i will make you hurt

the thing about elite athletes is that you generally need to be an elite youth athlete to get there. and the thing about being an elite youth athlete is that there are a million of them and very few actually see returns on the insane investment of time and resources it takes to support an elite youth athlete. no one is owed a career in elite sports. frankly elite youth sports fries the minds of most children who come into contact with them, why wouldn’t a parent watching out for their child’s mental wellbeing seriously question if moving their child to boarding school half a world away for the remote chance of a lucrative career in a very expensive dangerous sport is the right move. (and why wouldn’t a mother still feel rage if that decision was taken away from her completely)(this post is about oscar piastri)

My friend is a paediatrician and she once worked in an area where there was a big gymnastics scene and she saw so so many teen girls come in with gymnastics injuries. They were always like "I'm going to be a professional gymnast, that will be my career, I don't need to be wasting all this time with school." And she'd ask about their backup plans if they were feeling chatty and she needed to make conversation (not as a matter of course, she's their doctor not their guidance counsellor, but it would often be the natural flow of conversation with these young athletes suffering athletic injuries where a critical part of the treatment is 'do less gymnastics') then they'd say that if they got too injured to do it, or when they aged out, they'd become gymnastics coaches instead. And she'd be like "okay, mathematically, there are at least five times too many young gymnasts in your position to ALL be professional gymnasts or coaches, and everyone says that; what's your backup plan if you can't do either of those things?" and they'd always be like "no I'm dedicated enough to make it; I can do the sport for as long as my body can handle it and teach the sport when it can't."