Andrew McCeltic wrote:SA37 wrote:Andrew McCeltic wrote:
AFAIK each made a single public statement? Neither is doing interviews or going on at length. The idea they’re doing it for media attention has no merit. And the point is that they shouldn’t have to be secretive - “personal reasons” - about something human, normal, medical.
Osaka brought the spotlight on herself by refusing to do interviews at Wimbledon. That was never going to fly with the tournament organizers and was always going to be a very public dispute. This became THE story for ~a week before she pulled out. It was by far the biggest story of Wimbledon. Had she pulled out a few weeks before, she could have claimed any sort of injury or some other reasonably credible excuse and she could have gone and taken care of her mental issues in a much less extravagant way.
For Biles, the story isn't quite as clear, but pulling out of the Olympics when you are one of the most popular athletes is going to attract insane amounts of attention. She could have pulled out of the Olympics way before the trials or any lead up to the Olympics and gone and taken care of herself.
Again, I am not questioning the validity of their mental health issues; I am saying the manner in which both of these situations have happened seem staged/rehearsed/planned in order to extract as much media attention as possible and laying the groundwork for future projects, such as documentaries, comeback stories, interviews, and careers that go well beyond sports.
Isn’t refusing interviews also the kind of “privacy” you’re asking of them? I don’t know why your take is so cynical - if the issues are valid, withdrawing is the same thing it would be with a physical injury. Like, maybe they could rake in media bucks going on talk shows to hype memoirs, but.. most (all?j athletes who have revealed mental health issues haven’t gotten million dollar Netflix deals. Like, they’re on big stages. There’s not really an easy way to not get attention, and a maximally circumspect withdrawal as if they’re experiencing something shameful and best left unacknowledged wouldn’t be healthy or fair.
Every player and their publicist knows there is no way the French Open (I mistakenly said it was Wimbledon, which Osaka subsequently skipped) or any major tournament is going to allow the star players to skip interviews (where many times there are products sponsors pay big money to place products or their logo, depending on the sport). The NBA, for example, has explicit rules against this.
While some tennis tournaments have different rules, in general players must appear at a post-match news conference at a Grand Slam event if a journalist requests their presence, whether they win or lose. Fines for refusing are often little more than a few thousand dollars. In 2015, Venus Williams was fined $3,000 for skipping a news conference after a loss at the French Open. She and her sister, Serena, were fined $4,000 each in 2010 for skipping a news conference at Wimbledon...
...Attending a news conference, regardless of the outcome of a match, is considered an obligation tennis players fulfill to promote their sport, which has struggled to maintain coverage in some markets in recent years as the budgets of news organizations have been slashed.
Billie Jean King, the Hall of Fame player who helped create the women’s pro tour, has spoken about visiting the sports editors in the markets in which she played to beg them to send sportswriters to cover matches during the tour’s early years and the importance of players speaking with the press to promote the sport.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/26/sports/tennis/naomi-osaka-french-open-no-interviews.htmlHad Osaka and her team approached the French Open organizers privately about working out some sort of arrangement, then one could see an effort to keep things low-key. However, Osaka had a very public announcement of not doing interviews and the public fallout was the biggest story in tennis and arguably in sports. Osaka already has a history of using her platform to draw lots of media attention to things she believes are important; she has also been very active using her endorsements to do the same. Of course, this has the off-shoot of drawing attention to her and it is to be expected the media will continue to ask her about her activism and her opinion on other political or social matters -- or look to her social media where she has also issued public statements. This was her decision.
Osaka is one of the most influential players in the world. Last year, tennis officials suspended play at the Western & Southern Open, a United States Open tuneup, after Osaka announced that she would default her semifinal match to draw attention to the issue of police violence against Black people following the shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wis.
The suspension of play, a move that several sports undertook as athletes threatened a boycott, allowed Osaka to remain in the tournament. She won her postponed semifinal match and then defaulted the final because of an injury.
