I have several very educated, informed, and articulate readers. Their comments are sometimes of a length and character that I give them their own blog post. This is one of those times. The reader felt my fundamental link between Biles' choke and the United States' indulgent values was not made effectively or even reasonably. Here are the comments....
You make several excellent points in your blog, especially when you adeptly pointed out that feelings are not mental health. In "The Frivolity of Evil," Theodore Dalrymple wrote of his patients, "
There is something to be said here about the word "depression," which has almost entirely eliminated the word and even the concept of unhappiness from modern life. Of the thousands of patients I have seen, only two or three have ever claimed to be unhappy: all the rest have said that they were depressed. This semantic shift is deeply significant, for it implies that dissatisfaction with life is itself pathological, a medical condition, which it is the responsibility of the doctor to alleviate by medical means. Everyone has a right to health; depression is unhealthy; therefore everyone has a right to be happy (the opposite of being depressed). This idea in turn implies that one's state of mind, or one's mood, is or should be independent of the way that one lives one's life, a belief that must deprive human existence of all meaning, radically disconnecting reward from conduct.
A ridiculous pas de deux between doctor and patient ensues: the patient pretends to be ill, and the doctor pretends to cure him. In the process, the patient is willfully blinded to the conduct that inevitably causes his misery in the first place. I have therefore come to see that one of the most important tasks of the doctor today is the disavowal of his own power and responsibility. The patient's notion that he is ill stands in the way of his understanding of the situation, without which moral change cannot take place. The doctor who pretends to treat is an obstacle to this change, blinding rather than enlightening.
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Simon Biles dropping out of the Olympic team competition was a safety issue, not a moral or social one. In watching the women's gymnastics competitions, what impressed me was that two of the NBC television commentators - Tim Daggett and Nastia Liukin - upon hearing that Simon Biles was dropping out, immediately said that she was doing the right thing. They didn't say this as political commentators. They said this as former gymnasts (both Olympic gold medalists), people who had undergone surgeries for gymnastics-sustained injuries, and as commentators who had followed the sport for years. They knew what they were talking about.
Daggett - who during his gymnastics career had landed on his neck and ruptured a spinal disc during a high bar routine in 1986 and who snapped his left tibia, fibula, and tore an artery doing a vault in the 1987 World Championships that left him in the hospital for three months - spoke quite a bit about "the twisties" as they are called in gymnastics jargon, the times when a gymnast loses his/her orientation in the air. This is a common, well-known phenomenon, something that at one time or another happens to most gymnasts when something is off - timing, 3D orientation, technique, what have you. The vast majority of the time, a little time off usually fixes the problem. Biles has had the twisties before - in 2019. But this time, they came during a major competition, when she didn't have the luxury of taking time off.
In Tokyo, Biles scored the highest of any gymnast in the qualifying rounds - quite a feat. But she was still performing subpar...for Simone. During the practice sessions, cameras caught Simone doing routines...and missing her landings. In the warmups on team finals night, Biles did a practice vault...and actually SUMMERSAULTED the landing! Then came the competition vault. Biles - on instinct - changed her vault in mid-air, did one less flip than she was supposed to do, threw her arms out to the sides (a clear manifestation of disorientation) and turned her head in an odd way, which the commentators immediately recognized as something that people do when they are spacially confused. Daggett said that in all his years of watching Simone Biles, he had never seen her do that.
Gymnastics isn't like most other popular sports - baseball, football, basketball, hockey, tennis, soccer, etc. You have off periods in those other sports and you simply don't perform well. You shower and go home. In competitive gymnastics, a time of the twisties has the potential to leave you in a hospital. Possibly, it might leave you sitting in a wheelchair the rest of your life.
Note - the Brazilian who won the silver medal in the women's all around competition in Tokyo, Rebeca Andrada, is only 22 years old, but has already had THREE ACL surgeries, not to mention "lesser" injuries that have led to things like having to wear protective ankle boots for months at a time. As for the more dangerous injuries, this article "gets it", going straight to the heart of the matter: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/28/sports/olympics/biles-gymnastics-injuries.html
The blog stated that Simone Biles has been the best gymnast in the world for nearly 8 years, has been in other Olympics, and her stressors have not really changed, so she choked. Yet for any high achieving athlete, every competition is a unique experience. Past success, even riding a current hot streak, doesn't mean anything today (as Novak Djokovic's Olympic experience in Tokyo demonstrated). Pain, injuries, body kinesiology, mental status, performing conditions - these are ALWAYS changing. What was it that Heraclitus said? "No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man." So in looking at Simon Biles' situation, to write "Nothing has changed," expresses something that is clearly not true.
You wrote, "In the name of safety we have abandoned achievement." Sadly, the airline industry has boatloads of stories about pilots who abandoned safety in order to achieve reaching a destination. Tragedy piled upon tragedy.
But safety and achievement are not the either/or choices that this sentence makes them out to be. As you know from surgery and engineering, it is precisely a "safety first" approach that makes achievement possible. That's also true in gymnastics. Risk can't be eliminated, but it can be diminished; part of diminishing it is recognizing when conditions are no longer safe.
Finally, in the Olympic finals competition of women's team gymnastics, only three gymnasts for each country can compete in each of the four events. For each event, the three scores are added together. Every performance counts. They don't drop the low score. So if one of the three bombs, it really matters.
When Simone Biles told her teammates she was dropping out, she told them that she didn't want to do anything to hurt the team. In other words, her missed landings were getting worse and worse, and they were now at a point where - in terms of scores - it would be better to have one of the other gymnasts take her place. This important point was missed by the blog.
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I enjoyed reading this blog, but it compared apples with oranges. A nations's cultural failure is not the same thing as a gymnast's physiological disorientation and safety.
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