The Questions the Olympics Asked That Most Leaders Spend a Lifetime Avoiding

I watched a lot of the Milano Cortina Winter Olympics this February from my home in Portugal. Partly because the sport was extraordinary. Mostly because, after twenty-five years of studying self-leadership, I find the Olympics irresistible as a laboratory.

Nowhere else does the full complexity of human performance play out so publicly, so relentlessly, and with so little room to hide.

What struck me most this year was not the medal count or the record-breaking performances, impressive as they were. It was the questions that kept surfacing beneath the surface of the competition. Questions that I recognise immediately, because I hear versions of them in every coaching conversation I have, in every keynote I deliver, in every workshop where I ask a room full of senior executives to sit quietly with something uncomfortable.

The questions are these.

Is your identity dependent on winning? And who are you when the result does not go your way?

The Difference Between a Result and an Identity

American figure skater Ilia Malinin arrived in Milan as the most consistently dominant competitor in his sport. He had won twelve international events in a row. The world expected gold.

He finished eighth.

What happened next is what I want to talk about, because it is more interesting than the competition itself.

In the days following his result, Malinin spoke publicly about the distinction between what he does and who he is. He talked about being a human being first and an athlete second. About a result being a moment in time, not a definition of a person.

I want to be clear about something. That is not a consolation narrative. That is not the kind of thing you say to make yourself feel better after a disappointing performance. That is a genuine psychological achievement, and most people never reach it, regardless of how successful they become.

In my book, Self Leadership (McGraw-Hill, 2012), I described what I called the performance-identity trap: the mistake of building your sense of self on top of your outputs, your results, your rank, or your title. It is an easy trap to fall into, particularly if you have been successful. Success reinforces the association between who you are and what you achieve. Over time, the two become so fused that a setback in performance registers as a threat to identity rather than simply a problem to be solved.

The leaders I have coached who struggle most during difficult periods are almost always those who have never separated the two. The ones who navigate disruption most effectively are those who completed that work before the crisis arrived.

Malinin completed it in real time, in front of the world, at twenty-one years old. That is remarkable. It is also, I would argue, the most transferable lesson from these Games.

Ask yourself honestly: if your title disappeared tomorrow, if your performance metrics fell short for two consecutive quarters, if the strategy you championed failed publicly, would your sense of who you are remain intact? Or would it wobble?

The answer to that question tells you more about your self-leadership than any personality assessment I know.

The Mentor Who Showed Up Without Being Asked

There is a second story from Milan that I have not been able to stop thinking about.

American gymnastics champion Simone Biles was not competing at the Winter Olympics. She was there as a spectator and wellness advocate. When Malinin processed his result in the public eye, she messaged him immediately, without being asked, without any formal role or responsibility to do so.

“I have been exactly where you are. You can come out the other side.”

I have spent a long time thinking about what made that intervention so effective, and the answer is not complicated. It was not the advice. It was not the strategy. It was the combination of credibility and timing. Someone who had genuinely experienced the same thing, showing up at the moment of maximum vulnerability, and saying: I see what is happening to you, because it happened to me.

This is what I describe in POTENTIAL-IZE (Wiley, 2026) as the Nurture principle: the understanding that unlocking potential in other people is rarely a matter of formal intervention. It does not require a programme, a framework, or a scheduled session. It requires the willingness to be present, to be honest about your own experience, and to trust that your presence at the right moment can shift something that no curriculum could reach.

Think about the people who shaped your own development most profoundly. I would be willing to bet that at least one of them did not do it through a structured mentoring relationship. They did it by showing up at the right moment and saying something you needed to hear from someone who had actually been there.

That is self-leadership extended outward. And it is available to each of us every day if we pay enough attention to the people around us.

Who Gets to Decide Who You Are?

The most polarizing figure at these Winter Games was not criticized for her performance. Freestyle skier Eileen Gu, competing for China despite being born and raised in San Francisco and educated at Stanford, has been a source of argument since her first Olympic appearance in Beijing 2022.

