A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
How far would you go to make it to the Olympics? Well, how about cutting off part of your finger? That's the choice Australian field hockey player Matt Dawson faced after badly breaking one of his just weeks before the Games. OK, this was the scenario - the 30-year-old could have had surgery to fix the finger, but it'd take months to recover and he'd have to miss the Olympics or lose a chunk and be back in time to play in Paris.
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MATT DAWSON: I'm definitely closer to the end of my career than the start, and who knows? This could be my last, and if I felt like I could still perform at my best, then that's what I was going to do, and if that - if taking the top of my finger was the price that I had to pay, then that's something that I have to do.
MARTÍNEZ: That's Dawson, explaining his decision to amputate, on the "Parlez Vous Hockey" podcast, and you might say it's paid off. I mean, he's in Paris with the team known as the Kookaburras, but why do athletes go to such extremes? I asked Mark Aoyagi, the co-director of sport and performance psychology at the University of Denver.
MARK AOYAGI: They've sacrificed and invested so much in what they do - their sport - that it becomes a dominant part, if not the defining part, of their identity, and therefore, you know, any threat to not being able to participate becomes a real threat to their identity. When it's put in those terms, if it's one part of my finger versus, you know, the dominant, or maybe even the totality, of my identity, it becomes a, you know, relatively easy choice in that framing.
MARTÍNEZ: Dawson's choice got me thinking about Kerri Strug. At the 1996 Olympics, the 15-year-old gymnast hurt her ankle while landing a vault in the team competition. With the U.S. team trailing, Strug was told she needed to vault again to win the gold medal, despite all the risks. Here's how it sounded on NBC.
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UNIDENTIFIED COMMENTATOR: Kerri Strug is hurt. She is hurt badly.
MARTÍNEZ: She stuck the landing, securing the gold, at the cost of further injuring that ankle.
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UNIDENTIFIED COMMENTATOR: Probably the last thing she should have done was vault again, but she did, and now she is in a lot of pain.
MARTÍNEZ: I asked Aoyagi what the dangers of pressuring such a young athlete to make that kind of decision are.
AOYAGI: As a general rule of thumb, the prefrontal cortex, which is sort of the higher-order-thinking part of the brain, is not fully developed until age 27, and one of the primary tasks of that prefrontal cortex is to model the future - to understand, what are the future consequences of the actions that I take right now? And so when you figure most athletes are, call it - 18-26 is generally the prime, depending on the sport, they don't have that capacity fully online. Combine that with the identity and the pressures of representing your team, representing your country - you really need a voice of reason to say, OK, there's a lot of momentum behind delivering under this pressure circumstance, but there's life beyond this. There's another famous story that's very similar to this story, which is Ronnie Lott, NFL football player - one of the best at the game, one of the best at his position.
MARTÍNEZ: Ronnie Lott, who, in the off season, had a shattered pinky finger partially amputated so he wouldn't miss the start of the 1986 season with the San Francisco 49ers. Apparently, unlike Matt Dawson, Lott immediately regretted his decision. In an NFL documentary, he talked about trying to explain it to his kids.
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RONNIE LOTT: And I hope one day, they do understand that their dad maybe should have thought about it.
AOYAGI: Another key part of his experience is that, to the extent that he analyzed it, it was only through the lens of physical functioning and maybe, like, cosmetic - you know, how is it going to look? - and what he talks about later in life is that, you know, psychologically, he's now disfigured. That part of his actual body is missing. Cosmetically, that's not great, but what he talks about is the loss emotionally of that connection to his body, and spiritually, like, he talks about losing part of his soul.
MARTÍNEZ: Mark, your role is usually about inspiring athletes to achieve a higher level of performance. How often do you find yourself having to rein them in so that maybe they don't come to a point where they make a decision to maybe amputate a piece of their body?
AOYAGI: (Laughter) Yeah. So, you know, the psychological characteristics of elite athletes - and elite performers in general - they're going to push them to the edge of whatever it is that they're doing. To put it into a finer perspective, think about a golfer whose whole life - whose whole identity - is wrapped up over this putt, and if it goes in, they're the person they want to be, they're the human being they want to be and they're celebrated, and if it goes out, they're worthless, right? That's a really hard putt to make, whereas if your perspective standing over that putt is, you know what? I'd really like to make this putt, but when I go home, my kids are still going to love me. My spouse is still going to love me. That putt now becomes a lot - put into a perspective that makes it a lot easier to be successful at, and ironically, the hardest step, a lot of times, for the elite performing psychology is to put less emphasis, less focus, on their sport, and more focus on other areas of their life. If they round out their life, it actually allows them to perform those skills on a more consistent and more higher, more excellent, level.
MARTÍNEZ: If Matt Dawson scores the winning goal to get Australia the field hockey gold medal and we look back on it as a heroic thing that he did, is this kind of on us, that we lionize and put it on a pedestal these kinds of sacrifices?
AOYAGI: So if you're asking me as a human being, yes. Like, we have followed the Roman model of sport, which is that the athletes are gladiators, and they're almost to be revered in a way that's separate from us. You know, they're bigger, they're stronger, they're faster, and there's truth to that, but there's also truth to the fact that we're using some of those characteristics to dehumanize them. Now, on the flip side, if you were to ask an athlete, they would recoil at that question. They would say, no, I'm never going to alter my performance, or my training, or anything about who I am or what I do in response to the crowd or in response to some felt level of societal pressure. Now, I think that there would be a lack of understanding of how interrelational we are as humans to say that no other human is going to affect me, but again, that's sort of the unique psychology of people that have spent their life doing, a lot of times, what people tell them they can't do or shouldn't do.
MARTÍNEZ: That is Mark Aoyagi, co-director of sport and performance psychology at the University of Denver. Mark, thank you.
AOYAGI: Thank you so much. It's been fun.
(SOUNDBITE OF BERLIN PHILHARMONIC & JOHN WILLIAMS' "OLYMPIC FANFARE AND THEME") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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