'Well, it's over now':

Post Olympic Depression isn’t just for athletes. This link, The Carnival is Over, is about us laypeople that suffer from POD.

On TV last week, a former Olympian was being interviewed and was asked, ‘what’s next for these Olympians?’
The former Olympian answered, and I’m paraquoting, ‘A couple weeks of press, interviews, viewings, appearances, and general madness; a couple months of a lot of attention; then, hopefully the athletes have something previously lined up for themselves. Most Olympic athletes have lived their sport. It’s all they’ve known and will often times not have anything else. Where next? School? Family? -Hopefully.’


I found this great example on the net:
‘ "I call them the post-Olympic blahs." Pat McCormick explains. "There's no depression just like them. I mean, they're bottomless if you let them.
"Consider that some athletes have never had a conversation in their lives that didn't have to do with swimming or diving, or running or jumping. They're interested only in their muscles, their times, their scores. They were conditioned from earliest childhood to point to a pinnacle of their lives occurring at age 20.
"It's scary. It's like you were suddenly dropped in a desert. At night, with no directions, and the stars aren't out. I mean, you've got coaches for everything else. Lots of people can tell you how high to jump, how fast to run, how deep to dive. But nobody tells you that you have to fit into that larger world. A world you pretty much ignored. Or took to be unimportant.
"You lose your identity. You have no tools. Education was something you fit around your life in the water. It was, as they say so glibly nowadays, irrelevant.” ‘

From somewhere else:
‘Something went out of their lives when the Olympic flame went out.’