EmperorLocky wrote:I don't see much of a difference between Simone Biles and Ben Simmons. Zero mental fortitude. One absolutely destroyed by fans and media. The other getting the bubble wrap treatment.
EmperorLocky wrote:I don't see much of a difference between Simone Biles and Ben Simmons.
MrPerfect1 wrote:th87 wrote:MrPerfect1 wrote:
1)She is nowhete near 1 of the Greatest Athletes in Human Existence. You can argue she is 1 of the most accomplished, but nowhere near 1 of the Best. For example, she wouldn't be even a Top 100 most athletically gifted in today's NBA.
2)I would say your lack of understanding that mental toughness is a primary component of top athletes displays a lack of understanding a sport.
Jesse Owens won Gold in the Berlin Olympics. Jordan played after his father was murdered. Lebron was a villain for a year minimum every road game went after the decision. Ronnie Lott had part of his finger amputated so he could continue to help his team.
Heck, even in her own sport, Strugg did a vault on a badly injured knee/leg because she thought it was needed. I'm sure she wasn't under any stress!
Representing your country is the greatest honor an athlete can have. Quitting because you feel stress (stress that she brought onto herself!!!!) is the definition of putting yourself before your team and your country.
It's been repeated to you ad nauseum that SHE COULD DIE if she can't get locked in for the vault. And that she was winning medals for her team as she was being sexually assaulted, which is 5 trillion times more stressful than f-ing Lebron getting laughed at about The Decision.
Yet you persist in this idiocy.
You could die in just about any sport, we still expect them to push through stress and adversity. Sports is about competition, teamwork, and rising up through adversity, not peacing out because it is no longer fun or you feel stress.
This applies even more so when you are representing your country.
Her past has nothing to do with today. If she was too stressed then don't go to the Olympics. 100% no problem with that.
It's also funny if you think the "stress" (most of which she brought on herself) compares to Jesse Owens or even Lebron. Lebron post decision faced round the clock scrutiny and expectations. By contrast, she has been under pressure for all of 3 days? out of the last 5 years.
Nobody talks about or has a single word of criticism towards the gymnasts outside of a few days at the Olympics.
I was wondering, were such people with the team? It'd make sense to have replacements in case of injury.bkseven wrote:dirkforpres wrote:She has given enough and then some to Team USA. She deserves a break
Then she could have taken that break earlier before the Olympics started... There were other US Olympians competing for her spot.
Steelo Green wrote:People are expecting way too much from Barnes out of the get go. He is a project player who will need 2-3 years before he makes a major impact.
EmperorLocky wrote:I don't see much of a difference between Simone Biles and Ben Simmons. Zero mental fortitude. One absolutely destroyed by fans and media. The other getting the bubble wrap treatment.
Andrew McCeltic wrote:SA37 wrote:Andrew McCeltic wrote:
AFAIK each made a single public statement? Neither is doing interviews or going on at length. The idea they’re doing it for media attention has no merit. And the point is that they shouldn’t have to be secretive - “personal reasons” - about something human, normal, medical.
Osaka brought the spotlight on herself by refusing to do interviews at Wimbledon. That was never going to fly with the tournament organizers and was always going to be a very public dispute. This became THE story for ~a week before she pulled out. It was by far the biggest story of Wimbledon. Had she pulled out a few weeks before, she could have claimed any sort of injury or some other reasonably credible excuse and she could have gone and taken care of her mental issues in a much less extravagant way.
For Biles, the story isn't quite as clear, but pulling out of the Olympics when you are one of the most popular athletes is going to attract insane amounts of attention. She could have pulled out of the Olympics way before the trials or any lead up to the Olympics and gone and taken care of herself.
Again, I am not questioning the validity of their mental health issues; I am saying the manner in which both of these situations have happened seem staged/rehearsed/planned in order to extract as much media attention as possible and laying the groundwork for future projects, such as documentaries, comeback stories, interviews, and careers that go well beyond sports.
Isn’t refusing interviews also the kind of “privacy” you’re asking of them? I don’t know why your take is so cynical - if the issues are valid, withdrawing is the same thing it would be with a physical injury. Like, maybe they could rake in media bucks going on talk shows to hype memoirs, but.. most (all?j athletes who have revealed mental health issues haven’t gotten million dollar Netflix deals. Like, they’re on big stages. There’s not really an easy way to not get attention, and a maximally circumspect withdrawal as if they’re experiencing something shameful and best left unacknowledged wouldn’t be healthy or fair.
While some tennis tournaments have different rules, in general players must appear at a post-match news conference at a Grand Slam event if a journalist requests their presence, whether they win or lose. Fines for refusing are often little more than a few thousand dollars. In 2015, Venus Williams was fined $3,000 for skipping a news conference after a loss at the French Open. She and her sister, Serena, were fined $4,000 each in 2010 for skipping a news conference at Wimbledon...
...Attending a news conference, regardless of the outcome of a match, is considered an obligation tennis players fulfill to promote their sport, which has struggled to maintain coverage in some markets in recent years as the budgets of news organizations have been slashed.
Billie Jean King, the Hall of Fame player who helped create the women’s pro tour, has spoken about visiting the sports editors in the markets in which she played to beg them to send sportswriters to cover matches during the tour’s early years and the importance of players speaking with the press to promote the sport.
Osaka is one of the most influential players in the world. Last year, tennis officials suspended play at the Western & Southern Open, a United States Open tuneup, after Osaka announced that she would default her semifinal match to draw attention to the issue of police violence against Black people following the shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wis.
The suspension of play, a move that several sports undertook as athletes threatened a boycott, allowed Osaka to remain in the tournament. She won her postponed semifinal match and then defaulted the final because of an injury.
Days later, she began her triumphant quest to win her second U.S. Open championship. She walked to the court for each match wearing a mask with the name of a different person of color who had been a victim of racist violence.
But certainly [Osaka's] profile, well outfitted as it is, provides a glimpse into her business — and like the meme decrees, business is boomin’. Ms. Osaka is covering everything from ears to rears, making headphones with Beats, athleisure with Nike and denim with Levi’s. Dresses? She designed them with Adeam, a Japanese-American brand. Swimwear? She crafted a collection with Frankies Bikinis.
In April, she announced that she would serve as C.E.O. of her own company: Kinlò, a line of skin care made for people with melanated skin tones, produced with GoDaddy. According to Forbes, she made $37.4 million in endorsements and tournament prizes between May 2019 and May 2020, the most a female athlete has ever earned in a single year.
“She’s the first professional tennis player we’ve worked with,” said Jen Sey, the brand president of Levi’s, “but for us, she rises above that. She’s such a powerful voice, the way she’s encouraged others to speak out about equality. She’s outspoken. That’s what we like about her. There’s no point in partnering with someone if you’re just going to tell them what to do.”
With Nike, she founded an academy to introduce more young women to sports; with L.V.M.H., she joined a judging panel to choose an emerging fashion designer worthy of a 300,000-euro grant. Her imprint seems to be suddenly on everything from enterprise management software (Workday) to water (Bodyarmor).
“She is the perfect storm,” said Cindy Gallop, a brand consultant who has worked with several of Ms. Osaka’s sponsors. “She’s a spectacular athlete. She has a strong sense of social justice, she’s prepared to speak her mind.”...
...In September, Ms. Osaka won the U.S. Open while declaring solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement through her face masks. From a corporate sponsorship perspective, this was a turning point: taking a stance increased her brand value. She shortly thereafter teamed up with Basic Space, an online swap meet for hype beasts (sample items for sale include a St. John coat and a Range Rover) to sell 500 masks designed by her 25-year-old sister, Mari. They sold out in 30 minutes, with proceeds going to UNICEF.
But in 2020, Osaka found her voice and the self-possession to speak up when and how she saw fit, a massive leap for a global superstar who once felt too self-conscious to exhort herself even on the court. With time to engage with civil rights protests because of the pandemic’s pause of tennis, Osaka found the space to unravel her thoughts to convey an urgent and unequivocal demand for change.
In doing so, she came to be as precise and efficient in her protest as she has been in her tennis, offering up her version of soft power: deploying bold activism shaped by her unique understanding of the world and her place in it....
