Paris 2024 Olympic Games: “The mental trainer is not a performance comforter, he is there to help the athlete grow”

Julien Deville intervient auprès de l'équipe de France de natation “pour créer une émulation collective dans un sport individuel.” Julien Deville

Psychologue de formation, préparateur notamment des équipes de France d'équitation et de natation, Julien Deville explique comment il cherche à créer des automatismes pour permettre aux athlètes d'être performants en situation de stress.

How did you become a mental trainer?

I was a high-level triathlete from 1998 to 2007 and sport has always been part of my daily life. This was followed by a somewhat complicated period of retraining. I was lucky enough to be followed by a psychologist, Christian Ramos, who has also been a mental trainer since the 90s. He trained me and I got started.

You had used it as an athlete ?

No way. This was not common in those years. This could even be seen as a weakness. Today morals have changed.

Is France behind in this area ?

I don't know if we're late. We do it according to our culture, our education, and it’s developing. We see more and more of them in France. Christian Ramos paved the way in the 90s. In Sydney, in 2000, the French basketball players, finalists, were followed by Christian Target.

Which Olympic teams are you working with?

With the Nantes handball and volleyball teams, the French equestrian team, and the open water and pool swimming team, especially on the collective dimension: how, in an individual sport, create a team that creates emulation to train better against a backdrop of healthy competition. I also work with athletes individually at their request but it is always better to work in a triptych with the coach. This allows us to clear up all the hares and unsaid things.

What are the sources of mental preparation ?

I use the term performance support more. I am very operational: teaching people to know themselves better. What are my reactions and behaviors? ? How do I organize myself based on this to be more successful? ? It is not the result that counts. It is how the athlete grows and achieves through his goals, on which path he commits himself with his skills. The result is only the consequence of all that. We must dissociate performance from the result, which has an anxiety-provoking side and will create fear. To do this, it is necessary to create athletic and mental automatisms during training and to be able to reproduce them in competition in a degraded context, that is to say under high pressure. And this will be the case during the Olympic Games, at home for the French, with very high expectations.

Read also: Paris 2024 Olympics: preventing overwork, improving performance… why mental preparation is essential in France

You will intervene during the Games ?

With the French dressage team, I will be involved in the week before the Games and during the competition, but not in swimming. The idea is to make the athlete independent. We must not be a comfort blanket for performance. We provide tools that the athlete must use. But I want to emphasize that this mental support is not to the detriment of the rest. We are used to hearing that everything is in the head. If it were that simple, things would not happen like this. There is a whole balance to be sought to find performance with the coach, who, for me, must be the first mental trainer. There is real work to be done with coaches and athletes on what needs to be verbalized. Because coaches also have a performance to produce and pressure to manage, we forget it… Even if, in the end, it is the athlete who runs or swims.

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