In this episode of Martial Attitude Voice, we welcome Jamie Smokler – a former competitive figure skater, football coach, and psychology student – to discuss his compelling BSc dissertation on the role of fear in elite figure skating. Rooted in his personal experience and enriched by interviews with international skaters, Jamie’s research sheds light on the psychological pressures that swirl beneath the surface of a sport often seen as elegant and poised. From the fear of injury and failure to the more unexpected fear of poor ice quality, Jamie unpacks how fear manifests in performance and how culture, coaching styles, and competition structure influence how skaters cope with it. Throughout the conversation, Jamie highlights how deeply embedded the “no pain, no gain” mindset still is in the sport – often leading skaters to dismiss medical advice in pursuit of competitive milestones. He explains how fear isn’t just about physical risk, but also about judgment, loss of control, and emotional vulnerability in environments where skaters may feel unseen or unfairly assessed. With refreshing honesty, Jamie reflects on why he didn’t prescribe solutions in his study, instead choosing to create space for skaters to voice what they’re rarely allowed to say. This episode offers a thought-provoking look at performance psychology, sporting culture, and what it means to skate on both thin ice and even thinner expectations.
Follow Jamie Smokler on LINKEDIN
Read Jamie's BSc psychology research HERE.
If you are interested in the literature reviewed by Jamie upon the categorization of fear, look at the following paper:
Endler, N. S., Parker, J. D., Bagby, R. M., & Cox, B. J. (1991). Multidimensionality of state and trait anxiety: Factor structure of the endler multidimensional anxiety scales. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 60(6), 919–926. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.60.6.919
Mathias Alberton (00:03)
Hello everyone, this is Mathias Alberton, I'm the creator of Martial Attitude. This is Martial Attitude Voice. You know, we're exploring a bit of psychology before and behind and beyond performance, resilience, attitudes and discipline. As you know, I'm pretty passionate about discipline. And of course, you know that I'm conducting my own research and training program for visually impaired and blind people to enhance their level of confidence, overall well-being, posture, and work on their sense of comfort when touching and being touched by other people in social settings. It's called martial attitude training. We do workshops every Sunday in central London. If you're interested, drop an email. If you know someone who might like to attend to partake in the training, let us know. We will certainly be happy to have newcomers and we will work across summer 2025. So yeah, the program is starting again with 10 fresh new weeks of training if you'd like to join in. Today on the podcast, I'm joined by Jamie Smokler, football coach, welfare officer and is here today because he's bringing something honestly quite unique. I came into knowing of Jamie pretty much this week, last week at the Psychological Insight into Coaching Practice 2025 conference held by Newcastle University, where he presented the results of his research in psychology, specifically sport psychology, is about fears in international figure skaters. So he proposed a study with personal interviews to 17 international figure skaters, both male and females. He made a thematic analysis of the interviews and he started to unpack a bit the idea of fear across injury, failure, external judgment, and to, let's say, expose a bit what kind of vulnerabilities the high skaters are pressed by when competing internationally. Also, if I don't get this wrong, Jamie himself was, has been a figure skater, so we will try to unpack a bit of this. Jamie, hello. Welcome to the podcast. I hope you well. And then let me understand this correctly. Were you a figure skater?
Jamie Smokler (03:05)
Yes, thank you for having me on today. Yes, I've been skating myself for about nine years now. I never competed at the highest level. Some of the participants that I interviewed were competing on the world stage and I was never going to reach those heights just because of the commitment I had to my education. But I've been around skaters for so long and I've skated for quite a few years and I'm still practicing and still learning.
Mathias Alberton (03:40)
It's actually interesting that you said, well, I was actually busy in my studies, so I couldn't skate at that level, even if I wanted, because reading your paper, when we come down to, let's say, one of the aspects of being limited, there is what is called, let's say, a struggle between the participants of your search in choosing whether they have to go to school, dedicate the hours, the days to schooling or to training. So would you say that you have made your choice, therefore you haven't become that skilled and they chose different? Or did you meet among your 17 participants and more people who actually were having to master degrees and were international figure skaters.
