Alina Zagitova: “After the Olympics, the hate began – the kind of hate that probably no athlete wants to hear: ‘the Olympic gold was undeserved.’”
2018 Olympic champion Alina Zagitova reflects on the negativity and media pressure she faced after her Olympic victory.
original source: Championat
2018 Olympic champion Alina Zagitova reflects on the negativity and media pressure she faced after her Olympic victory, sharing how she coped with criticism and the importance of protecting young athletes from harmful information. Here’s a translation.
“Some headlines didn’t hurt as much, because sometimes they motivated me: ‘You write this, but I’ll show you how it really is.’ But the comments… You realize that a 15-year-old girl is being written to by some adult man, whose profile picture is his family, and he’s writing unpleasant things with a sexual undertone.
After the Olympics, the hate began – the kind of hate that probably no athlete wants to hear: ‘the Olympic gold was undeserved.’ Even though our sport should be absolutely clear to the audience – if you fall or don’t fall, it’s obvious to everyone, and there are clear score sheets showing how the judges evaluated you. The judges are independent; they don’t just put anyone there. They go through training and have their own judge ratings. And it’s based on those ratings that they judge. That was probably the most unpleasant and incomprehensible moment for me,” Zagitova said on the YouTube channel “vMeste.”
Zagitova also shared her attitude toward the media and recalled how she handled the pressure at the 2018 Olympics.
“Even though I was only 15, I was fully aware of the scale of everything happening. I understood that there was a lot of press, even at practices. They’d come, stand along the boards, some filming, others taking photos. Whether you want it or not, you realize the whole world is watching you. And there are a lot of ill-wishers, too.
What the media wants is new headlines – they make money from that. So you can’t really blame them, but sometimes it was completely out of context and a lot was made up. If you write facts, that’s fine. But if you try to twist the story, to say more than there is, I condemn that. It’s wrong — we’re all people, all with emotions. At that time, my parents helped me a lot because they took away my phone. My grandmother lived with me that whole Olympic season, which lasts four years. She would take my phone, so I had a kind of detox from it all. That helped.
That’s why I think, especially at a young age, kids should be shielded from this a bit, because there’s so much informational garbage out there that you don’t need,” Zagitova said.
Related topics: Alina Zagitova
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