Last week I discussed Joannie Rochette's performance at the Vancouver Winter Olympics, where she won a bronze medal in figure skating only days after her mother died suddenly of a heart attack. For a while, Shaun White's performance was the most impressive of the games, but after Rochette, no one comes close to her. Hands down the best.
Reading some of the online news stories, I was struck by all the words and phrases used to describe Rochette and her performance. Phrases like grace under pressure (10,800 Google hits) and words like courage (122,000 Google hits) were thrown around. In the Boston Globe, Bob Ryan said that "the gold medal for Grace Under Pressure went to Canadian figure skater Joannie Rochette, whose mother died of a heart attack hours after arriving in Vancouver. She skated a truly elegant short program and followed with a top-notch long program and she skated off with the bronze."
Dr. Robert Quinlan Costas, a psychotherapist, probed Rochette's innermost feelings in an interview on NBC. Held in front of a toasty warm gas fireplace, this interview no doubt fueled the perception of Rochette the Courageous.
True, Rochette was courageous, and she displayed enormous grace under pressure. But how many of these words were used because she was a dainty female figure skater? (I am assuming that those who said she exhibited grace under pressure were not using it according to the Hemingway definition: guts.) Now, I am not saying that it would be proper to write that Ray Lewis from the Baltimore Ravens exhibits grace under pressure when he pulverizes a quarterback. But, to me, courage is something you have when you withstand something. It's not the same as aggression.
So when I saw Rochette's performance, what came to my mind was her ability to attack, to grab her routine by the rhinestone-studded lapels and destroy it. That's what separates professional athletes from the rest of us: their aggression--whether internal or external--and fiercely competitive nature. But most of the news stories focused on her ability to withstand what was coming at her, rather than this ability to attack. Rochette did not merely overcome adversity; she annihilated it. In his interview, Dr. Costas read a quote from Rochette in which she said that in order to focus, she had to become, in her words, "cold"--just two days after her mother's death. Rochette may have been graceful, but those are the words of an assassin, someone who wants to crush her routine, and probably her competitors (though the Christian Science Monitor says she was "buoyed by love"). I can't help but wonder if someone like Bode Miller would have been called "courageous" had the same thing happened to him.
Note to teachers: easy paper topic!
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