It's extremely hard for athletes to accept what's happened to them sometimes. It's hard to be beaten by a small margin and I've spoken with athletes who for years afterward have been tormented by the knowledge that had they done something ever so slightly different they could have been one-ten-thousandth of a second quicker.
When you have lost people like I lost my birth mom at a young age and you remember the whole process of losing her you want to grab on to something that makes you whole.