Olympics Thread
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Look I have no issues with people withdrawing for mental health reasons, none at all. I've done it myself when I was in a bad place.
However for me the biggest issue with mental health is that people simply try to "cope" and say "their fine" and "they're managing" when really they're not.
All this does is heap additional pressure upon themselves to the point they break and creates an incredible mess for everyone else around them (who are often totally unaware there's a problem at all). This is a perfect case in point...
To fix mental health we need to speak up early, we need to encourage people to come forward and talk about it and get help as early as possible and not encourage people to just grit their teeth and try and get through it.
Coming forward early is courage, gritting your teeth and thinking you can just cope is lunacy.
Whether she didn't come forward early enough, or she did and her organization didn't give her the necessary support we'll probably never know but someone's messed up terribly. It's been poorly handled.
To say this is a good example on how to handle mental health as you are implying - well, no it's not. It's a case study in how to do it wrong. I guess we can agree to disagree.
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@windows97 you may have misread my post. I agree with what you have written.
My guess (as people were all making guesses) is that she may well have raised her concerns about not being in the right frame of mind but was pressured into starting. I just see that as more likely than her recognising her state part way through or simply pulling out to avoid failure.
I guess we won't know until a book comes out down the track. -
What the hell happened to the Brits there? Bloody hell.
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@rancid-schnitzel said in Olympics Thread:
What the hell happened to the Brits there? Bloody hell.
Can't remember seeing that at that level and stage before... One time where "stay in your lane" would be a fully deserved shout...!
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I have a somewhat different take to the orthodoxy having spent a good portion of my life in what is now called a toxic environment. I've been in the position of considering giving up to end the pain but the only thing that stopped me was I couldn't put up with the contempt of my peers if I took that option. It's not for nothing we used to say "pain is weakness leaving the body".
As a result of this exposure, it's difficult to reconcile strength with quitting when the challenge is hardest. You may not succeed, but you don't give in. That for me is the test of mental strength.
And having witnessed people push themselves to the utter limit, it's not something they can simply recover from and attempt to work/ compete again quickly. They're physically and mentally exhausted.
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Aus women swimmers killing it at these Games.
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@rancid-schnitzel said in Olympics Thread:
Aus women swimmers killing it at these Games.
Australia are killing it period. What have they got, 3 more gold this morning?
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Rowing course chopping up and it's screwed two finalists already.
Oz with a great result in the fours: gold to men and women.
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Speaking of wild mash-up's did anyone see the first leg of the lazar class sailing a couple of days back??
Seems there were about 40 boats all trying to get around the first mark at the same time, coupled with boats doing penalty turns off the first mark...
So you had boats upon approaching the first mark trying to avoid the boats doing penalty turns and also trying to avoid the boats coming the other way trying to round the first mark...and then when they rounded the first mark they had to avoid the incoming boats trying to round the first mark as well as avoiding the boats doing the penalty turns at the marks exit.
Confusing?? Yep it was like watching a bunch of seagulls fight over a loaf of bread...
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a little more colour in here:
Tokyo Olympics 2021: Simone Biles shows courage in pulling out of competition
Biles pulls out of team event to focus on mental health
TOKYO, JAPAN - JULY 27:
By MATT DICKINSON
NEWS CORP AUSTRALIA SPORTS NEWSROOM
9:28AM JULY 28, 2021
1 COMMENT
Simone Biles has done many extraordinary things as the greatest gymnast of all time but perhaps none more remarkable than turning to her coach after one vault and saying: “I don’t want to do it. I’m done.”Overwhelmed by anxiety and doubt, fearful that persisting might result in physical harm to herself, an iconic athlete walked off the Olympic stage during Tuesday’s women’s team final, declaring that looking after her mental wellbeing was more important than chasing a medal.
The twisting, leaping vaults that only Biles dares to attempt require enormous courage – but not half as much resolve as telling the world just how vulnerable you are.
So many important questions were raised by the 24-year-old’s exit, starting with how it ever reached a point that she was so burdened and troubled by doing something that, as she kept saying, was meant to be fun.
Her own part in that discussion was extraordinarily candid late into the night at the Ariake Gymnastics Centre in Tokyo.
It would have been so easy for Biles to hide behind the official statement from USA Gymnastics about “a medical issue”. She could have slipped away through a back door. Instead, she gave one of the most astonishing press conferences I have heard from a leading athlete.
As Biles stepped forward to talk about demons and fears and the attack of the shakes that hit her before the final, she did so with remarkable presence. She was composed. She welled up only once when she talked about how she felt that the sport was being robbed from her by outside pressures.
