The drama of Simone Biles is an interesting case study as to where we’re at as a global culture, in terms of a whole lot of things.
For those who’ve been watching the badminton and skateboarding exclusively, Biles is the US gymnast claimed by many to be one of the greatest ever.
Though part of the US Olympic team, she quit the games mid-competition after an unusually average sequence — leaving, returning and then leaving for good — citing her mental health concerns and a need for mindfulness.
It’s not the first time an Olympian has snapped but Biles’ departure has set off a storm, with many writing in support of her “self-care” while there’s been a matching — and crude — right-wing backlash from the likes of Piers Morgan and Andrew Bolt, with much chatter about snowflakes and wimping out.
That chatter in turn prompted a defence, couched in terms of Biles’ background as an African-American foster child, a hothoused gymnastics kid, and a victim of abuse by her coach. (All this coach abuse in these sports! It’s almost as if there’s a problem with giving middle-aged men total control over lithe young girls.)
More than one commentator has said that Biles’ act of self care was the truly heroic act, greater than Olympic-level achievement itself. Ridicule has been directed at flabby, middle-aged journalists (in other words: journalists) telling a gymnast who can do what no one else can — landing a double somersault on a bar, 10 hours a day for 15 years — to show some guts.
There’s a lot going on here, but the essence of it seems to be that Olympic sport and the values attached are no longer culturally strong enough to supervene the claim to vulnerability and self-knowing as an alternative idea of the heroic.
Even 20 years ago, Biles’ dummy-spit would’ve been… well, would’ve been called a dummy-spit, the expression showing disdain but also understanding. Earlier than that, it would have been shaming only. Now, we know too much about how Olympic heroes are made.
For decades, they were deformed by drugs, especially the Eastern Bloc athletes. It’s hilarious to watch Olympics of old, with commentators dutifully tallying up the medal count as the East German women’s swimming team — essentially fridges with hair in one-piece swimsuits — lined up on the blocks to win again. But after the drugs were removed, instrumental psychology took over, as it did in commercial competitive sport.
This was, in fact, the end of sport, if by sport we mean a person of given talents honing their body through practice for the purpose of rules-bound competition. Sport was the point where the chance of nature met the expression of will in the enactment of culture, and that’s what produces its capacity for joy, for a sense of collective triumph. Yes, yes, Nazis.
But Hitler’s 1936 reconstruction of the Games marks the point at which it was first fully co-opted, discrediting the notion of will in the process. But it’s the rise of the sports psychologists, and training regimes that mimic military-style “breakdown” regimes, that really undermine the spirit of sport. They’re the Taylorism of the will, turning out sportsbots for national competition or commercial gain, making for a uniformity of expression and a grim, mechanistic focus on shaving hundredths of seconds off previous records.
For quite a while, sport, as a stopwatch activity, has had a role in legitimising the domain of work and the alienated control of time; the rise of sportsbots is of one with the rise of HR departments, motivational training and attitude monitoring in the workplace. And, as Greg Jericho notes in Guardian Australia, sport is almost concluded as a rising activity.
The gains have become so micro-incremental that the curve is hitting the asymptote. Humanity has climbed Olympus. Perhaps that’s why Biles’ quitting was greeted with so much excitement and support. While there has been celebration of achievements, it was Biles’ act that released the sort of energetic enthusiasm the sport used to do.
Here was someone making the only act of will possible in this now wholly disciplined activity: refusing it. Those who apply a simple opposition between the commitment and stoicism of sport, and the supposed self-indulgence of Biles’ act, haven’t understood how reversed the polarities have become. Biles is “Bartlebying” — “I would prefer not to” — and, in that sense, resisting a world coming to be wholly dominated by administration and quantity.
One wonders if the language of self-care she uses is a cover, knowing or otherwise, for the more basic feeling that it just ain’t worth it. Nevertheless, celebrating that refusal in terms of psychological self-care brings its own problems.
There’s a difference between sympathy and acceptance of someone as fully human in falling short and a celebration of a failure at something you set out to complete. Failure is failure: the rule of human life. Success is the exception. You’ve got to shoot for the asymptote to fall somewhere on the curve.
Look at the etymology. Fail/fall — they’re of the same root. It’s what gives gymnastics its power, somewhat more central to our culture than badminton.
But if you turn an act deserving sympathy into one of heroism, then the culture enters a spiral — or what I believe they call in gymnastics “the twisties”. The celebration not of refusal but of collapse, which a certain phalanx of op-ed writers is enforcing, evacuates will from the public sphere.
