News

Curt Harnett captured the nation's heart, pumping his legendary gams around Olympic velodromes, blond locks flowing in the slipstream.

But his closest encounter with his feminine side came exactly 12 years ago, when he came home from Olympic competition for the last time.

"Without fear of being politically incorrect, I would liken it to post-partum depression," says the three-time medal-winner, now a director at an event software company. "When you're training and competing, it's like you have this baby for months, it's blossoming and then, suddenly, it's over and your whole life changes."

Fresh off the plane from Beijing, the latest batch of Canadian Olympic athletes are in for a similar shock: the pestilent golden hangover. Before the Games, they sweat thousands of hours over several years in preparation. And then, for two weeks they live and slog at the epicentre of the world's greatest sporting event, the mood of a nation swinging on their every leap, toss or twist. But now, nearly a week removed from Beijing's closing ceremonies, the adoring crowds have dispersed and the klieg lights have dimmed. No more medals await. Just real life.

So ... now what?

For many athletes, and especially those retiring from competition, coming off the Beijing high will be nearly as difficult as getting there in the first place.

"The transition is dramatic," Mr. Harnett says. "You go from the top of the world to pushing paper, answering phones - all this submissive behaviour that you're not used to."

Settling back into his Victoria home after a bronze-medal rowing performance in Beijing, Iain Brambell says the post-Olympics lull feels like "the air has just come out of the tires. We come back to reality immediately and it can be pretty devastating."

Mr. Brambell has gone through the anguish before. After placing out of the medals in Athens, Mr. Brambell retired from rowing for a year and a half to become executive director of BC Athlete Voice, a lobby group for high-performance athletes in the province. But his angst got the better of him, and he returned to competition in 2006.

He also watched his wife, Laryssa Biesenthal, winner of rowing medals in 1996 and 2000, spend several months in a post-Games funk. "I knew what to expect," he says.

One of the toughest parts of dropping oars for an office chair, he says, is realizing how far behind he was. "I looked around at friends and realized that I'm 10 or 15 years behind my schoolmates who built up a real career for themselves."

In recent years, the Canadian Olympic Committee has tackled the lack of options for some returning athletes. In October, it will hold a career fair in King City, Ont., where retiring athletes will learn the nuances of résumé writing and job applications. Other organizations such as AthletesCAN and Olympians Canada have created alumni networks to help former athletes cope with job markets and personal problems.

That wasn't always the case.

Bruce Deacon, a former Olympic marathoner, remembers a time when a fellow runner retired from competition only to end up as a garbage man. "He had absolutely nothing to put on his résumé," Mr. Deacon says. "It was the only job he could get."

Several studies have looked at how athletes cope with life after competition. One U.S. study found that 40 per cent of a sample of 57 Olympians encountered serious personal problems making the transition to a regular work life.

A 1982 Czech study found that 73 per cent of retiring athletes encountered major emotional tumult entering the workplace. Many were wracked with depression and substance-abuse problems.

"I struggled with who I was as a person," says Mr. Deacon, who gave up competing in 2004. "So I went and got help."

The COC and other athlete organizations offer a range of counselling services for returning athletes. After a few sessions, Mr. Deacon, now an education and community relations manager at the COC's Vancouver office, learned that he was experiencing something akin to grief.

"The emotions were the same as if I'd lost a loved one," he says. "I loved my life as an athlete, and now it was gone. I left the counsellor's office thinking, 'Okay, good, at least I'm not a nutbar.' "

But even when athletes do ease into a traditional workplace, they don't always like what they see. Saul Miller, a B.C.-based sports psychologist, recently brought a white-water kayaker to speak at a corporate gathering. The crowd found her inspiring, but sadly, she couldn't say the same about them.

"She was surprised at the lack of commitment among some of the people she met there," Dr. Miller says. "Here these athletes are, working with a team that wants to be great, that pushes to be the best. Then you come back to the real world where people function at a mediocre level, and it's frankly less inspiring."

Dr. Miller recommends athletes take a while to rest and reflect after the Games as a way of decompressing.

"We have a remarkable ability to be in war zones and suppress all stress symptoms," says Dr. Miller, who works with Olympians as well as several professional sports teams.

And stepping away from the Olympic spotlight can have its benefits, too. Many companies covet the focus and goal-setting abilities of athletes.

For Mr. Harnett, there was yet another upside. When his tree-trunk bikers' legs started to atrophy, "I could finally buy regular-sized pants again," he says. "Buying off the rack, that was a definite bonus."