in a social-media post, that “my heartbeat nearly fell out of my butt.”
But Shiffrin demonstrated that it is possible for someone to remake themselves as an Olympic-level-pressure performer. She alternately glided and smashed through the slalom gates, at times seeming to punch them with her fists, to triumph by 1.50 seconds, the largest margin of victory in any Winter Games’ Alpine event since 1998. “I questioned all that I’ve learned in life, multiple times this week,” she wrote. “I questioned what kind of grit I have in my heart and I wondered if I should be doing this at all. I questioned my toughness and tenacity. I questioned it all. And then I left those questions behind, and stepped into the arena anyway.”
The 20-year-old American skater Alysa Liu also demonstrated that such pressure can be overcome. She quit figure skating at 16, weary of the continual strain, only to come back determined to do it in her own blithe, pleasure-seeking way; she was the most carefree performer of the entire Milan Cortina Games. “No stress,” she told reporters before she competed. She was rewarded with a gold, the first for an American woman figure skater in almost 25 years, after a rapturous free skate.
A performer overruled by anxiety can learn to overrule it in turn. All of us could profit from examining that more closely. When the body is under stress, it will “take imperious control of human actions,” Walter Bradford Cannon, the chair of physiology at Harvard Medical School from 1906 to 1942, observed. Cannon, the man who coined the phrase fight or flight, measured various ways in which the nervous system will reroute to cope with an emergency. For instance, he found that blood is siphoned from the internal organs to large muscle groups when the brain determines that digesting is secondary in importance to rapid action. Cannon’s work, and Loewi’s, laid a foundation for modern neuroscience. In 1997, the neuroscientist Candace B. Pert drew a much finer picture of what goes on inside us in her book Molecules of Emotion: The Science Behind Mind-Body Medicine. Pert described how neurotransmitters such as dopamine, norepinephrine, and acetylcholine act as a mail system throughout a body and govern its actions.
The neurotransmitters issue physiological calls and responses, which turn into an athlete’s physical execution under pressure. Dopamine receptors moderate muscle contractions to create refined rhythmic movement. Pyramidal tract neurons turn the brain’s intentions into a body’s calibrated motions, such as a skater’s jumps and spins. Serotonin enhances the synaptic responsiveness that allows a skier to perceive, change direction, and carve a quick turn around a gate. Enzymes convert cholesterol into cortisol, which is discharged from the outer layer of the adrenal glands, to sharpen alertness. All of this combines to give the body the dexterity, agility, and exactitude that constitutes high performance in the right moment. A 2024 academic review in the journal Physiology & Behavior states it this way: Fine motor skills are an “intricate integration of sensory inputs with motor outputs, particularly in dynamic and unpredictable environments.” But when this neurochemical integration is disturbed, tilted, or disrupted, it increases “the likelihood of operational errors in high-stakes scenarios.”
Hands and feet grow colder, slower, less alive. Proprioception, a sense of position and spatial orientation, is lost—Malinin talked of hardly knowing where he was in his program during the free skate. Proprioception loss is one reason a great tennis player may throw up a bad toss and double-fault on a big point, or a golfer might miss a three-foot putt, or a champion figure skater such as the United States’ Amber Glenn, on the verge of medal contention, will abort a triple loop that should be routine, because she suddenly doesn’t trust where her feet are. Perhaps the most damaging of all effects of stress to an athlete is “the corruption of ‘muscle sense,’” Kevin Bickart, a UCLA neuroscientist who specializes in sports neurology, told me. “The athlete literally feels different to themselves—stiff, jerky, or ‘heavy’—because the internal data stream regarding limb position is chemically distorted.”
The good news is that there are antidotes. Some well-established ways to relieve pressure on the nervous system include getting proper rest, using breathing techniques, and “reframing” negative thoughts. These aren’t just vague wellness notions. Deep breathing or breath holds such as the Wim Hof Method can signal the brain stem to activate a parasympathetic “brake,” Bickart said. This allows an athlete like Shiffrin to override the fight-or-flight response. Athletes can also simulate stress and train their body to deal with it. The big-wave surfer Laird Hamilton, for example, uses ice-bath plunges to rehearse suppressing panic and practice self-calming. Bickart told me that this works because it strengthens neural connectivity, building stronger brakes for the mental alarm system and “raising the threshold for what triggers a meltdown during competition.”
Malinin seemed genuinely unprepared for his stress responses, how the sudden onset of nerves would throw off the delicate chemical balance that underpins performance. Instead, he appeared to have compromised himself with not enough sleep, too many obligations, and way too much internet. He was a nonstop traditional- and social-media presence and seemed to have consumed as much of it as he put out, allowing it to bother him. He wrote in an Instagram post this week about “vile online hatred” that “attacks the mind.” Even before his catastrophic free skate, he reposted on his TikTok account a meme that said, “Your little boy is tired mom.” He got on the ice looking pale. The great skating coach Rafael Arutyunyan, a consultant to Malinin, told RT in a brief interview, “We, the adults, are to blame for failing to protect a young man from making the wrong moves.”
Meanwhile, Shiffrin made all the right ones. After her 2022 Beijing experience, she took the vital step of learning more about her own involuntary reactions. “I didn’t understand why these things were happening or what the chemical effects in the brain were,” Shiffrin told Olympics.com in October. Twelve years ago, she became the youngest Olympic slalom champion at 18, only to encounter crippling performance anxiety in the face of increased expectations. At times, she would get nauseated before races. At others, she would get a feeling that she was “destined to fail.” Lingering grief over the 2020 death of her father and post-traumatic stress from a 2024 crash compounded her issues. In the past four years, she has worked with a psychologist to learn how to manage intrusive thoughts through meditation and breathing exercises.
A body can turn into an engine rather than a panic alarm, Bickart said, when an athlete reframes a threat as a challenge. This can release a chemical that inhibits anxiety. When that happens, an athlete can achieve what is known as a “clutch” performance. Shiffrin’s slalom victory was hardly effortless or uncomplicated, but she managed herself perfectly. After the combined event and the giant slalom, when she failed to medal, she knew that the topic of Olympic choking would be renewed all over social media. She refused to read any stories or look at anything about herself on social media. “I have built this up in my own mind,” Shiffrin told reporters after the race. “I’ve dreamed about it. I have been nervous for it. I’ve felt pressure. I have also felt like, ‘Who cares?’” She had a long, agonizing wait between her first and second slalom runs. NBC cameras caught her stretching, breathing, meditating, and then trying to take a nap in the snow. She didn’t sleep, but she didn’t sink into a fatal cave of anxiety either.
She said of that restful interlude, at her press conference after the medal ceremony, “I was thinking about the fact that I actually can show up today and honestly say in the start gate that I have all the tools that are necessary to do my best skiing, and to earn that moment.”
As these Olympics end, look again at the athletes. This time, see their spangled unitards and bodysuits for what they are: mere envelopes containing massive chemical reactions and a hard-fought, organized elegance. As Shiffrin proved, if biochemistry can be the enemy of high performance under pressure, it can also vault an athlete into that imaginative emotional state called greatness.