Jamie Smokler (04:48)
So, in the end I made a choice myself. A lot of the skaters that I interviewed described a sense of having to sacrifice school for their art, for the sport of figure skating. And the biggest reason is because most ice rinks that you can train in have training early morning and late evening because throughout the day the rink is used for public and it means that your time to train is limited to either, as I said, early morning or late evening. And early morning means from 5am and if you have school at 8am then it becomes incredibly difficult. You also start skating from such a young age that you won't be able to travel yourself to the rink for 5 in the morning because the chances are you don't drive yet and you're probably still too young to do public transport alone. So a lot of skaters rely on their parents or friends to take them to the ice rink for the early morning practice. But if you wanted a substantial practice quite early in the morning, you would have to leave quite early as well to get to school on time. And it was something that I was never going to be able to do considering the distance I lived from the ice rink and that my parents were working so I wouldn't have access to getting to the ice rink at the time for the early morning sessions. Plus I had other commitments after school with other sports. None so that I was better at. I wouldn't say that I exceeded so well in another sport that figure skating wasn't something that I should have pushed. But for me, I was always more academically minded and I wanted to go into that.
So I knew that I wouldn't be able to commit to figure skating in the same way that some of the skaters that I interviewed had done. We have skaters now at the rink that I work in predominantly who are completely homeschooled and that's exactly what I found with some of the interviews as well. A lot of these skaters were either homeschooled or sacrificed their schooling in some way for skating and to improve and to be the best of the best that was what they felt they needed. But interestingly as you mentioned not quite having two masters degrees but one of the participants that I interviewed actually is currently doing an online masters and it's actually a psychology, sorry an online psychology degree and she's been working her way through that slowly since she kind of retired her competitive career and has moved into coaching. So for a lot of the athletes, it's a decision to be made afterwards. It's not something they will focus on while they're competing, but once they've finished competing and started a new career or started in the coaching side, they would then move to the education side to stay around in the sport because once you're in the family, you don't really want to leave the family.
Mathias Alberton (08:16)
Are you going to leave the family?
Jamie Smokler (08:19)
I don't plan to. When it comes to the postgraduate education that I'm looking for, I don't want to stop researching figure skating. For me, the opportunity to do it at my degree level was incredible and I know not every university allows that. So I feel privileged to be able to have done my research and with the feedback I've received from the actual participants and how much they enjoyed it and they wanted to read what I came up with as the results of the research. I want to do it more now. I don't want to stop the figure skating research. I want to explore other avenues of the psychological impact and positive psychology and negative psychology and the different emotions and how that can affect the skaters who we grow and love and we see once every four years at the Winter Olympics.
There's a lot more that goes into it than just that performance. And for me, it's just an opportunity to bring a sport that not many people know the ins and outs of, other than if you fall over, you're going to cut your fingers because that's the classic thought. It brings that sport into the light. And that's why I was so passionate about it.
Mathias Alberton (09:40)
Did you discover across your research? Just to explain a bit also to the audience who is listening now, we understand you have explored a bit the idea of fear across participants in figure skating, but then did you discover anything particular that may be something that you wouldn't have thought, being yourself a figure skater? Tell us a bit what happened in the research.
Jamie Smokler (10:08)
Yeah, of course. So when I created the research proposal, the main aspects of fear that I was looking at were fear of failure and fear of injury. And they were the two that I had experienced the most in my time as a skater. throughout the interviews, a lot of the participants that felt particularly comfortable to talk and talk openly started talking about other aspects that I hadn't even thought about because my competitive experience had been different to theirs. So for example, some of the skaters spoke a lot about the actual quality of the ice. Now, for those that don't skate regularly, ice is ice and you just look at it as slippery. For someone like myself who's worked in multiple rinks, I can tell that there's a different feel to the ice. But for these skaters, whenever you compete, depending on your discipline and depending on your standing in the previous skate, you might be skating after 11 other people and the ice isn't cleaned after each skate, it's cleaned after 6 or 12 skaters and what it means is that you've got divots and you've got grooves in the ice that can often be quite deep depending on the nature of the discipline so if you are a men's single skater then you've got skaters before you jumping quadruple jumps and triple jumps and they leave quite big dents into the ice. And if you don't recognize where they are or don't see them with enough time, you can skate over them or you can attempt an element into a groove that's already been made. And that really worried some of the skaters, especially the dance ice dance skaters that I interviewed because oftentimes the female skater will be on the shoulder or will be lifted up and if the male skater skates over a groove and that makes him lose his balance it's not just himself that's falling but his partner's falling from an even greater height so it fed into the fear of injury but it was more just a fear of not being vigilant enough and not seeing the ice for what it was. Ice is white and a groove doesn't really change the colour so it's difficult to tell what it looks like. So for them they felt that if they weren't being vigilant enough or watching the other skaters closely enough before them they might not recognise where a groove is and that caused them more to worry about getting hurt because they didn't know if they were doing their job well enough of actually looking and seeing is this quality of ice actually good enough.
