It’s the “off-season” and we’ve got a week buffer before the MXdN so I’m going to write outside the lines of specifically moto this week.
It’s the “off-season” and we’ve got a week buffer before the MXdN so I’m going to write outside the lines of specifically moto this week.
A few rounds into the 2014 MX series we caught wind of a top racer having tested positive for a banned substance during the SX series. The wolves were unleashed on this topic as we all focused in our sights on the culprit and wanted blood, or at least swift justice and an actual punishment to be handed down to him. I was in this group of people who felt this was a simple process of “here’s the rules” and “here’s the punishment for infringing upon them”. But no, as with all things in the American legal system both public and sporting, there is a protective barrier put in place for the guilty, even the obviously, proven guilty. The saying is “innocent until proven guilty” but now even if the guilty ADMITS guilt, they are given options in the form of plea bargains and diminished punishment. I mean, WTF?! The culprit is admitting they did what the prosecution claims they did but now because they stopped lying about it, we reward them with a lesser punishment? Welcome to the America where everyone gets a trophy so their delicate emotions don’t get stung.
I’m speaking less about the specific instance of James Stewart testing positive for Adderall than I am about sporting and professional athletes as a whole in this day and age of constant monitoring and social media brush fires. I still want to see WADA display their due diligence and punish the offense with utter neutrality and honesty but as we’ve seen lately, there are far more poisonous acts happening behind closed doors with elite athletes which are shifting the sporting paradigm, at least I hope anyway.
Decades ago, iconic sports figures were just that, iconic. The parents of yesteryear held elite athletes up to their children as examples of greatness which they could aspire to be. It actually made a little sense in those days. There was no internet and the media was very moderated by the simple fact that tv cameras were so hefty that it was impossible to capture anything but the persona the athletes wanted to present to us, the public. They could be who they were in their private lives, demons and all and fret not about those darker sides of their lives reaching a broadcast or a print story. Just like the internet made it possible for niche interests(seedy, bizarre or evil) to build communities and popularity, it, with the addition of smartphones and miniaturized video cameras, has erased the lines between private and public lives, for top-shelf athletes especially.
Social media has been an enormous distraction for society. It allows us to step outside of our tightly confined existences and share in the lives of people who interest us. We could admire them, despise them or they may just be a cultural phenomena which we don’t get but that doesn’t mean we won’t play a role as voyeur by simply tapping “follow” and being bewildered at what they put out on social media. Another aspect of social media is playing judge for all that we intake visually and audibly. We don’t feel compelled to comment on all of it(well some do) but when something strikes us at our core, we take to social apps to voice our opinion(as I do here in blog-form). Although I enjoy social media, I often shake my head at it due to the spite that it not only allows but encourages with it’s anonymous nature. On the other hand, perhaps social media will turn out to be another system in place to extend the checks and balances of acceptable behavior and by extension, serve to resolve some of the misbehavior? Putting a little voice in people’s heads which makes them ponder consequences of an act when made public, may just curb that act.
Pro athletes are at a disadvantage at this point in time through mere evolution. The elite athletes of today were raised on this prior paradigm where they looked up to the sports figures and only saw the accolades and positives of their lives, save for a “feature” story in Sports Illustrated which shed light on some seedy behind the scenes story. The norm was professional athlete as demigod. It was just assumed that since they were rich, their personal lives were idyllic and also something to aspire to be. Are athletes more volatile today than the days of old? That’s a loaded question. Loaded because athletes of today now have a pre-disposition of expecting camera’s to be omnipresent. In and of itself, that is a poisonous mindset that breeds a little contempt between athlete and general populace. Athletes still do their best to put out that idyllic persona which brings in the sponsorships and makes them as marketable as possible but it’s getting harder and harder for them to even have a personal life. You can’t be “on” all the time and unfortunately, as with all famous persona’s, fans want them to be “on” at all times.
Don’t mistake “on” for being “not themselves”. If you’re a good person in your private life and a professional athlete, the two are separated by a nearly invisible line. You also can’t mistake being infallible with being a good person. I don’t expect pro athletes to be held to a higher standard than I do anyone else in society. Ray Rice punched a woman, a woman he claimed to love and later married. He’s the same piece of shit in my eyes as every other anonymous abuser in the world. The same goes for Adrian Peterson and Floyd Mayweather Jr. There is no separation between their accolades as professional athlete and their behavior in private. Just as there never was with the pro athletes of yesteryear; those athletes just had the luxury of not having to deal with the accessibility the athletes of today do. Athletes of today had better digest this fact and rectify their methods of operation because I can tell you one thing for damn sure, the evolution of social media and cameras everywhere is NOT going to reverse course. Want to be an asshole? Go for it. Tell the fans to lick your balls? Fine. But when you are inflicting harm on others, that is the line in the sand I hope no one would choose to overlook or accept.
Even the leagues which employ the athletes have inexplicably been caught with their pants down. Cover-ups have been around since the leagues(and political parties) formed but now there is a video, audio or “typed-out” trail of evidence somewhere in EVERY situation that will come to light at some point. Old habits die hard though and the NFL finds itself doing all it can to spin it’s way out of this Ray Rice situation. To introduce another modern-era metaphor; nobody uses a data-backup strategy until they suffer serious data-loss of something which really means something to them, then it’s scramble to recover the data, and then creating a data-backup plan. This is the NFL right now. They’ve always been the big dog who makes the rules, thrusts their chest forward and fears no recourse. Now they have been scissor-kicked by social media users and a typically lame TMZ and they are doing all they can to wind back the clock and put the toothpaste back in the tube.
Look, I don’t expect athletes to be infailable. Not in the least. I do expect them to be respectful, have integrity and not be monstrous to others in their “private” lives. If that’s too much to ask, well, they’ll get what they get in the court of public opinion, social media and by proxy, their next contract. And I don’t want to hear any bitching about it when they try playing victim.
