From Injury to Advocacy: How Athletes Are Using Their Platforms for Health Impact

INTRODUCTION

There is a moment that happens for a lot of athletes, sometimes after an injury, sometimes after a diagnosis, sometimes after hitting a wall that no amount of training could have prepared them for, where everything shifts. The focus stops being entirely about performance and starts being about something bigger.

About telling the truth. About making sure the next person does not have to figure it out alone.

That moment is becoming more common. And the athletes who reach it are changing the way sports talks about health.

Over the last decade, a growing number of professional and elite athletes have taken the hardest chapters of their careers, the injuries, the mental health crises, the diagnoses, the breakdowns, and turned them into platforms for advocacy. Not because it was easy or comfortable or part of the plan, but because they understood something important: the platform they built as athletes could do something that went far beyond a box score.

This is the story of that shift. And why it matters.

THE TURNING POINT: WHEN PAIN BECOMES PURPOSE

For most of sports history, the expectation was silence. You got hurt, you recovered, you came back. You struggled mentally, you pushed through, you never said a word. The locker room code was clear, what happened inside stayed inside, and showing any kind of vulnerability was a liability.

That code is cracking. And the athletes doing the most to crack it are the ones who have been through the worst of it.

Kevin Love's turning point came during a game in November 2017. The Cleveland Cavaliers forward had a panic attack on the court, heart racing, vision narrowing, body shutting down, and left the game without explanation. It was not an injury anyone could see. It was not something that showed up on an MRI. And in the days that followed, the silence around what had happened felt more suffocating than the panic attack itself.

Love chose not to stay silent. In a 2018 essay in The Players' Tribune titled "Everyone is Going Through Something," he wrote about his anxiety and depression with a level of honesty that was almost unheard of for an active professional athlete. The response was overwhelming. Fans, players, coaches, and mental health advocates all responded, not because Love was uniquely fragile, but because he had said out loud what so many people had never heard acknowledged in sports at all.

He did not stop there. That same year, Love founded the Kevin Love Fund, an organization dedicated to breaking the stigma around mental health through education, research, and advocacy. The fund has set an ambitious goal of helping over a billion people and has already partnered with UCLA to establish an endowed chair in the psychology department focused on diagnosing, preventing, and treating anxiety and depression.

One panic attack. One honest essay. One decision not to stay quiet. And a platform that is still growing.

SIMONE BILES: REDEFINING WHAT STRENGTH LOOKS LIKE

If Kevin Love opened the door, Simone Biles blew it off the hinges.

At the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, Biles, the most decorated gymnast in history, the athlete who was supposed to be the undeniable centerpiece of Team USA's gold medal run, withdrew from the team final and several individual events citing her mental health and a case of the "twisties," a dangerous condition in which a gymnast loses spatial awareness mid-air.

The reaction was immediate and divided. Some called it brave. Others called it quitting. A few prominent voices called her a national embarrassment and the biggest quitter in sport.

What happened in the years that followed told a different story.

Biles returned to competition at the 2024 Paris Olympics and won four medals, including gold. More importantly, the conversation she started in Tokyo, about mental health, about the pressure on elite athletes, about what it actually means to be strong, had taken on a life of its own. Athletes at every level began speaking more openly about mental health in the months and years after Tokyo. The number of players and programs seeking mental health resources increased. The stigma, while not gone, had been meaningfully disrupted.

Biles has said that becoming a mental health advocate was not her original goal, that she would have preferred to simply compete and win. But her willingness to step back, to prioritize her own safety, and to tell the truth about why, ended up having more impact than another gold medal ever could have.

"See for me, that was the hardest part," Biles said. "Speaking out on mental health, I knew that I could have the possibility of becoming an advocate for that. But it wasn't my goal. It's not what I really wanted."

That honesty, about not wanting to be an advocate, about arriving at it anyway, is part of what makes her story so powerful. It was not a calculated brand decision. It was a human response to an impossible moment. And that authenticity is exactly why it resonated.

JAKE DIEKMAN AND LARRY NANCE JR.: BUILDING SOMETHING FOR THE NEXT ONE

Not every act of advocacy starts with a viral moment or a headline. Some of the most meaningful work happens quietly, built by athletes who decided that going through something hard in silence was not enough, and that the next person who faced the same thing deserved better.

Jake Diekman was 11 years old when he was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis. He went on to pitch in the major leagues for over a decade, one of the most physically demanding positions in professional sports, while managing a disease that affects the digestive tract and can cause debilitating symptoms during flares. In 2017, he underwent three surgeries to have his colon removed. He came back and kept pitching.

