Athlete mental health is a real thing. To be clear, no one is suggesting otherwise.
It’s intriguing to explore the intersection in recent days of four separate episodes that bear on this fascinating topic.
Any therapist will tell you that matters of mental health are subjective. That is, they’re in the headspace of the person who’s dealing with them. All the same, that person — for purposes of this discussion, an athlete, and more specifically, a professional athlete — lives and works among us. That means there’s some significant measure of objective if not common-sense reality.
This means, inevitably, reasonable people are going to agree to disagree about what’s what. Especially when athletes are involved, and these athletes are young people — most in their early 20s. Science is pretty clear that the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that directs controlled reasoning rather than emotional reaction, isn’t fully developed until perhaps the mid-20s.
Case study No. 1
The White House announced July 1 that gymnast Simone Biles is among those receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.
Recall that when Biles withdrew from the team competition last summer in Tokyo, it was amid a social media post in which she said she felt she had “the weight of the world” on her shoulders and was finding it “hard” to deal with Olympic pressure.
It was afterward — after — that Biles started talking about the “twisties” and more. Everyone knows how what you say in the heat of the moment is way more likely to point to the truth. This is reflected all the way in the formalities of the law — in the rules of evidence, which allow an exception to the rules of hearsay for things that are said at times of great excitement because they’re all the more likely to be true.
Last summer, Biles was 24. She turned 25 in March.
Query: do we know the full and unvarnished truth of what happened last summer in Tokyo with Simone Biles? Time, as always, will tell.
Case study No. 2
On July 2, a Seattle Seahawks fan trolled tennis, and the U.S. Open Twitter account came back hard. Doubly hard. Then Seahawks quarterback Drew Lock, who is 25, responded. The sequence:
Case study No. 3
Kara Lawson, the Duke women’s basketball coach, had some words for her team. Kendall Baker at Axios sports reported:
We all wait in life for things to get easier. ... It will never get easier. ... What happens is you become someone who handles hard stuff better."
"That's a mental shift that has to occur in each of your brains. It has to. Because if you go around waiting for stuff to get easier in life, it's never going to happen."
"Any meaningful pursuit in life, if you want to be successful at it, it goes to the people that handle hard well. Those are the people that get the stuff they want."
"So make yourself a person that handles hard well. Not someone that's waiting for the easy. ... And then whatever comes at you, you're going to be great."
Here’s the full speech:
Case study No. 4
Kentucky’s 22-year-old Abby Steiner, the U.S. champion in the women’s 200 meters, is expected to step out onto the international stage at this month’s track and field world championships in Eugene, Oregon.
Unconfirmed rumors have been making the rounds in track circles about Steiner and a $2-million Puma contract.
That prompted Steiner on July 5 to issue this statement on social media:
There are any number of issues here.
To begin, is there a $2-million deal and is the public entitled to know about it? Wanna know Drew Lock’s salary? Click here. In 2022, Lock will earn a base salary of $1.351 million and a $100k workout bonus while carrying a cap hit of $1,451,021.
Is the NFL collectively bargained? Yes. Is track and field? No. Is Lock an employee while Steiner will be an independent contractor? Yes, and yes. Is track and field trying to again become a “major” sport? Yes. Is football the biggest sport? Without question.
Steiner winning the 200 at the U.S. nationals // Getty Images
Is financial transparency one step toward track reclaiming a place among America’s big draws? If the rumored $2-million deal is wildly inaccurate, uh, set the record straight with, you know, facts? If the argument is that football players sign deals with teams and runners with shoe companies, didn’t Allyson Felix prove that athlete empowerment and going public was the check vis-a-vis those companies and the clauses in their purportedly secretive deals? Discuss.
As for Steiner’s suggestion that reporters ought to “fact check”: if 1/ by her account contracts are not a matter of public record (even though they are in other major sports) and 2/ it’s our responsibility to fact-check so 3/ DM me but 4/ I’m not going to tell you anything because see 1/ contracts are not a matter of public record. What, then, is she getting at here?
What Abby Steiner knows, or thinks she knows, about journalism and public figures — “any reporter should know this, and reporting otherwise is extremely harmful in a time period of life that is already stressful” — is curious.
Is it different being an NFL quarterback than a world-class sprinter? A Duke basketball player?
Are reporters supposed to hold off from reporting things about public figures because facts — if they are facts — are inevitably or even possibly “extremely harmful in a time period of life that is already stressful”?
A curious position, indeed.