A reminder that quest for gold can exact horrible human price
Millions of Americans in a loyalist worldwide audience somewhere in the billions had put last and this week aside for intense Olympic engagement, parked in front of televisions from Blawnox to Bangkok to see which towering impossibility Simone Biles might tame next, how much water Katie Ledecky might put between her and the mere mortals with whom she would share a Tokyo pool, or even just to see how skateboarding and surfing got presented on a global stage for the first time.
None of that will happen, obviously, as the COVID-19 pandemic triggered the first postponement of the Olympics more than four months ago.
Good.
The Olympics have long since neutered themselves of relevance through the inability to get ahead of its drug cheats, as too many people on medal stands in the summer wind up unceremoniously stripped of their medals by officially harried anti-doping bodies in an endless chemical winter.
What did happen this past week, however, was not so much about that; it was about the horrid personal imbalance at the root of modern Olympic competition, and it was expertly presented in still another documentary triumph by HBO. “The Weight of Gold,” narrated by uber-medalist Michael Phelps, debuted Wednesday night.
It’s not so much about the weight, really, it’s about the ache, and the film puts its hands around the neck of this dilemma and never lets go.
Sasha Cohen, the great American figure skater who testified in the film with nearly a dozen Olympians, one more painfully articulate than the next, described the experience of competing in front of the world almost as though it were a form of entrapment.
She describes being in an Olympic village, then on a bus on the way to the venue, looking out the windows at
people who are going about their normal lives and will do that very thing again tomorrow.
“But for you it’s different,” she remembers saying to herself on that street in Turin in 2006. “When you get back on this bus, your fate will have been sealed. Something will be written into history that can never be unwritten.”
The written history is that Cohen fell in the final free skate and took a silver medal, not exactly the definition of tragedy to the rest of us, but for world-class athletes who define themselves as little-to-nothing else, setbacks can be murderously traumatic. Rarely has it been defined more harrowingly than in director Brett Rapkin’s documentary.
Phelps, who’s won more gold medals than anyone in Olympic history, contemplated suicide after two DUIs. He does well as the narrator, but he has plenty to say to the camera, too.
“When it’s over, it’s like, ‘Now what?’ Where did everybody go?,” he says, adding that he was identified, and dangerously self-identified, as a swimmer, and that he had no answer to a far
more important question: “Who was I outside of the pool?”
Phelps wondered why he didn’t just end it all before he came back to compete a final time in Rio. Others, perhaps not so singularly gifted, could not find any answer to that question.
Steven Holcomb, Olympic bobsledding champion, found dead in his room at the U.S. Olympic Training Center in Lake Placid, N.Y., May 6, 2017. He was 37.
Speedy Patterson, Olympic skiing medalist, found dead in a remote canyon near Park City, Utah, July 25, 2011. He was 29. “His pain,” his mother told the filmmakers, “was insurmountable.”
Lolo Jones, on her way to winning the 100-meter hurdles in Beijing, clipped the next-to-last hurdle and finished seventh.
“One minute I’m an Olympian and the next I’m making smoothies in a gym for some guy,” she says in the film. “He’s looking at TV and for some reason one of my races is on. He says, ‘Is that ... ?’ Yeah, that’s me.
“Sometimes when I’m driving, I just hope a truck hits me.”
Phelps thinks it’s safe to say 80% of Olympians go through what he calls postOlympic depression.
“We’re just so lost,” he says.
Part of that comes from the entrapment of being hyper-focused. Athletes who are so hyper-focused for so long find it nearly impossible to admit to mental health issues. Such an admission, said one, “cracks the façade of invincibility.”
Prior to release of “The Weight of Gold,” it was Phelps’ longtime agent, Peter Carlisle, who perhaps best framed the issue.
“To athletes at the elite level, performance is everything, and the narrowness of an athlete’s focus becomes easily justified, if not essential,” he said. “The imbalance that results often makes the transition to life outside of sport extremely difficult for many of these athletes. Their powerful stories reveal the pitfalls of pursuing success to the exclusion of all else and demonstrate the importance of mental health education and resources in sports and in everyday life.”
The Olympics, virus willing, will happen in Tokyo next July. All that means is that right now, all over the world, thousands of athletes are falling into a mental trap. Tragically, some won’t ever emerge. “When you get back on this bus, your fate will have been sealed. Something will be written into history that can never be unwritten.” – Sasha Cohen –