Her outward calm seemed almost incongruous with the magnitude of what she had done – but, then, this 4ft 8in athlete has faced up to far greater traumas than walking away in the middle of a competition.
In early 2018, Biles revealed that she was one of the gymnasts who had been sexually abused by Dr Larry Nassar, the former team doctor for USA Gymnastics, who was jailed for a horrific number of crimes against hundreds of girls.
“I am not afraid to tell my story any more,” she had said at the time.
On Tuesday, Biles told her story again in a way that was startling, admirable and terribly sad. She carries such hopes and expectations. How has it come to the point that they felt intolerable?
She kept referencing how the fun had gone out of her sport. She talked about not trusting herself to perform.
“I don’t know if it’s age and I’m a little bit more nervous when I do gymnastics,” she said.
Biles also talked of struggling to perform for her own pleasure, and the pressures from the internet and social media (she has an Instagram following of 4.9 million).
She has had a highly fractious relationship with USA Gymnastics.
“It hurts my heart that doing what I love has been kind of taken away from me to please other people,” she said.
Perhaps we should have seen the warning signs. In an interview with The New York Times shortly before the Games, Biles had talked of looking forward to it all being over.
When she had underperformed in qualifying, by her own exceptional standards, she had posted on social media: “I truly do feel like I have the weight of the world on my shoulders at times.”
And now we saw just how much.
Biles had trained earlier in the day before a team final which was always likely to be high pressured, as her United States team fought to defend an 11-year domination of the Olympics and World Championships from a resurgent team from Russia (ROC).
In the five-hour wait to perform, Biles was hit with what sounded like an anxiety attack. She talked of shakes.
“I just never felt like this going into a competition before,” she said.
She tried to push through her fears but when it was her turn on the first apparatus, the vault – at which she is such a maestro – she lost her way as she flew through the air.
A planned Yurchenko with 2 and a half twists was aborted into 1 and a half twists. She took a big step forward on landing. Her score, 13.766, was the worst of her Olympic career.
Biles immediately went into troubled conversation with the team staff and told them that she was in no state to continue.
She feared she would ruin America’s chances and, worse still, injure herself.
“I think the girls need to do the rest of the competition without me,” she told the coaches. “I can’t risk a medal for the team.”
Previously, she would have tried to persevere.
“Four or five years ago, that definitely wouldn’t have been that Simone – I would have gone out there and did whatever,” she said.
“But today it was like, you know what, I don’t want to do something stupid, get hurt. It’s not worth it.”
The coaches had supported her decision.
“They saw I was going through it and they totally agreed it was not worth getting hurt over something so silly, even though it’s so big – the Olympic Games,” she said.
“At the end of the day we want to walk out of here, not be dragged out of here on a stretcher.”
Biles spent the rest of the evening in a white USA tracksuit as cheerleader for Grace McCallum, Sunisa Lee and Jordan Chiles; her teammates who were suddenly trying to perform with little warning. Biles, inevitably, had been down to perform on all four rotations so there were gaps to fill.
Without their leading talent, the American team suffered a heavy loss, by more than three points, to ROC, while an inexperienced Team GB quartet picked up an unexpected bronze, but the result was overshadowed by Biles’s withdrawal and her unburdening.
“Therapy has helped a lot as well as medicine and I feel like that’s all been going really well,” she said.
“But whenever you get in a high-stress situation, you freak out and you don’t really know how to handle all of those emotions, especially being here at the Olympic Games.”
It was quite something to hear from an athlete who has amassed 31 global medals, 23 of them gold, including four Olympic titles in Rio five years ago. Biles was expected to win at least that number again in Tokyo.
Now she was unable to say whether she would even be able to return to competition for the all-around final on Thursday. Rather, she would be waking up this morning, trying to give her mind a rest and then considering if she was in a state to resume her Olympic career.
“Gymnastics isn’t everything at the end of the day,” she said.
But it has been her life for a long time, and her extraordinary gift.
Now it has seemingly become a torture and while this is, above all, a story of one exceptional athlete struggling with a colossal level of expectation and scrutiny and her own very personal anxieties, it has also raised much wider concerns that will rage over the coming days about how something that starts as a passion, and a pleasure and a joy for all the world, should come to this.
— Originally published in The Times
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NZ win womens pair rowing semi - looking good for A final
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Repechage in the premier event. NZ leading with 500m to go.
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Badminton is on, which I prefer to tennis.
