Now that Simone Biles has brought the flip side of the sport to the fore, perhaps it is time to draw attention to the tremendous expectations that fans around the world often place on their sports idols.
"We are not just athletes. We are people after all, and sometimes you have to take a step back," said the American gymnast on Tuesday as she left the arena of the Tokyo Olympics. A day later, she also resigned from competing in the all-around final in Tokyo 2020, which took place on Thursday.
"I think mental health is more important in sports right now. We have to protect our minds and our bodies, and not just go out and do what the world wants us to do," the four-time Olympic champion, considered to be the best gymnast of all time, added.
AN ACT OF GREAT COURAGE
"Some people will see giving up as a lack of will or cowardice; but, really, it is an act of great courage to expose the difficulty, weakness, and mental health to the public," Brazilian sports psychologist Livia Castelo Branco, says in statements to the British agency BBC.
Psychologist Valeska Bassan, from the Institute of Psychiatry of the University of São Paulo, Brazil, also highlights Simone Biles's "courage" in recognizing and exposing her limits and suggests that the decision may have been motivated by stress-related factors, but also for self-knowledge. "It's asking yourself: Why do I have to go through all this; and, above all, by whom?" And Bassan highlights the external pressure to which Biles is subjected.
Although much more common than one might think, the problem acquires greater notoriety because it is the American extra class gymnast, who has revolutionized her sport from every point of view. The 24-year-old athlete has broken with each of the stereotypes that for decades marked such a traumatic and sacrificial discipline, but often also a bit retrograde, such as artistic gymnastics.
At the Tokyo Games, there has been the same space for a super veteran like 46-year-old Uzbek Oksana Chusovitina, as there has been for potential champion 16-year-old girls. And black, white, or Asian women have shared tapestry and appliances with a naturalness that should be the norm, but which, unfortunately, has been the exception.
"Without Biles, the sport would not be as diverse as it is and how it will be," Juliet Macur wrote in The New York Times. The journalist says that she was surprised by the number of “colored” girls who have come from all over the United States to the World Champions Center, the gym in Spring, Texas, owned by her mother, where she trains.
However, beyond diversity, there are other factors, even more important. Thanks in large part to Biles, the gymnasts are no longer girls who shut up in fear, but women with their own voices.
It began in 2016, with a scandal in the United States; the complaint of sexual abuse to the North American team doctor Larry Nassar. In a painful chain reaction, some 260 gymnasts turned out to testify in a trial that ended with a sentence of more than 200 years in prison.
Already recognized as the number one in the world, Simone Biles announced that she had also suffered abuse by Nassar and expressed her commitment to helping all gymnasts speak and be heard. Since then, she went from being the best competitor in the world to becoming a true leader, admired not only for her technical genius but for her strength in the face of life and her psychological strength.
However, when in April 2020 Biles learned of the postponement of the Olympics, she retired to a corner of her training gym and began to cry. Apparently, she did not believe she had the strength to endure another year subjected to the extreme pressure implied by her dual status as a sports star and world icon. The consequences are now being seen in Tokyo after her mind said "no more" and forced her to stop.
SIMONE IS NOT ALONE
Although surely the most notorious, the case of Simone Biles is far from unique. The International Olympic Committee has recognized that at least 35 percent of its elite athletes experience anxiety, depression, substance abuse, or eating disorders at some point in their careers.
The best swimmer of all time, the American Michael Phelps, suffered depression and suicidal ideas after the 2012 London Olympics; while Japan's Naomi Osaka, several times number one in the world tennis rankings, has admitted that press conferences make her feel "vulnerable and anxious."
On other occasions, mental crises or extreme fatigue have been the enemies of world-class athletes, not to mention the expressions of xenophobia and racism that emerge from time to time in various settings.
Because, apart from the inner struggle of each athlete, a very high percentage of their challenges have to do with the pressure exerted by the fans, exponentially multiplied in the last decade by the rise of social media.
Not a few studies have talked about the psychosocial dynamics that signify the behavior of hobbies, abounding around the transfer to their idols of unsatisfied expectations and unfulfilled personal goals.
A LESSON FOR CUBAN FANS
We should know a lot about all this in Cuba, the land of one of the most demanding (and perhaps most unfair) hobbies in the world. For many years, and various reasons, ranging from the idiosyncratic to socio-political factors of great weight, Cuban sport was an ambassador of the conquests of a system in perpetual conflict with the main Western power centers.
In this context, the "warlike" conception of athletic activity led us to win all kinds of "battles,” when, really, it was always about tireless work and the talent of men and women faced with the will and desire to win of their opposites.
This is how incredible conquests came, such as winning the 1991 Pan-American Games against the United States, or the unrepeatable fifth place by nations in the Barcelona Olympic Games, a year later.
Since then the evolution of sport towards a business model and the more or less constant economic crisis to which the country has been subjected, have marked the passage of the Antillean delegations through the Olympic concert until reaching the Japanese capital with an unlikely prognosis to stay in the top 20.
In this transit, we were left, as collateral damage, certain chauvinism, which reached the point of desecrating Olympic medals for the simple fact that gold medals are which allow us to go up or down in the medal table.
One of the athletes who suffered the most from this nonsense was the judoka Yordanis Arencibia, judged without mercy for not having passed from his status as a double bronze medalist in summer events. Who, at the time, was the best judoka in the world at 66 kilograms has had to carry the inexplicable stigma of not being able to climb to the top of the Olympic podium.
That is why now when it becomes increasingly difficult to have Cuban representation among the best in the world and the great deeds of yesteryear are just one more longing; perhaps it is convenient to value in its fair measure the limitless sacrifice of our athletes, everything that the sport takes and never returns.
It's probably time to see them as we now see Simone Biles: not only the most spectacular gymnast ever, but a simple girl from Ohio, the United States, trying to find herself.
