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Why Do We Put So Much Pressure on Our Athletes?
Emma Raducanu was up and then down, and we put her there.
I love sports. I was never good at them and was always the last girl to be picked for any team. This made me think I didn’t like sports. It was only when I needed to start writing about sports that I found out that indeed I love them. I love the fact that you need to give your best self and show up every day to be good at something. Sports are a school of life. You can’t cheat, and you need to deal with lots of ups and downs.
The problem with sports, it’s the sports industry, including the media. I used to love to write about Neymar, mainly about his ups and downs, because this is part of the game. Any recognised athlete has had ups and downs. It’s inevitable. I always tried to write about him, remembering that he was a human being and not a legend, a star, or a hero. This is the problem.
When the world is falling apart, usually, people devote themselves to follow sports, and for some of them, they do that normally. We call them fanatics. It’s easy to understand them because sports move our most pure human nature, and we feel things but in a controlled environment with rules to protect us, differently from life where anything and everything can happen, good or bad.
