I wouldn't dispute the mental aspect, although the hassle of needing to walk an extra 1000 m is a somewhat mild example - it may affect you if you're already on edge, but it's not that bad in the general picture. On the other hand, we once had a team competition where everyone expected my training partner - tough guy, national vice champ in Combat SAMBO, hard wrestler (we pretty much always left bloodstains on the mat, and I can't recall how often he had kicked me in the balls with that Sumi gaeshi of his), but otherwise really quiet and always super polite - to fill his spot, but he didn't show. My coach then took the hard step (possibly the only time I think I would have done things differently if I had been coaching that day) and decided to come out with it: "As you have noticed, X isn't here today. He went to prison for attempted murder and hung himself there." Well... we were beaten 36-4 that day if I recall, most of the people expected to win lost. I think my pin were the only points we got. Still took me a while to get over it, it was a couple of years until I could look in the mirror without remembering him (he started my cauliflower ear).It's in the article. Her coaching team addressed it and we have another athlete that she arrived with that performed well.
You have. You went from initially saying emotions are fake and it's purely physical, to now you need to not let emotions impact your physical performance.
That's a completely different position inline with what we were saying.
There is no physical reason she should have performed any worse. She still had an adequate time to do her usual thing, she just entered from a different gate and had extra mental stress applied prior. A good coach could have known the athlete enough to get her back into the right frame of mind by making an adjustment if needed to her usual routine. AI would have told her to do the exact same thing and it didn't work for her that day.
We see it all the time with coaches in MMA with the corners. Eric Nicksick is a great example of this with Dan Ige. He was cracking jokes to break the tension in a recent fight, talking about his moustache. He has said in interviews he does this to get Ige into the right head space. It works with him, but he has to corner other fighters differently. AI would say he needs to do a specific set of actions to win the fight based of what his opponent was doing, but Eric knows that it's more important to get his fighter into the right headspace to do what he needs to do.
Nobody is saying anything about sport psychologists helping every aspect of an athlete's performance throughout the performance by guiding them through emotional struggles. Of course that's ridiculous.
As for cornermen, I found I need two things: first, I need to be able to hear the guy. I get strong tunnel vision in matches, I usually hear zero of the crowd, and the referee is a blur. I only hear voices I know and recognize, so ideally, I need a coach that is vocal and that shouts instructions to me in regular training so I get used to it. And second, I need to like my coach. In my mind, I am out there bleeding for him (I always had a much stronger connection to my coaches than to my teammates - my teammates I might have to destroy in a tournament, so I can't like them too much, my coaches will be on my side forever), and made weight for him (miserable process, especially if you have to cut 10 kg on short notice like I sometimes did), so I need to know we have each other's back, or the outcome will be suboptimal. I'm used to chatting with my coaches for hours - Zwei Idioten, ein Gedanke - would often hang out with them and their families on the weekends etc.
In the former Eastern Block - most of my coaches either are from there or were strongly influenced by their methodology - if a coach takes you in, it's almost a form of adoption. There's a thing Amit Elor once said in an interview about her coach, Valentin Kalika. When he took her in as a teenager, first thing he did was to give her his number, saying: "Call me 24/7, 365 days of the year. If you have a problem, I will make it go away." That sums up pretty nicely what it's like, and anything less than that just doesn't do it for me. And of course, it has to run both ways.