Australia celebrated its most successful Olympics ever in Paris, with 18 gold medals, but for those athletes who didn't achieve their goals, the come down from the Games is challenging to grapple with. 

Speaking on her podcast, Under the Surface, 3x3 basketballer Anneli Maley is still processing her emotions after the Gangurrus exited in the pool stage.

"I'm so proud of myself, I'm so proud of us, but I'm so disappointed, and I feel so embarrassed," she said.

"In my head, I'm like, I gave it everything I have, and it still wasn't enough. 

"But what is enough? That's the thing that I'm trying to come to terms with now."

It's a feeling Georgie Parker knows well. 

She went to her only Olympics in Rio 2016, when the world number two Hockeyroos were knocked out in the quarter-finals.

She says it was confronting trying to go back to regular life afterwards. 

"You are told what to eat, how much to sleep, you're weighing in every day, you're monitoring every single bit of your life," Parker told ABC Sport.

"And you come back, and that all stops, and you don't actually know what your future looks like. 

"A lot of Olympians think of four year blocks, so you're very lost on the other side of it.

"If you have no medal it's a little bit worse because you've got nothing to show for a really long period of time. 

Erasing the past

Parker says even eight years on, it's still something she deals with. 

"The longer you're away from it, the more you appreciate what you've done, it's only a select few that can get there," she said.

"But the first Olympics after Tokyo, I remember watching it going, 'I really don't want my team to win a medal.' 

"And it's an awful way to think, it's that little devil on your shoulder that you don't want to be there."

Parker is currently having her Olympic rings tattoo on her forearm removed, in an important part of the healing process for her.  

Parker says she was often stopped by people in the street who'd want to talk about the Olympics and then pity her when she said she didn't medal. 

"I hated that look of pity. My psychologist said that it's a very therapeutic thing that I've done, because you can see that weight of the disappointment is starting to go the further this is going along in removal."

Finding acceptance

Even for athletes who reach the pinnacle, like two-time sailing gold medallist Matt Wearn, it can be difficult when the Olympics spotlight fades. 

Parker says it's important not to forget Olympians outside of the Games window. 

"We put so much pressure on a very small amount of people who we don't really care about the other four years," she said.

"I think it's that sudden shift of being 100 miles an hour to suddenly no one caring about you again, is what's the hardest bit. 

"A lot of them aren't okay, a lot of them come out of the Olympics and slip into this sort of depression area where you don't know how to look after yourself, you don't really want to start exercising. 

"I put 10 kilograms on after the Olympics because I didn't want to look after myself in the same way. 

"And so it's just looking after the athlete as people and how you'd want to be treated after those big moments stop."

Maley is philosophical after her experiences too. 

"I am an Olympian, I am one of the best players at 3x3 in the world, we finished fifth and I am in that team and those are things that I am.

"What I am not is, I am not a medallist, I did not make it to any sort of semifinal, and that doesn't mean that I won't be in the future."