Top sports psychologist joins Team SA in Paris

Paris — An internationally respected sports psychologist is in Paris to give Team SA 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 in London, linked up with the team in France this week 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”.