I can attest to that as a Youth football coach ~5-10 years ago. There are some kids that refused to admit they were hurt, specifically when their "bell was rung". One kids in particular, a super fast inner city kid, would have tears in his eyes after not backing down from the baddest dude on the team for fear that it represented weakness. I loved that kid but wish he would have felt more comfortable to be honest with me after helmet to helmet contact. Instead, our staff had to guess.
Yep - we've got the "don't drink water in practice you *****, tough it out" mentality still holding sway over a lot of people now.
Kerri Strugg is revered for her performance in the 80's Olympics in which she badly injured her ankle in the vault and returned for a 2nd vault to land on 1 leg. After Biles pulled out she applauded her. Dominique Moceanua (sp?) performed on a broken leg when she was 14. She claimed she never had the option of a personal choice to compete or not. As adults, shouldn't the individual be able make a decision on whether they are healthy enough or not to compete? It certainly shouldn't be a couch spectator that makes that decision.
People also forget that Team USA would have won gold even without Kerri's vault, and that she had to retire from gymnastics afterward thanks to exacerbating the injury. Bela Karolyi should be spoken of along with Mike Shanahan sending RG3 back into the game and ruining his career.
It's funny how the same people who will criticize overbearing sports parents for pushing kids too far and taking it too seriously can so easily become just like those parents - for kids they aren't even the parents of.
Being brave doesn't mean being reckless. If she's not mentally capable of competing, she shouldn't be trying. It's too big of a risk for something that simply isn't that consequential.
Even more than that, if she's not mentally capable of competing, then subbing out to let a teammate sub in is a rare step of choosing team over ego. Not only is that not a "sign of the times", it's the opposite.
Team USA was, after Simone's sub-par vault, on pace to win no medal at all. If her self-assessment of her odds of futures high score was accurate (and nobody yet has given me any reason to suspect otherwise), then letting Chiles and McCallum perform instead is what let Team USA get Silver rather than nothing.
It's akin to an ace pitcher falling behind 4-0 after two innings while throwing wild pitches all over the place, getting subbed out early in favor of some capable relievers who solidified things the rest of the way but the team still lost 4-3. And if that starting pitcher said to the manger "I'm rattled out there and I'm trying to shake it off but it's not working. Put _____ in the game instead, that's our best chance to win" - wouldn't that be an unusually humble and team-first thing to do?
If she'd have nailed that vault, she'd have kept going
Right, that's the point. And if the starting pitcher had thrown 6 strikeouts in 2 innings, the best thing for the team is to not make a switch.
I also reject the parallel to the military. Someone who has joined the military knows the expectation is that he put his life on the line to fulfill his duty. Furthermore, he's doing so for a very important reason - to protect his nation, its freedoms, and its people. None of that applies to an Olympic athlete.
Yeah, the parallels there are just awful, and for even more reasons than the ones you mentioned. War isn't a tightly-regulated competition set up for an even playing field. Having more men and material to throw into the fray than your opponent is great. Gymnastics don't work that way at all, you can't just stack all the athletes you want on the team and then pick the best scores out of dozens.
So to make the analogy work better, let's take a fighter pilot for the "mid-air" similarity.. You have 4 aces in your squadron but only 3 working planes, so only 3 of the pilots can fly on a given mission. You set up a rotation for which one flies which mission. One day, your best pilot nearly crashes on takeoff, nearly crashes into his wingman, and can't even hold formation. He tells you he's completely losing his sense of alignment in the air.
Wouldn't sending your other 3 pilots up and subbing in the other dude who's sitting out just be common sense? The fact that the Allies actually did this sort of thing - tried to rotate guys in and out to give them a break, and even recalled them back stateside after a while - while the Japanese and Germans didn't care about mental fatigue and just threw their pilots into endless missions until they got shot down - was a big advantage for us.
Or let's say you're a squadron commander and Chuck Yeager says he can't focus on flying to the point where he's a danger to himself and others and he'd be holding his squadron back. Don't you take him seriously?