Diekman has used his platform consistently to raise awareness about inflammatory bowel disease, not because it was glamorous or because it helped his career, but because he knew how isolating a diagnosis like that can feel, especially for a young athlete who does not see anyone else talking about it.

Larry Nance Jr.'s story follows a similar path. Diagnosed with Crohn's disease at 16, he spent years managing a condition that made it difficult to even get out of bed before finding a treatment plan that worked. He made the NBA. And then, rather than quietly move on, he co-founded Athletes vs. Crohn's and Colitis, a nonprofit dedicated to raising awareness about inflammatory bowel disease in adolescents and helping young athletes excel despite their diagnosis.

The through-line in both stories is the same: I went through this, I did not want anyone else to go through it alone, so I built something. That is advocacy in its most direct and human form.

JARREN DURAN: SPEAKING UP SO SOMEONE ELSE DOESN'T HAVE TO

Earlier this year, we wrote about Jarren Duran's mental health journey, his struggles with depression during the 2021 and 2022 seasons, his suicide attempt in 2022, and his decision to share that story publicly in the Netflix documentary The Clubhouse: A Year With the Red Sox.

What makes Duran's advocacy particularly significant is the context in which it happened. He did not come forward after retirement, at a safe distance from the sport and its pressures. He came forward as an active player, in a market as intense as Boston, knowing full well what the reaction could be.

He said he shared it so that even just one person who felt alone might feel less so.

That is the essence of what athlete advocacy around health looks like at its most important. Not a press release. Not a branded awareness campaign. One person saying, I was in the dark, I found a way through, and I want you to know that it exists in the loudest possible room, at the greatest possible personal risk.

WHY THIS MATTERS BEYOND SPORTS

It would be easy to frame athlete health advocacy as a sports story. But the reason these moments land the way they do, the reason Kevin Love's essay got read by millions of people who had never watched an NBA game, the reason Simone Biles' decision in Tokyo sparked conversations in offices and classrooms and therapy offices around the world, is that they are not really about sports at all.

They are about permission.

When a person who has been held up as the physical and mental ideal — the strongest, the most disciplined, the most competitive, says "I struggled," or "I was not okay," or "I needed help," it gives permission to every person watching who has felt the same thing and stayed quiet because they thought they were supposed to be stronger.

That permission is not a small thing. Research consistently shows that stigma is one of the primary barriers to people seeking mental health treatment. When high-profile figures normalize the conversation, when they demonstrate that struggling is not weakness and asking for help is not failure, it moves the needle in ways that clinical resources and awareness campaigns often cannot reach on their own.

Athletes have always had platforms. What is changing is what they are choosing to do with them.

THEY BEYOND THE GAME HEALTH PERSPECTIVE

At Beyond the Game Health, the work these athletes are doing is not separate from what we do, it is an extension of the same mission.

Every time an athlete uses their platform to speak honestly about injury, mental health, chronic illness, or the transition out of sport, they are doing something that we believe in deeply: they are treating the whole athlete as worthy of attention, not just the performance.

We also believe that advocacy should not have to start with a crisis. The athletes in this article, Love, Biles, Diekman, Nance, Duran, all arrived at their advocacy through some version of a hard moment. And while those moments produced something meaningful, the goal should be a sports culture where athletes have the support, the language, and the psychological safety to address these things before they become a breaking point.

That is what Beyond the Game Health is building toward. Not just catching athletes when they fall, but walking alongside them throughout a career, so that the advocacy they do later is born from strength and purpose, not just survival.

Because the most powerful thing an athlete can do with a platform is tell the truth. And the most powerful thing we can do is make sure they have the support to get there.

CONCLUSION

Kevin Love did not plan to become a mental health advocate. Simone Biles did not want to be one. Jarren Duran shared his story not for recognition, but because he thought it might help one person feel less alone. Jake Diekman and Larry Nance Jr. built organizations because they refused to let the next young athlete navigate a difficult diagnosis without someone in their corner.

None of these were easy decisions. All of them mattered.

The shift happening in sports right now, where athletes are increasingly willing to use their platforms for health impact rather than just highlight reels is one of the most important developments in the culture of competition. It is making sports more honest, more human, and more helpful to the millions of people who look to athletes not just for entertainment, but for something to believe in.

From injury to advocacy is not a straight line. But for the athletes willing to walk it, it may be the most important play of their career.

At Beyond the Game Health, we support athletes at every stage, from performance to recovery to advocacy. If you are ready to tell your story or build something bigger than the game, we are here. Reach out.