BORMIO, Italy — Lindsey Vonn would be in another world. Standing on the slope before she races, ski goggles on like a virtual headset, she’d take her arms to the left, then curve her hands to the right; they’d dip and rise as her head tilted slightly back.
She is not alone in this imaginary world. Eileen Gu is up high, flying with a drone, seeing herself somersault in the air below. Then she is back in her body, listening for the “whoosh” of different tricks and feeling the cold wind on her face.
While a race or run can take just seconds, athletes practice hundreds of repetitions in their mind, doing what U.S. skier Sam Morse calls the “zombie dance” as they visualize their performance — the potential pitfalls, the turns, the tricks, the glory.
“I’m a big believer that if you can see it in your head, you can do it in your body,” American halfpipe snowboarder Maddie Mastro said.
But what is visualization, and how is it helping athletes at the Winter Olympics? Can it also help in everyday life?
Visualization, in its broadest terms, is the ability to form an image in your head. It could be a memory, an object or a task. In sport, it is the psychological practice of performing movements.
Although the practice of visualization has become more common over the past 70 years, Dr. Alexander Cohen, senior sport psychologist for the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee, believes the technique has existed for as long as humans have been able to hold images in the mind. “I’m sure it was used in the original version of the Olympic Games,” he told The Athletic over the phone before Team USA’s halfpipe training at Livigno Snow Park. “And it is one of the most used skills at these Games.”
Visualization is most effective when it is vivid and engages the five senses: sight, hearing, smell, touch and even taste.
When athletes imagine executing a movement, the brain sends low-level electrical signals to communicate with the muscles, just below the level they would when performing the maneuver in real life. Neuromuscular theory, or layered stimulus response training, strengthens the neural connections between the brain and muscles.
Freeski slopestyle Olympic champion Mathilde Gremaud warms up before the women’s slopestyle final in Livigno. (Patrick Smith / Getty Images)
Whether hitting a golf ball, catching a pass or skiing downhill, visualization increases repetitions safely without physical exertion while also reinforcing key technical and tactical focus points.
“I’m going to be visualizing my halfpipe run,” China’s Gu said, when asked how she would celebrate winning silver in the big air final, an event that clashed with her halfpipe training. “I’ll be lying in bed thinking about my tricks.”
Perhaps most importantly, visualization can provide a genuine sense of control, “particularly in sports where people can die,” Cohen said. A stark reminder of the consequences at play.
As athletes enter Cohen’s cozy office in Park City, Utah, some click into their boots and put their helmets and goggles on, simulating their competition environment. Others sit in a chair or stand up, eyes closed, speaking out loud.
Before adding further layers, Cohen starts by assessing somebody’s ability to visualize because not everyone can. It is a spectrum. Can you picture an apple? Is it bright, shiny and green? Or dull and vague? Can you feel its texture, taste the acidity, hear its crunch as you bite into it, or can you not picture anything at all?
Those who cannot visualize may have aphantasia, he said, and those who produce detailed, vivid images may have hyperphantasia. There are pros and cons to both, Cohen explained. For instance, while hyperphantasia can provide realistic, detailed images to help train subtle biomechanical details, it may lead athletes to fear skiing 90 mph downhill because the possible outcomes, like crashing, are so vivid. At the other end of the scale, the inability to visualize can be a “super power,” as it acts as a natural buffer against vivid flashbacks of a traumatic event.
Then Cohen assesses whether the athlete has a mental model of what they want to do with their body biomechanically, technically and tactically. One exercise is to time an athlete’s imagery session of their run and compare it to their expected “real-life” competition time. If it is five seconds faster, athletes may have skipped a section.
Sam Morse of the United States visualizes the course during men’s downhill training in Bormio. (Dustin Satloff / Getty Images)
Some athletes say they feel rushed or in control as images move faster or seem to slow down. Remarkably, Cohen can tell if the athletic performance they have just visualized was stiff or mechanical just by noticing tension in the athlete’s jaw or shoulders.