Who gets custody of it? Capital, the state — an impersonal process which is dissolving the capacity for vigorous life. You can see this in the whole billionaires-in-space (actually the upper atmosphere). Doing it to address their own jadedness, they demand we applaud them and then speak the language of diversity and manufactured hope, when the response is a huge “meh”.
How is it possible to be a billionaire, go into “space” and come off as needy? Because the culture’s got itself into a twisty. You see what I did there? (Lands perfectly as Vivaldi plays.)
Perhaps Biles is a harbinger of the changes we are undergoing at the end of modernity. Modernity attached heroism to sport at its pinnacle — actual literal mountain climbing included — as well as, say, art and political revolution.
Those now appear concluded as such, and we are shifting to a new set of values while still talking an older language. After badminton, goodminton. The Olympics may retreat to a more limited role, as art has become commodified decoration and politics performance.
But it will take a while in the air yet before we finally land. See what I did again? (Turns, presents to judges, steel butt clenched tight directed to audience, nil points.)
I for one was quite glad at the symbolic (don’t think that’s the right word) middle finger being shown to Biles’ masters who were riding off her sporting excellence to make some big bucks, and no doubt wouldn’t turn an eye at crashing her into the ground (haha!) unless it affected their bottom line.
It was always the case, but even more obvious in our time, that these marketable athletes are treated like circus animals, expected to sit and jump when told to – no difference really from the rest of us capitalist slaves whose jobs are dangled in the air above us. I’ve never been one for removing the humanity from a person just for some trifles.
One thing I think it’s different now is the level of intensity needed to get to and compete at that level. You know if you’re not putting in every possible bit of prep work, there’s another competitor who will be. Each advance in technique, training, sports psychology, etc. there’s a new dimension the would-be champion needs to master just to be in it. At some point, it’s gonna break even the best.
(It’s not like Biles should have need to prove her credentials – she already has – so if even she is breaking then the cheap shots about mental health display a wonderful ignorance of what is asked mentally of each athlete.)
On a slight tangent, Michael Sandel’s latest book talks of a similar trend in college admissions in the US, where teens are having to work harder and longer than ever before to get into college for the same reason – anything they don’t do will be done by a competitor for that same place. He talks of the actual harm this is doing to the teens, and with no societal benefit as what makes a good college student could be filled by any number of applicants.
One of them Pommy writers, I think it was Chesterton, said he rejoiced to hear that sport was being played badly. That would indicate that average people were playing it, which is the basic function of sport.
“Look at the etymology. Fail/fall — they’re of the same root.”
No they’re not. Best leave language commentary to the experts.
fall (v.)Old English feallan (class VII strong verb; past tense feoll, past participle feallen) “to drop from a height; fail, decay, die,” from Proto-Germanic *fallanan (source also of Old Frisian falla, Old Saxon fallan, Dutch vallen, Old Norse falla, Old High German fallan, German fallen, absent in Gothic).
These are from PIE root *pol- “to fall” (source also of Armenian p’ul “downfall,” Lithuanian puolu, pulti “to fall,” Old Prussian aupallai “finds,” literally “falls upon”).
fail (v.)c. 1200, “be unsuccessful in accomplishing a purpose;” also “cease to exist or to function, come to an end;” early 13c. as “fail in expectation or performance,” from Old French falir “be lacking, miss, not succeed; run out, come to an end; err, make a mistake; be dying; let down, disappoint” (11c., Modern French faillir), from Vulgar Latin *fallire, from Latin fallere “to trip, cause to fall;” figuratively “to deceive, trick, dupe, cheat, elude; fail, be lacking or defective.” De Vaan traces this to a PIE root meaning “to stumble” (source also of Sanskrit skhalate “to stumble, fail;” Middle Persian škarwidan“to stumble, stagger;” Greek sphallein “to bring or throw down,” sphallomai “to fall;” Armenian sxalem “to stumble, fail”). If so, the Latin sense is a metaphorical shift from “stumble” to “deceive.”
Didn’t know that you were such a totemic asymptotic fall-guy, Guy. ‘You’ve got to shoot for the asymptote to fall somewhere on the curve.’ Really!! Are you going to throw a hypothesised Reimannian zeta function at us next, or, (gasp) a LHC proton-smashing hit score. Probably not tangential enough for you for a zero to infinity differentiation, but my god, it’s an impressive bridging of the two-cultures abyss.