...
Without the tunnel vision of a tennis schedule, Osaka showed the effects of the psyche-scarring onslaught of violence against Black Americans. In the days after George Floyd was killed by the Minneapolis police in May, she flew with Dunston to protests there and later wrote an opinion piece for Esquire challenging that society “take on systemic racism head-on, that the police protect us and don’t kill us.”
Though Osaka’s assertion of each part of her identity — Japanese, Haitian, raised for a time in the United States — has given her profitable endorsement lanes, she has often highlighted her Blackness when commentators minimize it...
...With Osaka cut off from IRL social touchstones and without access to her day job, her TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and other platforms provided the most candid way for her to speak up as she had pledged. When she tweeted her support for the Black Lives Matter movement in June and encouraged participation in a B.L.M. protest in Osaka, Japan, she faced social media trolls who called her a terrorist and a widespread backlash from Japanese people who viewed the issue as an outsider’s cause.
Texas Chuck wrote:Disgraceful this is even a discussion.
jc23 wrote:the fate of humanity rides on Chicago winning this game.
SA37 wrote:Andrew McCeltic wrote:SA37 wrote:
Osaka brought the spotlight on herself by refusing to do interviews at Wimbledon. That was never going to fly with the tournament organizers and was always going to be a very public dispute. This became THE story for ~a week before she pulled out. It was by far the biggest story of Wimbledon. Had she pulled out a few weeks before, she could have claimed any sort of injury or some other reasonably credible excuse and she could have gone and taken care of her mental issues in a much less extravagant way.
For Biles, the story isn't quite as clear, but pulling out of the Olympics when you are one of the most popular athletes is going to attract insane amounts of attention. She could have pulled out of the Olympics way before the trials or any lead up to the Olympics and gone and taken care of herself.
Again, I am not questioning the validity of their mental health issues; I am saying the manner in which both of these situations have happened seem staged/rehearsed/planned in order to extract as much media attention as possible and laying the groundwork for future projects, such as documentaries, comeback stories, interviews, and careers that go well beyond sports.
Isn’t refusing interviews also the kind of “privacy” you’re asking of them? I don’t know why your take is so cynical - if the issues are valid, withdrawing is the same thing it would be with a physical injury. Like, maybe they could rake in media bucks going on talk shows to hype memoirs, but.. most (all?j athletes who have revealed mental health issues haven’t gotten million dollar Netflix deals. Like, they’re on big stages. There’s not really an easy way to not get attention, and a maximally circumspect withdrawal as if they’re experiencing something shameful and best left unacknowledged wouldn’t be healthy or fair.
Every player and their publicist knows there is no way the French Open (I mistakenly said it was Wimbledon, which Osaka subsequently skipped) or any major tournament is going to allow the star players to skip interviews (where many times there are products sponsors pay big money to place products or their logo, depending on the sport). The NBA, for example, has explicit rules against this.While some tennis tournaments have different rules, in general players must appear at a post-match news conference at a Grand Slam event if a journalist requests their presence, whether they win or lose. Fines for refusing are often little more than a few thousand dollars. In 2015, Venus Williams was fined $3,000 for skipping a news conference after a loss at the French Open. She and her sister, Serena, were fined $4,000 each in 2010 for skipping a news conference at Wimbledon...
...Attending a news conference, regardless of the outcome of a match, is considered an obligation tennis players fulfill to promote their sport, which has struggled to maintain coverage in some markets in recent years as the budgets of news organizations have been slashed.
Billie Jean King, the Hall of Fame player who helped create the women’s pro tour, has spoken about visiting the sports editors in the markets in which she played to beg them to send sportswriters to cover matches during the tour’s early years and the importance of players speaking with the press to promote the sport.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/26/sports/tennis/naomi-osaka-french-open-no-interviews.html
Had Osaka and her team approached the French Open organizers privately about working out some sort of arrangement, then one could see an effort to keep things low-key. However, Osaka had a very public announcement of not doing interviews and the public fallout was the biggest story in tennis and arguably in sports. Osaka already has a history of using her platform to draw lots of media attention to things she believes are important; she has also been very active using her endorsements to do the same. Of course, this has the off-shoot of drawing attention to her and it is to be expected the media will continue to ask her about her activism and her opinion on other political or social matters -- or look to her social media where she has also issued public statements. This was her decision.Osaka is one of the most influential players in the world. Last year, tennis officials suspended play at the Western & Southern Open, a United States Open tuneup, after Osaka announced that she would default her semifinal match to draw attention to the issue of police violence against Black people following the shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wis.
