rojo wrote:
This has got to be one of the worse posts in LRC history. And yet it has a 4 to 1 up to down vote ratio? I need to check if bots are voting.
1)You call her a sports bust. Hello? She's was the NCAA record holder in the 400 and Olympic champion. She's an all-timer if she never runs a step again.
2) You incorrectly assume she was forced to give up a normal college live to go pro.
"Sacrifice your opportunity at a normal college life and your 20s where you can grow into a woman, and instead leave college at 19 or 20 for relative isolation, living alone and forced to figure out how to become an adult yourself."
What are you talking about?
You can easily attend Texas A&M and run a pro track schedule in the summer. No one forced her to give up the normal college life. She chose to give it up. Most people in life would kill to live in LA with a 7 figure contract. If she wanted the normal college life, she would have stayed and trained at A&M.
She wanted to live the highlife in LA>
And why do you assume you are isolated as a pro? There are a ton of track groups she could join. She can get roommates , etc.
3)Undergo 10 years of brutal training with frequent media responsibilities interspersed, where you’re so tired physically and of answering the same questions (while also having to conform to the media’s attempt to make you an Olympic beauty icon looking nice and skinny for magazine covers) that all you want to do is just go back home to your dark and quiet apartment.
Undergo 10 years of brutal training? Please. She's an 800 runner. You think training for that for 9 months out of the year pulling in 750k a year is harder than working a normal office job? No one was trying to make her a beauty icon. She is the one who wants to be the model/
And then you try to make us feel guilty by bringing up the S word. Maybe once a month do I see a post this bad and I'm not sure I've ever seen a post this bad with so many upvotes.
Came back. Yeah, I overdid it a bit. I think before writing that, I watched ESPN's doc on that Stanford female soccer player who committed suicide. She did it after reading an email that she might be expelled for throwing coffee on someone, which would mean no Stanford law school. Devastating, but in the grand scheme of her life trajectory, a fairly minor and overcome-able setback. But in that moment it was tragically too much for her to take.
So I saw this and thought about how Athing COULD be feeling after reaching the pinnacle of the sport and then looking up and seeing the extremely high expectations set for the next 10 years of her career. And seeing already how the rest of her life might look after that, maybe as a track commentator, chronic reflector on her past sports fame, etc. I thought about how there was a chance she might see all that and not want to do it, but also feel trapped in it. So, it's an extremely low chance, but some people might start thinking about the S-word in her shoes. It didn't take the worst thing in the world for the Stanford girl to. But overall, I think my intention with the S-word was to say, "she could be depressed, and that's no small deal, because there's a minimal but non-zero chance it leads to suicide".
1) Yes, I 100% agree, but I was responding to the OP saying "it's a shame she didn't live up to her full potential". To me, "it's a shame" and "not living up to full potential" = "bust".
2) Did she want to live the high life in LA, or did she want to get coached by the person who seemingly had the best potential of helping her reach her potential, Bobby Kersee? We don't know for sure. Yes, this was ultimately her choice, but could it have been a career decision where she didn't foresee the personal consequences? It's possible. And you say there are no personal consequences of moving to LA, but I do. Friends in college you knew before you were famous are not the same as the "friends" you meet as a celebrity in LA. But I don't totally disagree. All of this is just me painting a potential narrative, and yours is another potential narrative. Each has a percent chance of being true.
3) Yeah, definitely not as bad as an office job. And maybe not as bad as someone training for a longer-distance event. I was thinking of the people who run high mileage and say they're tired all the time. But we don't know how much intensity she's training with. I once heard Malcom Gladwell say that he and many others have gone to the well and been so traumatized by how much it hurt that they don't want to go back again. So a single hard training session can still feel like a lightning rod through your brain and maybe have you as mentally tired as someone who just worked a 9-5. But yeah, not my strongest point.
Overall, this was kind of like Skip Bayless saying something outlandish to make a headline, where it's slightly based on truth but he's turned it up to 10. Or just any "hot take" that the person half-believes but has to defend. Whatever. No one will read this. I need to go to bed. Why did I type all of this. Ugh