OLYMPIC TRIATHLON STAR COGGINS EMERGING FROM ‘BLACK HOLE’, TALKS ABOUT ‘CRUSHING’ ASIAN GAMES, MENTAL HEALTH TREATMENT

Oscar Coggins was 33rd in the Tokyo Olympics, aged 21, the finest Games performance by a Hong Kong triathlete
The 24-year-old is recovering from an extended period blighted by injury and illness, talking to clinical psychologist to mitigate stress

As he sank into "a black hole of disappointment and frustration", Oscar Coggins needed all his Olympian resolve to rationalise a creeping hatred of triathlon.

A brutal, uncompromising sport showed no mercy during a 18 dispiriting months when Coggins said he felt like Sisyphus, fruitlessly rolling his boulder up a hill in Greek mythology.

The hammer blow was delivered at last September's Asian Games. Coggins emerged from the swimming leg of the race in Hangzhou, peeled off his wetsuit, and quit. Andrew Wright, Hong Kong's head coach, said Coggins "was not in a good place mentally or physically".

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Coggins, who finished 33rd in the Tokyo Olympics, the best Games result for a Hong Kong triathlete, promptly stepped back from a sport he sacrificed much for in his pursuit of success.

The 24-year-old, whose family lives in England, remained in Hong Kong during the pandemic, missing a series of important events, including having to watch his grandmother's funeral on a Zoom link.

"I was left trying to work out why [I made those sacrifices], because what did I get out of it?" Coggins said. "That was part of a huge cloud of emotions ... the whole thing was just such a crushing experience. The previous 18 months felt like a Sisyphean struggle: every time I started to climb, I fell back down again.

"The [Asian Games] swim started OK, but I could tell my body wasn't quite there. You begin to go on this downward spiral, and I came out of the water in really bad [mental] shape. I just didn't have it in me to go through that experience.

"Afterwards, I had this terrible association with training. I thought, 'I hate this [triathlon], right now'. But I knew it wasn't triathlon I hated, I needed to separate the sport from the emotions caused by my negative experiences. I knew whatever inside me was initially drawn to triathlon was still there."

Even before the Games there was the food poisoning on the eve of the 2022 Asia Triathlon Championships in Kazakhstan, immediately after two months of "nailing every training session" during time with the Great Britain squad in Loughborough.

The episode accelerated a dispiriting cycle, where he would train like a demon, only to be laid low by injury or illness at competition time. Then came "the worst-timed, and most-consequential injury of my career" at a World Cup meeting in Weihai five weeks before the Asian Games.

"I ripped about a square inch of skin off the arch of my foot during the run, by the end, the blood had turned my white trainer half red," he said.

Coggins' frustration over that setback was compounded by the knowledge he was fresh from an outstanding training camp in Gran Canaria. At a camp in Thailand, soon after Weihai, Wright said Coggins "wasn't there at all, physically or mentally".

Calling Wright's comments "an accurate description", Coggins said the trip to Thailand was "the straw that broke the camel's back".

Coggins began seeing a clinical psychologist as the Asian Games approached, and is still unpicking the issues that were causing his repeated breakdowns.

Central to that was his tendency to not understand the impact of overtraining, both mentally and physically.

"What I realise now, is that overtraining is not only to do with your intensity," Coggins said. "If my training was too hard, the cracks would have appeared after a few weeks, but I was always nailing everything until the last day. What I didn't appreciate, was that I had a lot of outside stress."

There was also the anxiety that came with travel for Coggins, who, "is not a laid back person".

From struggling to sleep on flights, to the simple task of packing, there were several sources of stress to combat, compounded by "behaviours, and responses I have to some things that are outside the norm".

"I recognised there was a problem, and I could not ignore it, it was adding an extra load I could not tolerate," Coggins said. "The expectations I was placing on myself were too high. I don't have to pack for the entire trip, and don't need to triple and quadruple check everything.

"I need to pack at the right times. If I pack for three hours, and train for three hours, it is a six-hour day close to a race. It is a Catch-22 situation, because to be truly world class, you have to pay attention to every detail. The question is, how do I reduce the stress?"

Coggins would almost without exception fall ill following a long-haul flight, countering the benefits of training overseas. He will "mostly stay in Hong Kong" in 2024, as he reacquaints himself with 25-hour training weeks, ahead of returning to elite competition in the closing months of the year.

An element of Coggins' burnout derived from an unrelenting training schedule during the pandemic.

"Training is a means to an end, during Covid, it became the end itself," Coggins said. "I began looking at my training numbers as if they were race results, and clinging to them too hard. I would take a competition mentality into training every day. There was nothing else happening, so it was easy to slip into a mindset where training targets became your goals for the year."

The remorseless training, married to separation from family, and the recurrent injury and illness setbacks added up to Coggins arriving in Hangzhou, "not broken, but depleted and frustrated".

"The cracks were beginning to show," he said. "I had been doing the training I needed to do, but my heart was not in it. You cannot get away with that in triathlon, so it was inevitable things would start sliding. Physically, I was in good shape, but the mental side wasn't there. If I hadn't been injured in Weihai, I would have been super-confident of a medal."

Coggins acknowledges it is impossible to "completely avoid what ifs" around missing this year's Olympics in Paris.

"Coming to peace with the failures I've had, and mistakes I've made, is an ongoing process, but I am getting better at it every day," he said.

"I am still doing the sport, and enjoying it, and excited about races, so that shows to some extent it is working. Spending your time thinking about things that didn't happen is how you end up miserable. Part of the reason I can stop these things taking over my every waking moment is that I have quite a high degree of confidence in the future.

"Although the experiences over the past few years weren't pleasant, something needed to happen to make me take a step back, start from ground zero, and build back up."

Coggins made his comeback in a low-key domestic race, on the undercard of the Hong Kong-staged World Triathlon Cup last month. He sensed an external curiosity over "whether I would be garbage", but a second-place finish, and resultant positive internal feeling, confirmed that this was "what I want to do".

"In the short term, I am aiming for next year's National Games, and I want team and relay medals at the 2026 Asian Games," Coggins said. "I have a lot of years ahead of me, and I am definitely targeting the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles."