Growing Up Wanting Gold: Are Competitive Sports Really Worth the Cost?

collage by Mari Tapia

I still have memories of when I was six years old watching the Olympic Games in Beijing in 2008. 13 years later, and I can still recite Michael Phelps won a record 8 medals that summer. Maybe this is because I have a bookshelf lined with autobiographies of famous athletes to refresh my memory. Sports are one of those all-consuming things for a kid growing up in the US. Forget famous politicians or artists or scientists, every 12-year-old wanted nothing more than to be a Seahawks quarterback or take gold home for the USA Gymnastics team. In America, our athletes really are gods to the everyday citizen. They are their own kind of celebrity, raking in salaries larger than teachers, doctors, architects, and social workers. If you’re good enough, it’s hard to name a career you’d make more money in elsewhere. Sports have been, since the dawn of time, a part of our society. To be a champion, to win, to exert all the pent-up competitive energy from hours and hours in the gym. It’s everything.

Our athletes are on such high pedestals they win the utmost respect of any average Joe, but the pedestal is never too high that we don’t think one day, we might be up there too. It is this mentality that feeds the obsession with sports culture. We love watching the NBA, not only to root for our favorite team, but to imagine what it would be like if we were on the court. The desire to reach this level is what created the modern-day integration of all-intensive training and sports for children. Youth athletics is not what it was when our parents were kids. Sports are selected and honed-in-on from elementary ages, and in high school every school team is dominated by kids who have trained with private clubs since they were eight. 

Swimming was my obsession of choice. I can’t really remember any version of my childhood that didn’t have the pool as the centerpiece. I started swimming for a club when I was nine and it slowly became my outlet for everything. For my social life, for role models, for exercise, for learning the value of hard work. Swimming is one of those things you have to do every single day, or you lose it. A week off could set you back three weeks in training. This is why there was no “off” season. It was year-round, every day, as hours and double practices stacked up throughout the years. Meets meant 30 hours at the pool in a weekend, anxiously snapping my latex cap against my forehead to try and distract myself from the fact I had to swim the 200 Butterfly in the first heat, after swimming the last heat of the 500-yard freestyle. 

Of course, I loved it. I never could have lasted as many years as I did if there wasn’t a part of me that felt a high every time I smacked my hand onto the time pad. I still don’t believe there is a feeling that could put me on cloud nine the same way winning did. When you invest all of yourself into a sport, even with an ambiguous future attached to it, you can forget there is more out there. I really did draw all of my self-worth from what my coaches thought of me. It didn’t matter if you were the meanest, most irresponsible kid in the water. If you could win, you had all the coolest friends, and could even become one of the coach’s favorites. And really, that’s all any of us ever wanted. 

As I got to high school, my relationship with swimming began to shift. Freshman year, I had it all. I was in the good graces of my high school coach, getting praised every single day, while forming a superiority complex because he picked me to favor that year. In the world of high school swimming, I was comparatively faster and more accomplished than on club. I swam individually at state, and I honestly thought that I was going to spend the rest of my able-bodied days in the water. 

As I began to struggle more with my own mental health after the end of the freshman season, going to club practices became harder and harder for me. During my sophomore year in the fall, I quit. For a million and one reasons, it was one of the hardest decisions I ever had to make. It is in this decision I was able to reflect and realize how harmful an upbringing in this world was for me. Without swimming, I felt a total loss of identity. I was a swimmer. That’s it. I didn’t know what career I wanted to enter, my grades weren’t great, and every one of my best friends was still going to practice every day after school. Every college I had ever dreamt of attending was because of their swim team. The whole event really caused me to press a redo button on what I thought was my entire life. Since leaving, I have gained a new perspective on the long-term effects of participating in such intensive sports during the most developmental years of my life. 

As time passed, I realized a lot of the lingering problems growing up in this all-consuming world has had on me, and on my peers. For a while after I left, I realized I didn’t have much remaining future direction, because all I ever focused my outlook on, was swimming. College was not for learning, but for the next step in the sport. I lacked passions elsewhere. It has taken a lot of introspection, and time away from that environment, to develop a new plan and a new understanding of who I am. 

I also had to overcome the unhealthy relationship I had with working out and eating. I know this is not an experience that only swimmers face. Dance, wrestling, gymnastics, football. Pretty much any sport on the grand list has an aspect that revolves around your physical size, how you look, and your diet plan. I spent my childhood parading around in a swimsuit seven days a week. Worrying if I was going to be able to fit into last year’s tech suit, and whether my teammates were more slender, fitter, or more disciplined with their food than me. The paradigms we have around physical appearance that bleeds into America’s sports culture is something that sticks with us long after we have retired. Finally learning to understand how much chicken breast and broccoli I can eat, how many pull-ups I can do without passing out, and how small of a suit size I was able to order this season, does not matter in the grand scheme of life and success, and is a feat in itself. 

The problematic aspects of youth sports and competitive sports culture can also fall on a more serious end of the spectrum. The concept of sexual assault, grooming, and an unhealthy relationship with authority in American sports has become recognized on a larger scale, especially since the USA Gymnastics and Larry Nassar story became a national story. Youth sports, and the dynamic that it creates between children and the adults they are taught to look up to, is in many cases, incredibly damaging. The power difference between an athlete and their coach, physical therapist, or club owner is massive. It creates a space where it is difficult to stand up for yourself. An athlete from my own team came forward with allegations of grooming against the head coach of the club, causing a world of discomfort and shock within the system. This is about the time I left, and since then, I have been able to reflect on how skewed my own relationship with authority is because of what I experienced at such a young age as an athlete. 

The lingering fear of adults in power does not always stem from sexual assault or misconduct, either. The verbal abuse, shaming, and emotional stress put on young athletes is more than many can handle. I have seen peers and friends struggle with it in every other sport as well. Volleyball, cheer, cross-country running. You name it. I can’t even count how many times I’d wind up crying in the locker room because I added a few seconds on, and was terrified to face my coach’s disapproval, or had been yelled at for taking too many breaths in a set of 50-yard sprints. I find myself still struggling not to be afraid of my teachers, bosses, or older family members. When one relationship with a role model figure is tainted by an abuse of power and pressure, it is difficult not to attribute the same dynamic to the rest. 

However, I am in a place where I am beginning to heal my relationship with exercise, with food, and with the people I look up to. I have forged a new path for myself, in re-discovering my passion for storytelling and writing, which was abandoned when I was younger due to the hours I had to spend in the pool. When I think about my goals and aspirations now, it is so much more than a medal and a constant aching for the glory days (that would have dissipated before I even reached thirty). I now think about how I can help and uplift people who may look up to me, connect with others and myself, and build a long-term career based on a healthy passion. I learned so much through my years in the swimming world, and I thank all of the experiences I had, both good and bad. Sports are such an amazing outlet for growth, and for many, hold nothing but fond memories. More than anything, I have come away from this period of introspection to realize this: as a collective, we have to recognize that we would not grow or learn without the parts of our past that have hurt us. We have to learn to release our grip on these versions of ourselves, say thank you for what you taught me, and move forward.