From Serious Injury to Returning to Winter Olympics:The Psychological Rehabilitation Process of A High-risk Sport Athlete

Many winter game sports, such as snowboarding, alpine skiing and freestyle skiing, have high risk of serious injuries.How to help athletes in these high-risk game sports to cope with the setbacks of sports injuries and the challenges of rehabilitation therapy is an important issue for preparing for the Beijing Winter Olympics. The present study describes the process of the psychological service team helped an injured athlete named LGZ in the China freestyle skiing aerials team to recover from difficulties and return to the international competition. Based on the Chinese athletes' psychological construction system, three goals were set for LGZ's psychological rehabilitation training: Firstly, reducing the psychological stress caused by sports injuries,participating in rehabilitation treatment actively, and returning to normal training and competition as soon as possible; Secondly,improving self-control ability, establishing good behavior habits, participating in training and competition with a steady state of mind; Finally, improving cultural literacy and spiritual realm, improving herself constantly and promoting lifelong development.From February 2017 to February 2018, five kinds of psychological interventions were carried out in one-year psychological training,including providing psychological support, performing imagery training, conducting psychological lectures, formulating pre-match routine and providing psychological counseling. Psychological tests were used to monitor the mental state, and the efficacy of psychological training were assessed by athlete self-evaluation, supervisor coach evaluations, and athletic competition performance.At the end of the one-year psychological training, the athlete gradually overcame the anxiety caused by sports injuries, established confidence in post-traumatic rehabilitation, improved self-control ability, and achieved her personal best to win a medal in the PyeongChang Winter Olympics. This case suggests that the psychological training of“combination of skill orientation and spirit orientation”has certain effects and it brings us a lot of reflections.