Simone Manuel opens up on Tokyo Olympics experience, athletes' mental health and Paris 2024

Simone Manuel is one of the most decorated swimmers in the world, and after the Tokyo Olympics, she added another medal to her impressive hardware collection.

Manuel anchored the U.S. women’s 4x100-meter freestyle relay with a 52.96 split and helped the Team USA win a bronze medal behind Australia and Canada. Individually, she also competed in the 50-meter freestyle and tied for sixth in her semifinal heat but failed to advance to the final.

After the swimming program ended, Manuel posted a thoughtful reflection on Instagram and wrote that she’ll “remember this point in [her] career forever” because she “didn’t give up.” At the Olympic Trials in June, she missed the final for the 100-meter freestyle — an event she won gold in at the 2016 Rio Games — and opened up about being diagnosed with overtraining syndrome in March. She also said she had been dealing with depression and anxiety, which began to impact her physically this year.

For The Win spoke with Manuel — who was promoting her partnership with Toyota — about her experience at this summer’s unique Olympics, athletes’ mental health and what’s up next for the 25-year-old star.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

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How are you feeling now that the Tokyo Olympics are over?

Simone Manuel: I’m just glad it’s over. It was a tough year for me, so I’m grateful and blessed that I was able to make the team and come home with the medal. But just given everything that I went through, I’m glad to be home and enter rest up.

At Olympic Trials, you spoke about being diagnosed with overtraining syndrome and dealing with depression and anxiety. Were you still working through that at the Games?

SM: Absolutely, and I probably still am. But I think that heading into the Olympic Games, I still had to manage my physical energy. I wasn’t able to go 100 percent. It was annoying and emotionally exhausting because your body’s not doing what you know it’s capable of doing or what it has done in the past. And the Olympics are coming up and you’re still having to modify practices, or you’re still having to get out early because you’re tired, or you come in and you can only do a recovery practice because you didn’t sleep well, or your body just continuously feels sore.

So the physical part is tough, but the mental part of knowing that you’re not at your best and you’re getting ready to perform on the biggest stage is really hard. And it takes a toll on you, so those weeks leading up to the Games were a roller coaster. Some practices were good, some days were good, and some days weren’t that great, but I had to keep my head in it to get to the finish line. But I’m glad that I’m home, and I can kind of start over and hopefully get ready for some competitions in the future.

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When you look at the experience of these Olympics compared with Rio in 2016, what was the atmosphere like, and was it totally different?

SM: It was just different for me from a performance standpoint. I wasn’t as busy. I only had a couple of races, versus in 2016, I had multiple events to focus on. Being a veteran swimmer, you kind of know what to expect, so the experience is different in that sense, as far as getting to the Olympics and performing there.

I think the hardest part of the Olympics this year was just COVID. You feel a little anxiety every day when you have to take your COVID test, and you’re hoping that you don’t have it or that you didn’t get contact traced with someone and then you can’t compete. You’re in a village with a lot of different countries and athletes, and everybody has different ways on how they handle COVID or the precautions they have around it. So I think more than anything, there was just a lot of anxiety around [the idea of]: I hope I don’t have positive and can’t compete at all.

What was the Olympic Village like with so many athletes probably trying to stay away from each other as much as possible?

SM: The population of the village makes it hard to really social distance. You get on the bus to the pool, you’re not always sitting by a USA athlete. And so you’re sitting next to someone who you don’t know has been in contact with who. You just have to do the best you can to manage how you’re interacting with others and how you’re sanitizing and controlling what you can control. But there was still a little bit of fear around it.

After you were done swimming, you tweeted a thread about athletes' mental health and being interviewed immediately after falling short of their goals at the Olympics. What would you like to see more of from the media and how they work with elite athletes in these moments?

SM: I saw some interviews being done by athletes after a disappointing performance when I was at home, and that was tough to see because I’ve also had those experiences myself. So that’s kind of where the tweet came from. After I didn’t qualify for the 50 free finals at the Olympics, you go to the mixed zone [to talk to reporters], and I was asked to do some interviews not more than two minutes after that race when I’m trying to walk through the media area. And I had to pass at that moment.

But I guess for me, I just kind of felt like, why even ask? You know that I had a disappointing performance. You know that — or you should know that — I’m struggling in some sense. The story of me going into the Olympic Games was my overtraining syndrome, so you kind of know where the performance came from — or the lack of performance. So it becomes mentally and emotionally exhausting to have to say no in that moment, because it’s better to just let us go process what’s going on or give us some time to really think about what we’re going to say because we know we’re going to have to go back and talk to the media.

What I would be suggesting is recognize when athletes are disappointed. Recognize when they may have fallen short of the goal that they have for themselves or their performance wasn’t up to par, what they may deem as acceptable. It’s written all over our face. You can kind of tell we don’t want to talk to the media, so just give them a moment to process and then ask them if they’re willing to come back and talk about what happened or how they’re feeling.

And oftentimes, I have felt a little pressure to go back, especially at the Olympic Games. I expressed that I didn’t want to do it; “Could I do it tomorrow?” Because I still had to process the swim, but also, I just hadn’t processed really all that I went through in the past several months. And so I went back to the media, and I cried the whole time. You’re trying to get words out. You’re choking through your tears, and it’s just kind of like, what? Thank God that the interview wasn’t in front of the camera, but it’s kind of like, why did I have to go through that?

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Do you think there's a general lack of empathy for athletes?

SM: I wouldn’t say a general lack of empathy, but I think that there just needs to be a balance in terms of taking care of the athlete in some ways in that moment because I do know that it would benefit all of us — not just the athlete, but the media.

You might get a more well-thought out answer from the athlete because, from my own experience, I went back, and I could really only get three questions answered. I know that they probably wanted to ask me more than that, but because I was so emotionally drained and was crying, I was like, “That’s all you’re getting from me.”

On Instagram, you posted some photos of a mural in your hometown in Texas. Is that new, and what does something like that means to you?

SM: Nike surprised me with that, so that was really special and for it to be in my hometown. And then I found out that the artist allowed kids in the community to be able to build in parts of the mural in whatever way they wanted to. And so just to know that it was in my hometown, to have kids involved, and to see that mural was really special, especially given the year that I had.

It really just made me feel good about the impact that I hope that I have on other people on both in and out of the sport, and especially in my community in my hometown of Sugar Land.

Going forward after something as taxing as the Olympics and an Olympic year, are you taking a break from swimming or already looking ahead to some meets?

SM: I’m taking a break. I don’t know what my future competitions will be, I just know that I’m going to get back in the pool and compete again. But right now, I’m still going through the process of overtraining, especially since I probably didn’t take enough time off.

I took three weeks off [between March and April], but that wasn’t enough time for my body. It was only enough time for me to try to get to Olympic Trials and the Olympic Games. So I’m taking the time to be a normal 25 year old and rest up my body for when I get back into the pool.

Are the 2024 Paris Games too far ahead in the future to even talk about?

SM: It’s absolutely something I’m thinking about. In the now, I’m thinking about getting my body back healthy, and then after that, it will be practicing and my first competitions.

I’m always someone that likes to focus on what’s right in front of me instead of what’s farther away, so that I can focus on those daily goals. But, yes, obviously, I’m focused on trying to compete in 2024.