Olympic athletes including Apolo Ohno, Lolo Jones, Shaun White, Katie Uhlaender, Steve Holcomb, Bode Miller, and Sasha Cohen are coming together to discuss their post-Olympic depression in the new documentary The Weight of Gold.
The HBO Sports film released the first trailer for the documentary which will be available on HBO and HBO Max on July 29, which is when the Summer Olympics were scheduled to take place in Tokyo, Japan.
In the trailer, the athletes speak about how “40 seconds will dictate our human lives,” before they’re sent home, sometimes without medals, to live their ordinary lives beyond competing.
“None of us had normal childhoods,” says Michael Phelps, who says he estimates “a good 80 percent, maybe more” of athletes experience some kind of “post-Olympic depression.” “I thought of myself as just a swimmer, and not a human being,” he continues. “That’s where I was like, ‘Why don’t I just end it all?’”
In addition to interviews with the athletes, the documentary features an archival interview with bobsledder Steven Holcomb, who died from an alcohol and sleeping pill overdose in 2017 and an interview with Linda Peterson, mother to three-time Olympian aerial skier Jeret “Speedy” Peterson, who died by suicide in 2011.
Watch the trailer below.
