Due to the cancellation of the summer 2020 Olympics, many professional athletes’ dreams have been taken away from them. Although their qualifications carry over automatically to the next Olympics, it is still tough news to receive that everything the athletes have been training for is gone. There are ways that these professional athletes have improved their physical and mental health.

According to the article When COVID-19 Dashes Your Lifelong Dream, in most cases, these events have not vanished from our lives fully. Instead, they’ve shifted from being right there in front of us, to being in distant sight. So, in a state of lock down, keeping a healthy mental and physical foundation to get to the end, whenever that may be, requires a lot of determination and grit.

When big amounts of time are spent working towards these goals, yet everything is canceled, athletes may have felt like they trained for nothing. Although this is not true in most cases, it is hard for an athlete to get out of that mindset. Olympic athletes have spent a lot of their new-found time training and getting ready to be the best competitor. 

According to a participant of the Olympic Channel: How Athletes Are Coping With COVID-19 video, it is really insane what they do as athletes. They spend four years planning out their perfect performance for one singular day that they compete at the Olympics.

While many athletes are crushed that the Olympics were canceled, others are taking this time to improve themselves, seeing this break as an opportunity to train even harder. Having this mentality may result in creating a better athlete and ensure that they achieve their goals. Junior Hadde Luebke is an athlete at Antioch Community High School, and shared what she would do if she was put into the position of these professional athletes.

“I would do exactly what I am doing now,” Luebke said. “I would continue my training as often as I was before, because by the time the next Olympics comes around, I would be even better and have more skills than I already did.”

There may not be a lot of information for what is going to happen with the next Olympics, but these athletes are dedicated to work hard and make this break time the best they can.