Emily Seebohm couldn’t hold back tears after finishing second in Monday’s 100m backstroke.
As predicted by www.ausfailure.com Aussies are doing a terrific job at showing the world that they are just not quite good enough to be called winners these days.
The world was of course aware of that, but as usual the slow on the uptake Ocker boofheads are the last ones to wake up to just how utterly crap they are at everything.
So who do you blame when you are shite?
Well in rugby league it’s the refs fault as Saint Ricky Stuart tells us.
If that doesn’t work for you, ball your eyes out and blame the fans.
Source: http://ca.sports.yahoo.com/blogs/eh-game/aussie-swimmer-blames-twitter-well-wishers-her-second-224000698.html
If you can’t beat the heat, blame it on the Tweets? That appears to be the strategy Australian swimmer Emily Seebohm is pursuing following her silver medal in Monday’s 100-metre backstroke final. Normally, a silver medal would be cause for celebration, but the 20-year-old was heavily favoured over 17-year-old eventual winner (and Canadian citizen!) Missy Franklin and came up just short (as you can see from the Wall Street Journal‘s popsicle-stick recreation). Seebohm’s 58.68-second time was less than a second-slower than Franklin’s 58.33 mark, but it was a substantial drop from the Olympic-record 58.23 the Australian put up in the previous day’s heat. Her original explanation for that? She lost focus by staying up late and responding to well-wisherson Twitter and Facebook:
“I guess when you swim that fast in the heat, then people put pressure and more pressure on you, saying, ‘Oh, you’re going to get the gold.’,” she told media.
“Maybe I just started believing that and just thought I’d already won by the time I had swum and I hadn’t even swum yet,” she said,
“I don’t know, I just felt like I didn’t really get off (social media) and get into my own mind.”
[Related: Canadian Brent Hayden swims for gold on Wednesday]
And as reported by news.com.au, Seebohm wishes she’d prepared differently:
“When people tell you a thousand times ‘you’ll get the gold’ somewhere in your mind you are going to say ‘you’ve done it’,” Seebohm, 20, said.
I’ve obviously got to log out of Twitter and sign out of Facebook sooner than what I did.”
There’s no dispute that high-performance competition carries a strong mental component as well as merely a physical one, so Seebohm’s comments may well have some truth to them. It’s quite possible that reading all the messages she received caused her to believe her own hype and lose the cutting-edge focus required for gold. However, it’s also possible that the difference came from something else, and that could be either a physical letdown from Seebohm or just some bad luck. Also, if it was in fact the Twitter comments that caused Seebohm to lose focus, that’s much more on her than it is on anyone else; she’s the one who chose to spend time reading and responding to them before her event. In and of itself, that isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as Twitter feedback also could potentially provide motivation for some athletes to get over the hump; if it made Seebohm cocky, though, she’d be more accurate in blaming herself than in blaming her well-intentioned and supportive fans. Thankfully, that appears to be where she’s moved on to now:
I don’t think Twitter and Facebook cost me a gold medal,” she said.
“I think me, myself, cost me the gold medal. I think I was just too nervous for my own good and that just cost me.”
[Related: Diver Alexandre Despatie plays cards dealt to him]
Exactly. Sure, it’s quite conceivable that supportive tweets could cause an athlete to lose focus, but it’s also possible that they could help push someone to victory. No one’s forced to read the tweets sent to them, and no one’s forced to take anything away from them. If they were a distraction for Seebohm, that’s her fault for reading and paying attention to them, not fans’ fault for sending them. Tweets don’t kill gold-medal chances, athletes kill gold-medal chances.
