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The pressure of just being at the Olympics has  been something that a lot of people have been following. And Brian, you've actually spoken to  some psychologists about exactly what that means for athletes in in these Games and what exactly  they're dealing with. Yeah, it's really come up a lot with U.S. athletes here. We've had some top  contenders for gold medals like Ilia Malinin, the figure skater, Mikaela Shiffrin, the Alpine  skier, who haven't yet uh gotten their their individual medals that they were hoping for.  Some real disappointment there. And what sports psychologists talk about there are terms for  it. They call it the yips, getting the yips. Or uh sometimes they talk about getting the twisties  in gymnastics. Sometimes the term is more blunt.

They say it's a question of choking, which is  such an ugly term, but sometimes it happens to athletes. And all of that preparation and training  coming into these Games. Here's what the experts tell me that they're aiming for. They're trying  to get this down to where it's muscle memory, where essentially once they get into that start  gate or jump into that bobsled or go out on that ice uh to do their performance, it's all dialed  in. They're ready to go. But what can happen is uh that the pressure of these Olympics can crash  down on them. Remember, most of these events, according to experts, after four years of  preparation, it comes down to an average 10 minutes of actual final competition. And so  all of that pressure can kind of come to an edge there and it just blows all that training out  of their minds. And so the twisties, the yips, they can hit really hard. And we've really seen  that, you know, when you saw Ilia Malinin down on the ice last Friday, that was a moment when it,  when it struck with tragic force. And the thing, Brian, and just not with Olympic athletes, but  also with athletes in general, when this does happen, it doesn't necessarily mean it's happening  on the most difficult moves that they can attempt.

Sometimes it's the routine things, things that  they've done hundreds and hundreds of times and they can't seem to get over that mental hurdle.  Why does this though happen so often, it seems, in the Olympics? Yeah, a lot of it's just  the pressure and the scrutiny. You know, these are people who do perform consistently at  World Cup meets at at national championships, but it's really until you come here, you don't  realize the magnitude of the spotlight that comes on these athletes when they reach the Olympics.  Uh, there is a microphone in front of them, a camera in front of them all the time. You  know, when Mikaela Shiffrin uh skied in the giant slalom the other day, all the other  skiers just skied normally. When she came up, this legendary Alpine skier, they actually play  this dramatic like tension-building music. She has to stand there in the start gate while they  throw this energy at her that's just saying, "You're different. You're being watched more  closely." And again, sometimes, you know, they have techniques. They've all practiced how  to avoid the yips in those moments, but sometimes the walls crumble. They fall down. I spoke to  one expert uh Dr. Sahen Gupta uh who's studies, researches it in Great Britain and and he says  literally they can lose contact with their bodies.

They can just lose the sense of themselves in  space uh and uh and they lose their their sense of gravity. It can be a powerful event. Is there  anything that you've heard of that they can do to maybe try and get over these make-or-break  moments? Increasingly, what we've seen is these athletes being very proactive on this. Um, a  lot of them are working with therapists and sports psychologists coming in. Really, if you're  talking these days about a top-tier contender, they almost always have in their team somebody  who's working on the mind as much as the body, right? And and you'll see, sometimes you'll  hear them like playing really loud music. You'll see them dancing. You'll see them meditating  sometimes. And these aren't just quirks. These are practiced things to get the mind to quiet  down, right? Those are really important tools and probably a lesson to all of us that there  are moments when we need to kind of, you know, work through our system a little bit to to calm  our brain. And there's another thing that's really important here is that after the yips hit,  there is also a whole kind of playbook for how to help athletes recover, how to help them kind of  rebuild. This this Dr. Gupta that I spoke to said the experience of going through an event like  this is really like grief. They're suffering a loss event. It's very baffling in the moment that  all of that work, four years of work, implodes in a single moment. And so there's a really important  time for these athletes after they fumble, after they fall short, uh, where they need support, they  need help. And and I'll say the hopeful really cool thing on the back end of this, A, is that if  they use those techniques often after they do that kind of collapse, they come back stronger. You'll  remember Nathan Chen, the great figure skater, uh absolutely uh fell apart uh in South Korea,  came back in China and triumphed. Same thing for Simone Biles, the gymnast. Fell apart in Tokyo,  uh had the twisties so bad she had to withdraw from competition. Four years later in Paris, she  was the great star of the Paris Olympics. And so a lot of these people we're seeing struggle here uh  in Milan Cortina. These are going to be the great athletes we're going to see in another four years.  Yeah. And Malinin, to his credit, when it was over, he answered everyone's questions. He stood  there and took the heat and just admitted that he blew it. Admitted that he may have been too  confident and handled it with a lot of poise. Um, yeah. So, I mean, that's, if that's the first  step toward recovery after a huge disappointment, he at least is certainly on his way. NPR's  Brian Mann. Brian, thanks a lot. Thanks, A. The Olympics are about more than medals.  They're about the stories, the sacrifices, and those rare moments that bring everyone together.  NPR is covering the wins, the heartbreaks, and everything in between. From first-time athletes  to history-makers, if you're enjoying the ride, support the coverage by hitting the blue donate  button. Thanks for being part of the team.