In a shock decision last week, Hawks great Cyril Rioli retired from the AFL at 28 years of age.
Ending his career on a high note rather than ageing out of the game is an admirable decision, albeit a sudden one. Rioli admits that he had lost the passion to keep playing after his father suffered a heart attack in October 2017, wanting to spend more time with his family in Darwin.
What’s perhaps most gutsy about Rioli’s decision is that it’s a huge step forward for athletes taking self-care and their mental health more seriously, just as Lance Franklin did in the 2015 AFL season. It’s a positive turn to see players putting themselves first – their minds as much as a their bodies.
It remains to be seen as what Rioli will do in retirement – a state which has proven to be a bit of an existential rabbit-hole for Australian athletes great and small.
As Chris Judd wrote in The Age last year, “almost all (athletes) will have a period where it’s hard to tell up from down as an entire adult life of discipline and routine is no longer mandatory”.
With much of an athlete’s life prescribed to a strict schedule of training, competing, more training, and recovery, “normal life” is a sudden vortex of time to fill, self-managed timetables, and more downtime than they’ve likely ever had before. And we thought our regular-schmegular lives were dull. Imagine winning literal gold, and then having shit-all to do.
If you couple this hectic change with a series of poorly timed pitfalls in your personal life – or even just one – it’s easy to see how retirement becomes exponentially harder to face.
We’ve seen a few too many of our country’s greatest sportsman flounder off the field. Grant Hackett, Geoff Huegill, and fellow AFL champion Ben Cousins have all suffered very public, and alarming falls, from grace. Add to this the news of former Hawthorn FC star Brian Lake’s arrest in Japan, and you’ve got yourself a trend developing.
And – not counting Barry Hall’s recent, extremely sudden foot-in-mouth career tumble – the most alarming spiral in recent years goes to celebrated player and premiership coach Mark ‘Bomber’ Thompson, who is currently facing a much-publicised array of mental health and legal battles, as well as more than half a dozen drugs charges.
Bomber proves that it’s not just players, but also athletes who stay embedded in the game well after their playing days are over who could benefit from a larger sport support-framework.
The AFL and AFLPA are making efforts to try make the transition easier with initiatives like ‘max 360’ which focuses on developing players as “people first”.
The Australian Athletes Alliance (AAA) has noticed that the biggest issue facing athletes during their careers is, indeed, that they want to be recognised as “just people” too and like the rest of us, need help supporting their mental health throughout their careers.
While on the turf and track, athletes and coaches may seem like gods, they are all mere mortals like us.
Jacob Holmes of the AAA believes it’s the work of not just clubs and codes but the whole sporting industry. Especially given that sport is a “temporary, results-driven business”.
Holmes explains that the more work the AAA do, the more they uncover around what athletes need and want, and how to best support them. We need to face the fact that mental health is a very big and real issue that needs to be considered at the start of an athlete’s career and not just when retirement rolls around – when it’s often too late.
Since retirement can happen at the drop of a hat (or the twist of a joint), players at any level really need to be set up from the get-go.
It can be hard, for anyone, to keep things in perspective when you’re focusing on one thing 24/7. But some of the game’s contemporary greats are recognising what’s really important, and modelling self-care for their younger teammates.
Support frameworks really do need to become a part of the sporting industry as a whole, at every level, in every code to help not only our nation’s heroes but athletes of all ability.
The truth is, as Holmes puts it, “retirement is a struggle for everyone.”
After all, we all need a pat on the back from time to time. Even long after the final siren has sounded and the locker room door has swung closed.