Mathias Alberton (12:59)
Provided that you have researched ⁓ the psychological element of fear and you discovered this aspect of it across figure skaters, have you also identified a kind of a potential solution to the problem? Psychologically speaking, mean, is there an identified by you psychological training that could help them overcoming this kind of issue or not really. It's just a matter of luck and awareness.
Jamie Smokler (13:35)
So the biggest aspect for this research for me was because it was only a psychology degree, it means my sport and exercise psychology training isn't there. I don't have the understanding at this moment in time that somebody who has studied a sport and exercise psychology degree would have. So any ideas that I have about solutions all come not from theory and not from practice, they come from general psychological theory and for me I never wanted to try and recommend anything because this research itself hasn't been done before in this sport that I didn't want to sort of come into it and bring out you should start doing this or this would be a good thing to start using. It was more giving the skaters a time to be able to anonymously share their experience. A lot of the time you don't want to incriminate your coach if they've done something wrong or your partner if they've done something wrong or specific judges potentially. You don't want to criticise when your name's on it and you don't want to name other people because it gives you that sense of guilt. So for me it was giving them the opportunity to share honestly how they have experienced the sport and what they are truly worried about rather than giving a dressed down version to their coaches so that their coaches don't think they're lazy or that they're uninterested. It was more about letting them openly explore their experience and their experience of fear and what has worried them, what puts pressure on them and if they've done anything to deal with that rather than come into recommend solutions to the problems that they felt like they faced. So that wasn't really something I was looking to do here.
Mathias Alberton (15:37)
And you have declared, of course, is enough to read your paper, but you also said a few minutes ago you identified predominantly the idea of fear of injury and then fear of failure. You derived this from your own experience, as you said, but then there was a study referred to, which is a handler 1991, was defining let's say anxiety, as divided in different subcategories. And you specifically took these two, but there are others which have more something to do with the social aspect of fear or the ambiguous element of something that is not yet happened or the lack of control on settings. I know that you have created different themes from your analysis. One of these themes was exactly on the characteristic of the toxicity, if you like, of the environment, whether that environment is toxic because it's a cultural toxicity or it is a coach-athlete relationship which has not gone in the right direction. Can you tell us a bit more about this?
Jamie Smokler (17:12)
Yeah, so when I originally started looking for potential participants, I realised quite quickly that I didn't want to just use figure skaters from my local rink. And I wanted to use skaters and interview skaters from different areas around the world because skating, you may be from somewhere, but you might train elsewhere and training environments really differ across countries and it was something that I knew from what my friends who were skaters have told me but it's obviously not something that is theorized in academic writing. So I tried to use a broad cultural theoretical framework with the research. I tried to use a framework that basically shared that different cultures have different positions on scales and the results really fit with that. So for example when it came to, just getting my research out, when it came to things like masculinity versus femininity on this scale, it was very obvious which skaters were from cultures or had trained in cultures who were considered masculine where you came across as assertive, whereas the femininity aspect of that scale looked more at cooperation and caring and quality of life. And the biggest thing with that was certain skaters who spent more time in school and with other people and in the rink and tried to balance their time had a care for quality of life because they wanted to still experience life while training. Whereas other skaters were very hard on the masculinity scale. They were, I will skate 39 hours a week in total, which is the same amount as you would work a nine to five for a week. So an incredible amount of dedication and those skaters sacrificed sleep. They sacrificed to social life. So that was a big reason of what I wanted to do. I wanted to bring the cultural differences between skating environments to light as well. But as you said, one of, obviously, Endler 1991, his research looked at five different subcategories of fear and how it's experienced by athletes. And one of them that actually came up in the research that I wasn't expecting was the lack of control and the decision ambiguity. And that aspect became its own theme in my research because of how often it was discussed by everyone there weren't many skaters in the participant pool that actually didn't discuss lack of control and decision ambiguity. And the main problem that they found was a perceived bias against them and they felt that a lot of the time they were pushed down by other judges because they didn't look a certain way. Whether it was a physical thing some skaters spoke about kind of the eating side of it and the strength side of it. Do I have a six pack? Do I not? And am I going to get scored less because my competitor has a six pack? But other skaters spoke about it more that they would be told by other competitors, how did you get there? You should have beaten us. Like you skated so much better than us. You beat your own score from last time. But then when the results come out, they're nowhere near what they're expected and a lot of the time to compete in certain competitions you're hopeful that your previous score will be high enough. You have to reach a certain point, you have to get as many points as possible. And for some skaters, they have one competition that they have to get a certain score in in order to go to Worlds or to go to Europeans.
