If you were to walk through the Olympic Village in Milan, you’d see a lot of athletes on their phones. Some are calling family, sure. Some are planning dates (will Sophia find love?). Most are editing reels. But Johannes “Hansi” Lochner, the 6-foot-3 bobsled pilot from Germany who just won gold, is doing something a little different. Instead of doomscrolling, Hansi is in something called the Athlete365 x Powerade Mind Zone chatting with his mental health coach, an AI generated “mind mentor” named naia.
Developed by Relief AI, naia was built with a closed-system “brain” trained on a decade of real-world interactions between athletes, therapists, and sports physiologists at Germany’s Scheelen Institute. The app tracks Hansi’s personal stress indicators (even a 220-pound Olympian has them) and helps him regulate them. It also offers hyper-specific steps to help him stay cool when the anxiety gets Olympic-level.
“Working with naia has become an important part of my preparation,” Hansi tells Cosmopolitan. “To perform at my peak, I need to filter that noise and stay centered—naia helps me structure my thoughts, reflect with clarity, and stay mentally disciplined...especially during high-pressure competition moments.”
Paris 2024 marked the first Olympic Games in which the International Olympic Committee (IOC) implemented athlete protections using AI, but Milan 2026 is taking it a step further with a more rapid response time... and therapy tech is only one branch of the operation.
Online abuse runs rampant at such high-profile live events, and the IOC is hoping AI might help curb that, too. Athletes can receive upwards of 2,000 abusive messages after just one event during the Olympics. (Imagine finishing the biggest race of your life and then opening your phone to hate speech, death threats, stalking, and straight-up cruelty. That has been the reality for Olympians for years now.) Athletes are simultaneously managing wins, losses, trauma, and the voices of digital mobs blowing up their phones.
The IOC wants AI to help. The Milan Winter Olympics are now the biggest AI-driven sporting event in history after launching a full-scale cyber-abuse system called Threat Matrix AI that was first piloted during the Paris Summer Olympics in 2024. Back then, the system monitored more than 2.4 million social media posts in 35 languages, flagging more than 152,000 posts and comments via AI and verifying more than 10,200 abusive posts and comments for removal. This year, it’s been rolled out in full: The IOC says the goal is to have the hate blocked before it reaches the athletes’ screens.
“It shouldn’t be on the athlete to disclose abuse,” writes Olympian (Moscow ’80) Gloria Viseras, current senior manager for safeguarding in the IOC’s Health, Medicine, and Science Department. “It’s the environment that needs to be safe. It’s the responsibility of those around the athlete to keep them safe.”
Threat Matrix AI proactively scans major social platforms in real time, marking red flags with a multilingual analysis of potentially weaponized emojis, threatening imagery, suspicious location data, and, of course, hate speech or extreme language. Posts deemed harmful are immediately reported to the social media company for rapid removal. (The cyber team at Threat Matrix AI works closely with social platforms like Facebook and X. While Threat Matrix AI bots do not have the power to literally remove threatening posts themselves, they have an avenue to escalate their concerns to the social platforms directly and push for action.) Anything posted that crosses the line into being potentially criminal is automatically marked as “evidence” and sent to the athlete’s National Olympic Committee so they can then report it to authorities.
For athletes like Hansi, it’s all welcome support. “Knowing that there is a system actively filtering out abuse allows me to concentrate fully on my preparation instead of being distracted by negativity,” Hansi adds. “That external protection, combined with strong mental coaching, creates the conditions I need to stay focused and compete for Olympic gold.”
