All in the name of competition
Please don’t talk to me about the Olympics. I find the news coming out of there horrific and incomprehensible. Actually, we can talk about Lindsey Vonn and the way the media is enabling her idiocy. There is nothing “brave” or “admirable” or about someone saying, “Gosh, you know, I just don’t want to face reality.”—I’m synthesizing and paraphrasing here, obviously—“Didn’t that little gymnast compete on a broken ankle? Sure, she was competing in an event where the impact to the ankle was minimal and risk could be mitigated, and I’m competing in a sport where I need to place extreme pressure on both legs, but I’d hate to get an xray and find out I have a fracture. It’d be much more romantic for my leg to shatter halfway down the course—won’t the papers call me a trooper and awesome athlete then?!”
Actually, what she said was, “I don’t know that it’s not broken. My physio that was there [in Austria] wanted me to get a X-ray and I refused to get one. I pretty much stuck my fingers in my ear and just pretended like I didn’t hear what was going on. I didn’t want to hear that my shin was fractured because, at the time, that’s what it looked like.”
God, I’m glad we pick our athlete-heroes wisely. What an awesome poster-child.
The stuff you see oozing out of your screen right now? That’s sarcasm.
We have reached a point in sports where athletes are risking their lives on course if they make a mistake, and we justify this because “they’ll die doing what they love.” I’ll buy that sort of risk-taking rhetoric for Joe Smith who goes and climbs Everest alone in a blizzard, but in an organized sports setting, someone has to be responsibility for safety.
And it sure as hell won’t be the athletes. What athlete ever said, “Uh—this doesn’t look safe. I’ll just sit this one out. Y’all go on and compete for fame and glory. I’ll be waiting when you get back.”
They don’t say that. They don’t make that decision. They enter the competition at all costs, no matter what injuries—diagnosed or stupidly kiss-and-make-it-bettered (Vonn)—they have. Because they’re athletes and they compete and this drive to maybe kill themselves is all about their own desire to succeed and not at all about public pressure. And the public pressure it not at all driven by a social fascination with chills and thrills. The new stuff oozing out of your monitor? Cynicism.
And—you know—let’s go to the luge.
Right after Nodar Kumaritashvili died, the existing concerns of the lugers were all over the place—they had been questioning the safety of the track, speeds were much faster than anticipated, and even top-notch athletes—like the defending champion—were crashing. And now? “Oh, gosh, you know, the athletes have had time to review things, and they agree it was pilot error, and they are now fully convinced the track is safe.”
I am sure no one sat the teams down and said, “Look, voicing your concerns about the safety of the track is hurting the Olympic image. You are the best of the best, and you are supposed to march out there and compete. With a smile on your face! Here are some numbers; allow them to override your actual impression from running down the track. It’s a shame about Kumaritashvili’s death, but after all, he died doing what he loves. And he made a mistake. Now go race for your country, mother, and apple pie—and shut up about safety!”
If you think that conversation didn’t happen, in some form or other—formal or not—you’re an idiot.
Have you noticed the news reports have done a complete 180, from doom and gloom and “what is going on there?” to butterflies and roses? You think that isn’t PR?
And Kumaritashvili is dead because of pilot error, and everyone is accepting that. Just like that. Gosh, it’s a shame, but what can you do?
I get that life is risky, and elite sports are elite for a reason. I could kill myself on a horse, in my car, or by stumbling over something in my apartment and hitting my head just right. By the time you get to the elite levels of competition, you know (or should know) your sport very well. And that includes the risk you take every time you step into your sport’s competitive ground. There is always the chance that one mistake can kill you.
That doesn’t make the combination of “race at all costs” and “create the toughest, riskiest courses possible” anything to praise and admire. I think the current stories coming out of the Olympics are symptomatic of something happening in sports everywhere. Maybe it shows a lack of something in me that means I will never be an elite competitor. Maybe I just can’t/don’t understand. Whatever it is, I find the direction elite sports is moving in appalling and incomprehensible. It makes me not want to reach the top levels of competition, any competition.
And it definitely, unquestionably, without any doubt makes me not want to watch the Olympics. The glitzy show can go on without me. I’m sure they’ll never notice I’m gone.
Jane says 15 February 2010
I had the same reaction: they are not admitting to making a nearly impossible course to run, or a mistake in the ice. And when other athletes that use the track started speaking up, and backing down, I thought “they’ve been told: Kumaritashvili’s Mistake Caused A Terrible Accident, and off the record; the profile of the ice/track will be changed, so shut up if you want to compete.”
I get too, that as an athlete, you get that far - The Olympics - and your denial mechanism kicks in; youve worked for this your whole life, what if it really was an accident? You want to believe it was. I can see it would be hard to stay grounded in your actual experience on that track, and walk away from your shot at something big.
The track designer should be required to do the first run.
The “I don’t want to know if it’s broken”, that I don’t get.