Some of the participants didn't get that score. Not that they didn't skate well enough to do that, but because they just weren't scored that way. And I felt privileged to be able to interview one participant in particular who was able to experience the privileged side of this perceived bias, who was rewarded for being at the, like on the podium for their country, so to speak. And the brilliant thing about my interview with him was that he was able to show the opposite side and say that he sees this bias that people talk about and he can perceive it in the same way as them. But now that he is on the higher end and he is being rewarded and getting so many more experiences because of his ranking, that he sees it even more. And it was a very damaging thing he thought for up and coming skaters and it was definitely an idea that was expressed by other skaters from smaller nations. They just felt what would be the point in actually competing here if I'm just not going to do well, if I'm not going to get what I deserve, what would be the point? And it was this decision ambiguity, this lack of control in understanding the results and I may skate amazing, but I'm still not going to do well. That led to what a few other researchers had described that you just lose enjoyment. And as we see with loads of sports around the world, what's beautiful about it is when they're competing and they have a smile on their face. Somebody in football scores a goal and they smile and you can see that they enjoy what they do and they love what they do. And in skating, it's the same. It's all artistic and it's putting on this performance. And that smile makes us as an audience, not even as a judge, as an audience, you really delve into it and you really enjoy it when you can see that the skater themselves is having fun. But what these participants described to me was the opposite, a lot of them felt this loss of enjoyment in the sport for part of the reason being this perceived bias and this decision ambiguity and this fear of just, I'm not going to do well no matter what. I could fall or I could have a clean program. But either way, I'm not gonna do well.
Mathias Alberton (24:02)
There is also another aspect that it was, let's say, more declared at the beginning and now it seems a secondary element to it. let's say you say that you were focused also on fear of injury. But then as it comes a bit obvious, mean, maybe the audience might be interested to know this, let's say statistically speaking, fear of injury is a big thing in sports psychology and is a big thing. Fear of being re injured after previous injuries. So to avoid new injuries or to get injured again. So this is a big thing in sports psychology. but it was interesting to read in your research how your participants said, well, yeah, the doctor saved me to well rest. 100 % rest, don't do anything for how many days, how many times. And they just didn't follow suit with the advice because it would have been unwise to do so because either the coach would have understood ⁓ them as lazy or just because they couldn't afford the time because the season is too short to miss opportunity to train or to do scoring in order to participate in future competition. So how did this aspect of fear eventually work out in your research?
Jamie Smokler (25:49)
So one of the pieces of research when I was doing the critical review of the literature kind of before I started, one piece of research that I really found interesting explained that you need first of all four days for an adult to rest and recover. And obviously from my experience, but from also the participants, that's something you don't have in skating. Even for myself getting onto the ice after a week of not skating, I suddenly, I'm in a bit more pain than I would normally be in. And that's just because my feet have now spent a few days not in skates. So that in itself, you don't have that time to recover and to relax. And as I said before as well with the decision ambiguity that a lot of skaters sort of they felt that because they needed to get this score, because they needed to get to this certain number of points for the next competition, they had to skate at the next competition. So they couldn't miss a competition, they couldn't miss the training the next day, because they were still chasing this score to get to this competition. And they just pushed through it. And I spoke in the presentation in the conference about the no pain, no gain mindset. I don't want to delve onto that just yet, but one of the biggest things that I found was there was another piece of research in the critical review that explains that you start to displace the fear that you feel towards one element after an injury onto other elements. And I illustrated it in the research article, but that would mean, for example, being injured during doing a jump and trying to land a triple jump, you fall and you get injured. And when you return to skating, you become fearful of something that is completely different in technique and in the presentation of it. So for example, a camel spin or a flying sit spin. And that was something that I had experienced.
