As Paris prepares and athletes arrive for the world’s biggest sporting event, one New Zealand rower is trying his best to act like nothing is happening.
The Olympic rings are hung from the Eiffel Tower, stadium venues are almost finished, and an estimated 15 million people are set to arrive in Paris. Athletes from all over the world have already arrived for their final training camps. All anyone is thinking about is the Olympics, the biggest event in most athletes’ lives. But New Zealand rower Tom Mackintosh is “trying to not make much of a deal about it” and “not buying into it”.
It’s a deliberate mental strategy in order to stay calm, even while he himself is en route to Paris.
He’s been in this position before. In 2020 Mackintosh competed at his first Olympics, winning gold with the men’s eight crew. It was a fairytale ending but it wasn’t all smooth sailing. Experiencing strong pains after the first 500 metres of the race, he realised he’d overextended himself and might not finish the race. He trusted his fitness, recognised his pain, and leaned into it. “It’s fine”, he remembers thinking. “It’s like that meme. Yes, the house is on fire, it’s really hurting here, but it’s OK.”
Growing up in Hawke’s Bay, Mackintosh began rowing at age 15 for his local club and school Lindisfarne College. Within two years, he’d won his first bronze medal at the world junior champs in the men’s four. He has gone on to win races at events like the Henley Regatta, the Japanese Rowing National Championships and multiple world rowing championship competitions. He has proven himself to be a world-beating rower. But this regatta is different.
For the upcoming Olympics, Mackintosh will be rowing alone, in the single scull racing division. Two kilometres in the boat, with no crewmates to keep you motivated. The single scull is one of the most watched and most isolating events in all of rowing. But Mackintosh insists he’s feeling “fine” less than a month out from the opening ceremony.
He wasn’t always so fine. There was a time when he couldn’t sleep the night before races, which was “very detrimental to my performance.” In 2020, in the lead up to the Tokyo Olympics, Mackintosh began meeting individually with a psychologist who he’d connect with through High Performance Sport NZ (HPSNZ).
Jason Yuill-Proctor, a sports and life psychologist, has been invaluable working through the troubles of racing, Mackintosh says. Yuill-Proctor has helped him to identify why performance issues arise, why they’re issues in the first place, and techniques to work through them. Mackintosh says Yuill-Proctor showed him that sleeping before a race doesn’t matter a lot – if he still lies in bed to rest, he could still perform.
Psychologists working with athletes “spend a lot of time dispelling myths that people are told”, says Rod Corban, a psychologist heading to Paris with the NZ Olympic Committee. Corban has worked for HPSNZ since 2004 and helped rowers more than any psychologist in the country. Athletes easily get caught up in these myths of having “the perfect diet, perfect warm-up, total self-belief and confidence”, says Corban. But in reality, “nothing is perfect. I don’t know too many people, apart from psychopaths, who have total self-belief and self-confidence.”
Corban says these expectations are sometimes perpetuated by media coverage. Rugby, cricket, rugby league and netball typically dominate local media coverage, so many Olympians fly under the radar for three years. But in the lead up to the Olympics, all of a sudden athletes get a lot of media coverage, which Corban says “promotes greater expectations”. While winning is important, he says a key role of psychologists for high-performance athletes is to help them realise it shouldn’t be their sole focus.
“Their identity is so wrapped up in their performance which can sometimes be problematic,” he explains. Such hyper focus means the consequences of failure can be immense. Regular people, like you and I, can go to work and have a bad day, but we will go home to friends and family and do our own thing to escape it. “We’re not in the press, and we’re not trying to be the best in the world,” Corban says. “Because our identity is not just wrapped up into this one thing.” A lot of the time, his work is about trying to help his clients see themselves as more than just one thing.
In the past, when Mackintosh wasn’t seeing a psychologist and lacked mental focus, he found it had an effect on his racing. “I wasn’t really that into it, I felt a bit burnt out. I was physically very fit, but I didn’t get a result that I was happy with”, he says. He finds seeing a psychologist vital, ensuring his mind is as fit and capable as his body and “ready to perform when it needs to”.
A mental challenge unique to New Zealand single scullers is the trap of comparison. Iconic rowers Emma Twigg, Rob Waddell and Mahé Drysdale have historical success winning gold Olympic medals in the division, with Drysdale named the greatest single sculler of his era for having done it twice. It’s a high-achieving group to be joining and can feel to Mackintosh like a weight on his shoulders. “Every now and then I’ll get a pang of expectation or nervousness as the games are approaching… while I’ve had some success in the world champs last year, there’s an element of expectation”. But Mackintosh says he has a quiet confidence in his abilities and knows he is capable of achieving a result that he will be proud of.
On his race day, Mackintosh will begin his routine by deliberately trying to eat the bare minimum, a struggle for him due to his nerves. Then, he’ll warm up his body, “more than one would expect”, and have a debrief with his coach about goals for the race. The goals won’t be a medal or specific placing (a surprise to most viewers at home), but rather a specific execution or improvement. “At the end of the day, you just do what you can, and you have to be happy with that – as cheesy as it sounds.”