Top sports psychologist joins Team SA in Paris to give athletes mental edge

An internationally respected sports psychologist is in Paris to give Team South Africa athletes the mental edge at the 2024 Olympics.

Prof Pieter Kruger, who is based at North West University in Potchefstroom and also runs a company out of London, linked up with the team in France on Tuesday after flying in from the Hungarian F1 Grand Prix where he worked with race leaders and pit crew.

He said most athletes at the Olympics were not short on skill but some lacked the ability to function at their best under pressure.

“It's very often the inability to apply your skill under pressure — that’s the problem ... It’s when you can't apply yourself because there’s too much white noise going on, you start seeing a massive interference with performance.

“And that’s the part where at least we try to educate the athletes and give them some techniques and skills to regulate that as much as possible.”

Kruger worked with some of the Great Britain teams at London 2012 but worked with Team SA for the first time at Tokyo 2020 and again at the 2022 Commonwealth Games in Birmingham.

“There are, even in a short space of time, some techniques at least you can give them to facilitate and manage performance, though it’s by no stretch of the imagination a foolproof plan.

“It definitely, at least for some people, will put them in a better position to apply themselves consistently in high-pressure moments.”

Voluntary online psychometric tests were sent out to athletes, though not all responded. 

“[That] gives me a very clear indication at least of how their minds tend to process information so it gives me a bit of a platform at least to work from, to take some guesswork out of this and try and customise something for an individual that would support them best.”

Kruger also works with Bath rugby, joining them at the start of the 2023/24 season after they finished near the bottom of the log.

“We really tried heavily to implement a system where we change the culture, but also individual reactions under pressure and a collective mental model on field where we really try to get players under pressure to apply this.”

There were no expectations, but the team ended up playing the premiership final, losing by four points.

The turnaround came because the players learnt to perform better under pressure, “making a huge impact in those critical moment reactions when you need to perform and when it counts”.

Kruger worked with some of the Great Britain teams at London 2012 but worked with Team SA for the first time at Tokyo 2020 and again at the 2022 Commonwealth Games in Birmingham.

He admitted being parachuted in for the events rather than working continuously with the athletes wasn’t “ideal”.

“In an ideal situation, you’d be involved in a four-year Olympic cycle to build up to this point. But even under current circumstances, it’s better than not having the service available, so we try to look at things from a dual perspective, so it’s partly around the mental health aspects involved and just mood regulation, etc.

“And the other half is very much about performance-specific aspects.”

He pointed out that they were careful not to interfere with mental processes athletes might have already put in place.

“It’s all supporting and helping them to connect some of the dots to see why some things have been working and maybe if there are areas for improvement [and deciding] what do we spend some time on.

“The system that I work on is very much based on the neuropsychology and the biochemistry of performance under pressure, so we just show them the impact of how cognitive reactivity — the thinking processes — will affect things such as mood regulation and behavioural execution, fluency of motion.”

Kruger said he was speaking to the South African Sports Confederation and Olympic Committee (Sascoc) about a more holistic approach where sports psychology was incorporated into long-term high performance planning.