Recently, another “controversy” exploded from the Rio Olympics after Gabby Douglas did not place her hand over her heart during the national anthem. As I rolled my eyes yet again at the ludicrous reasons that people find to be upset these days, my mind could not help but go back to this past February.
After the Super Bowl, a visibly upset Cam Newton went to his obligatory post-game interview and responded as someone who was, well, visibly upset. Though many people have talked about the ridiculous double-standard that exists between male and female athletes and the racially charged dialogue that is used to describe black athletes, there is not enough credence paid to the problem in which we engage our athletes to begin with.
We as a society tend to be horrible hypocrites.
We all understand that nobody likes to lose; even on a base biological level, humans have a dissociative reaction to losing because competition is representative of survival. As a direct result, we feel loss very deeply and it affects our outlook on the quality of life we can lead.
It is easy to say that professional athletes ought to act a certain way and that doing those interviews is “part of their job,” but just how far does that narrative go?
Should Newton have shown up with a smile on his face after he lost the biggest game in football?
People seem to think so, but many of them are people who likely wouldn’t even want to shake their opponent’s hand after losing a game of pickup basketball.
In that same way, we want Olympic athletes like Douglas to adhere to certain arbitrary standards without ever stopping to think about how we ourselves would act in a similar situation. She has spent her entire life training for this moment.
Was it a sign of disrespect? Was she just incredibly focused on the task at hand? Does it matter?
Respectively, the answers are: probably not, probably, and almost certainly not.
Instead of trying to shoehorn professional athletes into our ideals of how they “should” act, our time as spectators would be better spent acknowledging not only the uber-humanity in how good athletes are at what they do, but also the base humanity that exists there as well.
Or you could keep finding reasons to get upset. Your choice.
