Olympic swimmers Stephanie Au, Camille Cheng and Jamie Yeung dive deep into their mental health struggles and champion all-round well-being for young people
From Serena Williams to Lionel Messi, there’s no dearth of role models in sports. Be it for their extraordinary physical abilities or long list of medals, society has elevated them to ranks of superheroes, ones that young people often look up to and worship.
But building physical strength and abilities needs a lot of mental resilience too. And that’s the aspect of athleticism that Olympians Stephanie Au, Camille Cheng and Jamie Yeung want to highlight. With that in mind, the three Hong Kong swimmers founded Mind The Waves, an organisation focusing on the youth’s mental health, in February 2023. It draws its spirit from the fundamental lessons the three swimmers had to learn in their careers.
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“In Hong Kong, there’s a culture that celebrates and praises performance and rankings more than growth and development,” says Cheng to Tatler. “In our case, the training is very focused on physical training—volume, intensity—but [there’s] not as much support for mental struggles.”
The swimmer, who recently came back from the Asian Games with Au, explains that it’s always “easy for people to talk about the ‘winning’ moments—the Olympics, the medals, the records. But it’s more important to talk about what goes on behind the curtains, as it’s often more mentally challenging than physically.”
Lessons from Olympians
For example, in the latest Asian Games, which took place in Hangzhou from September 23 to October 8, both Cheng and Au delivered stellar performances, picking up bronze in women’s 4x100m freestyle relay, but mentally it was a gruelling experience.
“[The Asian Games] were a very physically and mentally challenging experience for me,” says Au. “I walked into the game knowing this could be my last, and I was scared I might fail to perform.”
Cheng, too, had her share of struggles. “Seven weeks before the Games, I had to undergo a small surgery which left me out of the water for almost ten days. I could barely push off the wall, but I wanted to perform and contribute, so I put a lot of pressure on myself to heal faster,” she says.
As for the third founder of Mind The Waves, Jamie Yeung, she chose to retire from professional sports at the age of 24 after performing at the Tokyo Olympics 2020.