Sportsmanship is a word that lays the cornerstone for how to act in a certain situation involving sports. Although some players may be enemies on the playing field, they can be the greatest of friends off it. At the Rio olympics many acts of poor sportsmanship threw daggers at the team’s reputation. Things such as social media or alcohol can be to blame, but what is the real reason Olympic athletes decided to act irresponsibly?
Ryan Lochte and three of his teammates had perhaps one of the biggest controversy in the olympics this year. Ryan and his teammates Gunnar Bentz, Jack Conger, and James Feigen reported to Rio police that they were robbed at gunpoint by gas station security guards. Eventually the media found out they lied and opened up what really happened. Still completely unknown how much damage was done, if any, the men were acting under the influence of alcohol and causing havoc. This made the security guards mad so they held the men at gunpoint, demanding for reparations in the form of money. The men gave up 50 dollars then fled the scene, lying about it the next day. When asked why he would lie about something so serious, Matt Lauer Ryan seemed to take complete blame explaining, “I’m not making me being intoxicated like an excuse, I’m not doing that at all. It was my fault and I shouldn’t have said it.”
So beside Ryan and the rest of the team who has to be held accountable, what could one say is to blame. The answer is a lot of things, but a main factor that many people leave out is pressure. This is something that forces people to act in interesting ways with only a teeny dosage. As an Olympian, this is something that Ryan clearly handles at a huge amount. In fact, in Rio about 7.5 million tickets were sold. That is a whopping amount and it brings pressure beyond imagination to these Olympic athletes. A P.V. Varsity swimmer, Alex Wong, was asked a couple of questions to try and relate this pressure to the daily life of a Spartan. First question asked was about pressure and how it affects athletes. Alex brings up a very good point in saying, “I think the amount of pressure on them definitely affects their behavior. When you’re in a competition where the whole world is watching and your country is counting on you, it can definitely start to cloud someone’s judgement. Not only do Olympic athletes feel pressure from their fans, but also from themselves. They’ve put an unbelievable amount of training for the past 4 years for one games and the pressure to do well for themselves adds on to the external pressure they feel and could cause some sort of break down.”
How does pressure then affect Spartan athletes who are competing at a much smaller scale? One would not believe it affects a local athlete that much, but Alex has something to say about that. Alex exclaims, “I definitely feel pressure as an athlete to do well. I feel like I need to do well to make my parents proud, make my coach happy, and to prove something to myself. When it comes down to the meet where all your hard training could finally amount to something, the pressure to do well is immense. In the span of those few days, nothing else matters except for how well you perform.”
Pressure seems to be all around, even at a local scale. Sometimes it induces stress and fatigue, but in the everyone is accountable for their own actions.
