“We’re not superhuman. We’re incredibly human.” The Mentality of U.S. Olympic Biathlete Deedra Irwin.

Deedra Irwin grew up as a runner. Injuries nudged her toward other sports, and at 16, late by any Nordic skiing standard, she discovered cross-country skiing. It wasn't a calling so much as a workaround. A way to stay in shape for the sport she was focusing on.

When she started Nordic racing, she fell. Five times in one race. Then four. Then three. And somewhere in that slow, stubborn arithmetic, the gears started turning.

"It wasn't fear of trying something new," she says. "It was excitement. How good can I get at something?"

A Sport She'd Never Heard Of

Ten years after picking up skis, Deedra found biathlon, a sport that combines cross-country skiing with shooting. She was 25. She had no shooting experience. She had a mountain of student debt. She was living out of her car.

To most people, this would be precisely the wrong moment to take up a new Olympic sport. To Deedra, it felt like a natural next chapter in the same puzzle.

"I can do half of this sport," she remembers thinking, "and I'm addicted to that half." The other half was just a new set of variables to solve.

She set herself an audacious internal clock: make the Olympic team in four years.

It was, she admits, a little crazy in hindsight. But she'd always believed that if you don't speak the thing into existence, it doesn't happen. Coaches, parents, somewhere along the way, someone had planted that perspective: belief first, then the work.

She joined the military. The support, the structure, the community that believed in her both helped her manage training and changed the scale of what she was attempting to do. "The journey wasn't just mine anymore," she says. "It belonged to all the communities that pushed and supported me too."

The Hard Part No-one Posts About

Deedra has now competed in the 2022 Beijing and 2026 Milano Cortina Olympics. She'll tell you herself that her most recent Games didn't go exactly the way she wanted. And yet she calls the experience successful because she can see, clearly, how much she's grown.

"Success looks different for everyone," she says. "There's only one winner. That means there are a lot of people who didn't reach their goal. That's not failure. That's sports."

What she's less casual about is what comes after the Games. She describes the post-Olympic period with the frankness of someone who's lived it twice: the contrast between the whirlwind of the Village, the clothes and the cameras and the energy, and then the return home that's suddenly, jarringly quiet.

"You're coming off a dopamine high," she says. "And you're in this post-Olympic depression of, okay, that was cool…now how do I move on?"

The fans are still there, she's quick to note. The love doesn't disappear. But NBC packs up and leaves, and with it, a certain kind of visibility that athletes (whether they admit it or not) have absorbed into their sense of self.

Asking for Help Is the Bravest Thing

"A lot of times we feel like what we're feeling isn't normal," she says. "We've all achieved a level of success. So why would we be sad?"

It's a question she has sat with herself. The same drive that gets an athlete to the start line (the grit, the relentless daily commitment) has its shadows. It tells you to push through. It tells you that struggle is weakness.

She's encouraged by how much that narrative is starting to change. Deedra notes the attention to athletes like Michael Phelps and Lindsey Vonn have pulled back the curtain on the ups and downs of their own journeys. When Vonn's recent crash played out publicly, Deedra felt something she recognized immediately. The particular heartbreak of a body that has given everything and a dream that didn't hold.

"We're not superhuman," she says. "We're incredibly human."