Asian Games: The other side of Roanne Ho's medal

In the quiet dawn, she began to write. Light had barely arrived in Jakarta but Roanne Ho, 25, couldn't sleep. In her backpack was her Asian Games 50m breaststroke silver medal, won the night before. Still in its case. Medals represent a 31-second race but she was reflecting on a longer, complex journey.

That journey is what Ho wrote about in a Facebook post which has been shared almost 600 times and should be read by anyone who cares about athletes. It is raw, revealing, generous. It is about being heckled by doubt and the leak of self-esteem. It is about the other side of the medal where insecurity lurks and the other side of the toned champion where the person lives.

"I always like to do big self-reflection after a major Games," she told me in a long interview. "I was thinking about the journey, from the Commonwealth Games (in April) to this podium. I am sure I'm not the only one who feels this kind of thing." There is no one story, she knows, but there are many struggles.

Ho is telling me honest stories and some I've heard before. Said quietly, over lunches, often with the recorder off. Athletes don't want us to see their weakness because in the fanciful image we've constructed for them they must be only brave. So they wear a mask.

"It's pretty true," says Ho. "Athletes don't want to look weak. We're supposed to be this strong person who achieves things normal people can't achieve. Also you don't want to show your rivals your weakness because it gives them a boost."

It's meaningful when athletes cry at a Games, either relieved or dejected, because it's a rare moment when they are unguarded. What we don't see on most days is the doubt that bubbles in the bloodstream. "I wondered," says Ho, "if what I am doing was worth it. You sacrifice so much, prepare so much and then you ask, 'What if you go there and don't do as well as you hope?'. Maybe you wasted all this time."

Am I fast enough, athletes wonder. There is no limit to human endeavour and it can be inspiring and yet suffocating. Athletes brutalise their bodies and sometimes don't progress for months and frustration hugs them tighter than a swimsuit.

"You try and change, you improve certain things, but you don't get results. Where did I go wrong? You've already tried your best and it's frustrating but we go back to the drawing board. Just 0.01 can make us happy. Improvement is improvement, we'll take it."

Athletes are an uncommon species for they are constantly measured, ranked, judged. Ho ruefully wishes that she was "more talented in the arts stuff because it's subjective. Sport is first, second, third, so clear cut". And too often athletes tie their self-esteem to their result.

"We are so result-driven that no one remembers second or third, forget about fourth. The first question people ask is, 'Did you win?' and you say 'No' and they go 'Aaaahhhh'. As if automatically you're not that great."

Ho is giving us a peek into a world we only think we know. Behind those goggles is a battle, not just for a medal but for balance. No one wants to lose, no one wants to let people down, no one wants labour to come to nothing.

All athletes have voices in their heads, but over-thinkers have too many. "I think," says Ho, "of variables I can't control and stress over them. I try to follow my competition and if someone in Japan has done 30.6 I think that person is probably going to win. What's she been doing? How did she get there? All this instead of focusing on myself." Amid emotion, logic steps back.

We always explore the self-belief of athletes but it's self-doubt that gnaws incessantly at them. "It's an insecurity," says Ho, "that you're not good enough, that you don't deserve to be here. In the Commonwealth Games call room before the 50m final I almost felt I was lucky to be there. If someone had come in and said, a mistake has happened, you're not supposed to be here, I would have followed them out."

She wrote on Facebook that after those Games she cried, skipped training, couldn't drag herself out of bed. "I was very fixated on the result," she told me. "I always wanted to break the 31-second barrier and I thought the Commonwealth Games would be it.

"So I only thought, 'below 31, below 31'. I was just .3 off that timing and the coaches said I did pretty good but I wanted the result so badly I got defeated. I thought, 'Should I keep on trying for the same thing to happen again?'."

Depression skulks in arenas and anxiety sneaks in and some of it found its way to Ho. She's hardly alone, for I know an Olympic champion who required therapy and sport is replete with suffering athletes. We need to acknowledge this, for to see athletes only as superhuman is to deny their humanity.

"It's bad that there is a stigma against depression," says Ho. "No one wants to talk about it and any suffering gets even worse. We should use any platform to say, 'It's OK not to be OK'.

"It's an illness we can't see, especially with athletes. I think we've all learnt to hide how we truly feel so that we seem like this stoic person. But just because we can't see it doesn't mean it doesn't exist. If you had the flu you'd go to the doctor to get it treated and I think the same should apply for mental health."

She worked with a psychologist and says: "I actually saw that I was achieving personal bests or national records for many major meets. She told me that maybe I need a difficult journey so that when I have a good result it feels more deserving."

Ho swims on, and she writes, her words a reminder to herself and others: "That you can't fault yourself if you tried your best and didn't get the result you want. Give it your all and have no regrets."

The medal still lies in the backpack, proof of what she has overcome. But it's her real expression of her struggle, her willingness to reveal her vulnerabilities in a swaggering world, that is her triumph. She is giving her tribe a necessary voice.