Sports news at the start of 2023 was marked by announcements of the retirement of several major champions. Welsh footballer Gareth Bale, French cyclist Thibaut Pinot, Swiss skiers Beat Feuz and Mauro Caviezel and Austrian Matthias Mayer have decided to retire, often taking fans by surprise. In many cases, the decision was clear, immediate, and dictated more by mental exhaustion than physical problems.

In a slightly different but equally symbolic register, two of the best tennis players of the past decade, Australia’s Ashleigh Barty and Japan’s Naomi Osaka, announced their pregnancy a few days apart, while the Australian Open, the latter of which she won two editions, kicks off in Melbourne on Monday. Barty, who surprisingly retired from professional tennis last year when she was number one in the world, is 26; Osaka, who has already announced that he will not play for the entire season, turns 25.

Read also: The quest for perfection in athletes, from quest to obsession

These champions who stop when they are at the top and everything seems to be going well, these athletes who prefer to fulfill their lives as a man or a woman say the same thing: top sport is tough, terribly demanding mentally. Sports psychologists find that this is increasingly the case, as athletes are more often caught up in an impossible quest for perfection that goes far beyond the scope of training and leads to a bulimia of control.

You have to time your sleep, weigh your plate, calculate your effort. It’s an illusion because sport will never become an exact science, but it’s also a comforting alienation. “At 100% my sport was already very tough, so if I didn’t put all the elements on my side, I wouldn’t have a chance,” says a former cyclist who preferred to stop at the age of 23.

“The best is the enemy of the good”, my father used to tell me. What is new is that new technologies and statistics offer measuring instruments – one was about to write torture – of infinite precision. “You cannot achieve excellence without striving for perfection. The challenge is not to get lost in the obsession with perfection,” sums up French psychologist Meriem Salmi, former head of psychological monitoring at the National Institute of Sport, Expertise and Performance (Insep) in Paris.

Particularly valued in elite sports, necessary to achieve excellence, the desire for perfection is a dangerous ideal that leads more and more athletes to believe that they have no room for error. We will have to try to remember that when Marco Odermatt, Rafael Nadal or Novak Djokovic take a new trophy, break a new record, and it all seems so simple and easy.