For sports fans all over the globe, the Olympic Games provides the chance to watch the best athletes in the world compete for the highest stakes. And already, the 2024 Games in Paris has provided memorable moments for Americans. The men’s 4x100-meter freestyle relay team won the country’s first gold medal. Team USA, led by one of the most decorated athletes in history Simone Biles, earned the gold medal in women’s team gymnastics. And on the men’s side, the United States gymnastics team took home its first medal in 16 years when they captured the bronze.
While the athletes are performing at their best, there are many more behind-the-scenes. Dr. Jason Zaremski is a nonoperative musculoskeletal and sports medicine physician currently serving in the Olympic Village as one of the official doctors for Team USA.
“All of us are there to do what we can to help every athlete be as successful as possible,” he says.
Located primarily in the Athletes Village during his stay in Paris, Zaremski is one of many health professionals, including medical doctors, physical therapists, chiropractors, athletic training staff and mental health specialists at the Olympics to provide support for athletes:
“Everyone is there to assist, whether that means from picking up the coffee run, picking up the towels to evaluating and assessing athletes, and treating them so we can get them healthy and safe back on the court, field or track as soon as possible.”
While his care and attention at the Olympics won’t be limited to one sport, his most recent experience has been helping with United States Soccer. He’s part of the volunteer physician pool for the U-17 U.S. women’s soccer team and prior to the Olympic Games, he traveled with the youth teams to several international appearances. He also served at the FIFA 2022 World Cup in Qatar, primarily at the training camp portion in Dubai. After a 15-hour flight, he was thrown right into the thick of things, assisting the sports performance team with anything and everything they needed.
With so much travel, Zaremski knows how to treat athletes who participate in international soccer tournaments. For athletes such as Atlanta United soccer players Bartosz Slisz and Saba Lobjanidze, who traveled across the Atlantic Ocean to play with their home countries in the UEFA European Championship earlier this summer.
For these athletes, consistency is really important.
“It really does amaze me, especially when it's the highest level of the sport, for men and women, when you're going from your club team, flying across the pond or across the world, then going to go back to it,” he says. “That's where nutrition is huge. Sleep is huge. And communication is really important.”
His last point is important for athletes of all ages. Whether you’re an athlete competing in the Olympics or a 16-year-old playing in the Atlanta United Academy, it’s important to communicate needs with the medical and sports staff. Going from international play back to club requires clear communication because even if it’s tweaking a muscle, that information is important for the medical and training staff, otherwise known as ‘the team behind the team.’ Seeing a PMR (physical medicine & rehab) doctor and communicating clearly helps the process. It helps that doctor, someone like Zamenski who’s proactive and a problem-solver, locate the problem and develop a recovery plan more quickly.
“It’s always important for the athlete to be very open with his or her medical team,” he says. “There’s a really bad saying that you don't want to be known as ‘Doctor Shutdown,’ as in shutting down an athlete for 2-3 weeks. What we want to do, and what we know from data in every sport, is that if an athlete lets a doctor, athletic trainer, physical therapist in on something that’s been going on earlier, then we can get to that and develop a plan.”
PMR and sports medicine physicians try to look at the athlete as a whole, and the idea is to be proactive rather than reactive. They want to figure out a way to prevent injuries or issues from occurring again in the future, whether it be overuse, some imbalance in nutrition, a tweak that needs to be taken care of to prevent serious injury or a true injury.
“If you are someone that doesn't sleep well on planes, maybe we give you a little bit extra melatonin or a piece of turkey that has tryptophan in it, so we can adjust your sleep schedule or something that may be tougher for you than another person,” he says. “Those are the things that we work on. We like to look at everybody as an individual, even though they we plan for the whole team, we can have little quirks or tweaks, if you will, for individual athletes based on past medical history, past surgical history or age.”
Zaremski’s has worked primarily with youth players under 17 years of age. With two daughters of his own, Zaremski had a good temperament and understanding of working with younger, female athletes.