I wasn't expecting to find research on it, it was something I had experienced but it wasn't something that anyone else had experienced and that made me ask why, I wasn't sure I remember feeling that myself but none of the participants that I spoke to felt that this had happened that they had moved this fear from themself and from this original injury and this element that caused the injury none of them had moved it to a different element, which was different and I wasn't expecting it purely because of the research that had spoken about it and my experience. But the no pain no gain mindset was a massive one and it's difficult to kind of separate a psychological and theoretical understanding of the no pain no gain mindset from the practical value of it. And personally, I'm not an advocate for it. I don't believe that it's the right way to kind of get the best out of an athlete. But as much as some of the athletes explained how they don't want to train through injury or they don't like skating on an injury because it just makes it worse, a lot of them felt that they still have that mindset themselves when they skate. And I spoke about it in the conference, but they described that there's more than one type of pain. So no pain, no gain is too broad to discuss. If we're talking no pain, as in you're at a 10 on a scale of one to 10, you're in absolute agony and you can't skate, that isn't going to get you anything. You're not going to gain from skating when you physically cannot do it anymore. But there is also a good pain. And those that go to the gym or those that are trying a new sport or using new muscles regularly, you know that when you start to use a muscle more than you have done before, you have a growing pain because it's strengthening and it's growing. And because of that, that's a good pain. Obviously it's an uncomfortable pain because pain is not a comfortable experience, but it's a good pain. And a lot of the time the coaches of the participants didn't distinguish between the two. They never encouraged one pain that would help them grow and discourage the pain of an actual injury. They never separated it. And I think that's for me where this research kind of can conclude from one perspective that when a coach is putting on this no pain, no gain mindset, which isn't always a bad thing. It becomes a good mindset to have with injury when you separate the type of pain. And it was something that the participants were really advocates for, that you have to separate this pain. You have to separate the pain of, can't skate anymore, with the pain of, this is my muscle strengthening, this is my muscle growing, and I will be stronger because of this pain and I will gain because of it. That needs to be separated.
Mathias Alberton (31:39)
You also mentioned in the research that you reviewed the literature and you found different results in different contradictory results or findings across the same papers. And I was thinking, it might well be because the subject of research, that is fear, is so subjective that is you you pose a question to participant A, B, C, X, Y, Z, and it will just respond differently than participant P, Q, R, and S to another interviewer in another piece of research. So let's say that answers are not exactly comparable across research because they are posed differently and answered differently by different people for something that is subjective to a high extent, that is the experience of fear. secondly, I thought, well, maybe also there is an issue here where we take in consideration studies which are very different than what I want to do.
So there is, let's say, technically speaking, an issue in methodology. So I want to make a cake and compare a cake to a fish cooked in the oven. It's going to be difficult to do it. What's your opinion here? Is it fear too subjective or are researcher to discontinued in research and fear.
Jamie Smokler (33:43)
So, my biggest strength of the research, in my opinion, would be the reflexive awareness, the understanding that my experience will first of all shape the interview itself, but my working relationship with lot of the participants, or my friendship relationship with a lot of the participants, allows for a level of comfortability that although fear is going to be subjective, it's a truer understanding. It's a more accurate depiction of their experience because of my reflexive awareness, because of my position within the research itself. The participants felt comfortable from the offset rather than needing to spend 10 questions of an interview building a rapport that another researcher might need to do, that rapport was there and the participants felt comfortable straight away, at least from what they've explained to me since. They felt comfortable, they felt at ease and it was a conversation and because it was semi-structured I was able to go away from the questions that I had previously prepared and just encourage that conversational style of an interview so that they felt open and they felt they could share anything. Fear is obviously very subjective and it's in my opinion never something that is going to have a standard way of assessing and that's why I chose qualitative because in the same way that on the flip side you look at positive well-being or mental health and we can use a standardized questionnaire with scales or rankings to understand how happy someone is or how depressed somebody may be.
To me, they lose the subjectivity of it because even though somebody might say that, let's say I was using this scale with fear, if I said on a scale of one to 10, how scared of this were you? And somebody ranks a seven, somebody ranks a nine. By looking at those numbers, although they are ranking, and we understand that because they are ranking, they are subjective, you lose the actual experience and you lose the individual experience and the difference between participants. So that was a bigger reason why I chose qualitative because I didn't want to push their experience into a box. I didn't want to categorize their experiences in certain ways. I wanted them to feel free to explore and to just explain and feel like they're able to provide for other people because the participants were made aware of my intentions with the research at the start of the interview. And a lot of them had this idea of actually just wanting to help and to raise awareness. So although some of the answers might then be worded a certain type of way, I felt that the methodology that I chose was more suitable for what I was aiming to do. Obviously, fear is still going to be subjective and what one person says and another person says, although it might be similar in wording, might mean two different things. I did rely on my experience in the sport to put context behind certain quotes, whether they might be the same as somebody else, but they might mean something different. So for me, that was purely because of my experience. And another researcher without the background in the sport that I have, potentially wouldn't have been able to do that. So I feel like yes, fear is subjective, but I chose the better methodology for understanding it.
Mathias Alberton (37:51)
It is interesting for me because myself, I've researched upon fear, anxiety in a different sport that was professional boxing. And I approached the idea of fear from, let's say, a cognitive perspective. So I try to first and foremost to identify or try to identify what fear is and how it's being appraised, how is categorized by the person, by the subject who is feeling fear slash anxiety. So kind of the approach is different. The things that researcher look for are kind of different. But then reading your research, there was a tiny bit of an idea that I found very intriguing. And it was not explore very much. There are two elements that I really like. One was in future direction. You're talking about fear as a negative, as opposed to positive emotions. And you mentioned a few. well, maybe future research could explore other things which are positive versus the negative of fear. Although fear might have positive elements into it. But then there is one that I found, this is actually interesting, really from a psychological perspective, kind of psychotherapeutic perspective, psychoanalytic perspective, which was maybe is also aligned with what your career will look like developing your skills as a psychologist.
I was reading through and I said, well, all this seems to boil down to fear of loss. But I don't know if I am onto something here, if I understood correctly what you were meant to convey. So that's the question. In your research, there are participants posing the aspect that, you know, maybe they need to move somewhere else. They have to make a big transition. They have to move to another league, to another country. So they are fearful of the change of conditions because they cannot control the change of conditions. And there are some flip side, like, I know I'm fearful that I'm going to lose important friendships.
But then, know, from, I'm a bit older than you are, that's an emphasis in Ombit. And we know that every kid who is transitioning from primary school to secondary school and is going to the secondary school where there are no difference, the kid was having in primary is already kind of a shock and there is a lot of fear, so to speak about the new environment, which is uncontrollable. So these kind of quotes, reference stories from your participants are kind of resonating with this general thing of I'm going somewhere that I don't know. I'm fearful of losing something that I care about.
So rather than the fear of lack of control, which you identified, I was thinking, well, maybe it's just the fear of loss. So, and the fear of loss maybe is not very, maybe spoken of just by some participants because it is something that really connects deeply with some participants and not others. Have you thought about this? Have you come across this thought? Or how do you react to this comment of mine?
Jamie Smokler (42:21)
So I completely, I resonate with it a lot because for example, when I moved from primary school to secondary school, I knew one person and that was one person in my year group and the other person in the school I knew was my older brother. But I went into this completely new environment and I was worried, I was anxious, I was scared. So I saw that very much in a personal perspective.
From what the participants described, obviously the privilege of the researcher is I have the entire transcript and the main difference is that I try to portray a story to the reader of the article and to academics and to coaches from what I have gathered from the research. Now, reading the articles themselves, there was so much and the amount of data that I had, I collected over 11 hours of interview data and the number of different smaller themes that were apparent and commonalities between skaters' experiences, there were too many to be able to condense into the themes. And when it came to refining themes and the approach to creating this thematic map that I used, things were encapsulated in bigger aspects. And the actual experience of loss and losing the environment you are in and having to move to a different environment, it wasn't necessarily described by the skaters from their competitive experience, but it was more so described by coaches who had moved countries for coaching reasons. So one of the participants that I interviewed skated himself in Germany and represented Germany, but when it came to coaching, he started in Germany and he moved and he's now coaching in the UK. And for him, the description of this loss was more about from a ⁓ business perspective, so to speak. From the idea of him as a coach wanting to coach athletes to the highest level but being unable to do so because of facilities or because of money or because of location. And he viewed the loss as necessary. So it wasn't a fear of the loss, it was more a necessary loss to have the change in environment, although you lose the environment you were in previously or you lose the opportunity to work with a certain coach because of moving, it's a necessary loss. So the fear didn't really come into it from what I took from the interviews and the context and the atmosphere of the interviews. It never felt like any participant described a fear of this loss. was more necessary losses along the way will provide you with this positive end goal. And if you liken it to a rocket or a ship that's going into space, you lose different aspects of the rocket as you go, but they're all necessary. They're necessary at the time to get you where you're trying to go, but they can't get you there, so they drop off. And that was very much described here, that the participants felt that along the way you were utilizing different things, whether that was coaches, whether that was environments, whether it was jobs to earn money for skating, they were all necessary at the time, but they become necessary losses in order to propel you further. So yeah, as I said, the fear itself wasn't really apparent from what I took from the interviews, but again, that's a rather subjective view because I'm obviously influenced by my experience and because of that I take from the interviews certain ⁓ theories that somebody else may not have necessarily taken and I describe it in my limitations. believe that because of this understanding that I have, it obviously means that there's a potential for me to have a more tunnel vision on what I experienced rather than general nuanced themes which I don't think was too apparent but again it's just a reflexive aspect that it may well have had.
Mathias Alberton (47:24)
That actually is a good point to try to wrap up this conversation upon fear and figure skating because your research was, because of your experience, was focusing on figure skating. Let's say, I am paraphrasing, investigating in this specific sport gave you, let's say, an advantage because of the insights you were having as an athlete yourself, which creates rapport, as you said with the interviewees you have approached. to wrap it up, would you say that is there any other sport that could be viable to make a research similar to yours, because it's similar to figure skating. But no figure skating, no, let's say, I think you mentioned gymnastics, something else where fear is actually an interesting component of the sport.
Jamie Smokler (48:39)
I think firstly, one of the aspects of fear that I never got to describe in the research just because it wasn't mentioned as often or as in depth as other experiences was fears relating to pressure and relate and representing a nation. So putting on your team's colors, your country, your nation's colors was an experience that some of these athletes felt immense pride with obviously but at the same time that comes along with this fear. The fear of again the loss of I might lose this position in the future because I may not do well enough or I may not do well and I'm going to fail or I might get hurt now because there's I'm thinking about this the wear in my country's colours too much. So any sport that involves athletes coming out on their own or with a partner wearing their nation's colours, whether that's at the Olympics where everyone will do, or just on their own sports world stage, any of them will have that aspect. And I think that would be an interesting avenue to explore of, you know, the pressure that comes with having your team on your back, looking in the mirror and seeing your nation's name and all of the people that that means are relying on you and betting on you and hoping and putting their dreams onto you because you're the one who can go and achieve it. So for that reason, I think any sport in particular that you do that with on a more regular basis than the Olympics. And what I mean by that is with figure skating, you compete for your country at most international events and there are multiple international events throughout the year and whether that's the Grand Prix, the Europeans, the Worlds, the Four Continents, you compete under your country's flag for all of those. Whereas, for example, in football you compete under your club's badge for the vast majority of your time, making only, on average, let's say 25 to 50 appearances for your country. And that's why I say with the regularity of representing your nation because for somebody who only does it the once, it may be a lot less experienced or a lot less kind of understood by them. Whereas somebody who does it week in, week out on the Grand Prix circuit in the figure skating community, that might represent itself in a very different way. So I think that would be the main thing is I don't know particular sports. Again, my kind of experience of sport has been predominantly with the sports that I have done myself or my colleagues and my friends have competed in. But I think anything where you're regularly wearing the country on your back, I think has in itself this whole level of fear that hasn't been explored yet. And I think that would definitely be an avenue to explore.
Mathias Alberton (51:56)
Jamie, thank you very much for being here and talking about your research. I really appreciate this conversation and thank you very much for accepting my invitation, truly.
Jamie Smokler (52:07)
Thank you for inviting me.
Mathias Alberton (52:10)
And thank you to all of you who have been listening to this episode of Martial Attitude Voice. If you do have questions you would like to post to Jamie, feel free to drop a text to me, an email, and of course you will find the link to the profile of Jamie in the description of the episode below. As usual, you keep in touch.