The suspension of play, a move that several sports undertook as athletes threatened a boycott, allowed Osaka to remain in the tournament. She won her postponed semifinal match and then defaulted the final because of an injury.
Days later, she began her triumphant quest to win her second U.S. Open championship. She walked to the court for each match wearing a mask with the name of a different person of color who had been a victim of racist violence.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/26/sports/tennis/naomi-osaka-french-open-no-interviews.htmlBut certainly [Osaka's] profile, well outfitted as it is, provides a glimpse into her business — and like the meme decrees, business is boomin’. Ms. Osaka is covering everything from ears to rears, making headphones with Beats, athleisure with Nike and denim with Levi’s. Dresses? She designed them with Adeam, a Japanese-American brand. Swimwear? She crafted a collection with Frankies Bikinis.
In April, she announced that she would serve as C.E.O. of her own company: Kinlò, a line of skin care made for people with melanated skin tones, produced with GoDaddy. According to Forbes, she made $37.4 million in endorsements and tournament prizes between May 2019 and May 2020, the most a female athlete has ever earned in a single year.
“She’s the first professional tennis player we’ve worked with,” said Jen Sey, the brand president of Levi’s, “but for us, she rises above that. She’s such a powerful voice, the way she’s encouraged others to speak out about equality. She’s outspoken. That’s what we like about her. There’s no point in partnering with someone if you’re just going to tell them what to do.”
With Nike, she founded an academy to introduce more young women to sports; with L.V.M.H., she joined a judging panel to choose an emerging fashion designer worthy of a 300,000-euro grant. Her imprint seems to be suddenly on everything from enterprise management software (Workday) to water (Bodyarmor).
“She is the perfect storm,” said Cindy Gallop, a brand consultant who has worked with several of Ms. Osaka’s sponsors. “She’s a spectacular athlete. She has a strong sense of social justice, she’s prepared to speak her mind.”...
...In September, Ms. Osaka won the U.S. Open while declaring solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement through her face masks. From a corporate sponsorship perspective, this was a turning point: taking a stance increased her brand value. She shortly thereafter teamed up with Basic Space, an online swap meet for hype beasts (sample items for sale include a St. John coat and a Range Rover) to sell 500 masks designed by her 25-year-old sister, Mari. They sold out in 30 minutes, with proceeds going to UNICEF.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/19/style/naomi-osaka-sweetgreen-beats-nike.html?But in 2020, Osaka found her voice and the self-possession to speak up when and how she saw fit, a massive leap for a global superstar who once felt too self-conscious to exhort herself even on the court. With time to engage with civil rights protests because of the pandemic’s pause of tennis, Osaka found the space to unravel her thoughts to convey an urgent and unequivocal demand for change.
In doing so, she came to be as precise and efficient in her protest as she has been in her tennis, offering up her version of soft power: deploying bold activism shaped by her unique understanding of the world and her place in it....
...
Without the tunnel vision of a tennis schedule, Osaka showed the effects of the psyche-scarring onslaught of violence against Black Americans. In the days after George Floyd was killed by the Minneapolis police in May, she flew with Dunston to protests there and later wrote an opinion piece for Esquire challenging that society “take on systemic racism head-on, that the police protect us and don’t kill us.”
Though Osaka’s assertion of each part of her identity — Japanese, Haitian, raised for a time in the United States — has given her profitable endorsement lanes, she has often highlighted her Blackness when commentators minimize it...
...With Osaka cut off from IRL social touchstones and without access to her day job, her TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and other platforms provided the most candid way for her to speak up as she had pledged. When she tweeted her support for the Black Lives Matter movement in June and encouraged participation in a B.L.M. protest in Osaka, Japan, she faced social media trolls who called her a terrorist and a widespread backlash from Japanese people who viewed the issue as an outsider’s cause.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/16/sports/tennis/naomi-osaka-protests-open.html?