Days later, she began her triumphant quest to win her second U.S. Open championship. She walked to the court for each match wearing a mask with the name of a different person of color who had been a victim of racist violence.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/26/sports/tennis/naomi-osaka-french-open-no-interviews.htmlBut certainly [Osaka's] profile, well outfitted as it is, provides a glimpse into her business — and like the meme decrees, business is boomin’. Ms. Osaka is covering everything from ears to rears, making headphones with Beats, athleisure with Nike and denim with Levi’s. Dresses? She designed them with Adeam, a Japanese-American brand. Swimwear? She crafted a collection with Frankies Bikinis.
In April, she announced that she would serve as C.E.O. of her own company: Kinlò, a line of skin care made for people with melanated skin tones, produced with GoDaddy. According to Forbes, she made $37.4 million in endorsements and tournament prizes between May 2019 and May 2020, the most a female athlete has ever earned in a single year.
“She’s the first professional tennis player we’ve worked with,” said Jen Sey, the brand president of Levi’s, “but for us, she rises above that. She’s such a powerful voice, the way she’s encouraged others to speak out about equality. She’s outspoken. That’s what we like about her. There’s no point in partnering with someone if you’re just going to tell them what to do.”
With Nike, she founded an academy to introduce more young women to sports; with L.V.M.H., she joined a judging panel to choose an emerging fashion designer worthy of a 300,000-euro grant. Her imprint seems to be suddenly on everything from enterprise management software (Workday) to water (Bodyarmor).
“She is the perfect storm,” said Cindy Gallop, a brand consultant who has worked with several of Ms. Osaka’s sponsors. “She’s a spectacular athlete. She has a strong sense of social justice, she’s prepared to speak her mind.”...
...In September, Ms. Osaka won the U.S. Open while declaring solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement through her face masks. From a corporate sponsorship perspective, this was a turning point: taking a stance increased her brand value. She shortly thereafter teamed up with Basic Space, an online swap meet for hype beasts (sample items for sale include a St. John coat and a Range Rover) to sell 500 masks designed by her 25-year-old sister, Mari. They sold out in 30 minutes, with proceeds going to UNICEF.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/19/style/naomi-osaka-sweetgreen-beats-nike.html?
But in 2020, Osaka found her voice and the self-possession to speak up when and how she saw fit, a massive leap for a global superstar who once felt too self-conscious to exhort herself even on the court. With time to engage with civil rights protests because of the pandemic’s pause of tennis, Osaka found the space to unravel her thoughts to convey an urgent and unequivocal demand for change.
In doing so, she came to be as precise and efficient in her protest as she has been in her tennis, offering up her version of soft power: deploying bold activism shaped by her unique understanding of the world and her place in it....
...
Without the tunnel vision of a tennis schedule, Osaka showed the effects of the psyche-scarring onslaught of violence against Black Americans. In the days after George Floyd was killed by the Minneapolis police in May, she flew with Dunston to protests there and later wrote an opinion piece for Esquire challenging that society “take on systemic racism head-on, that the police protect us and don’t kill us.”
Though Osaka’s assertion of each part of her identity — Japanese, Haitian, raised for a time in the United States — has given her profitable endorsement lanes, she has often highlighted her Blackness when commentators minimize it...
...With Osaka cut off from IRL social touchstones and without access to her day job, her TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and other platforms provided the most candid way for her to speak up as she had pledged. When she tweeted her support for the Black Lives Matter movement in June and encouraged participation in a B.L.M. protest in Osaka, Japan, she faced social media trolls who called her a terrorist and a widespread backlash from Japanese people who viewed the issue as an outsider’s cause.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/16/sports/tennis/naomi-osaka-protests-open.html?
After all of this fallout from the French Open and skipping Wimbledon, Osaka decided to be heavily involved in the Japanese Olympics despite he supposed desire to avoid the spotlight. I think this is beyond hypocritical.
In my opinion, you just can't have your cake and eat it too. Osaka nor anyone who decides to have such a vocal and active presence cannot pick and choose when to turn it off. Our decisions and our actions have consequences, and this is just an example of a person who doesn't want to accept the bad that comes along with the good. That's just not how life works.