Covid-19 impacts on athletes

Jinran Jin

Introduction
Covid-19 had spread to lots of countries,
causing panic, stress, and uncertainty to
many elite athletes. The research was to
investigate the psychological impact of
the Covid-19 pandemic on elite athletes,
their management strategies, and their
post-pandemic performance expectation.

U.S. softball players wear their masks after collecting their silver medals.
Kazuhiro Fujihara/AFP via Getty Images

Experiment

The study included elite athletes from different provinces of Turkey. The researcher chose the
subjects and gave them questionnaires. These athletes were all competing at the international
or national level. The main questions were:
Q1: What does the COVID-19 pandemic make you think about?
Q2: What are the most intense feelings you are experiencing during the COVID-19 pandemic?
Q3: How do you manage this situation?
Q4: How do you think your performance will be affected by this situation after you return to
competition?
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What can we get from the experiment?

Anxiety seems to be the most common emotion those athletes felt. 40% of the athletes had
been dealing with anxiety. Researchers believed that anxiety was caused by the unknown future
environment and the global environment. Those athletes also tended to think about the past.
They worried that their performance would go down because of the pandemic. However, there
were also plenty of athletes who were optimistic about the pandemic, 33.33% of athletes were
doing mental training. They believed that if they train hard enough, the pandemic would not
influence their performance.

Advice
Covid-19 will be a long-lasting pandemic, we have to be prepared both mentally and physically.
Sometimes, psychological effects can have even more influence on those elite athletes'
performance. So let's try to think positively like this is a good time to spend time with family and
friends, or this is the time you can try to find what is your strength and weakness. Be safe and be
happy!

Work Cited

Tingaz, E. O. (2020). The Psychological Impact of COVID-19 Pandemic on Elite Athletes, Management Strategies and
Post-pandemic Performance Expectations: A Semi-Structured Interview Study. IJERI: International Journal of
Educational Research and Innovation, (15), 73–81. https://doi.org/10.46661/ijeri.4863