Eimear Ryan: Are some evergreen athletes immune to burnout?
OUTRAGEOUS ATLETICISM: Sarah Rowe of the Victory (R) in action during the round nine A-League Women's match between Melbourne Victory and Perth Glory at AAMI Park in Melbourne, Australia. Pic: Daniel Pockett/Getty Images
I am that most tragic of individuals: a sincere U2 fan. Not an ironic U2 fan or even an apologetic U2 fan: a genuine one. Having said this, I was more than a little sceptical when the band announced their upcoming album last week: Songs of Surrender, a 40-track remake spanning their entire back catalogue. The first single, a lacklustre acoustic version of ‘Pride (In the Name of Love)’, didn’t bode well for the project. At 62, Bono’s voice can’t hit the heights it once did, and why the band would want to overwrite his vocal virtuosity on the 1984 recording of ‘Pride’ is beyond me.
Maybe I’m too quick to judge, however. The band has a habit of successfully reinventing themselves. "We have to go away and dream it all up again," Bono famously told the crowd at the Point Depot in 1989, just before they went to Berlin and recorded Achtung Baby, a significant departure in their sound. It’s a line I’ve always loved, useful motivation when you’re stuck, uninspired, or in need of reinvention. It sounds like, right now, they need to take their own advice.
Another fella who could do with dreaming it up all over again is one Jürgen Klopp. Now in his eighth season at Liverpool, he has won every trophy going – though he’s been unlucky to have coincided with Pep Guardiola’s tenure at a well-funded Manchester City, who have pipped Liverpool to the title by a single point twice in the last five years. Right now, it’s looking like Liverpool might not finish in the top four for the first time since 2016 and the overriding narrative is that they’re burnt out. Having over-performed for the last several years – racking up 90+ points in the league three times, reaching three Champions League finals, playing an astonishing 63 games last season – they’ve reached the end of their tether. The squad is riddled with injuries, individual players are struggling to reach the heights of previous seasons, and even Klopp seems out of ideas. Can he evolve the team to another level again?
Burnout is in many ways inevitable over the course of a long sporting career. Even for professional athletes who have numerous supports available to them, burnout can eventually come calling. Perhaps it’s especially prevalent in the Premier League right now: always a gruelling competition, many of the players are also recovering from the World Cup, played in intense humidity before Christmas. Normally, when the World Cup is held in the summer months, players get several weeks’ preparation beforehand and recovery afterwards; in 2022, they got just seven days’ preparation and eight days’ recovery before returning to club duties.
Sometimes an athlete can be in the midst of burnout before they even notice it’s happening. This is because sportspeople are used to discomfort; they know from years of experience that pushing beyond your boundaries is how you improve and progress. But frequent injuries, fatigue, flat performances, chronic joint pain, and lack of enjoyment are all telltale signs of burnout that can affect sportspeople at all levels and in all disciplines. The only cure for it is rest – something that does not come naturally to some sportspeople, who only feel ‘normal’ if they’re being active. And so the cycle continues. Very often, it’s only when forced to stop – for example, by injury or illness – that an athlete gets the necessary mental and physical break from sport to recover.
On the other end of the scale are those evergreen players who seem to thrive with multiple responsibilities; who are asked to do more and more and somehow absorb it all. We’ve had numerous examples of this in recent weeks, not least in the Kerry footballers who capped off a victorious All-Ireland year by tagging on another All-Ireland with their clubs. Chief among these was Shane Ryan – All-Ireland winning goalkeeper with Kerry last July turned dangerous corner-forward for Rathmore last weekend, helping himself to 1-3 from play. A Swiss army knife of a player.
The same could be said for Paudie Clifford – corner-forward for Kerry, centre-back for Fossa, All-Ireland winner with both – and his brother David, whose relentless excellence shows no signs of stopping. After beating Stewartstown of Tyrone on Sunday, the two Cliffords cited the split season as the reason that they’re able to do what they do, telling John Fogarty: "You were obviously able to go all out with Kerry and then it wasn’t as intense from August on. You could pick and choose trainings a bit more but then still go at it in the club season and you’re there all the time."
While the split season does seem to work much better for players mentally and in terms of focus, it’s still an incredibly long year if you happen to go all the way, and ferociously hard on the body. The Cliffords said they would take four weeks off before heading back to Kerry; you couldn’t blame them if they took four months.
And then there’s the outrageous athleticism of Mayo’s Sarah Rowe. Not content with playing two elite sports – senior football with Mayo and AFLW with the Collingwood Crows – she’s tagged on top-flight soccer with Melbourne Victory to her CV. In her first appearance as a winger earlier this month against Perth Glory, she turned heads with a penetrating run out of defence in which she left opposition players floored in her wake.
It’s not her first foray into soccer – she won a league and cup double with Shelbourne in 2016, and was part of the Ireland under-19 squad that reached the Euros in 2014. In a recent interview with the , she expressed a wish to play pro sports all year round, an ambition that seems well within her grasp. Having to travel between Ireland and Australia is another challenge for Rowe and her fellow Irish AFLW players, and I hope that they all have support systems around them to help stave off the symptoms of burnout. Until then, it’s natural to make hay while the sun shines.