The criticism comes from multiple directions, and I am not going to adjudicate it here. What interests me is something more fundamental than politics.

The discomfort surrounding Eileen Gu is, at its core, discomfort with self-authorship. She has made choices that do not conform to the simplified identity that various audiences wanted to assign to her. And rather than resolving her complexity on behalf of those audiences, she has continued to inhabit it fully, consistently, and without apparent apology.

In Self Leadership, I wrote that genuine freedom is not the absence of constraint. It is the deliberate, conscious exercise of choice within whatever constraints exist. That is a harder kind of freedom than it sounds. Most of us, if we are honest, spend a significant portion of our lives performing a version of ourselves that we have constructed in response to other people's expectations, whether those expectations come from our organisations, our families, our cultures, or our own internalised judgments about who we are supposed to be.

Self-leadership begins when you notice the difference between the self you perform and the self you actually are. It deepens when you develop the stability and the courage to close that gap.

Gu is a complicated figure for complicated reasons. But the psychological capacity she demonstrates, to hold a genuinely complex identity in a world that is constantly demanding simplification, is one that every leader operating in a diverse, globalised, AI-disrupted environment is going to need.

The Ceiling Is Higher Than You Think

I want to end with two stories that deserved more attention than they received.

Canadian figure skater Deanna Stellato-Dudek competed at these Games at the age of 42, having returned to competitive skating after a sixteen-year retirement. Chinese aerialist Xu Mengtao, 35, became the first athlete in Olympic history to win two gold medals in the aerials, adding to a collection that now spans five Games.

I spent seventeen years as a physiotherapist working with elite athletes before I moved into leadership development, and what these two performances confirmed for me is something I observed clinically and have been arguing professionally ever since. The nervous system, when it is trained rather than simply conditioned, continues to develop in ways that raw youth cannot replicate. What a 42-year-old brings to a high-stakes performance is not a diminished version of what she had at 26. It is an entirely different quality of capability: integrated experience, refined judgment, and an emotional steadiness that comes from having been through the fire more than once and knowing how to navigate it.

We live and work in a culture that has developed an unhealthy relationship with age and potential. There is a pervasive assumption that potential peaks early and declines thereafter, that the most exciting talent is always the youngest, that experience beyond a certain point is a liability rather than an asset.

Stellato-Dudek and Xu made a compelling counter-argument on the world's most scrutinised stage. Your potential is not a fixed quantity that depletes with time. It is a dynamic frontier that expands in direct proportion to the quality of your self-leadership.

That is a central argument of POTENTIAL-IZE, and it is one that twenty-five years of coaching have not given me a single reason to doubt.

The Question Worth Sitting With

Artificial intelligence is transforming what organisations need from their leaders. The tasks that used to justify seniority, analysis, synthesis, strategic option generation, and a great deal of specialised knowledge, are increasingly being performed faster and more comprehensively by machines.

What remains irreducibly human is the capacity to know yourself clearly enough to lead others through conditions of genuine uncertainty. To rebuild self-trust after a public failure. To show up for someone at the moment they need it most. To hold a complex identity with enough stability that disruption cannot destabilise your judgment.

These are the capabilities that Ilia Malinin, Simone Biles, Eileen Gu, Deanna Stellato-Dudek, and Xu Mengtao demonstrated across seventeen days in the Italian Alps. None of them are soft skills. They are the hardest skills there are. And unlike almost everything else we once thought defined leadership, they cannot be automated.

The Olympics always end. The questions they raise do not.

Who are you, right now, beneath the title, the result, and the expectation?

That is where self-leadership begins.

Andrew Bryant is the founder of Self Leadership International and the author of Self Leadership (McGraw-Hill, 2012) and POTENTIAL-IZE: How Leaders Unlock Human Potential in the Age of AI (Wiley, 2026). He coaches senior leaders and speaks to organisations across more than forty countries.