Trailer for 'The Weight of Gold' About Pressure on Olympic Athletes

"It's gold… And then what?" HBO has released a trailer for The Weight of Gold, a film by award-winning sports history filmmaker Brett Rapkin. The revealing and powerful documentary explores the mental health challenges that Olympic athletes often face in deeply personal detail. The film debuts later this month at the same time as the 2020 Summer Games with 11,000 world class athletes in attendance were slated to be competing in Tokyo, Japan. It features accounts from Olympic athletes who share their own struggles with mental health issues, including Michael Phelps, Jeremy Bloom, Lolo Jones, Gracie Gold, Bode Miller, Shaun White, and many others. HBO has been releasing an impressive slate of compelling, honest, eye-opening doc films these last few years about so many different topics. This one looks like an excellent double feature with the doc In Search of Greatness, also about the passion of athletes and the never-ending push to be the best.

Here's the official trailer (+ poster) for Brett Rapkin's doc The Weight of Gold, from HBO's YouTube:

In a typical year, more than 3.6 billion people globally tune in to watch the Olympic Games. What most of these viewers don’t know is that just like one in five Americans, many of these Olympic athletes similarly face serious mental health challenges and struggle to find the necessary support and resources. The Weight of Gold seeks to inspire discussion about mental health issues, encourage people to seek help, and highlight the need for readily available support. It features accounts from Olympic athletes who share their own struggles with mental health issues, including Michael Phelps, Jeremy Bloom, Lolo Jones, Gracie Gold, Bode Miller, Shaun White, Sasha Cohen, David Boudia, Katie Uhlaender, and, posthumously, Steven Holcomb and Jeret "Speedy" Peterson (via his mother, Linda Peterson). The Weight of Gold is directed by American filmmaker Brett Rapkin, director of numerous other acclaimed sports documentaries including Spaceman: A Baseball Odyssey, Holy Land Hardball, On the Clock: The NFL Draft, and also Welcome to Dodgertown previously. HBO will release The Weight of Gold streaming starting on July 29th this month.