I just watched one of those Olympian profile spots. You know, the ones designed to be filler in between events, done with the best of intentions to tell the heartfelt stories of the athletes' journeys to the games. This particular one was a Canadian bobsledder speaking about her experience at the last Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, lamenting how she didn't medal in one of her events.
She solemnly and genuinely stated, I quote, "I felt like I'd let down my family, my friends, and my country."
I can't speak for your family and friends, but you didn't let me down because I hadn't even heard of you until twenty minutes ago.
This brand of well-meaning but ultimately misplaced patriotic language has always left me feeling a bit uneasy, not least because we now live in a world where we can ask an astronaut if they see borders on a space walk.
This is just the beginning of what deeply irked me about it. In fact, I've been irked about this kind of thing for half my life.
I remember watching the Salt Lake City games in 2002 when Canadian freestyle skier Jennifer Heil placed fourth. Many of the major newspapers the next day bore the headline "Oh, so close." Fair enough on first glance, not least because the distance between her fourth place finish and the podium was one one-hundredth of a point as deemed by the judges.
Fast-forward to the Vancouver games in 2010. On day two Heil won Canada's first medal in front of the hometown crowd. It was a silver. Guess what the headline from the major papers read?
"Oh, so close."
I wish I was joking.
Being second-best in the world at something is not good enough?
Even the official Freestyle Canada website reused the headline for this entry in their history of the sport.
Dear society:
Stop this insanity.
An article in the Edmonton Journal about Jennifer Heil addresses the many external pressures athletes face on the world stage. A kinesiology professor is interviewed, who suggests that "cluttering the mind with the expectations of others and the pressure that brings may not be an effective strategy. Own the Podium is about outcomes; own the moment is about process, which is the more effective pathway to success."
Wonderful. Sounds like a reasonable path to cherish the experience. But in the same article they also referred to Heil's second place finish as a defeat.
Are you kidding me? Being second-best is not even "close"—now it's a defeat?
Google the phrase "settled for silver" in quotes and you'll get about 325,000 results. Try "won silver" and you'll get 1.6 million. This means roughly one in five instances of speaking about being second-best in the world at something carries the implication of not being good enough.
Dear society:
Stop this insanity.
Tonight at the beginning of the bronze medal game in men's hockey, a commentator referred to it as "the game nobody wants to play in." Likewise, just before the bronze medal game in men's curling began, much of the chatter from the press box was about how this wasn't the game Canadian skip Brad Gushue was hoping to be participating in, treating the chance to be the third-best in the world at your chosen passion as a consolation match. They even went so far as to say it may not be a big deal for Gushue as he'd won Olympic gold before, barely stopping short of insisting the game should be taken lightly and played more for the two members of his team who'd never won an Olympic medal before.
No, no, NO.
Dear society:
Stop this insanity.
When someone is named high school valedictorian, they're treated like they've won an Olympic gold because they came in first place. This is obviously a marvellous achievement. But there are nearly 3,500 high schools in Canada, and each one has that top student. With 2.5 million students, that's about one in 700. And that's generous, as it's not even accounting for the sizeable portion of students without academic aspirations.
By contrast, there are an estimated 135 million skiers in the world. If you qualify amongst the top hundred or so in the world to be in the Olympics, you are literally one in a million. But if you finish in any position apart from number one, you're a failure.
And yet we wonder why athletes struggle with mental health issues?
Dear society:
Stop.
This.
Insanity.
From this humble soapbox, all I can ask as one tiny voice is that we seek a happy medium between these two extremes.
Perhaps we should rethink the language we use in individual sports. In team sports there are only two teams playing, whereby one team typically wins and the other loses. It makes sense in this context that winning and losing is framed in binary terms. But in individual sports—particularly ones where dozens of athletes are racing against the clock, or especially relying on the input of judges who are prone to emotionally driven biases and various other forms of human error—it's not a clear cut winner/loser type situation. If whoever is in second place was "defeated," that means in an event with 50 competitors, 49 are considered defeated. But of course nobody actually says that, because everybody knows it's not true.
Going forward, let's try to remember that literally everyone who makes it to the Olympics is world class. Maybe it's time we steer the conversation in that direction and become more cognizant of this undeniable and remarkable fact while we pick apart the minutiae that separates the top 0.000001 and 0.000002 percentile of athletes. And maybe then we'll progress to a point where we won't have a 15-year-old girl having a complete meltdown on live TV because she was only the second-best in the world.
Dear society:
Stop this insanity.