In Paris, he’ll encounter a variety of athletes from all different sports and age groups. At the Olympics, there’s more than a 50-year age gap between the oldest and youngest athlete. The oldest athlete in Paris is Australian equestrian star Mary Janna (69 years old). The youngest is Chinese skateboarder Zheng Haohao (11 years, 11 months).
When looking at differing ages in soccer specifically, the treatment given to a 16-year-old in the Academy will differ than that given to a 28-year-old starter on Atlanta United’s first team. The Academy player might encounter an injury for the first time. Those players might still be learning what habits work for them to optimize performance and feel their best. Their bodies are also younger and have gone through less stress. A professional soccer player, on the other hand, has the luxury of experience. They also usually have greater resources and dedicated staff.
The same applies with the international programs. Paris in 2024, for example, is the 30th Summer Olympic Games. The event is well-funded and scrupulously planned with lots of resources available.
“You’re a verging soccer player, that's awesome. If you’re hurting from time to time, let's figure out a way that you can work on it,” Zaremski says. “I think it's important that they communicate with their parents, physical therapist. If they have to see a doctor, so be it. It doesn't mean they're getting shut down, but let’s try to figure out why you're hurting the first place."
Primarily a baseball player, Zaremski’s second sport growing up was soccer. His father was an all-state soccer player in high school and college, and Zaremski himself played goalkeeper. Soccer is one of his favorite sports, so it was a natural fit for him to get involved in U.S. Soccer, which would eventually be his entry point to working with Olympic athletes.
Zaremski shares that soccer has different physical and health expectations than other sports he’s worked with. When treating soccer players, he’s on the lookout for a few factors: running, heat and conditioning. This requires work that is more leg-focused, clearly different from other athletes such as baseball pitchers who don’t run nearly as much and use mostly their arms.
Another factor that physicians need to consider with soccer are acute injuries which are occur less in soccer than other sports but can be caused from sudden movements. This might be more common with goalkeepers who have to make quick, twitchy reactions that involve a quick dive or high jump as Zaremski explains:
“For baseball, as an example, you worry about your throwing injuries when you’re pitchers. You don't really have too much heat illness in baseball, except for maybe if a catcher's catching a double header or something like that. And there's might be more acute injuries when you have to maybe sprint for a ball one time, whereas in soccer, you're sprinting almost all the time.”
Traveling to so many different countries equipped Zaremski with knowledge of how to treat athletes in different environments under varying conditions. During his work as a physician for U.S. Soccer, he’s encountered high altitudes in Mexico City and experienced a 20-second earthquake in Guatemala. He’s already anticipating the FIFA U-17 Women’s World Cup, which will take place in the Dominican Republic later this year during hurricane season.
So far, there haven’t been too many serious dangers to disrupt competition in Paris – only croissants and Nutella as the doctor hoped for. Sports federations like U.S. Soccer are well-organized and have emergency action plans for each of these situations. For example, if a player needed to go to a hospital for an X-ray, there’s a protocol is in place, a list of hospitals, routes to take, country’s doctors that the federation works with that makes medical emergencies or needs easier to satisfy, etc. Even when it comes to prescription medications, where laws might differ between countries, U.S. Soccer will provide documentation to avoid any confusion.
“There's a lot of planning that goes on behind the scenes. My goal really is to not get in the way,” Zaremski says. “I just try to help out the athletic trainers whenever they need it. From a medical standpoint, especially as a PMR physician, we want to try to figure out what's going on, just like any doctor, and then we treat everything, whether it is a musculoskeletal injury, whether it's a medical issue, whether it's a mental issue, psychological issue, and all the above.”
While he’s a decorated and respected physician, high in his field, Zaremski is not above doing some of the physical work involved in international competition. When traveling with a national soccer team, it really becomes an atmosphere of comradery and service, from the players down to the staff:
“We all carry bags. We all carry the water bottles. We all do all that, and all that comes into play, so that we make it seamless for the athletes and the coaches. Their job is to go out and perform as best they can, and our job is to assist them behind the scenes as best we can.”
Click here to learn more about Jason Zaremski, M.D. Follow all the latest Olympics coverage on NBC Sports and Peacock.
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