After all of this fallout from the French Open and skipping Wimbledon, Osaka decided to be heavily involved in the Japanese Olympics despite he supposed desire to avoid the spotlight. I think this is beyond hypocritical.
In my opinion, you just can't have your cake and eat it too. Osaka nor anyone who decides to have such a vocal and active presence cannot pick and choose when to turn it off. Our decisions and our actions have consequences, and this is just an example of a person who doesn't want to accept the bad that comes along with the good. That's just not how life works.
13th Man wrote:My mistake was taking what she said recently at face value, but looking back why did her story start changing and adding in the Twisties thing a couple of days later? Frist she said that it was due to the pressure from social media and not having fun but now it has become an issue of life and death akin to a pilot experiencing vertigo?
So of the thousands or even hundreds of thousands of gymnasts over the years, it just so happens that she is the only one brave enough to realize this threat? What about gymnasts like Kerri Strug who continued to compete on an injured ankle to help her team win?
For a second, I totally forgot that today's society has everything totally backwards, my bad. The truth of the matter is that she failed to live up to expectations and simply quit. Only in today's backwards society does this get twisted into a brave and heroic act.
13th Man wrote:The truth of the matter is that she failed to live up to expectations and simply quit.
jc23 wrote:the fate of humanity rides on Chicago winning this game.
WarriorGM wrote:13th Man wrote:My mistake was taking what she said recently at face value, but looking back why did her story start changing and adding in the Twisties thing a couple of days later? Frist she said that it was due to the pressure from social media and not having fun but now it has become an issue of life and death akin to a pilot experiencing vertigo?
So of the thousands or even hundreds of thousands of gymnasts over the years, it just so happens that she is the only one brave enough to realize this threat? What about gymnasts like Kerri Strug who continued to compete on an injured ankle to help her team win?
For a second, I totally forgot that today's society has everything totally backwards, my bad. The truth of the matter is that she failed to live up to expectations and simply quit. Only in today's backwards society does this get twisted into a brave and heroic act.
She could have just released the story at the beginning that her ankle was hurt. Would that have been better?
Little Nathan wrote:13th Man wrote:The truth of the matter is that she failed to live up to expectations and simply quit.
I love when people who have no actual idea what they're talking about make statements about THE TRUTH like this. This thread is filled with nonsense like this.
It's okay not say anything sometimes, internet warriors.
MrPerfect1 wrote:1)She is nowhete near 1 of the Greatest Athletes in Human Existence. You can argue she is 1 of the most accomplished, but nowhere near 1 of the Best. For example, she wouldn't be even a Top 100 most athletically gifted in today's NBA.
13th Man wrote:WarriorGM wrote:13th Man wrote:My mistake was taking what she said recently at face value, but looking back why did her story start changing and adding in the Twisties thing a couple of days later? Frist she said that it was due to the pressure from social media and not having fun but now it has become an issue of life and death akin to a pilot experiencing vertigo?
So of the thousands or even hundreds of thousands of gymnasts over the years, it just so happens that she is the only one brave enough to realize this threat? What about gymnasts like Kerri Strug who continued to compete on an injured ankle to help her team win?
For a second, I totally forgot that today's society has everything totally backwards, my bad. The truth of the matter is that she failed to live up to expectations and simply quit. Only in today's backwards society does this get twisted into a brave and heroic act.
She could have just released the story at the beginning that her ankle was hurt. Would that have been better?
Or just face the tough reality like every other athlete. It sucks for her that she was built up to be super-human and that everything came to a head at the biggest meet in the world but this is the cruel reality of sports. The window to be elite in gymnastics is tiny, and it looks to me like may have closed on her.
I watched her at the Olympic trials and they hyped the crap out of her then as well with her failing to live up to expectations. They brushed it off to be a subpar performance which was fine but could a string of subpar performances be due to a natural decline of physical abilities rather than blaming it on something else like mental health?
13th Man wrote:I'm just calling a spade a spade.
jc23 wrote:the fate of humanity rides on Chicago winning this game.
