Africa-Press – Ethiopia. Left hand in his pocket, and right hand holding an air pistol, the cool Turkish shooter Yusuf Dickeç managed to grab an Olympic silver medal and with the same breath grabbed the world’s attention just like that. There is a saying by Ayrton Senna: “Being second is to be the first of the ones who lose!” But, in the case Yusuf Dickeç that myth was broken, not just because of the unconventional approach this 51-year-old shooter had in achieving his medal, but also because of the way this went viral on social media.
This went to the extent that many people were feeling sorry for the gold medalist whom no one was talking about. And soon enough podcasts started to talk about him, calling him ‘Yusuf the shooter’, ‘the sniper’ and he was even called a mob boss and an assassin.
If you watch the Olympics, at some point you realise that these athletes come on stage with such grim and anxious faces that you can almost feel the tension they have in your own guts!To some extent we know all the physical preparations those athletes go through, the thousands of hours of training, practicing, taming every single muscle,but we often forget the mental pressure they go through, not just from the trainers and coaches, but from a whole nation that sits in the arenas and behind their TV sets watching and anticipating the collection of medals by their representatives in the games.
Talking about all the above, brings to mind the story of Simone Biles,the young American athlete who so far won tens of medals in Gymnastics, she is someone who can potentially call herself the greatest of all time.
Simone was also one of the girls who at some point opened up about the case of sexual abuse that she and tens of other girls were subjected to by the team USA’s former gymnastics doctor, Larry Nassar in 2018, and in this way Simone also changed the way people perceived mental health issues that athletes struggle with. After going through many traumatic experiences, Biles says that athletes should first take care of themselves before anything else.
In a Netflix documentary called “Simone Biles Rising”, she touches just the surface of the challenges she went through both physically and mentally to reach where she is today, and it’s interesting that she kept mentioning how social media was very cruel to her. She said every time she performed one of her dangerous acts, she was just trying not to die, and then she would read people commenting about her hair and make-up.
To what extent will we allow social media to dominate our lives, is anyone’s guess. My Olympic hero though is the Turkish shooter Yusuf Dickeç, a silver medal never looked better!
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