Olympic hopeful Jessie Smith has battled a loss of confidence – going from junior BMX world champion to ‘riding like a five-year-old’ – and chosen to take a break from the sport.
Jessie Smith is used to riding the bumpy road of a BMX track.
The 2019 junior world BMX champion has been travelling and competing around the globe since the age of 11 and was en route to qualifying for the Tokyo Olympics.
But the 19-year-old has also been dealing with her own mental highs and lows off the track.
After silently battling away for over a year, Smith has made the call to steer away from the sport and the New Zealand high performance pathway. For now.
“I think at the end of the day, your happiness should always come first, and I let my mental wellbeing slip for well over 15 months which was really hard,” says Smith.
“But like people always say, the shit you go through is what makes you a lot stronger and I’d like to think I’ve learnt quite a bit about myself along the way.”
Smith is referring to the slippery slope she found herself riding after experiencing a major crash in 2019, which left her hospitalised in Japan for over a week with a ruptured spleen. She was training in Tokyo in the lead-up to the 2020 Olympic Games.
“I noticed I wasn’t riding like I used to. I wasn’t feeling good and I wasn’t really doing any big jumps,” recalls the four-time world champion. “I was super scared of doing everything. From going fast to doing big manuals, I was really afraid.”
The fear of riding has always been there but Smith says overthinking her last move in 2019 got in the way, causing her to crash in Tokyo.
“I know how good of a rider I am so when I made that massive mistake, it kind of imprinted in me. So I wasn’t really doing any big jumps and I wasn’t progressing,” she says. “I stayed like that up until now.”
She likens the drop in confidence to going from junior world champion to riding like a five-year-old. “I was battling with that every day,” says the eight-time New Zealand champion.
Even after recovering physically from the incident, her mental health remained shattered. Smith was turning up to training and race days with a deflated mindset.
“In my head I was like ‘There’s no way I’m going to be able to do what I know I can, or what I used to do, so what’s the point?’,” she says. “I tried so many psychologists to help with that fear and my crazy thoughts and stuff, but nothing was really clicking until the end of last year.”
Smith found Taylor Rapley of ĀHUA Psychology in Wanaka, a mental skills coach who was able to make sense of things for her. Rapley also represented New Zealand in alpine skiing for nearly 10 years.
Her practice is about mindfulness and using awareness to allow people to be uncomfortable with their thoughts, says Smith.
“It’s not about changing your thoughts or emotions, because I just hated them. I wanted to avoid my thoughts and emotions at pretty much all cost,” she says. “But once I actually sat with them, I realised ‘Wow, I’m really unhappy’. And I’m not enjoying the sport I’m meant to love which was really hard.”
It was difficult because Smith thought she needed to always enjoy what she was doing. But with the help of Rapley she learned that’s not the case. Before connecting with her, things were constantly going up and down for a while, says Smith: “I was in a really depressed and really anxious state.
“But I just thought I should keep on going and keep pushing. I thought ‘This is what everyone goes through’, ‘This is the athlete’s life’ – which is really shit to say.”
“I felt the top people would see and they’d be like ‘Oh, she’s just a weak link, we don’t need her’.”
It wasn’t until she spoke with her good friend, Tori Peeters – a performance excellence coach at St Peters School in Cambridge and the 2020 javelin national champ – that things started to become clearer.
“She could just see I was all over the show but I didn’t want to admit it,” Smith says. “I was so good at avoiding everything. She was like ‘Mate, you’ve got to do something. “And that’s when I pretty much started to want to get better. I was like ‘Wow, this is bad’. I want to change, I don’t want to keep going like this.”
Smith has been investing in her wellbeing ever since. But admits the biggest hurdle is wanting to help yourself otherwise nothing is going to change. “When I was working with my other psychologist, I didn’t really want to get better, I just thought I’ll keep pushing through it,” she says.
A strong support crew of women – including Peeters, hammer thrower Julia Ratcliffe, rower Emma Twigg, cyclist Emma Cumming, and chair of the NZ Olympic Committee’s Athletes’ Commission, Sarah Cowley Ross – are the reasons why Smith stayed in the sport for so long after the 2019 crash. “I love training with them in the gym,” she says.
When she opened up to the group about her struggles, they were supportive of the young athlete and mentioned their friendships were strong regardless of whether she was riding or not.
Smith is now splitting her time between working as a mountain bike coach, a convenor at St Peters School and labouring. She’ll also pick up coaching a hockey team at St Peters this year and hopes to work towards her teaching degree so she can pursue her love for outdoor education.
Letting her family know about her decision to step away from the sport was another big step for Smith. “I’ve never actually spoken to my family about anything that goes on in my head,” she says. “Because I was always like ‘This is my problem, no need to worry or stress them out’.
“But as soon as I sent the message, I got a lot of tautoko [support] and love from them that I always knew I had. I’m just really grateful to have incredible friends and family that I can lean on for support.”
Even though her inner circle have been encouraging, Smith admits being in a high performance programme is really hard while “trying to be a human being.”
“Because you’re also trying to be a professional athlete, trying to be the best you can be,” she says. “But obviously when you get injured or something, you go to physio and when you are struggling with your performance stuff, you go to your sport psych.
“But it’s not like you’re going to turn around to your support crew and your coach and stuff and be like ‘Look, I’m really struggling’.
“Some will do that. But I never really wanted to do that because I felt the top people would see and they’d be like ‘Oh, she’s just a weak link, we don’t need her’.”
Smith says hopefully that’s something that will change in the minds of other athletes and possibly a change in the environment is needed to encourage that shift simultaneously. “It might allow athletes to actually be open and honest because I think if I was able to do that, maybe I would’ve felt less pressure.”
High Performance Sport New Zealand have recently launched their 2024 strategy with initiatives focusing on athlete welfare.
Smith practices mental wellbeing now by being present and aware of her thoughts and emotions throughout the day. She’ll stop to look around and notice small details. “That just brings your awareness to the ‘now’. Like ‘I’m here now; this is what I’m doing now; and I’m only as good as I can be right now’,” she says.
“There’s no point in thinking well into the future or well into the past. You just need to live in the now and be grateful for what you’ve got. Whereas before I had no idea what was going on. I can’t even remember a lot of things because I wasn’t there, I wasn’t present.”
Rapley also guided Smith to learn more about her thoughts and emotions instead of suppressing them. Now, she can break down her thoughts by relating them back to core values she’s identified.
“I created my values and one of them was self-compassion and self-kindness, which I never really practised before,” says Smith. “I’m a perfectionist and I always want to be good and perfect at everything. I’m also a people pleaser.”
These traits meant Smith would form negative, unnecessary, false ideas in her head. “When I’d be riding it would be stuff like ‘You’re shit, you’re never going to get better, you might as well quit’, all that bad stuff. And it’s so true what people say, what you think is what you become,” she says.
“I was just thinking negatively, thinking really bad things. And then that affected my emotions and that affected my behaviour and it just spiralled from there.”
Actively practising these skills around her mental health will hopefully see Smith back in BMX further down the track, when the time is right.
She hasn’t quit the sport completely, she says. “Hopefully I can find that passion and love for the sport again because there is no point in trying to commit to a sport that you’re only going to put 50 percent in. That’s what I was doing. And that’s not me. I want to give 100 percent.”
The Olympic Games in Paris 2024 and Los Angeles 2028 (if BMX is included in that edition) will suit Smith if she’s in a better position to put her best foot forward. Plus she already knows what it takes to be in an Olympic cycle.
“I’ll have some pretty good skills to back me and I know I’m an amazing BMXer so those skills won’t go away,” she says. “It’ll just be building back up the courage and a bit of fitness.”
