‘M“My biggest problem is that I don’t feel in my body,” Naomi Osaka wrote on Instagram this week. A year after giving birth to her daughter, the Grand Slam champion, who returned to competitive play in January, is struggling to find her form again. “I try to tell myself, ‘It’s OK, you’re doing great’ … Inside I hear myself screaming, ‘What the hell is going on?!?!'”
That’s awful, but how fantastic that she’s speaking out about how she feels. Traditionally, vulnerability has been frowned upon in elite sport, an environment where “mental health issues are stigmatised, there is a high barrier to seeking help and a low sense of psychological safety”, as one study described it last year. Yet much of elite athletes’ success is in their heads; of course they falter because they are regularly faced with pressures that would crush us normal people (unsurprisingly, research suggests they may be at higher risk of damaging mental health symptoms).
Osaka helped change that. Her high-profile withdrawal from the 2021 French Open, citing anxiety and press commitments she couldn’t keep, reinforced an important discussion that others have continued: Adam Peaty; diver Noah Williams, who spoke this week about his depression; and two athletes we usually casually refer to as superhuman, Michael Phelps and Simone Biles.
Because they are human, and superhuman at that. Their vulnerability makes them more impressive, not less. Recent research has confirmed my gut feeling: the public supports athletes who have mental health problems.
What strikes me is that Osaka describes a feeling familiar to most people who have given birth themselves—not just elite athletes. “Not in my body” hits the nail on the head when it comes to the alienation from your former self that you can feel in the months and even years after giving birth. The body I inhabit now was reshaped by “uncomplicated” pregnancies and “good” births in my supposedly resilient and recovering 20s; by the undiagnosed hernia I had for three years; by the abs that no amount of Pilates could fully heal; by the problematic perineum (sorry, but we need to talk about this).
And I got off lightly. Research this year found that childbirth is a traumatic experience for one in three women. (I often think of PMSL, Luce Brett’s hilarious, angry and sad memoir, in which she describes how “an hour of pushing” left her incontinent and, along the way, revealed an unspoken world of birth injuries around her.) You are no longer in your body when you grow and then expel another body from it – and that must be a lot stranger when that body is your tool and your livelihood.
In recent years, a new, optimistic view has emerged about elite athletes returning to sport after pregnancy and childbirth. This view began to crystallise when Jessica Ennis-Hill won the World Championships 13 months after giving birth and then went on to win Olympic silver shortly after.
Laura Kenny, who won two Olympic medals after the birth of her first child, has written about how this change in attitude benefited British sport. There were nine mothers on the British team at that Olympics; they won seven medals.
That is – and they are – astonishing. Normalising maternal success is a powerful corrective to the deeply ingrained stereotype that motherhood weakens women. “It was either one or the other – you were either a current Olympian or a mother,” Kenny wrote in the Guardian of the mindset she had internalised. It should also mean that women get more and better support when they return to elite sport after giving birth (Denise Lewis described trying to return to the heptathlon unsupported after the birth of her daughter in 2002 as a “very lonely experience”).
It is neither gloomy nor alarmist to say that you are no longer the same. It does not necessarily mean that you are worse off: you may be stronger, better, more resilient. Physiologically and psychologically, however, things are different. As Brett put it, “What was left of Me in this ‘new mum’ body?” This is harder for some than others, whether they are elite athletes or have never done a parkrun before. It helps when women say it’s tough and adds some nuance to the “you can do it mum” narrative.
Osaka says she is giving herself “grace”; she is also giving grace to everyone who has lived through this struggle. That is what makes her contribution – and her – so brilliant.
Emma Beddington is a columnist at the Guardian
