Simone Biles shook the world on Tuesday.
That probably sounds like hyperbole, even by the everything-is-hyperbole standards of the digital and social media age.
But Biles’ decision to withdraw from the women’s team gymnastic finals at the Olympics for mental health reasons is one of those news stories that will have a long-lasting impact on how we view athletes and sports.
One of the main reasons for that is that her decision runs counter to the sport ethic.
What is the sport ethic?
If you’ve never heard of the sport ethic, it’s a sociological theory that can help us understand how professional, Olympic and elite college athletes behave and how the media cover them. If you want to understand the Simone Biles story, the sport ethic can help.
Jay Hughes and Robert Coakley, sociologists from the University of Colorado, published a paper in 1991 that first defined the sport ethic. Their big idea is that elite athletes subscribe to a common world view that includes the following traits:
Being an athlete involves making sacrifices for The Game.
Athletes must love ‘the game’ and prove it by giving it top priority in their lives. They must have the proper attitude.
Being an athlete involves striving for distinction
Winning symbolizes improvement and establishes distinction.
Being an athlete involves accepting risks and playing through pain
Athletes are expected to endure pressure, pain and fear without backing down from competitive challenges.
Being an athlete involves refusing to accept limits in the pursuit of possibilities
Athletes don’t accept obstacles without trying to overcome them and beat the odds; dreams, they say, are achievable unless one quits.
Hughes and Coakley’s point in their original paper was that the sport ethic led to what they called deviant overconformity, examples of which include playing through extreme physical injuries or the use of performance-enhancing drugs.
What does this have to do with sports media?
One of my working hypotheses in my own writing and research is that sports journalism reflects and propagates the sport ethic through the industry's reliance on coaches and players as sources. If players and coaches have internalized the sport ethic, it's logical they will espouse those beliefs in interviews with the media, and the media (based on those interviews) will in turn espouse the sport ethic. .
The sport ethic helps us understand Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods. It helps us understand athletes coming back from injury and the trope of the hypercompetitive athlete.
It also helps us understand the Simone Biles story.
Seeing the reaction to Biles’ decision unfold in real time on Tuesday was fascinating, and probably reflected the information bubbles we’ve all created for ourselves on social networks. My network was filled with Tweets and messages that were overwhelmingly supportive of Biles. But it didn’t take much effort to find other messages.
Let’s break down the Biles story, using the sport ethic as our guide. As you’ll see, things get complicated really quickly:
Being an athlete involves making sacrifices for The Game.
So one read of today’s story is that Biles did not live up to this part of the sport ethic. She did not make a sacrifice, she did not put The Game ahead of anything else in her life. She put herself ahead of the game and her teammates.
But by the same token, Biles has sacrificed for The Game for most of her life, and Juliet Macur’s story in The New York Times details the physical and emotional toll Biles’ career has taken. It’s hard not to read that story and conclude, as my old boss Chuck Pollock used to say, that Biles gave at the office.
See. It’s complicated.
Being an athlete involves striving for distinction
If you ain’t first, you’re last. That sums up this part of the sport ethic. No one has won more than Biles, achieved more distinction. But, she did not win on Tuesday. She did not lead Team USA to victory. More to the point, she didn’t try to win.
Being an athlete involves accepting risks and playing through pain
Keri Strug was trending on Twitter on Tuesday, as people compared her famous 1996 vault on a broken ankle to Biles’ withdrawal. It’s understandable. Athletes have been praised for playing through pain as long as there have been athletes and media covering them.
But what is interesting over the past few years is that there has been an evolution in this aspect of the sport ethic. Players are more likely to take care of their bodies, whether through load management, knowledge of the risks of CTE or just trusting their own judgment.
In the past few years, this has slowly moved into the realm of mental health, with Kevin Love, DeMar Derozan and Naomi Osaka becoming outspoken advocates for taking care of their mental health.
Think of it this way. If Biles had been forced to withdraw from the Games because of a physical injury, would this have been a story? Would Biles have been criticized at all?
Being an athlete involves refusing to accept limits in the pursuit of possibilities
“Dreams, they say, are achievable unless one quits.”
The four letter word. Quit. Under the sport ethic, that is the cardinal sin.
And one view of Biles’ actions is that she quit on her team. She accepted limits in the pursuit of possibilities. It ran counter to how athletes have expected themselves to act, She ran counter to how we have expected elite athletes to act.
But the reaction to Biles’ withdrawal has not been universal condemnation, as we might expect from a sports world, a sports media, and sports fandom that’s lived in the world of the sport ethic for generations. In fact, there’s been pretty widespread support for Biles.
This may be an outlier. Biles, already the greatest gymnast of all time, had nothing to prove in these games. Like Osaka earlier, she’s a popular figure at the top of her sport. When a young woman of color speaks about protecting her mental health, it’s hard to ignore her without appearing insensitive at best.
An interesting test will be if and when an up-and-coming athlete does something similar. Or a male athlete at the top of his game.
Suffice it to say, how we view athletes is evolving.
And the sport ethic lets us understand how athletes act, and how we react to them.