The mental effort required can be tiring. “It uses up brain juice,” Cohen said, specifically glucose. Functional MRI machines can monitor the effect of visualization on the brain. When a novice visualizes, the machine may show much more frontal lobe activity than an expert because novices have to work harder at it. Interestingly, this allows the expert visualizer to let other areas of their brain take over, which could create more room for distractions.
Cohen recommends his athletes practice three to five times a week for between 30 seconds and 12 minutes. Such practice is done months in advance of the Winter Olympics so when athletes need to flex their neural pathways under pressure, they can.
But everyone has a different approach.
In the men’s Alpine skiing super-G, for example, athletes do not know the position of the gates nor the terrain. They have 75 minutes to inspect the course and a further 75 minutes before the race starts. “You really have to key in, go back to what you remember (from the course),” Ryan Cochran-Siegle, who won silver last week, told The Athletic. He steps away from the cameras to find a quiet place where he can be alone. Using his hands to show the tips of his skis and his wrists to mark their centers, he visualizes his movements.
Sometimes, freestyle athletes, as big air silver medalist Mac Forehand did Tuesday, land tricks they have never practiced.
“You’re asking your body to do something it has never done before,” five-time Olympic medalist Gu said. “The point of visualization is to acquaint yourself with the unknown before it even happens.”
Ryan Cochran-Siegle won silver in the men’s super-G. (Alexis Boichard /Agence Zoom / Getty Images)
Gu’s multi-sensory and multi-dimensional process is “complicated” and “convoluted,” she said. When The Athletic asked her about her process at a news conference, she talked through each lens of her five angles.
The night before her run, the 22-year-old visualizes. She does so again in the morning, then again just before the run. “Sometimes, as I’m going into a trick, I will visualize what the takeoff is one second before,” she said.
Before slopestyle gold medalist Mathilde Gremaud performs a new trick, it is already “perfect in my head,” she said. Then, as she builds up to competition, she focuses on her “gut feeling,” anchoring herself in her ski boots, feeling the snow and trusting her body to do what she has told it to do. “I trust the moment I am in.”
Olympic finals can throw up unpredictable moments. That is why Cohen refers to typical visualization as “mindful imagery,” a nuanced but important distinction.
Often, athletes think they should visualize the perfect scenario. They wake up to a bluebird day, feeling refreshed, muscles relaxed, skis perfectly waxed, no negative thoughts preventing them from their pursuit of a medal.
“That might only happen 10 percent of the time,” Cohen said.
Lindsey Vonn prepares ahead of downhill training in Cortina on Feb. 7. (Julian Finney / Getty Images)
Picturing perfection does not help deal with distracting thoughts about results, comparisons to other athletes, fear of injury or excitement about winning.
“I’m trying not to think about the result,” some athletes tell Cohen. But instead of blocking out those thoughts, it is more beneficial to train the brain to acknowledge that the mind might wander before or during performance. The goal is to bring it back to the task at hand.
Making the visualization realistic and relevant to the situation and the individual is key. Cohen will prompt athletes to notice a range of potentially distracting thoughts and feelings. Some unpleasant, like, “What if I fail? What if I let my family down? What if I fall?” And some pleasant, like: “I’m doing so well, I could win.”
One of Cohen’s athletes during the Winter Games had that exact uplifting thought. But they had prepared a response ahead of time: “Just keep skiing.” And that is exactly what they did, bringing their focus back to the present.
The same techniques can be applied to everyday activities, whether it’s taking an exam or presenting in a meeting. Cohen encourages everybody to practice mindfulness and predicts that within a couple of weeks, psychological flexibility and the ability to visualize will have improved.
In general, if an athlete performs well, visualization can help them be consistently excellent. If they underperform, it can help them regain control and confidence.
Mastro fell three times in her snowboard halfpipe final. “In my head, I did my run, and I landed it a bunch of f—ing times, guys, and it was f—ing sick,” the 25-year-old, trying to smile through her tears, told the media. “I’m over there on the podium right now. That’s the reality that my head made, and I’m still a believer of that.”
Researchers are just scratching the surface of the power of the mind, and Cohen predicts that in the future, we might even be able to see the image the visualizer is trying to create.
“If we had this conversation 50 years from now, I’d be fascinated to see what we come up with,” he said.
— Zak Keefer contributed to this report.