After the Applause: Understanding and Healing the Post-Event Blues in Elite Performance

There is a particular kind of quiet that follows something monumental. After the Olympic flame is extinguished. After the final whistle of a championship game. After the last routine, race, match, or performance that has shaped this season, and even your life for years. It is a quiet that does not always feel peaceful. For many elite performers - Olympic and Paralympic athletes, professional competitors, artists, and high achievers - the end of a major performance cycle can bring pride, relief, gratitude, and fulfillment. It can also bring an indescribable sense of let-down, disappointment, frustrations, and anxiousness. Regardless of how the Big Game, season, or concert tour went, unexpectedly, it can also bring emotional flatness, sadness, disorientation, or a sense of internal emptiness.

This experience is often referred to as post-Olympic blues, but that label is far too narrow. What athletes describe is better understood as post-event blues: a temporary, yet often profound, psychological and physiological response to the ending of an intensely meaningful performance chapter. And it is far more common, and far more human, than most people realize. If you are reading this and thinking, “Is that it?”, “I should be happier than I am,” or “Why does everything feel so quiet now?”, let me say this clearly: