Catherina McKiernan: Mental preparation vital for Irish athletes to overcome common Olympic pitfalls
McKiernan: "They need to constantly keep their thought processes positive, to feed their minds with good thoughts and memories of good races they’ve had, so that anxiety or negative thoughts don’t overwhelm them."
By now most of our athletes will have moved into the Olympic village in Rio and be trying to settle and, for those who are doing it for the first time, that's not easy.
Rio looks very glamorous, obviously, but I'll never forget my first experience of an Olympic village, in Barcelona in 1992. It was so daunting.
