Bulimia and depression. Vanessa Fernandes assumes that she was ‘a slave to her own success’

Triathlete Vanessa Fernandes assumed that she was “a slave to her own success”, which culminated in her winning the silver medal at the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games, in which she was already sick and with the mission of “suffering, suffering, suffering”.

Thirteen years later, Vanessa Fernandes stars in the short film “72 Hours”, about the three days before the Olympic achievement, acknowledging that she had already competed with a diagnosis of depression.

“My goal was always the same, to win and be the best”, recalled in her statement the athlete from Perosinho, in Vila Nova de Gaia, admitting that the eating disorders started when she stopped eating, thinking about the seconds she could win.

With a life dedicated to High Performance, leaving her studies at the age of 16, when she was attending the 10th grade, Vanessa Fernandes did not discard her responsibility: “I only argued because I thought that what I walked was never enough”.

“Let’s hang on a little longer and see soon. What I allowed myself, I allowed others to do to me […]. If you go to the Games, pass the goal and get the medal and then die, that’s all right,” said the Gaian, in the short film directed by Miguel C. Saraiva and produced by the sports betting company Betclic.

In the countdown to the women’s competition of the Beijing2008 Games, on August 18, Vanessa Fernandes recalled the “constant bulimic episodes, [em que] he ate compulsively and vomited”, in a behavior not of an athlete, but “of someone who is sick”.

“I liked the pre-test days, it was as if you were going to get as many things as possible to find pleasure. There is an excuse to rest a little longer, to eat more, to not train so much and I enjoyed it”, he said, noting that at the time , felt “euphoria and happiness, for being able to eat after the test”.

On the day of the race, won by Australian Emma Snowsill, Vanessa Fernandes had the important support of her mother, who traveled for the first and only time by plane to accompany her in Beijing. “My mother held back a lot, it’s amazing, it seems I’m seeing that. She made sure I didn’t shut down,” he added.

Then “it was a lifetime in one day”.

“I went into a show. I dove into the water, I still remember the smell […] inside the war, inside the arena, and inside, it’s fighting to the end. You enter the perfect mode of a competition machine. In the transition to the race, I didn’t even bother going forward, I almost wanted an excuse. I was going to get a medal, because I had almost ruled out the possibility of winning,” he said.

The message I heard during the test was that it was necessary to “suffer, suffer, suffer” and even “suffer to death”. “They still want me to give more”, questioned Vanessa Fernandes, acknowledging that these stimuli gave her “bué rage” and an enormous desire to free herself.

“It was as if I had stopped being a slave to my own success. For me, it was already being too much and I diluted myself in achieving that result”, he stressed.

Already with Olympic silver, after the world title in 2007 and the five European absolute titles, Vanessa Fernandes felt she had reached the limit.

“I was depressed, it reached a point where I had to ask for help, otherwise it would destroy me. I was hospitalized. It was a great way to wake up to my personal development and then came life, peace, harmony, comes the reality,” he concluded.

After her Olympic success, Vanessa Fernandes returned to the Games at Rio2016, as an alternate in the marathon, having, in the following year, tried her return to triathlon.

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