The Race Within
How Dontae Richards-Kwok Tackled Mental Health in Athletics
Written by Lucas Yang | Edited by Isabella Della Ganna & Marc Louie
Dontae Richards-Kwok is a former Canadian National Team sprinter and one of York University’s most decorated athletes. During his time at York, he won 16 OUA medals and 14 CIS medals, while also achieving OUA all-star and CIS All-Canadian honours.
Richards-Kwok started playing sports at a very young age. He grew up in a household with four brothers and a sister—an environment he describes as “quite hectic,” but extremely beneficial in igniting his passion for sports.
A lot of the early exposure he had to sports can be attributed to his brothers, who would frequently play basketball while Richards-Kwok followed them and joined in on a few pick-up games here and there.
More or less, Richards-Kwok’s childhood involved him having fun playing sports rather than competing. It wasn’t until his first year at York University that he started to seriously compete in high-level sport and discovered his true athletic talent in sprinting. This point marked his start in high-performance sports and was when he began competing with individuals at the same level as him. He describes this experience as not necessarily a “mental blow” but rather a sign that his athletic career was being taken to another level.
“It was kind of a big wake-up call,” he said.
Photo by Canadian Olympic Committee
Richards-Kwok didn’t see this as an opportunity to back down and let his ego take a hit, but instead saw it as a chance to add fuel to the fire and get stronger as an athlete.
During this time, Richards-Kwok first encountered the concept of mental health and the struggles that can come with it. However, he explains that he didn’t personally experience significant mental health challenges, like anxiety, stress, or depression. Instead, he saw mental health as a key motivator for competition, recognizing the pressure and stress that come with high-level sports. To manage this, Richards-Kwok relied on thorough preparation as his way of handling the demands of competition.
He recalls a quote from the late, great Kobe Bryant that instilled the value of preparation in him.
“I don’t know the exact quote, but it basically said that he never got into a game that he was nervous about because of the amount of preparation that went into things,” Richards-Kwok said.
Richards-Kwok always trusted his preparation.
“Trust in my prep led me to not have competition anxiety, and to be confident in moments of high stress,” he said.
Photo by Armando Villavona
That said, Richards-Kwok doesn’t credit any single strategy or technique for his success; instead, he emphasizes the importance of his overall approach to preparation. In the latter half of his career, however, he increasingly relied on self-talk to stay focused during competitions. At this stage, his coaches weren’t always there for pre-race pep talks, so he took on the responsibility of mentally motivating himself.
“I would say the only big kind of difference towards the end of my career is I took a lot of those things on my own shoulders,” he said.
A moment comes to mind when Richards-Kwok was competing in China in a stadium full of 80,000 fans, where trust in himself, and himself only, and all the preparation he had done up to that point was all he could rely on.
“There’s no real preparation for that; all you can really do is rely on all the prep that you have done over the past four, five, six months,” Richards-Kwok said.
Photo by Athletics Canada
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In a sport such as sprinting, where the average sprinter runs 15 to 20 seconds per race, preparation is key because you need to be completely locked in during that time frame, and Richards-Kwok never took that for granted.
Richards-Kwok would warm up for an hour-and-a-half prior to competing. To most, this seems like overkill given that he would only be running for 15 seconds at a time, but given that race results can come down to a hundredth of a second, Richards-Kwok’s preparation was even more valuable.
He also points to visualization as a key factor in his success in competition. Being able to visualize what those 15 to 20 seconds of physical exhilaration would look like was essential for Richards-Kwok.
“That mental and physical prep shows itself when the competition actually starts,” he said.
Richards-Kwok credits a lot of his success on the track to his support system and coaching staff. He used his mentors and coaches as a way to prepare and visualize for upcoming competition, due to the fact that most of the coaches he trained with had already coached prior Olympians and competed in the very situations Richards-Kwok found himself in.
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Having these coaches provided Richards-Kwok the ability to visualize what the competition would be like, which gave him somewhat of an advantage in his mental preparation.
Photo by Athletics Canada
Though Richards-Kwok still has a strong tie to competition, he underscores the difficulty that a lot of athletes experience post-sport and says that he himself still has trouble detaching from the sport he competed in for years.
“You have to find a whole new identity,” he said.
He maintained this attachment by becoming a coach at Guelph University for a few seasons, with some freelance coaching for professional sprinters on the side.
Richards-Kwok continues to search for a different passion that was once filled by sprinting.
“It’s hard to replace that kind of love for something; I think I’m still in search of that thing,” he said.
As Richards-Kwok continues to find a way to fill that void, his experience in high-performance sport will help many with the hope of thriving mentally in a physically demanding environment.