Swimmer Rylov spoke about working on the mental component after the Rio Olympics

2020 Double Olympic Champion Swimmer Evgeny Rylov said he started working on psychology after the 2016 Rio Summer Games.

Rylov became a bronze medalist at the Rio Olympics. On Sunday, the swimmer held a creative meeting at VDNKh and answered pressing questions about sports and his own career.

— Have you ever thought about quitting swimming?

– I had this. When I was younger, training was easier. Around the age of 17, it began to make itself felt. When the body was overloaded, of course, one thought about quitting. It’s okay. Why didn’t you quit? There was no choice. Any person gets tired of monotonous actions and burnout occurs. Here, discipline is needed to force oneself somewhere, to overcome moments of weakness. We must accept that this happens. Sooner or later, we all want to be weak and collapse.

— How did you manage to pull yourself together?

– That’s a tricky question. The hardest thing is that it’s individual, we’re all different. I loved to relax at home playing video games. You change gears, you don’t just think about swimming. Some people find it in books, in music. I also like music – rock – Rammstein, Metallica. You take your headphones and turn the volume up to distract yourself from your thoughts. Sometimes you have to move your brain to another area. For example, go play football to work other muscles.

It is very important to develop the mental component. At the Rio Olympics, my body was incredibly ready. In the end, I only won bronze, although I was ready for gold. But I broke down, exhausted and couldn’t do it. So after that, I started working on my mentality. The head can also help the body.

— What is the greatest victory of your career?

– 100 meters backstroke at the Olympics. Before this start, I was nervous; everything was not going well technically. I did not have enough water pressure at 100 meters. I started slowly and lacked average speed. I tried to correct the technique, it put pressure on my nerves. The coach was also nervous, we were pushing each other. But before the start, during the warm-up, I realized that everything was going well. When I went to the start, I was so focused – I did not hear or see anything, I was concentrating only on the track. I stood like this: either I will catch my victim or I will die of hunger. I did not have a single unnecessary thought in my head, it was an ideal state – a state of flow. I went beyond my abilities. The coach programmed me: everything will be decided in the last 15 meters. “Everything was tense for me, I felt very bad, but I changed gears, started to accelerate and eventually gained two hundredths of a second over Klim Kolesnikov. By the way, in recent years I have not managed to reach this state,” the correspondent reports, citing Rylov’s words.

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