Mark Reason: Why young athletes gamble with their lives
‘‘Swifter, higher, stronger’’ proclaims the famous Olympic motto. So where’s the thinking in that? Where’s the brain gone? It’s all very well bouncing about like Tigger when the world is a beautiful place, but in these troubled times Tiggers need to get smart. They need to think of others. They need to stop bouncing Covid-19 across the universe.
So the new challenge to Olympic athletes is to be swifter, higher, stronger, smarter, because in all this brouhaha about the postponement of the Olympic Games, I’m not hearing enough young people taking responsibility. There are reams of lovely sentiments out there, and thank you for all of those, but first and foremost you youngsters need to get a grip.
A few weeks ago I read a New Zealand sportsperson bleating about the IOC’s failure to cancel or defer the Olympics. And I thought, hang on, how about taking a little personal responsibility here. No-one is forcing you to go. How wonderful it would have been if athletes like Valerie Adams and Mahe Drysdale and Nick Willis, who have quite a bit of brain between them, had said: ‘‘Stuff the IOC, we ain’t going.’’
How wonderful it would have been if a group of elite athletes around the world had joined forces and decided to boycott the Games. How powerful a message that would have sent, not just to the amoral old lawyers and bank clerks who run the IOC, but to all the youth around the world. It would have said: ‘‘The health of the world is on us too, however invulnerable we may feel.’’
Instead, everyone kept just hoping that the IOC would eventually put this thing off. And I think we should worry when our young people are looking to the likes of Teuton Tommy Bach to determine their future. What happened to the revolution?
What happened to young people thinking and talking for themselves?
When the decision to postpone was finally taken Christian Taylor, the American double Olympic triple jump champion, spoke of his relief because, ‘‘The concern of safety was always on my mind. It wasn’t actually about my personal safety. It was really the safety of my friends and family who would have come to visit me.
‘‘I was getting calls from my friends and family saying: ‘Chris, if you’re going to risk it, we’re going to be there with you.’ And that actually scared me. So I really had a sigh of relief knowing that they were going to be safe.’’
This sentiment has been repeated time and time and again by athletes around the world in recent days. And although you can cherish the love behind it, you also want to shout, grow up. Many of you supreme athletes are loving, thoughtful, caring people, but, please, please, please, start thinking for yourselves. Taylor could have kept his family safe, or at least safer, by declaring weeks ago that he would not be going to a Tokyo Olympics in July 2020.
This lack of personal responsibility is a problem being echoed around the planet. One of the glorious things about being young is that golden selfishness which consumes the world in a positive energy. The front of the brain still hasn’t fully grown up and so anything is possible.
Maybe that is why so many heroic young men, many of them still teenagers, rushed to be fighter pilots in World War II. ‘‘Live fast, die young’’, although that bravado is seasoned with a sense of invincibility.
And our Olympic athletes often have rushes of that same immortality. And we celebrate that. It is one of the glories of being human. Sometimes it can come at a terrible cost, but how diminished life would be without the sheer reckless thrill of being young.
But in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, being young comes with a sense of awesome responsibility. I’m not asking all young people to act like Greta Thunberg and save the world. Actually, Thunberg is literally a bad example.
The sermonising 17-year-old Swede was in Davos in January, she was leading 15,000 Brits on a Bristol protest in late February rain, and she was telling off European leaders in Brussels in March. That’s a lot of travel and a lot of contact.
Thunberg says now that it is likely that she and her father have Covid-19. She added: ‘‘We who do not belong to a risk group have an enormous responsibility, our actions can be the difference between life and death for many others.’’ These are good words, but she didn’t follow them herself. Thunberg’s actions through February and March, despite her own laudable call for activists to go online, will have put many at risk.
Like so many Olympic athletes, Thunberg is speaking and preaching after the event.
And this is the big, big challenge for young people around the world. In a famous study in the 1970s Gabe Mirkin asked elite runners: ‘‘If I could give you a pill that would make you an Olympic champion and also kill you in a year, would you take it?’’ Mirkin claimed that over half of those asked responded in the affirmative.
This work was followed up by Robert Goldman in the 1980s and 90s. He offered athletes a hypothetical drug that guaranteed five years of victory in every event that they entered, from decathlon to Mr Universe. Five years, then it would kill them. Over half said that they would take such a drug.
And a microcosm of this dilemma is what we have seen repeated in our Olympic athletes. They were not prepared to boycott the Olympics, even though it jeopardised their health and the health of many others. Instead they hung about on the street corner shouting until someone else took the decision for them.
Which makes me wonder how our young people are going to behave during this lockdown in New Zealand. Can they really keep themselves to themselves. It is a mighty big ask and we know that some will fail us.
I read an interview with the 94-year-old Jim Murray, who at the age of 17 risked his life to serve in World War II and protect his country. And that is the brilliance of young people. If you call them up to action, then they will man the barricades for us. They will do heroic things.
But it is the call to inaction that is such a vastly bigger challenge. Are they up to it? Are they up to doing nothing?
Yes, I can hear the jokes, but it is a colossal challenge. Imagine being 19 again and having to sit around on your hopes all day.
The veteran Murray is less than sure that everyone will cope and thinks that the government should call out the army to enforce this lockdown.
And you know, he may be right. Young people with a gun may be the only way to keep young people without a gun to stay at home.
Or we could put our faith in swifter, higher, stronger, smarter. Faith is a powerful force when it comes to inspiring our young people, but it’s also a gamble with our lives.
What happened to the revolution? What happened to young people thinking and talking for themselves?