Fake News From Tokyo
Distorted reality leads to yet another Twitter-fueled orgy of misinformed self-righteousness, this time pitting Simone Biles against Novak Djokovic.
“A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes.”
Everybody knows Mark Twain said that.
Only he didn’t. It actually has a pedigree going back to Jonathan Swift and beyond.
You’d think misquotations and distortions of the truth would be diminishing in the Internet age. We can source quotes back to reliable sources with a few clicks. We can usually dig up raw footage of news conferences and see if people actually said what they were alleged to have said.
Instead, misattributed quotations, bald-faced lies, and other forms of bullcorn and fake news are multiplying tremendously. Given a choice between facts and believing what we want to believing, it seems most of us choose the latter, insulating ourselves in information silos or even concocting the news as we would rather it be than the way it is.
Take this latest kerfuffle out the Olympics, the one juxtaposing the frustrations of the world’s greatest living gymnast and male tennis player.
All right-thinking people love Simone Biles, America’s sweetheart who has overcome amazing odds to get where she is today — perhaps the greatest who ever lived. The vast majority of tennis fans despise Novak Djokovic — he seems to be a prickly son of a bitch whose graciousness falls far short of his predecessors atop the sport — Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal. Maybe anti-Serbian bias plays into it some, I dunno. Other than to generally know who the world’s top players are at any given time. I haven’t paid much attention to tennis since John McEnroe’s day.
So anyway the big news out of the Olympics first week was Simone Biles’ mental breakdown and subsequent departure from competition. This being 2021 in America, this immediately became politicized, with right-wingers calling her out as a wuss who let down her country and the left enthusiastically endorsing her decision to place her mental and physical well-being ahead of athletic competition.
At around the same time, Djokovic spoke to the media about his mental state as he prepared to do something no man has done before — win a “Golden Slam,” meaning all four major international tournaments and Olympic gold in the same year. (Only Steffi Graf has accomplished this feat.)
Here is the AP’s account of his answer:
“Pressure is a privilege, my friend,” Djokovic said in answer to a reporter’s question after winning both of his matches at the Ariake Tennis Park on Wednesday, beating Alejandro Davidovich Fokina of Spain to reach the quarterfinals in singles then teaming with partner Nina Stojanovic for another victory in the opening round of mixed doubles.
“Without pressure there is no professional sport,” Djokovic added. “If you are aiming to be at the top of the game you better start learning how to deal with pressure and how to cope with those moments — on the court but also off the court.”
And here is that of Reuters:
"Pressure is a privilege," Djokovic said when asked about the attention on him after reaching the singles quarter-finals and also winning a mixed doubles match on Wednesday.
"Without pressure there is no professional sport. If you are aiming to be at the top of the game you better start learning how to deal with pressure. And how to cope with those moments on the court but also off the court, all the expectations."
Slight variation in wording, but that’s all.
But then Reuters reporter Sudipto Ganguly added a couple of short paragraphs for context in between Djokovic’s answers:
Athletes such as tennis superstar Naomi Osaka and Simone Biles have highlighted the immense pressures on them, raising questions about whether global sporting figures get enough support for mental health.
At the athletes' village, Djokovic has been swamped with requests for photographs with competitors from other disciplines and many of them have been doing the rounds on social media.
"All that buzz and all that noise is something that I can't say I don't see it or I don't hear it. Of course it's there," the 20-time major winner said.
"But I've learned, I've developed the mechanism how to deal with it in such a way that it will not distract me and will not wear me down.
"I feel I have enough experience to teach myself how to step on the court and play my best tennis."
Like I said, Ganguly was providing context, emphasizing that Djokovic along with Osaka and Biles was under tremendous pressure.
Again, because this is 2021 and not some year in which the entire world has not gone insane, Djokovic’s little self-motivational pep talk was politicized, first by the right.
Fox News’s Anthony Farris called his words “truth bombs” and characterized them as the sort of lessons Biles should have been tough enough to heed:
If Simone Biles is looking for an ally amongst sports superstars, she’ll have to find someone other than tennis legend Novak Djokovic. The sports’ top-ranked player is accustomed to the pressure surrounding athletes who compete at the highest level. But rather than run from it, Djokovic welcomes the challenge, referring to pressure as "privilege".
After Biles withdrew from the remaining individual all-around competition at the Olympics, mental health and pressure became a hot topic for other athletes involved with the Tokyo Games. One such competitor, Djokovic, embraces the pressure…
As it would happen, the pressure embraced Djokovic back. It embraced him back so thoroughly, one might say he choked.
Against vastly inferior competition, he lost his next two matches. In the second, he tossed his racket into the (empty) stands at one point and assaulted the net with it at another, drawing a bad conduct warning from the umpire. Medal-less in singles, Djokovic then dropped out of mixed doubles, depriving his partner of her shot at basking in the limelight on the medal stand.
If you are predisposed to dislike Djokovic or Fox News, the schadenfreude must have been tremendous. All that cocky big man talk coming from the Serb and then that smug Fox writer and his “truth bombs” and then Djokavic gets taken down not once but twice and, on top of all that, he has two tantrums to boot.
I get it: I’ve loathed certain athletes before and have rejoiced at similar downfalls. I am not exactly proud of it, but I wouldn’t let you take those wickedly delicious moments away from me, either. And when Fox News comes a cropper in such grand fashion I have no such mixed emotions: I am overtaken with sheer unadulterated joy, especially when I read the comments to Farris’s article, all those yayhoos talking about Biles’s perceived softness and how she lacked the toughness of a manly man like Novak Djokovich. STFU and go back to your Trump rally videotapes.
BUT….that was not enough for some people. They just had to go and hitch this story to the Biles tragedy, because why not? That’s the way it would work in the movies. It wasn’t enough for Djokovic, tennis villain, to fall apart. It had to be his comeuppance for having propped himself up at Biles’s expense.
Which he did not do. But which did not stop the usual Holier Than Thou orgy on Twitter, or the creation of viral memes like this:
After the scandal broke but before Djokovic faltered on the court, Ganguly, the Reuters reporter, seemed horrified at what his question to Djokovic had wrought.
But as you can see, Ganguly’s was a voice crying in the Twitter wilderness. Nobody wants to retweet the truth from the guy who created it. Nobody cared when it was pointed out that “pressure is a privilege” has been a stock answer in Djokovic’s dealings with the media since at least 2014, not to mention that he says it in homage to feminist icon Billie Jean King. Nobody mentioned that when Naomi Osaka faltered at the French Open about a month ago, Djokovic was one of those who called her to offer his support.
Nope: it’s just so much more fun to pile on Novak Djokovic because he seems like a jerk and the right-wing chose to make him a hero for a day or two. Self-righteous mobs are the most seductive kind of all…who doesn’t enjoy competing to see who can ride highest on their horse?
And so we see again, like Mark Twain did not say, you can toss a lie into the stands of an empty tennis stadium before the truth can get the twisties on the vault…Or something like that.