On Simone Biles and Intense Media Pressure on Athletes

 Simone Biles is easily the most decorated gymnast on both the World and Olympic level. And NBC made sure that the average viewer wouldn't forget it. NBC's talking points on Simone Biles ranged from assuredness to cockiness to downright ludicrous: There's really only three spots on the team left; With Simone on the team, a gold medal is almost guaranteed; Simone could walk away with the most golds ever earned by any female athlete. Even running commercials with Simone standing next to a goat, emphasizing the claim that NBC would too often repeat: Simone was the greatest of all time and anything less than perfect was just not good enough for Simone. So when Biles announced she was pulling out of the team competition after losing herself in the air on her vault, it was both shocking and not so shocking at all. The pressure for Simone to be perfect night in and night out, heaped on by a network whose only duty is to show the event, had finally caught up and left a young woman feeling like she wasn't good enough. 

Biles has become the face of this games in a lot of ways. She's been featured in numerous commercials, ranging from Visa to Uber Eats. She's currently front and center on the NBC Olympics Twitter header. The description for the primetime coverage the other night only mentioned her name on the gymnastics side. Then the coverage of the sport itself has left little doubt that Biles is front and center. After a night of small mistakes during qualifications, NBC aired a small segment on the faces that she made after each apparatus, most of them varying faces of disappointment. Just yesterday, NBC had MSNBC consultant Steve Kornacki focus all of his attention on Simone's scores alone when figuring out whether the US team could earn gold in the team event. The reasoning? Simone had made mistakes and she alone could save the US team's gold medal hopes. Going into a competition having that in the back of her mind, that the media and the general public expected her to win that gold for the US, had to have her working under delipidating pressure for any person.

This is just another American athlete who has fallen victim to media narratives that expect perfection or excellence when it comes to the Olympics or any major international competition. Biles has arguably had the worst of it this Olympic cycle but there are so many who have suffered from the sheer amount of pressure that they are under. One such name is Michael Phelps. The pressure of his eight for eight during the Beijing Olympics, the pressure of earning the most gold medals in history, and the media's handling of his silver medals led him to contemplate suicide after the 2012 Olympics. His battles with depression drove him to drinking and drugs, which prompted more media scrutiny of his behavior. Yet 2016 also prompted the same expectation that he would succeed in all of his races and disappointment from interviewers should he not.

Nathan Chen is another example of this. At 18-years-old, NBC was touting Chen as a gold medal favorite after he won the Grand Prix Final in December 2017. Yet they failed to mention in commentary that he had won while the reigning World and Olympic champion Yuzuru Hanyu and 2016 World champion Javier Fernandez were not in attendance. Couple that with reigning silver medalist Shoma Uno having multiple falls in his two programs and only barely losing to Chen, it was unclear how Nathan Chen would stack up to a clean field. While Chen was a definite medal contender, he was by no means a gold medal favorite heading into Pyeongchang. With the constant pressure by NBC to be great, centering their figure skating commercials around him and his potential while Tara Lipinski and Johnny Weir set expectations high in their commentary, the pressure became too much for Chen. Nathan Chen ultimately got 16th in the short program after a poor performance in the team event, leaving his hopes for any medal effectively dashed. While he redeemed himself in the free program, the damage had undoubtedly been done. Regaining the top men's spot in men's figure skating for the US was too much pressure to put on a young man who was less than a year removed from high school.

Michelle Kwan is a similar story, almost being set up to fail. American media claimed that she just couldn't lose, she was just that good. She won every competition she had entered in leading up to the 1998 Olympics. She was in commercials promoting figure skating. The then 18-year-old Kwan went to Nagano so heavily favored that she tightened up in her programs, not wanting to fail the American expectation. Suddenly fellow American Tara Lipinski was on top of the podium and Kwan won the silver. After not learning a thing from the previous Olympics, the American media propped Kwan up again so that she was under all the pressure in the world to bring home the gold. She landed in third, with fellow American Sarah Hughes on top. Instead of encouraging a young woman to do her best, it was deemed a disappointment for Kwan to come home with anything but gold, pressure that plagued the rest of her career following the 1998 Olympics.

Even with all of these stories, the stigma of athletes needing to push through all of that pressure and keep competing is the prevailing one in America. Simone Biles pulling out of the team event was met with critics saying that she cost the Americans the gold or that she choked when her team needed her most. This shouldn't be the case at all. Biles could've cost her teammates a medal and/or severely injured herself if she had continued in the team event. No medal should be worth a potentially serious injury from being out of it mentally.

The media in general truly needs to take a step back from mounting so much pressure on young athletes. Expecting gold every time one of the US athletes steps onto the field, into the stadium or onto the rink can truly be damaging to their self-esteem and mental health. The media's fixation on gold alone has led to some of the worst broadcasting moments: Katie Ledecky being asked about when she knew the tide was turning against her instead of asking her to go over her silver medal race; focusing on Jordyn Wieber crying after not qualifying for the all-around; the disappointment from the media when Noah Lyles didn't qualify for the 100 meter dash; Mckayla Maroney's fall in vault final leading to commentators harping on about her disappointment. All of these athletes have dreams that are either realized or crushed within minutes without adding a commentator's thoughts on their performance.

We as a nation truly have to readjust what our expectations for athletes should be. Expecting Simone Biles to walk away with five golds in Rio and being disappointed by anything else is incredibly unhealthy for everyone involved. Instead, we should focus on an athlete doing their absolute best, whatever that looks like. If a swimmer gets silver, our first question shouldn't be, "What went wrong?" but instead ask them to frame their own race for themselves after congratulating them on their accomplishment. Instead of cameras focusing on an athletes moments after a personal loss or disappointment, let them come to terms with it on their own. And instead of building pedestals, awaiting on bated breath to see if they fall from grace, let's treat them as the humans they are.

Because that's what all of our athletes are: human. Humans with extraordinary talents, yes. But human. And the media and our society need to make sure we don't put insurmountable pressure on humans who have off days or off competitions. We shouldn't make an athlete scared to fail. Instead, we should embrace our athletes regardless of results, without harping on about expectations. We can be excited when Simone Biles wins and comfort her in defeat. Only when we do that, when an athlete no longer feels the weight of the world (or, more accurately, the US Olympic Committee) on their shoulders, can our athletes truly succeed in every aspect of their sport.